James II and the Battle for the Soul of Britain
As the last British monarch to openly resist the slide towards parliamentary absolutism, the last Catholic king straddled a crossroads of history
The Stuart kings occupy a curious place in the popular consciousness of the English-speaking world. After all, centuries of secular mythology has entrenched the belief that ‘parliamentary democracy’ constitutes the natural and righteous governance of the Britons.
As the dynasty associated above all others with the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ and the rejection of the Protestant Reformation, the House of Stuart thus forms the absolute foil of history to this assumption. James II, who succeeded to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland on this day in 1685 — only to be ousted from them three years later — remains the most recent British monarch to not only challenge Parliament publicly, but to challenge the very notion that history is a ‘settled matter’.
So who truly was King James II, the man who placed loyalty to God above all things, including his throne, and the father of Britain’s most romantic lost cause?
A Prince in Exile
Born on the 14th October 1633, three years after his elder brother the future King Charles II, James was of exalted lineage. Through his father, King Charles I, and the House of Stuart, he was descended from three centuries of Scottish kings. His mother meanwhile, Queen Henrietta Maria, was the daughter of the beloved King Henry IV of France, the first French sovereign of the House of Bourbon.
As per tradition among the second sons of British monarchs, James was designated with the title of Duke of York soon after his birth, but his education and youth would be profoundly disrupted. Just nine years of age when the English Civil War erupted, James dutifully accompanied his father the King into the thick of action.
On the 23rd October 1642, during the first pitched battle of the war, the young Duke and his brother narrowly avoided capture by Parliamentarian cavalry at Edgehill. It would be his first brush with war — an arena in which he would earn great renown over his adult years.
Nevertheless, the King, not wishing a repeat of this close call, stationed the boy at the Royalist capital of Oxford, where he remained until the capitulation of the city in the summer of 1646, whereupon Parliament ordered his confinement within the walls of St. James’s Palace in London.
A little under two years later, however, he would demonstrate his refusal to submit to the new regime — in April 1648, he outmanoeuvred the Parliamentarian guards and escaped the Palace, London, and England herself, for the comparative safety of the European continent.
“He Chargeth Gallantly”
With his homeland occupied now by a regime hostile to his person and station, the formative years of James would be lived on foreign shores. It was a regime that would, on the 30th January 1649, render him fatherless at fourteen years of age, with the execution of King Charles I in Whitehall.
Condemned it seemed to permanent exile, the Duke of York marched to the aid now of his mother, who had taken refuge in her own homeland of France, itself besieged by the civil war of the Fronde. There James discovered, to his pain, that he had arrived before the news of her husband’s execution.
Putting aside his own agony, he thus moved to assuage that of his mother, while all the world appeared on the brink of ruin around them. Familial piety, after all, was foremost among the qualities of James.
As the new order entrenched itself in London, Scotland and Ireland refused to bow to the new English Republic, proclaiming James’s elder brother as King Charles II, only to suffer the violent wrath of Oliver Cromwell in campaigns that have poisoned the bonds between the British Isles ever since. In light of such resistance, Henrietta Maria resolved that the Duke of York would best serve his brother the new King through the acquisition of experience in the arts of war, and arranged through Cardinal Mazarin, advisor to the young King Louis XIV, for James to enrol in the French Army under Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, the Vicomte de Turenne.
James, devoted to duty and acutely aware of the growing need to support the family financially, borrowed £250 and invested in a military career. It was to prove a wise investment, as the Duke of York through his competence and character earned the respect of Turenne, a man today revered as one of the greatest commanders in French history, surpassed in legend perhaps only by Bonaparte himself.
It was then observed of James that he “ventures himself and chargeth gallantly where anything is to be done”, leading to his promotion to the rank of Lieutenant-General at just twenty years of age.
Alongside Turenne, James played a far from insignificant role in the final defeat of the Fronde rebellion in 1653, earning the gratitude of a Louis XIV who, at fifteen years old, had yet to assume his full powers as King of France.
Turmoil on the continent would cut short this promise however, for the end of Thirty Year’s War in the Germanies had now left France to face Spain alone, who had profited from the chaos of the Fronde to beset the French from multiple directions. The calculating Cardinal Mazarin therefore responded to this new threat by striking a sudden deal with the devil.
In 1657, he allied France with the republican junta in London. The zealous Puritanism of Oliver Cromwell, having been unleashed upon Catholic Britain, was all too happy directed now upon Catholic Spain. By the terms of the alliance, however, Paris was required to expel the exiled Stuarts.
The royal brothers, now double exiles, responded by allying themselves to the new Spanish cause. Thus did James now find himself facing his old master Turenne across the battlefields of the Spanish Netherlands, with Cromwellian as well as French troops arrayed against him. At the Battle of the Dunes on the 14th June 1658, with Englishmen on both sides, the Duke of York led a valorous cavalry charge, thereafter fighting unhorsed, and thwarted only by the sheer weight of French reinforcements.
As it happened however, this setback of the Stuart cause proved fleeting. For the death of Oliver Cromwell weeks later, on the 3rd September 1658, overturned all the assumptions of Europe.
The King’s Most Loyal Subject
With its ‘Lord Protector’ dead, and the military genius he brought to it gone with him, the English Republic collapsed with lightning speed. By the army it was enforced, and by the army it would fall, when General George Monck, tolerating the anarchy no more, marched down from Scotland to correct the ‘Rump Parliament’.
On the 8th May 1660, the restoration of the monarchy was at last proclaimed, and in James, a now enthroned King Charles II would find a brother in spirit as well as flesh. For twenty five years, the Duke of York would serve his King and his country with the utmost distinction.
As newly appointed Lord High Admiral, on the 13th June 1665 James led the Royal Navy to an extraordinary victory over the Dutch Fleet at the Battle of Lowestoft, and upon the conclusion of the war, the newly acquired colony of New Amsterdam in the Americas was renamed ‘New York’ in honour of the Duke of York.
One year later, when embers caught flame in Pudding Lane, the deadly indecision of Lord Mayor Thomas Bloodworth would see the blaze swell into the Great Fire of London, in a city already reeling from terrible plague. In the face of unprecedented catastrophe, and despairing at the quality of London’s officials, on the 3rd September 1666 the King appointed the Duke of York to take direct charge of operations.
To this crisis James would rise with remarkable efficacy, moving quickly to direct firefighting efforts and stave off a collapse of public order. Of James, one John Rushworth would observe five days later:
“The Duke of York hath won the hearts of the people with his continual and indefatigable pains day and night in helping to quench the Fire”
Alas that the bigotry and betrayal of Parliament would see many of the Duke’s talents go wasted within his own country…
The Price of Faith
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