2) James II (1685-88)

Task 14.

1. Why was James deposed and what was the result of this?

2. Who participated in the coup?

James II, like his elder brother, had spent his boyhood years amid the dramas and tragedies of the Civil War. Born on 14 October 1633, he was 12 years old when the Royalist head-quarters, the city of Oxford, surrendered, and the monarchy was overthrown. He was taken as a prisoner to St James's Palace in London, but in 1648 a daring escape was organised for him, and he managed to flee in disguise to Holland, to the court of his sister Mary and her husband, William II of Orange. In exile, he showed himself to be a brave and capable soldier; and when the Restoration came, in the spring of 1660, James, Duke of York was welcomed home to England almost as warmly as his brother the King.

It was a state of affairs which could not last. While in exile, James had not only contracted a secret marriage, to Lord Clarendon's daughter Anne Hyde, he had also become attracted to Roman Catholicism, and by 1668 it was known that the heir presumptive to the thrones of England and Scotland was a Catholic convert. He continued to attend Anglican services, and his loyalty to his brother was unaltered; as Lord High Admiral James played an important part in the wars against the Dutch, who actually sailed up the River Thames into the Medway in 1667 and raided the English fleet. But James's Catholicism became the cause of increasing unrest, and in 1673, when Parliament passed the Test Act forbidding Roman Catholics to hold rank in public life, he was obliged to give up his office of Lord High Admiral. As though to affirm his devotion to his new religion, in the same year James, now a widower, was remarried – to the ardently Catholic princess, Mary of Modena.

The anti-Catholic hysteria engendered by Titus Oates and his allegations of a 'Popish Plot' led to the Exclusion Crisis of 1679, when attempts were made to pass a bill excluding James from the succession. Wisely, King Charles responded by sending his brother into exile abroad for a time, until the fuss had died down. By 1680 James had returned to public office as Lord High Commissioner for Scotland (where he brutally persecuted Presbyterians) and soon was back in London and restored to Admiralty. The king resisted all attempts to have his brother disinherited; and by the time Charles II died, on 6 February 1685, James Stuart had recovered sufficient popularity to allow him to succeed to thrones of England and Scotland in peace.

He was then 51 years old, a man of high principles but little common sense, who more resembled his stubborn father Charles I than his easy-going cynic of a brother. Like Charles II he was a sensualist, but even in this the brothers differed; it was Charles’s joke that James's mistresses (who were usually very plain) must have been chosen by his confessor, for penance. Religion was, indeed, never very far from James's thoughts.

The example of his father's downfall execution, which had overshadowed early life, had left James II with an attitude of wary hostility, rather than conciliation towards the people whom he now ruled; the English, he believed, 'could not be held to their duty by fair treatment'. He regarded it as his duty to re-establish Catholicism in England, and although in May 1685 he assured Parliament that he would protect Anglican Church, 'whose members have shown themselves so eminently loyal in the worst times', he speedily set about redressing the balance of religious power in the kingdom, by appointing Catholics to positions of influence.

Parliament remained loyal to the new king during the early months of his reign, and those who assumed that James’s accession would rouse the country to the rebellion were proved wrong. A rebel force which landed in Scotland, under the Marqius of Argyll, met with failure, as did the attempt on the throne by the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth. After Monmouth’s defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685, his followers were hunted down and tried by the notorious Judge Jeffreys, whose ruthless sentences gave these trials the name of the ‘Bloody Assize’. Monmouth himself was beheaded.

In the wake of the rebellions, dissentions arose between King and Parliament. James sought to staff the army with Roman Catholics on whom he could rely; Parliament, fearing the prospect of a king with a powerful army at his bidding, disagreed. As a result, Parliament was prorogued in November 1685, and not called again for the rest of James II’s brief reign, while the king, unrestricted, carried out his policy of granting important offices to Catholics. He appointed them as officers in the army, to the Privy Council, even to key positions in Oxford colleges, and in 1686 the Catholic Earl of Tyrconnel was made Lord Leutenant of Ireland.

When the First Declaration of Indulgence, aimed at establishing complete religios tolerance, was followed by a second Declaration in May 1688, to be read by the Anglican clergy to their congregations throughout the land, the Church of England leaders could take no more. The Archbishop of Canterbury and six bishops petitioned the King to have the order withdrawn; James’s response was to put them on trial for seditions libel. This time he had gone too far.

Public opinion was now mounting against the King. The Bishops were acquitted amidst general rejoicing, and in the months that followed events moved swiftly towards the deposition of the King. The final spur was the birth of a son to James’s Queen, Mary of Modena in June that year. Hitherto, the two daughters of James’s first marriage, the Protestant Princesses Mary and Ann, had been next in line to the throne, but now there was a male, Catholic heir, to carry on the unpopular work of James II. The prospect had become intolerable. Rumours were spread that this child was not a true Stuart, but had been smuggled into the Palace in a warming-pan; and an invitation was sent to James’s son-in-law, William of orange to come and claim the throne on behalf of himself and his wife, The Princess Mary, to protect the people’s ‘liberties, religion and properties’. James began to offer concessions to his Protestant subjects, but it was too late. On November 5 1688, The Dutch Prince William of Orange landed at Tornbay in Devon with an army, and found himself faced with little opposition, even from those Catholics and dissenting Protestants on whom King James had thought to rely.

On the night of 10 December 1688, Mary of Modena and her baby son, named James Edward, were hurried secretly out of London, and James II soon followed. On his way he threw the Great Seal into the Thames, from where it was later recovered. The fleeing king was caught by a group of Kent fishermen and returned to London, but his successor, the new King William III, had no wish to keep him there as a political embarrassment, and so James was permitted to escape once more. On Christmas Day, 1688, James Stuart arrived in France, where he was to live out the rest of his life, an exile at St Germain. (J.Ross)

The year is 1685, the new King of Great Britain and Ireland is James II, the first Catholic monarch of England since Bloody Mary, more than a century earlier. James reigned for three eventful years in which Protestant fears of Catholic domination and autocratic government led to Revolution.

James was the second son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria so he was Charles II's brother. By his first marriage, to the Earl of Clarendon's daughter, he had two daughters, Mary and Anne. James was humourless and he had the uncompromising belief of the convert. And the society over which he had just became King mistrusted Catholics so much that there were laws to control them. Little wonder that the memory of regicide lingered in the Court of King James II.

C+His accession to the throne seemed to him to be the vindication of the downright conceptions for which he had always stood. All he thought he needed to make him a real King, on the model now established in Europe by Louis XIV, was a loyal Fleet and a standing Army, well trained and well equipped. Here was the key by which all doors might be opened. Prating Parliaments, a proud, politically minded nobility, the restored, triumphant Episcopacy, the blatant Whigs, the sullen, brooding Puritans, all would have to take their place once the King of England possessed a heavy, tempered, sharpened sword. Everyone was awestruck or spellbound by the splendour of France under absolute monarchy. The power of the French nation, now that its quarrels were stilled and its force united under the great King, was the main fact of the age. Why should not the British Islands rise to equal grandeur by adopting similar methods?

But behind this, there swelled in the King's breast the hope that he might reconcile all his people to the old faith and heal the schism which had rent Christendom for so many generations. It is one of the disputes of history whether toleration was all he sought. He was a bigot, and there was no sacrifice he would not make for his faith.

The King ruled with considerable authority. During Charles II's closing years he had ruled without Parliament therefore there was no challenge in the House from the Whigs. Furthermore the Whigs had been politically and commercially hounded. The Crown and its supporters still had the power to clean out the places where the Whigs could build powerful committees and alliances.

It's a truism that there's no believer so dogmatic, so intolerant, so narrow-minded as a convert, perhaps particularly a religious convert. But James II had crossed the line between devotion and unbending evangelism. Many Catholics understood this and some of them saw that the King would bring about catastrophe rather than the return of the nation to Rome. Now there would be open rebellion, and James would be the last Catholic King of Britain.

His people believed that what was happening in England was part of the wider return of Catholicism, and that it was a symptom of the advance of France's Catholic Louis XIV. Indeed, Charles II had made secret agreements with Louis, and he had been converted to Rome - albeit on his deathbed and with a sincerity that was doubted even at the time. Louis's power had grown in less than a decade and the way he had demonstrated that power gave many Protestants in England cause to believe that what they saw taking place on the Continent could spread to England.

C+England, rent by her domestic quarrels, had ceased to be a factor in European affairs. The Habsburg Empire was equally paralysed for action in the West by the Оttoman invasion and Hungarian revolts. Louis, conscious of his dominating power, sought to revive the empire of Charlemagne on a vaster scale. His neighbours cowered beneath his unrelenting scourge in pain and fear. His nail fell upon the Huguenots, but he also engaged in a most grievous quarrel with the Papacy. He marshalled and disciplined the French clergy with the same thoroughness as his armies. He grasped all ecclesiastical revenues and patronage. He claimed not only temporal but in many directions spiritual control. The Gallican Church yielded itself with patriotic adulation to his commands. All who diverged fell under the same heavy hand which had destroyed the Huguenots.

There were those in England and beyond who saw in James the same uncompromising determination. This was the James, once Duke of York, whose succession to the throne had been opposed, but who when the Whigs were routed, had been cheered in the streets. This was a King who had been crowned with vows of religious tolerance and who now swept them away. And so by 1688, Britain was once more on the brink of civil war. But this was not the sort of war that so divided the people in 1642, Military science had come a long way in forty years or so.

C+The King had a large, well-equipped regular army, with a powerful artillery. He believed himself master of the best, if not at the moment the largest, navy afloat. He could call for powerful armed aid from Ireland and from France. He held the principal sea-ports and arsenals under trusty Catholic governors. He enjoyed substantial revenues. He assumed that the Church of England was paralysed by its doctrine of non-resistance, and he had been careful not to allow any Parliament to assemble for collective action. Ranged against him on the other hand were not only the Whigs, but almost all the old friends of the Crown. The men who had made the Restoration, the sons of the men who had fought and died for his father at Marston Moor and Naseby, the Church whose bishops and ministers had so long faced persecution for the principle of Divine Right, the universities which had melted their plate for King Charles I’s coffers and sent their young scholars to his armies, the nobility and landed gentry whose interests had seemed so bound up with the monarchy - all, with bent heads and burning hearts, must now prepare themselves to outface their King in arms. Never did the aristocracy or the Established Church face a sterner test than in 1688.

During the previous twelve months, sides had been taken. In April 1687 James had made a Declaration of Indulgence. This was a decree which suspended the laws against dissenters and Roman Catholics. He was probably quite successful in taking some, perhaps many, dissenters into his camp. Even the Quakers, who had refused to acknowledge a similar Indulgence of Charles II, were among the eighty or so groups which proposed formal addresses of thanks to the King. Even Whigs supported the King.

The impatient group was headed by Charles II's former chief minister, the Earl of Dunby. This was the very man who had been impeached for his part in negotiations with, of all people, Louis XIV, and sent to the Tower. Danby joined the conspiracy to bring Prince William and an army to England.

James II believed he had the army on his side. But did he? What about Churchill, his general and agent? Or Kirke, who had been with Churchill when Monmouth's rebellion had been put down in the West Country?

C+The supreme object of all the conspirators, civil or military, was to coerce the King without using physical force. This was certainly Churchill's intention. With him in secret consultation were the colonels of the two Tangier regiments, Kirke and Trelawny, the Duke of Grafton, commanding the Guards, the Duke of Ormonde, and a number of other officers.

At the end of April James had issued a second Declaration of Indul­gence. He ordered that the Declaration should be read in all the churches. On May 18 seven bishops, headed by the Primate, the Venerable William Sancroft, protested against this use of dispensing power. The Declaration was left unread.

James was furious and demanded that the bishops should be sent for trial on the grounds of seditious libel. But еvеn Judge Jeffreys thought that trying bishops was going too far. James would not listen and the bishops were sent to the Tower.

And then, on 10 June 1688, an event occurred which Danby and his friends believed was the moment they'd been waiting for. The Queen gave birth to a son who later became known as the Old Pretender. The significance was obvious: the Catholic line would be continued.

It was now that Danby and his group of conspirators wrote to Prince William of Orange With this document. British history twisted in another direction.

For William of Orange to plan, or to agree to a plan, to usurp the throne of his wife's father was not to be taken lightly. But William of Orange was a Protestant and Protestant desperation was high.

The Protestants really did believe that the newborn Prince was not the son of the King and Queen. It was even suggested, and believed for many a year after, that the baby had been smuggled into St James's Palace in a warming pan. James, it was said, must have an heir, by any means.

Danby's letter to William of Orange was signed by, among others, Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Russell. Sidney and the bishop of London. And it was written on the day that the seven bishops who'd been taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall were found not guilty. The people cheered the news.

Churchill, at whose home the young Princess Anne, the future Queen, had been staying, had already pledged his intentions to William.

C+Lord Cornbury, eldest son of the Earl of Clarendon, [and] an officer of the Royal Dragoons, endeavoured to carry three regiments of horse to William's camp. James, warned from many quarters, meditated Churchill's arrest. On the night of November 23, having failed to carry any large part of the Army with them, Churchill and the Duke of Grafton, with about 400 officers and troopers, quitted the royal camp. At the same time the Princess Anne, attended by Sarah Churchill, and guided by Bishop Compton, fled northwards. And now revolt broke out all over the country. Danby was in arms in Yorkshire, Devonshire in Derbyshire, Delamere in Cheshire. Lord Bath delivered Plymouth to William. Byng, later an admiral, repre­senting the captains of the Fleet, arrived at his headquarters to inform him that the Navy and Portsmouth were at his disposal. City after city rose in rebellion. By one spontaneous, tremendous convulsion, the English nation repudiated James.

By the end of the year it was all over. James had been allowed to escape from England: they didn't want him. He was still King, for the moment, and there was no question of another regicide. Two years later James landed in Ireland with French troops and laid siege to Londonderry. About 30,000 Protestants were trapped, but they held out for three months until rescued, an occasion still celebrated in Ulster. Later James was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne and retreated to France where he became a pensioner of Louis XIVs. He died in France on 6 September 1701. It is Bishop Burnet, not at all a friend of James, who left a complete picture of this humourless King.

* He was a Prince that seemed made for greater things than will be found in the course of his life, more particularly of his reign. He was esteemed in the former parts of his life a man of great courage. He had no vivacity of thought, invention of expression; but he had a good judgment where his religion or his education gave him not a bias, which it did very often. He was bred with strange notions of the obedience due to princes, and came to take up as strange ones of the submissions due to priests. He was naturally a man of truth, fidelity and justice; but his religion was so infused in him, and he was so managed in it by his priests, that the principles which nature had laid in him had little power over him when the concern of his Church stood in the way. In a word, if it had not been for his popery, he would have been, if not great, yet a good Prince.

But that was not, of course, a Catholic view of James II. The Earl of Nottingham, for example, said any invitation to William to become King was in violation of the law. He called it high treason and a violation of the oath he'd taken to his sovereign. However there is no evidence from William, nor from his supporters, that he intended to be anything but Regent. After all his wife was Mary, James II's daughter, and she was a Protestant. It was Mary who would be monarch, not William, unless of course she insisted that he shared her throne.(Lee)

3) William III (1688-1702) and Mary II(1688-94)

Task 15.

1. How did the political life change in this period?

2. What wars was Britain involved into?

3. Who were the leading politicians of the time?

William and Mary, the king and queen who gave their names jointly to an age, were the only husband and wife in English history to rule together as co-monarchs by right. Any suggestion that Mary, as the deposed King James II's elder daughter, should wear the crown alone was vetoed by her Dutch husband, who stated flatly that he was not prepared 'to become his wife's gentleman-usher'. As a grandson of Charles I William had a claim to the Stuart thrones in his own right; and as a great-grandson of the Dutch Protestant champion William the Silent, his religious credentials were impeccable. He agreed to the Declaration of Rights, curbing the monarch's power over the law, the army and parliament and on 11 April 1689 the combined coronation of William III and Mary II took place in Westminster Abbey.

William of Orange had been 26 years old, already a seasoned politician and military campaigner, when he crossed to England to marry the Princess Mary, in the reign of Charles II. On 4 November 1677 they we married in St James's Palace. Mary was then a shy girl of 15, who wept at the prospect of marrying a stranger and leaving her own country, but she came to love Holland, and also her husband, although he was often unfaithful to her, and may also have been homosexual. William was reserved and humourless, Mary shy and retiring; yet they had some shared interests, such as a love of architecture and gardens, and they were united in their devotion to the cause of Protestantism. Their marriage-alliance was itself a symbol of Anglo-Dutch unity in the face of the ambitions of King Louis XIV of France. Resisting French expansion in Europe was the central, driving aim of William's career, both as Prince of Orange and as King of England. In the Netherlands, he had successfully withstood the French king's territorial aggression, securing the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678. As King of England, in 1689, he proceeded to bring his new country into a treaty with the Spanish Empire and the United Provinces, to form a Grand .Alliance against King Louis XIV's plans for French mastery in Europe. In the years that followed, Mary was often left to rule while William was campaigning abroad. Early in the reign, in 1690, William was obliged to take the field close to home, against a French-backed attempt to restore King James to the Stuart thrones. In Ireland, with its largely Roman Catholic population, the exiled James could still command fierce loyally. He set up a court and Parliament in Dublin; and with the support of Louis XIV he set about reconquering his former pos­sessions, beginning with the Protestant strongholds in the north of Ireland. In the spring of 1689, James personally conducted the siege of Londonderry, but despite sickness and near-starvation the Protestant inhabi­tants succeeded in holding out, until ships carrying supplies from England broke through the besiegers' coastal defences to relieve the city. A long and bitterly-fought campaign followed until finally, on 1 July 1690, King William and King James faced one another at the River Boyne, some 20 miles north of Dublin. James's army bore the French fleur-de-lys on their banners, as well as the Stuart insignia; William's army included soldiers from almost every Protestant nation. In the ensuing Battle of the Boyne, William was slightly wounded, but by the end of the day he had won a resounding victory. James escaped to exile in France once more, never to return; and the name of 'King Billy' has remained a potent symbol of the conflict between Catholic and Protestant in Ireland to the present day. Though the wars against the French were to occupy much of King William's energy and attention, the achievements of the reign of William and Mary were the constitutional changes which took place at home. The Triennial Act was passed, requiring Parliament to be summoned every three years; the Commons gained increased control over the army through the Mutiny Act, and over the king's expenditure through the Civil List Act while a new Act of Indulgence brought a new degree of tolerance for non-conformist worship, though it precluded Roman Catholiclsm. In 1701, the Act of Settlement was passed, which, while settling the Stuart succession on James I's granddaughter Sophia of Hanover and her children, barred any monarch who was not a Protestant from succeeding to the throne, a provision still in force today. Though William and Parliament did not always see eye to eye, the power of Parliament increased during his reign, and a new balance between it ant monarchy was achieved.

The modest Queen Mary did not care for the responsibilities of power; except when William was away she preferred to leave matters of government in the hands of her husband and his ministers. She was, however, active in her role as Head of the Church of England, and it was she, rather than her Calvinist husband, who made Church ap­pointments. Her other notable sphere of influence was in the building works carried out on the royal palaces; under her direction, much of Henry VIII's old river-palace of Hampton Court was rebuilt by Wren, and its gardens laid out in the formal Dutch style, while Kensington Palace was created from an earlier mansion, also by Christopher Wren. William and Mary preferred to keep their court out at rural Kensington, away from the London air, because the King suffered from asthma. A short man with a habitual cough, he was never physically strong, and many thought he would not outlive his wife. But in the event she died first, carried off by smallpox on 28 December 1694, aged only 32. For all his shortcomings as a husband, William was overcome with grief, and he wore a lock of her hair until the day he died.

After the first enthusiasm of his arrival had died down, William of Orange had not enjoyed great personal popularity with his subjects, and after Mary's death he seemed a morose and isolated figure. His reign had seen notable achievements, from the creation of the Bank of England, in 1694, to the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, which curbed the power of France and secured Louis XIV's recognition of the invalidity of the Jacobite claim to the Stuart throne. But the final defeat of Louis XIV’s France was yet to come; and when he died on 8 March 1702, William's chief regret was that he had not lived to see it. (J.Ross)

When William of Orange landed in England in 1688 not everyone intended that he should be King even though he had been in the thick of the conspiracy to remove James. The Whigs, the party formed to fight for the exclusion of James, as a Catholic, from his right to the crown, were not unexpectedly on William's side. The Tories were the party of the Crown. But even the Anglican Tones were not all for William's accession, although they welcomed his invasion.

But once William had arrived in London, and once James had escaped (probably with William's help: he needed his father-in-law out of the way, but not as an assassinated or executed martyr) there seems little doubt that William wanted to be King – he certainly wanted the English Army to help fight his own battles. And the solution was obvious: William's wife, Mary, would be Queen and William could be Regent. Better still, Mary could insist that they should rule together: King and Queen. Perhaps that had been the Dutchman's idea all along. For all his weak appearance, humped back and sickly nature, William of Orange was a prince of considerable cunning.

C+Frоm his earliest years, the extraordinary Prince who robbed his father-in-law of the British throne had dwelt under harsh and stern conditions. William of Orange was fatherless and childless. His life was loveless. His marriage was dictated by reasons of State. He was brought up by a termagant grandmother, and in his youth was regulated by one Dutch committee after another. His childhood was unhappy and his health bad. But within this emaciated and defective frame there burned a remorseless fire, fanned by the storms of Europe, and intensified by the grim compression of his surroundings. His greatest actions began before he was twenty-one. From that age he had fought constantly in the field, and toiled through every intrigue of Dutch domestic politics and of the European scene. For four years, he had been the head of the English conspiracy against the Catholic King James II.

William was a Calvinist but he wasn't single-minded. He was on good terms with the Pope. He took advice from Catholics. He's said to have hated the French Catholics, but perhaps not because they were Catholics but because they were French. And here is a clue to William's determination to be King: the one reason why he might not have invaded England was Louis XIV of France. If Louis had decided to invade the Netherlands that year, as well he might have, then William would have been forced to stay in Holland. Louis in fact moved on Germany. Besides, William could very well say that what he was doing, he was doing for his wife. After all, he would hardly do it for the English, the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots. He didn't like any of them.

C+William was cold, but not personally cruel. He wasted no time on minor revenges. His sole quarrel was with Louis XIV. For all his experience from a youth spent at the head of armies, and for all his dauntless heart, he was never a great commander. He was no more than a resolute man of good common sense whom the accident of birth had carried to the conduct of war. His inspiration lay in the sphere of diplomacy. He has rarely been surpassed in the sagacity, patience, and discretion of his statecraft. The combinations he made, the difficulties he surmounted, the adroitness with which he used the time factor, or played upon the weakness of others, his unerring sense of proportion and power of assigning to objectives their true priorities, all mark him for the highest repute.

William's adroitness and timing were very obvious during the first few weeks after he arrived in England. Conspirators against King James II implied to William that he could be king (although some of them, including Danby, denied this). What they really wanted was a compliant and Protestant monarch. William worked quickly: James left England on 23 December and arrived in France on Christmas Day. On Boxing Day William called a meeting in London. In front of him were some of the surviving members of Charles II's last Parliament. Joining them were the aldermen, the Lord Mayor of London and men from the common council of London. William didn't invite the Tories from James II's Parliament, which meant that the group was dominated by Whigs - the people who didn't want James to be king in the first place.

One month later a Declaration of Rights was made which offered the Crown to William and Mary. And twelve months after that the Declaration became an Act of Parliament. But what about lawful succession? During the winter of 1688 and 1689, the Tory Anglicans had tried to stop the transfer of the Crown. The bishops didn't mind James being King as long as he was legally bound to the Church. Bui in January 1689 the Tories decided that they wanted William's wife, Mary, to rule as Regent, but on James's behalf, so that James remained King. That proposal was defeated, but only just. Then the Tories said that James's flight from the country amounted to abdication and since too many people believed that James and Mary of Modena's son was not actually theirs, that the baby had been smuggled into St James's Palace to maintain the Catholic line of succession, then James's daughter Mary was the obvious successor. It was then that William showed his intentions. He didn't want to be, as he called it, 'a gentleman usher' to his wife. The Declaration of Rights provided the form of words for Mary to declare that she wished to rule as Queen with her husband, William, as King.

So the succession was arranged and the Princess's heir was next in line to the throne because, whatever the feelings towards James, his daughter was still next in line. But there was something else to be resolved; perhaps, just perhaps, the most important section of the Declaration of Rights. It declared that, in future, no Catholic could be monarch. The issue remains sensitive to this day, even when it does not involve a Catholic. When Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten became engaged to Princess Elizabeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury advised that although the future husband of the future Queen was Greek Orthodox, it would be better if he were received into the Church of England. Just two weeks before the wedding, in 1947, he was.

So William, who had little regard for these islands and their peoples was to be King of England, Ireland and France. But William had an even greater dislike for Louis XIV.

C+His paramount interest was in the great war now begun throughout Europe, and the immense confederacy he had brought into being. He had regarded the English adventure as a divagation, a duty necessary but tiresome, which had to be accomplished for a larger purpose. He required the wealth and power of England by land and sea for the European war. He had come in person to enlist her. He used the English public men who had been his confederates for his own ends, and rewarded them for their services, but as a race he regarded them as inferior in fibre and fidelity to his Dutchmen.

It would seem that William accepted, indeed wanted, the crown for two reasons. One: as his wife, Mary, the beautiful daughter of James II, had a hereditary claim on England, then she (and he) should exercise it. Two: England's wealth and military power would be an invaluable weapon in his real ambition: the submission of France.

King William was regarded as an oaf, a bore, an uncouth King. Yet he was well educated, could speak six languages, including fluent Latin, and bewildered London society by his artistic learning. As William of Orange, he had used a mixture of cunning, astute diplomacy and military force; rid his country of the French by 1674, formed an Alliance with Lorraine, Brandenburg and Spain to deter the French, and had become the head of what was then called the United Provinces. But the steady march of Louis XIV was yet to be checked.

Seventeenth-century London didn't really understand the dangers as William saw them. Given the character of the new King and what he regarded as his special sense of vision it was inevitable that William thought so little of his new people. And just imagine how this new regime went down with a society that still remembered, with some fondness perhaps, the easy going times of the Merry Monarch, Charles II. And also, think what it must have been like to see armed Dutch infantry around the capital of England, not English soldiers.

C+Once securely seated on the English throne, he scarcely troubled to disguise these sentiments. It was not surprising that such manners, and still more the mood from which they evidently arose, gave deep offence. For the English, although submissive to the new authority of which they had felt the need, were as proud as any race in Europe. No one relishes being an object of aversion and contempt, especially when these affronts are unstudied, spontaneous and sincere. William's unsociable disposition, his greediness at table, his silence and surliness in company, his indifference to women, his dislike of London, all prejudiced him with polite society. The ladies voted him 'a low Dutch bear'. The English Army too was troubled in its soul. Neither officers nor men could dwell without a sense of humiliation upon the military aspects of the Revolution. They did not like to see all the most important commands entrusted to Dutchmen.

C+ Had William used his whole strength in Ireland in 1689, he would have been free to carry it to the Continent in 1690; but in the new year he found himself compelled to go in person with his main force to Ireland, and by the summer, he took the field at the head of 36,000 men. Thus the whole power of England was diverted from the main theatre of the war [on the Continent]. The Prince of Waldeck, William's Commander in the Low Countries, suffered a crushing defeat at the skilful hands of Marshal Luxembourg in the Battle of Fleurus. At the same time, the French Fleet gained a victory over the combined fleets of England and Holland off Вeachу Head. It was said in London that 'the Dutch had the honour, the French had the advantage, and the English the shame'. The command of the Channel temporarily passed to me French under Admiral Tourville, and it seemed that they could at the same time land an invading army in England and stop William returning from Ireland.

Queen Mary's Council, of which Marlborough (John Churchill who had changed his allegiance from James II to William and was now an earl) was a member, had to face an alarming prospect. They were sustained by the loyalty and spirit of the nation.

James II was still alive, just, and his Jacobite court was at St Germain.

С+William hastened to present this to Parliament as proof of perfidy. But the supreme event which roused all England to an understanding of what had actually happened in the virtual union of the Crowns of France and Spain was a tremendous military operation effected under the guise of brazen legality.

Philip V [the Duke of Anjou] had been acclaimed in Madrid. The Spanish Netherlands rejoiced in his accession. During the month of February 1701, French forces arrived before all the Belgian cities. The Dutch garrisons, overawed by force, and no one daring to break the peace, were interned. All that the Grand Alliance of 1689 had defended in the Low Countries in seven years of war, melted like snow at Easter. Europe was roused, and at last England was staggered [surprised]. William felt the tide had set in his favour. By the middle of the year, the parties in opposition to him in his two realms, the Tory majority in the House of Commons and the powerful burgesses of Amsterdam, were both begging him to do everything that he 'thought needful for the preservation of the peace of Europe' – that is to say, for war.

War was inevitable. But there was one final event which made even the English Parliament recognize this: James II died. This mattered because James II’s son, James Edward Stuart, was proclaimed by his father’s court as James III of England and VIII of Scotland. That was no surprise, of course, but the significant point is that Louis XIV of France announced that he recognized the son, the Old Pretender as he became known, as King of England.

С+Whigs and Tories vied with one another in Parliament in resenting the affront. The whole nation became resolute for war, supplies were tendered to the Crown. King William was able to sever diplomatic relations with France. The Emperor had already begun the war, and his famous general, Prince Eugene of Savoy, was fighting in the North of Italy.

William was never to see the war through. On 20 February 1702, he fell from his horse and broke his collar-bone. He was a tired, weak man and in this second year of the eighteenth century medicine had no remedy. (Lee)

Emergence of the Jacobites

In the course of the seventeenth century, the government of Scotland, with its inseparable components of religion, the royal interest and the effort to maintain stability as well as sustain the economy, had swung wildly from out-and-out Presbyterianism to a draconian Episcopacy. Such a fluctuating state of affairs reflected the primitive political make-up of the country and did not necessarily represent public opinion at any stage. The mass of the population had no say in political affairs and did not yet expect one, but the times provided a rich seed bed for future political thinking. Just as James VII and his agents had sought to manipulate the very restricted but electorates with his supporters, so the Convention of March 1689 was packed with his opponents. Those who were on the side of James, already called Jacobites, stayed away for their own safety. It is possible that they formed a majority in the country, since the Scottish respect for Stewart le­gitimacy remained strong and could transcend the religious divide The Judge of Session, Lord Tarbat, noted that The Presbyterians are the more zealous and hotter; the other more numerous and powerful.' But there was no means by which the 'other' could translate that superiority into effective control. Except for the old remedy of brute force, duly tried by the energetic Claverhouse, who was by now Viscount Dundee and had been lately the scourge of the southwestern Whigs. Between March and June he was in the Highlands parleying and bargaining with mutually suspicious chiefs, unit­ing them, and forging an army. A government army under Hugh MacKay of Scourie was sent out to meet him, and on 27 July 1689, in the steep-sided Pass of Kilkecrankie, the Highlanders routed it in a single charge. But Dun­dee was killed in the battle and without his leadership the cause was lost. Three weeks later, under his successor appointed by James VII, General Cannon, the Highlanders were driven back from Dunkeld by a regiment of Cameronians, formerly persecuted figures and now heroes of the new order. The new mon­archy was safe, although the Jacobites had not gone away. (D.Ross)