A rebel duke lands at Lyme Regis and is beaten on the Somerset Levels (1685)
The Monmouth Rebellion, ended at the Battle of Sedgemoor, 6 July 1685
Monarchs · Stuart
James II
1633–1701
House of Stuart — the Glorious Revolution
In office: 1685–1688
The last Roman Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland, James II survived a rebellion in his first year but destroyed himself in his third. His use of the dispensing power to put Catholics into office, his prosecution of seven bishops and the sudden birth of a Catholic heir in June 1688 persuaded seven leading Protestants to invite his son-in-law William of Orange to invade. James fled, and the Convention Parliament declared the throne vacant.
How to spot them
- ▸James VII in Scotland; the last Catholic sovereign; the last to be deposed
- ▸Lord High Admiral before his accession; New Amsterdam renamed in his honour in 1664
- ▸The warming-pan allegation; the Immortal Seven; the flight to France
- ▸Died in exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1701; father of the Old Pretender
In the reign
A judge on the Western Circuit condemns hundreds of rebels to hanging or transportation (1685)
The Bloody Assizes of Judge George Jeffreys
A royal declaration suspending the penal laws against Catholics and dissenters, by prerogative alone (1687)
The Declaration of Indulgence, reissued in 1688 and ordered to be read from every pulpit
Seven bishops tried for seditious libel and acquitted to cheering crowds (1688)
Archbishop Sancroft and six others had petitioned against reading the Declaration
Seven noblemen and clerics write to a Dutch prince inviting him to bring an army (1688)
The Immortal Seven, whose letter was dated 30 June 1688
A Dutch fleet lands at Brixham in Torbay on the fifth of November (1688)
The start of the Glorious Revolution; the Protestant wind had blown the invaders down the Channel
A fleeing king drops the Great Seal into the Thames (1688)
December 1688; the flight was treated by parliament as an abdication
A deposed king is defeated by his son-in-law at an Irish river crossing (1690)
The Battle of the Boyne, 1 July 1690 Old Style, commemorated on 12 July
Quick-fire facts
- •Second surviving son of Charles I; as Duke of York he was Lord High Admiral and commanded at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665
- •New Amsterdam was renamed New York for him after its capture in 1664
- •He converted to Roman Catholicism about 1668–69, and the Test Act of 1673 forced him to resign his offices
- •His first wife, Anne Hyde, was the mother of the future Mary II and Queen Anne; his second was Mary of Modena
- •The birth of his son James Francis Edward on 10 June 1688 gave England a Catholic heir and triggered the invitation to William; opponents spread the story that the baby had been smuggled in inside a warming pan
- •The Convention Parliament of 1689 resolved that he had abdicated and that the throne was thereby vacant
- •In Ireland his Jacobite army besieged Derry in 1689 and was beaten at the Boyne in 1690 and Aughrim in 1691
- •He died at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 16 September 1701; Louis XIV recognised his son as James III
- •He wrote a memoir of his naval service, and the Royal Navy's tactical Fighting Instructions are associated with his period as Lord High Admiral
Drill it — 8 cards
1 / 8new card
Sources
- The Royal Household — James VII and II (r.1685-1689)
- Steve Pincus — 1688: The First Modern Revolution