The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688

James II was England’s first Roman Catholic monarch for a hundred and fifty years (if you don’t count his brother Charles II’s deathbed conversion). At any rate, Parliament was determined that he would be the last, and in 1688 they took drastic action to make sure that England did not become a vassal of the powerful and ambitious French King, Louis XIV.

AFTER James II came to the throne in 1685, it soon became evident that, like his father Charles I, he believed Kings had a divine right to rule without any Parliamentary restraint. England’s brief experiment as a republic from 1649 to 1660 had admittedly been a disaster, and the restoration of James’s elder brother Charles II had felt like a golden age, but Parliament refused to turn back the clock to the days of Absolute monarchy.

Moreover, while exiled in France James had become a Roman Catholic. Now he began appointing Catholics to senior government and military posts, and fears that England could become a vassal of Louis XIV’s ambitious Catholic France only grew when news broke in 1688 that James’s second wife had given him a Catholic son and heir.*

Seven leading statesmen approached James’s eldest daughter Mary and her husband William, ruler of the Netherlands, and offered them the crown:* both were Protestants, both were grandchildren of Charles I, and William was at war with Louis XIV, making them an attractive pair.

Continue to Part 2

James’s first wife Anne Hyde died in 1673; the same year he married Mary Beatrice, daughter of the Duchess of Modena. Parliament tried to preempt a Catholic heir by various means, all of which failed at the time. However, in 1701 the Act of Settlement barred Roman Catholics from inheriting the Crown, a law which remains in force to this day. It should be borne in mind that the Popes still claimed supreme authority in secular as well as religious matters; it was for this reason that a hundred and fifty years earlier Henry VIII’s Government had declared ‘the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England’.

Mary and her sister Anne were daughters of James’s first wife, Anne Hyde. William’s mother Mary was James II’s sister, making William a grandson of Charles I, and thus his wife Mary’s cousin.

Word Games

Clay Lane

The Copy Book