JAMES II. (OF ENGLAND). 



JAMES II. (OF ENGLAND).' 



591 



affair was broken off, partly by the obstinate Protestantism of the 

 lady, partly by the interference of her father, who gave the king 

 information of what was projected, when Charleg sent for his brother 

 and told him that having played the fool iu making an unequal 

 marriage once already, he ought to be satisfied without repeating the 

 same thing in his advanced age. The lady was induced to relinquish the 

 claim she had, founded upon a written promise of marriage, and by 

 way of compensation was, 25th of March 1674, created Baroness 

 Belasye for life. She survived till 1713. On the 4th of November 

 1677, the duke's daughter Mary, then in her sixteenth year, was, 

 greatly to the public satisfaction, married to her cousin William, 

 prince of Orange, the consent of her father having been obtained to 

 this Protestant alliance by the persuasions of the king, his brother, 

 who represented to him how much he might soften the popular 

 hostility to him on account of hia religion by so apparently strong 

 an evidence of his liberality. 



Durinj the excitement produced by Titus Oates's Popish Plot, in 

 1678-79, the Duke of York, by the advice of his brother, retired to 

 the continent, and he resided at Brussels with his wife and his youngest 

 daughter for five or six months. While he was absent the famous bill 

 for his exclusion from the throne was twice read in the Commons, and 

 ordered to be committed, by large majorities, and was only prevented 

 from being passed in that house by the prorogation of the parliament, 

 27th May 1679. To this date may be assigned the commencement of 

 the open rivalry between the Duke of York and Charles's natural son 

 the Duke of Monmouth, whose popularity with the nation, atill more 

 than the presumed partiality of his father, undoubtedly made him a 

 somewhat formidable competitor for the succession, in the actual cir- 

 cumstances of the legitimate heir. For the present however the latter 

 succeeded in maintaining the ascendancy. Returning home iu the 

 beginning of September he had the satisfaction of seeing Moninouth 

 removed from his post of captain-general and exiled, while h* obtained 

 from the king for himself the government of Scotland. Before he set 

 out for that country however he became involved with other persons 

 of bin religion in the discredit of giving countenance to the story of 

 the Meal-Tub Plot, which the Roman Catholics got up with the hope, 

 in which they were grievously disappointed, of counteracting the 

 effects of Oates's pretended discoveries. The share which the duke 

 had in this business only added to the dislike in which he was held 

 by the great body of the nation, and which was still further increased 

 by the bigoted severity of his administration of affairs in Scotland. 

 In November 1780 a new exclusion bill was brought into the House 

 of Commons, but although it was carried through all its stages in 

 that house by great majorities, it was thrown out in the Lords. The 

 bill was again introduced in the lower house in the following January, 

 but the prorogation of the parliament on the 10th of that month, and 

 its dissolution a few days after, prevented the business being proceeded 

 with. A new parliament having met at Oxford in March, the bill was 

 again brought forward there, and again defeated by the same expedient, 

 this the last parliament held by Charles II. having been dissolved after 

 it had oat only seven days. 



A visit which the Duke of York paid to London iu March 1682, is 

 memorable on account of a disaster which happened to the ship in 

 which he tailed on hi* return to the north in May : it struck upon a 

 sand-bank near the mouth of the Humber, when the duke and a few 

 of bis attendants, among whom was Mr. Churchill, afterwards the 

 great Duke of Marlborough, were the only persons saved. The soli- 

 citude the duke was said to have shown on this occasion for the safety 

 of hiii priests and his dogs contributed considerably to deepen the 

 popular odium of which he was the object. Very soon after this he 

 finally left Scotland, his government of which country had been 

 throughout an oppressive and cruel tyranny, and again taking up his 

 residence at the English court, became his brother's chief counsellor, 

 and, much more than Charles himself, whose increased indolence and 

 infirmities now more than ever indisposed him for exertion the 

 mainspring and director of the conduct of public affairs. To his 

 instigation are chiefly attributed the general attack upon corpora- 

 tions, the executions of Russell and Sidney, and the other violent 

 and despotic acts which crowd the two closing years of Charles's 

 reign. 



On the death of his brother, 6th of February 1685, no opposition 

 was made to the accession of James. In his address to th privy- 

 council he said, " I have been reported to be a man for arbitrary power; 

 but that in not the only story that has been made of me ; and I shall 

 make it my endeavour to preserve this government, both in church and 

 state, as it is now by law established." In his very first measures how- 

 ever the new king showed, to borrow the expressions of Hume, " that 

 either he was not sincere in his professions of attachment to the laws, 

 or that he had entertained so lofty an idea of his own legal power, that 

 even his utmost sincerity would tend very little to secure the liberties 

 of the people." He began by issuing a proclamation ordering the 

 customs and excise duties to be paid as usual, although the parlia- 

 mentary grant of them had expired with the termination of the late 

 reign ; and this step, it appears, he took after a secret consultation 

 with the French minister, Barillon, with whom arrangements were 

 soon completed for the continuance of the pension that Charles had 

 received from King Louis, and the general dependence of the govern- 

 m-nt upon that of France. (Sir John Dalrymple, ' Memoirs of Great 



moo. ui v. VOL. in. 



Britain,' Appendix, part I., pp. 100-113, and Fox, ' History of the Early 

 Part of the Reign of James II.') In another direction James made an 

 equally offensive display of his principles, by going openly and in great 

 state to the illegal celebration of the mass; he even lost no time iu 

 sending an agent to Rome to make his submissions to the pope and to 

 prepare the way for the readmission of England into the bosom of tha 

 Roman Catholic Church. 



He determined however to call a parliament, for reasons which b.8 

 explained to Barillon partly in person, partly through the Earl of 

 Rochester, lord treasurer. " Hereafter," said he, " it will be much 

 more easy for me to put off the assembling of parliament, or to main- 

 tain myself by other means which may appear more convenient for 

 me. ... I know the English ; you must not show them any fear 

 iu the beginning. ... I will take good care to hinder parliament 

 from meddling in foreign affairs, and will put an end to the session as 

 soon as I see the members show any ill will." By the mouth of 

 Rochester, he observed in addition that he would be too chargeable to 

 Louis if he should be obliged to come to him for all the supplies he at 

 present wanted ; what he was doing did not however exempt him from 

 also having recourse to the French king for some assistance; he hoped 

 that in the difficult beginning of his reign Louis would help him to 

 support the weight of it ; that this fresh obligation would engage him 

 still more not to depart from the road which he used to think the 

 deceased king his brother should have kept with regard to the French 

 monarch ; and would be the means of making him independent of 

 parliament, and putting him in a condition to support himself without 

 the assistance of that body, if they should refuse him the continuation 

 of the revenues which the late king enjoyed. (Barillon's 'Despatch' 

 of the 19th February.) When, a few days after, in compliance 

 with these importunate solicitations, Louis transmitted bills for 500,000 

 livres, James expressed his gratitude in the most rapturous terms, 

 even shedding tears as he spoke ; and Rochester, Sunderland, and 

 Godolphiu hastened to Barillon to tell him he had given life to the 

 king their master. It was readily agreed, in requital of Louis's bounty, 

 that the chief obstacle which stood in the way of the seizure by the 

 French king of the Spanish Netherlands should be immediately 

 removed, by the existing treaty between Spain and England being 

 held to have terminated with the death of Charles. 



These curious details of its commencement supply the key-noto to 

 the whole course of James's disgraceful reign. All that followed flowed 

 naturally from such a beginning. The parliament met according to 

 proclamation on the 19th of May, and, iu the usual temper of the 

 nation at the accession of a new sovereign, was found abundantly 

 compliant. The revenue which the kins; demanded was granted to 

 him for life by the Commons, with little or no debate, and by a 

 unanimous vote ; and on almost every other subject that carne before 

 it that assembly manifested the same complete subserviency to the 

 wishes of the court ; a strong attachment to the Established Church, 

 and a still lingering horror of the popish plot, being the only disposi- 

 tions on the part of the generality of the members that gave James 

 any trouble in managing them. The influence of the court indeed had 

 been unscrupulously employed in. their election, and with so much 

 success that James declared there were not forty of them whom he 

 would not himself have named. A Scottish parliament, which had 

 assembled a few weeks before that of England, responded to all the 

 royal demands iu a spirit still more slavish. Scotland indeed, by the 

 utjieard-of atrocities of the late king's government, had been now 

 humbled for the moment almost to the point of utter despair. While 

 the two parliaments were still sitting, both England and Scotland were 

 invaded, the former by the Duke of Monmouth, the latter by the Earl 

 of Argyle, both of whom had for some years been exiles in Holland. 

 The disastrous issue of each of these attempts is well known. Argyle, 

 after the dispersion of his few followers, was apprehended and executed 

 at Edinburgh, on the 30th of June. Monmouth, whose landing did 

 not take place till the llth of that month, by which time Argyle was 

 all but an unattended fugitive, was, after having met in the first 

 instance with a much greater promise of success than his confederate 

 in the north had experienced, defeated, 5th of July, in the decisive 

 battle of Sedgemoor, and being two days after found concealed in a 

 ditch, was brought to London, and delivered to the executioner on the 

 15tu of the same month. His uncle obdurately refused to grant him 

 either his life or even tbe briefest respite. The suppression of Mon- 

 mouth's insurrection was followed by the savage military vengeance 

 of Colonel Kirke, and the more revolting enormities of the western 

 'campaign,' as it was jocularly called by tbe king, of chief-justice 

 Jeffreys. Between the two the south-western counties were strewed 

 with the corpses and the dismembered limbs of human beings, women 

 as well as men, butchered by the sword or the axe. 



When the parliament re-assembled iu November, the king told them 

 that in the late crisis he had employed a great many Roman Catholic 

 officers, and that he had, iu their favour, by his own authority 

 dispensed with the legal test of conformity to the Established Church 

 to be taken by every person appointed to any public office. This was 

 too much to be borne without some expressions of dissatisfaction aud 

 alarm ; but the resistance of the House of Commons was exceedingly 

 timid and feeble. A very respectful and submissive address having 

 been answered by the king with great arrogance aud violence, nothing 

 further was done in the matter; the supplies were at once voted ; and 



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