James II & the "Glorious Revolution"

thanks hello everyone, it's Sam the historian explaining that a historian tells you why everything you know is wrong. These lectures are on Soundcloud YouTube Stitcher and other platforms and if you can help keep them posted, please go to my Patreon page. The link is in description in advance of an interview I hope to do soon with the historian of modern Britain who has studied the honor system, the system of knighthoods and dames etc., and the monarchy and the role it plays in modern British society. I want to go back and pick up the thread I left off last year about English dynastic history, the history of the different monarchs of Great Britain, what they reflect and the impact they have had on British society and, specifically, it is very appropriate that I I am going to talk this time about James II because we recently saw earlier this year the accession to the throne of a new king who is a mature man, a man who has had many years behind him, a complex life and career with many ups and downs. . and casualties, vicissitudes and scandals, and in many ways can be seen as a kind of echo of James II, who came to the throne in 1685, although we have yet to see whether this new king's reign will be as disastrous. like James II, perhaps the recently deceased Prime Minister who just left office after the shortest term in British history, in some ways resonates a little more with what ended up happening with James II, but before we get into that, I left a previous comment.

The conference called England was interrupted by talking about the end of the reign of Charles II, who died in February 1685. And this ended, most scholars would say, the era of restoration, this time of an uneasy peace between the different factions of English society, so the Restoration had seen a kind of careful but possibly fragile balance of power between the monarchy and Parliament, between Protestants and Catholics and especially between Whigs and Tories, these new partisan factions that had formed within of Parliament and I will speak later about why these divisions were so deep in the late 1600s and what they represented, but nevertheless these divisions that had persisted in Restoration England were reactivated after Charles was succeeded by his brother youngest, James, the Duke of York, and he was a very complex character, we'll talk about what kind of person he was. and what his life had been like, but above all he was Catholic and this was very important because he was the first Catholic ruler to ascend the English throne since Mary Tudor, more than a hundred years before, unless we count Charles II perhaps for a few few minutes on his deathbed when he converted to Catholicism in his last moments, but excluding that it was a new and dramatic event to now have a new monarch coming to the throne who is a Catholic who governs a country now with a firmly Protestant majority , but before we get into his religion we have to consider where he came from who he was what happened to him before he became king and how that helped lead to another radical break and what has been called a

revolution

that paved the way for a new Constitution The settlement and even more paved the way for a modern commercial imperial Britain, more like the Britain we know today, so let's go back to who James was and what his life was like before he became king.

Well, he was born in 1633 as the second son. of King Charles I and his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria, so it is often said that the monarch and his wife have to find an heir and a replacement, and Charles and Henrietta Maria did it and it turns out that James was the replacement, so For most of his life he did not seem very likely to become king, he was waiting in the wings, he was raised and educated mainly by the Tudors in the Royal Palace and they showered him with extravagant titles, including Duke of York, which already by At that time it was a traditional title for the youngest sons of the king and also Lord High Admiral, even when he was just a child, then he came of age in his early teenage years, he came of age in the midst of the crisis constitutional and civil crisis.

War in which Parliament rebelled against his father Charles I and eventually overthrew and executed him when he was a teenager. James actually fought in a Civil War battle and was apparently quite competent at least for his young age and barely escaped being taken prisoner by the Parliamentarians at the end of the war, he was held captive for a time by the Parliamentary government in London, but he was able to escape abroad and go to France, where he joined his older brother Charles in exile, while in exile he became an adult and served for a time in the French army fighting against the Frondes rebellion and also against the Spanish and was noted for his courage and aggressiveness in battle and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General partly for his performance, but was later expelled from France due to a diplomatic realignment when France finally made an alliance with the government of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, so abruptly that he was forced to leave France and had to switch sides to Spain and fought for a time in the service of Spain for some years.

However, years later, in 1660, the English Parliament changed course and invited Charles to return and retake the throne in England and he was proclaimed King Charles II and James, naturally, was able to return with him, so he returned to England. and soon assumed royal office. duties as Lord High Admiral he claimed that title and effectively assumed command of the Navy. He was also appointed governor of the slave trading cartel called The Royal African Company, so perhaps you could say he had divided loyalties and in the Anglo-Dutch War in the 1660s, he commanded the English Navy and he concentrated on capturing trading ports in Africa as a way to promote the interests of the African royal company.

James was also assigned more duties and special tasks; He was granted charters to govern the colony of New Holland in America after it was captured from the Dutch and that is why he became interested in this Colony, it was renamed New York in his honor because he was Duke of York and it seems that he began using New York as a kind of laboratory for religious politics. tolerance and for several decades New York was the most religiously free and tolerant colony in North America. He also supervised firefighting operations during the great fire of 1666 and was perceived as brave and effective and gained a degree of public favor, so in late 1666 he seemed to be quite promising, right, his brother, King Charles, He was still childless, although he was young and perfectly capable of fathering children, he had yet to conceive any with his wife, so by most accounts James seems to be pretty solid and well-liked and was a pretty good prospect for a potential future king if his brother had no children, but soon his popularity would suffer and this was largely due to his family life so early in 1660, shortly after returning to England, James married Anne Hyde, who was the daughter of a government minister and she was a commoner, not a noble woman and much less a foreign princess, so this was seen as an inappropriate marriage, the king had forbidden it, but still James complied and married Anne hidden in secret and appears to have been a close relationship. and affectionate marriage Ann and James had a total of seven children throughout the 1660s, but most of them died in infancy or childhood, which was common, only two lived to adulthood and those were two daughters named Mary and Anne and both were raised.

As Protestants, at this moment the entire royal family and Anhyde are all firm. Anglican Protestants, it appears that James was very loving and affectionate towards his wife Ann and his two daughters and spent a lot of quality time with them and his wife. It seems to have been a major influence on James's opinions and loyalties, so it was very significant when Anne converted in 1667 to Roman Catholicism and at some point, not long after, James seems to have followed Anne's example; We do not know the exact details, but it is evident that he began taking Catholic communion in 1668 or '69 and gradually stopped attending Anglican church services.

This was still a private matter that was carried out in private masses held inside the court because Catholic worship was still technically illegal, but there were some sort of special dispensations that allowed Catholics to have masses held inside the court, so that James' Catholic loyalties were still a private matter and a subject of rumors and whispers at court and sometimes beyond, and it also makes sense to some extent that James converted because his mother Henrietta Maria had been Catholic and he He had spent so many years abroad in the service of France and Spain, so he was probably already familiar with and favorably disposed toward the Catholic religion.

His wife Ann died in 1671 and it seems that this probably sealed and further cemented his resolve to remain Catholic now. All of this could have remained hidden and simply a sort of private, non-political matter until Parliament passed a test law, so there was a growing fear of Catholic influence or infiltration in England, especially among the House of Commons, and passed this test law that required anyone in any kind of public office to have to take an oath condemning various Catholic doctrines, including transubstantiation, it seems that they were particularly bothered by that and they had to commit to taking the Anglican communion in the Church of England and this test law actually applied to James because he was the Lord High Admiral of the Navy and he refused to take this oath and instead resigned his office and therefore his Catholic loyalties became obvious and publicly known and it happened that he was not alone, he was joined by hundreds of royal members and local officials, all of whom resigned in a wave rather than submit to this testing act that surprised and even alarmed a number of people throughout the country seeing that there were so many private Catholics throughout England and even in high positions, except James Duke of York. was especially important due to his closeness to the king and the fact that he was still his brother's heir apparent and likely successor, so this incident when James resigned in 1673 led to a tug-of-war over the religious future of the dynasty and This was especially pressing because King Charles still had no legitimate children;

He was perfectly productive of illegitimate children with his many mistresses of all backgrounds and religions, but for some reason his wife Catherine of Burgundy had not yet had children, so James was next in line of succession. The throne was then followed by his daughters, eldest daughter Mary and then Anne, so the king's faith and that of his heirs were very serious political questions and Charles had to come to a kind of deal in which he first allowed James remarried a few years later. to an Italian Catholic princess called Mary of Modena, but in exchange James agreed that his eldest daughter Mary, who was a Protestant like the king, would be matched with William of Orange, the head of state of the Dutch Republic, and this was extremely significant.

Mary, apparently, didn't. It's not like the idea was forced, but politically and diplomatically it made sense for the country, so William of Orange was a committed Protestant and was technically the Stott holder of the Dutch Republic, which is kind of caretaker of the State, but really for this. By the end of the 17th century it had basically become a monarchy and William was the heir to the House of Orange, which had basically become the ruling dynastic House of the Netherlands, so he was actually King in everything but the name of the Netherlands and was a Protestant hero and was the main sort of Protestant nemesis of the great Catholic rival that was France and therefore, from the Protestant point of view, he was a natural ally for England if he married Mary, which would ensure Protestant success. dynasty from Mary and her offspring onwards because James did not yet have any children, so Mary remained his heir and represented the promise of a future Alliance of England and the Netherlands, a reorientation away from the friendly relations with France that had been the rule. in the Restoration era and more towards the Protestant world and it also implied that William would actually become the de facto ruler of England and that is in part because William would now not only be married to Mary, the second in line succession to the throne, but also because he himself was related to the English ruling dynasty and his mother, his father had been William II, the shareholder of the Netherlands, and his mother had been an English princess, sister of Charles II and James, so for those keeping score, yes, that means that William was the nephew of Charles and James and therefore was Princess Mary's first cousin.

This was a first cousin marriage, but you know what a little bit ofincest between royals, that's how the game is played and it did matter that he was related. that through his maternal line with Charles and James because that further strengthened Williams' link with England and his credibility as a possible future Regent, the true de facto ruler or perhaps even as a future king, perhaps he could get the title of King if he got the right. support and allies within England, so this marriage of Mary and William of Orange should have allayed the fears of many English Protestants, but nevertheless the anxiety remained there; it was still a fact that James was the successor, the next successor to the throne before Mary or William and this anxiety and fear erupted again into paranoia and panic in the years 1678 to 81 over the alleged popish plot that I spoke of. but last time in my previous lecture on England, he interrupted James himself during this outbreak of conspiratorial fear.

Around the papal plot, James tried to be accommodating, he supported calls for a full investigation into the allegations and there were multiple ongoing trials of many accused Catholic conspirators and these were mainly overseen by James's own lawyer, George .Jeffries, who was known for being extremely harsh in mocking and ridiculing the accused and accused conspirators, and for the harshness of his punishments, meted out many executions and forms of torture, and Jeffrey in this way was a staunch Protestant, but nevertheless he personally trusted James, there was a kind of special alliance between them and Jeffries opposed the exclusion bill in Parliament which sought to exclude James from the line of succession.

Jeffries truly believed in the sanctity of the law and royal authority and in James's good character, and he came. James and King Charles trusted him greatly and a few years later he was appointed president of the Supreme Court; However, at the height of this Führer's Popish plot, James was forced to temporarily leave England and went first to Belgium for a time and then, when it seemed safe, he went to Scotland and took up residence at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. , but finally, between 1681 and 1682, the Führer over the papal plot gradually calmed down and the idea of ​​excluding James from the succession was abandoned and he was able to return to Scotland.

England from Edinburgh back to London, but just at that time, just before taking up full residence in London in May 1682, he was sailing aboard a warship, the Gloucester, while traveling up the east coast of England when he collided violently against a sandbank. and she sank within an hour and in this disastrous shipwreck about 200 people were drowned and James himself narrowly escaped and reached the shore and Stuart Royal's propagandists presented his survival as a miraculous sign of divine favor, but just at that moment were following in the footsteps of this close call in 1683. The Rye House Plot was discovered which was a very sophisticated insurrectionary plot led by a group of aristocrats based in a manor house in Hertfordshire called Rai house and the plan was to assassinate both the King Charles and James to overthrow the monarchy and declare a new Republic.

Modeled after the Parliamentary Commonwealth, one of the likely conspirators in this plot was King Charles's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, who then fled abroad and this scandal surrounding the Rye House Plot actually ended up helping boosting James' popularity again, just what happened in time because shortly after, in February 1685, Charles II finally died and James was proclaimed king and ascended the throne at the relatively advanced age of 52. So what was the situation when James finally came to the throne? Well, one thing we have to consider is James. personal attitude and perspective he was greater than most monarchs when they ascend the throne he was very firm in his customs and firm in his convictions many would say stubborn he was a devout Catholic not only committed to that faith but actually with the zeal of the convert, someone who had embraced religion as an adult, was very confident in his divine right as king.

A lot of this was probably influenced by his experience in France, where it was actually the homeland of Catholic divine right absolutism and he had survived as We saw repeated brushes with death and I think this almost certainly had an influence on him as well. He had been repeatedly threatened or forced into exile by one enemy or another before finally coming to the throne, and he did come to the throne. He seems to have a sense of distrust, probably resentment towards his critics and enemies and also I think a sense of Fate, the notion that his accession to the throne after surviving so many dangers and obstacles was a providential right that he would eventually come to the throne and As a faithful Catholic now, what about everyone else?

What was the political situation in the country among the people of England when he became king? Well, as I said, there was a deep division between Catholics and Protestants and this was not just a question of doctrine, certainly, people. He fought over things like transubstantiation, but he was also political and social. Each religion was seen not only as a variety of Christianity, but as aligned with a totally different vision of society, so if we think about the most committed Protestants, they are generally concentrated in the largest cities. and in London and politically they support the Whig party.

The Whig party was the party that had wanted to exclude James from the succession when he ascends the throne. They are his most likely enemies and the Whigs associate Protestantism with freedom in quotes which did not simply mean freedom. personal, it meant for them a participatory government embodied by city councils and corporations and especially by Parliament and wigs. They based the idea of ​​a community of independent and self-sufficient men on classical republicanism and even used that word Commonwealth which they claimed to defend independence from England. quote religion Liberty and property and in terms of its class profile, the wig faction has its roots in merchants and new landowners, those who owned freehold property over which they had exclusive rights to dispose of as They wanted and had obtained these properties through the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century and the enclosure movement in which land traders, buyers and speculators had seized what had been common lands, closed them and They sold them to buyers and speculators and wanted to defend their land holdings without obligations to honor the rights. of tenants or rights over common lands tended to associate Catholicism with tyranny and slavery and the famous poet Andrew Marvell, who was also a member of Parliament and a committed Whig, wrote a pamphlet in 1677 warning of the growth of potpourri. in England and along with it they cite tyranny, slavery and idolatry so that they see those things as all connected and part of a social system that they want to resist and that they see embodied by Catholic Europe, especially France and, in more practical terms , wigs were also simply Fearful of losing the political voice they had in the House of Commons and losing title to the properties they had gained over the previous 200 years.

Now at the opposite extreme are the Catholics, there were a number of private recusants called Catholics who refused to participate in Anglican worship, at that time it was a small minority, but not insignificant, perhaps around 10 to 12 percent of England was still Catholic, they tended to be in the rural areas and especially in the northwest of Lancashire, in the northwest, they had the largest number of Catholics. They see themselves as guardians of an old England, of an older world where classes and institutions have duties to society at large. They tend to believe in landowners, masters, employers, and the church, who derive their authority from their responsibility for the welfare of the commoners.

They have hope. from reversing the enclosure movement to returning to older land arrangements and also from reestablishing monastic houses that had been a large part of English society before Henry VII, they tend to associate wigs with grass. Being a greedy merchant elite with a corrupt government and with the enclosure movement and the widespread dispossession and poverty that the enclosure movement had led to, so you have these two extremes right and clearly the wigs are bigger, more powerful, they have more political voice at this time as James comes to the throne in 1685, but in the meantime. There are also the conservatives and in this context the conservatives could be seen as a kind of soft middle right.

They were a wide swath of English society that also tended to be largely rural, mainly concentrated in the northern and western parts of England. They favored a middle sector. In religion, a kind of compromise style of worship in the Anglican Church that is neither quite like Reformed Protestantism nor Catholicism, but something in between. Socially they are based on a traditional rural agrarian society. They embrace the values ​​of paternalism, social stability and social cohesion in the face of what they see as the corrupt and greedy commercial society of London and the court, but they still also see Catholicism as a danger as a foreign and idolatrous religion and tend to be very committed to the Church of England and that the The Conservative party in the Church of England continues to be very united and in modern times people sometimes describe the Church of England as a rendezvous of the Conservative party in prayer, which was a suffragette of the 19th century who coined that phrase and in some ways it captures how people view the Church.

In England, this religious and political position are closely related, so when James comes to the throne, he naturally has the support of Catholics who see him as a possible defender, a defender of tolerance and acceptance, and he also has a fairly strong support among the Conservatives and In 1685, the Conservatives had a majority in Parliament, so there was a favorable majority willing to cooperate and work together with James and it seems that there he has the opportunity to govern and perhaps readjust the course of society in Britain if it plays its cards and handles the situation well from May 1685, as I said, the parliament is mostly conservative, it is quite friendly, it votes willingly to allow it to collect various taxes and raise money for military purposes and of another kind, but the House of Commons firmly rejects his idea. to exempt Catholics from the Test Act, so the wigs and Tories in Parliament still largely want to keep that test law in place to find out the religious loyalties and Anglican loyalties of anyone in high office if they had approved this exception to the evidence law. it would have effectively made Catholicism another state-sponsored religion alongside the Church of England and weakened the authority of the Church of England in its ability to keep people attending its religious services if not required by its political and legal position , so James gets to clash with Parliament over this issue of the test law and whether or not to exempt Catholics from it and then repeatedly suspends Parliament over and over again for the next two years, much like which his father Charles had done in the 1630s.

This could have led to a total collapse, but in a sense he could be said to have obtained a partial pardon in a strangely ironic way when in May and June 1685 a rebellion broke out against him and was again led by Charles's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth who landed with an invading force. This is what people keep doing over and over again in Britain. Then they go abroad into exile. They gather some foreign supporters and mercenaries. They venture across the channel, land somewhere and hope to rally their supporters. because this is what Monmouth did. He landed with a force in Dorset, in the south-west of England, claimed to be Charles's legitimate heir, which required a rewriting of marital history and gathered some supporters, especially in the western country, and touched upon the uprisings both in In western England and Scotland, James joined and commanded an army and militia that aggressively confronted Monmouth and defeated the uprisings.

Monmouth attempted to escape the country again, but was captured and the Lord Chief Justice at the time is George. Jeffries, who then summarily executed Monmouth without a trial, you clearly know that Monmouth had lost this fight, but still summarily executing him without even allowing a defense was a bit controversial and raised the question of whether James was perhaps overreacting and this turned out to be be only the beginning of a series of escalating events that increased tension and eventually power struggle between James and his opponents in Parliament, so after the Monmouth Rebellion was put down, the Chief Justice Supreme,George Jeffries, oversaw a series of aggressive treason trials in which he faced implemented punishments including drawing and quartering, you know, the most graphic and gruesome way of executing someone for participants in the rebellion and even for many who just They had harbored the rebels after the fact, did not even actively participate in the uprising itself, and their court was especially draconian.

It came to be called quote "the bloody sizes" and over the course of about two months they executed 320 people and transported another 800 to Barbados, which at the time was effectively a slave right because there was still no clear legal boundary between the slaves imported from Africa and condemned prisoners from Europe and also beyond, it was effectively as a form of execution because the hard work and disease environment in Barbados was so brutal that most of them simply died quite quickly after their arrival. , so this truly draconian crackdown on Monmouth's rebellion could be seen as justified in a sense and within royal authority because that was how traitors were treated, but nonetheless the House of Lords saw Jeffries as going too far. and asked for his dismissal;

It was considered to exceed the usual limits of how to treat subjects. even if they were accused of treason and in response James simply suspended Parliament again, this became another point of contention leading to a cycle of parliaments called and suspended in October 1685, so shortly later that year King Louis and killed, thousands of them fled to England because England was still a Protestant country, but the entire incident raised fears that Protestantism was losing ground and was now under attack across Europe and James himself had no control over these events. All of this was happening in France, but he was an ally of Louis XIV anyway.

It was known that he had grown up. It arose largely in France and helped to revive fears that James possibly wanted to do something similar and perhaps also believed he could forcibly reimpose Catholicism in England and provoke similar persecutions across the Channel and now meanwhile across the other. side of the ocean in the English colonies. Abroad, James also undertook a reform program that also generated some alarm and consternation, resulting in James's government revoking the charters of several colonies in North America, including the four colonies of New England and New York, and all of these Colonies had previously had elected assemblies and some of them had elected their own governors, but James overthrew all such charter-based governments.

He consolidated them. into a single so-called Dominion of New England that would have a royally appointed Governor and Council, so it was taking self-government away from these local colonial regimes which, in the case of New England, had actually been seen as sort of Protestant strongholds and even ideal societies, God, New England, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and this sent a possible message about James's goals. It could be seen as an early example of something that happens again and again in empires of reforms being first tested in overseas colonies before being implemented. Home and especially a kind of authoritarian consolidation of power could be carried out first in the colonies and then returned to the home country, and seemed to be an illustration of how James was looking again to France as a model just as he was establishing a Dominion in North America. similar to New France right in what is now Canada and this was very worrying and seemed to raise again the possibility of renewed persecution or tyrannical rule and reignited the fears of so called tyranny and the potpourri moving forward together so all these fears and worries loom. about the political situation when the following year and in April 1687 James issued a declaration of Indulgence so he invoked his so-called dispensing power, which is something like a pardoning power, the power to grant exceptions to the laws and used his dispensing power to suspend the Test Laws so that local officials and office holders no longer had to take an oath of allegiance to the Anglican Church and one of the effects of this is that it opened the door to governmental power for English Catholics and also, by On the other hand, for Protestants. dissenters and nonconformists, these sort of dissident nonconformist groups like Quakers and Presbyterians, so some people like this, obviously, the Catholics and the dissenters saw this as very welcome, but it provoked a backlash and opposition from traditional Anglicans and, Of course, they were the majority. in Parliament, so the House of Commons strongly objected and argued that the king did not have this authority to totally override laws made by Parliament, so what did James do in July?

He eventually dissolved Parliament permanently and forbade them to meet again and this last conflict, then in 1687, led to a concerted and aggressive royal campaign to build support for his programme, so he used his executive power to appoint Catholics to town councils. to judge ships, militia offices, and even army and navy offices. He appointed a Roman Catholic as Chief Justice of Ireland, which was the main instrument of Royal Authority in Ireland, and even began to delve deeply into civil society by interfering in the academic elections of dons and deans at Oxford and Cambridge. and in quite a short time Magdalene College Oxford has secured itself as a Catholic beachhead with a Catholic faculty and curriculum at Oxford, so it is clearly trying to move forward and somehow weave Catholicism deeper and also more high in English civil society, it seems as if he expected it, there were clear signs that he hoped not only to suspend but to repeal the testing laws altogether, thus removing any requirement of membership in the Church of England, but he did not have sufficient support in the Parliament for that to happen, so he embarked on a Catholicization plan for local councils and Parliament and he may not have been able to, maybe it would have been too ambitious to get Roman Catholics into the House of Commons, but he did. aimed to fill Parliament with allies and supporters, including sympathetic Protestant dissidents, and required that all candidates standing for election Parliament had to be approved by their local Lord Lieutenant, which was a royally appointed position to county or province and as a condition of getting this prior approval from the Lord Lieutenant, the candidate had to pledge their support to repeal the testing laws properly, so they are trying to filter who can enter Parliament and make sure that only those who support his ultimate legislative objectives and also local governments, councils and corporations, the king not only put his thumb on the scale but even began to fire and Purge the wigs and committed Anglicans and replace them with his allies , including the Catholics, now throughout this campaign was so ambitious and far reaching that it is not clear exactly what the King's real objective was and this is still debated to this day.

Was it his idea to make England a tolerant kingdom with freedom of religion, even for its coreligionists, or was his goal to go further and re-Catholicize the country. Did he hope to reverse the Reformation and make England once again a Catholic kingdom? It's not very clear, for one thing. Some historians have found reported statements or declarations by the king against prejudice in principle and in favor of freedom of conscience and tolerance, for example, in the early 2000s, a Canadian graduate student found a diary in an archive in England that recorded a speech given by James II. in the city of Chester in 1687, in which the king reportedly defended the idea of ​​religious toleration on principle and included this passage in the account of the speech that included the quotation of the passage Suppose that a law should be made by the that all black men should be imprisoned.

It would be unreasonable and we had as little reason to quarrel with other men for having different opinions as for having different complexions. End quote, so this passage, as you know, has been seized upon by some modern scholars as a sort of precursor to modern ideas of equality. and Tolerance and seems to foreshadow modern beliefs in civil equality and in the equivalence of racial prejudice and religious prejudice, but on the other hand there were actions of James that seemed to speak of something different, for example at about the same time that James II summoned to his treasury lord, the Earl of Rochester and demanded that he convert to Catholicism, he decided that it was inappropriate for a Catholic ruler to have a Protestant treasury lord in such an important position, so he demanded that the earl convert and when he denied, he fired him and this was kind of a high-level instance of a growing push to expel Protestants from power and from the king's inner circle, so again there are different conflicting signs of what exactly James was trying to achieve;

There is no doubt that there was a sense of injustice felt by the fact that Catholics had been deprived of the opportunity to hold public office, that they had been discriminated against, that they had been labeled as disloyal to the kingdom and that they definitely wanted Catholics to take over. public offices, partly as a way to demonstrate that they could be Loyal Servants of the Kingdom, but beyond that, it is not clear exactly what he was trying to achieve, but the following year, after several months of this Catholicization campaign, in April 1688, James issued an order for his Declaration of Indulgence to be read in all churches throughout the country. the kingdom and this caused a lot of unrest, you know, not only did the clergy have to accept this declaration, but they also had to go through the kind of humiliation of announcing it from their own pulpits and this led, not surprisingly, to seven bishops will refuse to comply with this order. and drafted a petition against it addressed to the king and this petition of the seven bishops asked to maintain the existing religious policy including the law of evidence, and also further argued that the king did not have adequate authority to repeal the law of evidence which did not had. has the ability to undo a law enacted through Parliament and King James took this as a grave insult and challenge and responded that his power, his dispensing power, came from God and that he was not going to give it up to anyone now at this time.

That was a very loaded way of speaking and in a way if you had gone back 100,200,300 years it wouldn't sound so shocking. It was normal for monarchs to claim that they were anointed by God and derived their maximum authority from there. and the position of this time, when there were absolutists like Louis The king then rejected this request as an insult and an affront to his majesty. he had the seven bishops imprisoned and accused of treason. Now these bishops received a great public outpouring of sympathy. They were seen as martyrs of the Protestant church and among their supporters were many members of parliament, both wigs and conservatives, and a few months later, in June, the bishops were acquitted in court anyway of the charge of treason and this It was a humiliation and a slap in the face to King James that now the Parliament of Bishops and all these judicial systems were defying his orders, all these things were leading to increasing friction and towards a real constitutional crisis, but even at this point, even in early June, it may have seemed to many people that it would eventually pass and many Protestants, including the Whigs, were prepared to grit their teeth and simply put up with this situation as long as it continued because it would not last forever , TRUE.

James's heirs and successors were all Protestants, so this was just a temporary situation that they would just tolerate and indulge this kind of stubborn Catholic King for the time being, but the final escalation that really forced this into dramatic upheaval and a breakup Revolutionary

revolution

occurred on June 10, 1688 and it was then that James, his wife Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son, a young prince named James Francis Edward Stewart, so Mary of Modena had had a long history before this. series of miscarriages and stillbirths, and many Protestants probably hoped that would be the end. of it and there would be no Catholic heir, much less a Catholic heirmale, so evidently this was the first healthy baby born to Mary of Modena and, furthermore, he was a boy and therefore, by virtue of his sex, he supplanted both Princess Mary and Princess Anne in In the line of succession, he immediately became the heir presumptive and this threatened the possibility of a continuous and indefinite Catholic dynasty, so this brought the religious question to a head very suddenly and the opponents of James and his program saw that they had to Act Fast. and very quickly rumors circulated orally and even in print, alleging that the prince was an impostor, that this birth had in reality been just another stillbirth, and that the king and queen, in their desperation, had smuggled a child into the Queen bedroom in one bed heating. pan then this conspiracy theory took off very quickly it was attractive it seemed to be avoided allowed to deny the real dynastic situation the country now found itself in James was outraged and collected and printed the testimonies of midwives and various other witnesses to attest that the birth was genuine and the prince was legitimate, but still Whig politicians latched on to these false rumors and conspiracy theories to legitimize the young prince and force a conflict between King James and his male heir apparent, his Protestant heir apparent William of Orange and a group of wigs opened communication with William of Orange in the Netherlands and urged him to demand a public investigation into the true birth and parentage of the prince, so this situation is what later led to a revolution, so The parliamentary leaders contacted William and successfully persuaded him to insist on an investigation into the prince's ancestry.

William, for his part, didn't care much about the throne or the succession of England, this really wasn't the most important thing on his mind, what he cared about was the Netherlands and its continued struggle with France and to that end, William he wanted English troops, English ships and especially English money to continue the fight against the French Kingdom and for this reason he was persuaded to demand an investigation, perhaps because he genuinely hoped that it might win him and his wife back. in the English line of succession or perhaps simply because it was an opportunity he saw to possibly overthrow James completely now James rejected this demand, naturally what would such an investigation look like?

There was no evidence for this absurd theory, so he had to say no. There is nothing to investigate here, this is the prince, so William of Orange agreed to prepare for an invasion and assembled a fleet of 260 ships and 15,000 men that made up about half the army of the Dutch Republic, but he did not launch or cross . the Channel throughout the summer of 1688 until July and August and by the end of August most observers assumed that his chance had passed as in 1066, when William of Normandy had no favorable victories throughout the summer of that year and Harold assumed That the window of opportunity was gone, he was safe, he sent his army away, but still, out of nowhere, William launched an invasion anyway in the bad season of autumn, when it tends to be stormy and the weather makes it almost impossible. to cross the channel so this is what happened again in 1688 at the end of summer the weather got worse and James let his guard down and so did Louis XIV so Louis XIV agreed to help defend England and defend James , his fellow Catholic Monarch.

In case of a Dutch attack, Louis also lowered his guard and moved his troops away from the coast and south towards the German border, so Louis was now at this point completely distracted and preoccupied with his fights against the Habsburgs in Germany and the Habsburgs. That same year he had defeated the Ottomans in the East and captured Belgrade in Serbia, so now Louis was preoccupied and busy with the changing balance of power on the continent, so he also diverted his attention from Holland in England. Now is the bad season. It is very dangerous to try to cross the Channel in the autumn, but still William of Orange declared in October that he would go to England anyway and that he was doing so not to try to overthrow James but simply to protect, quote, the laws and customs of the Liberty of England and to investigate the true parentage of the young prince, so he sailed from the Netherlands on November 1 and was fortunately carried westward by the so-called Protestant wind that moved his fleet from the North Sea to the English Channel and allowed him to land on November 5 at Torbay, in the south-west of England, so when this happens, James quickly summons a large army at Salisbury, in the west of the country to prepare for an engagement with William, but before any real fight he seems to have retreated to London to take refuge and hold the capital and this action was seen as unusual, unusually cowardly people said he had lost his nerve and regardless of whether it was a wise move from a military, did not inspire confidence and allowed William of Orange to begin gathering wig supporters from the country and in response, James brought Irish Catholic troops from Ireland.

James again seems to rely on the notion that his Catholic subjects were the most reliable and safe allies, so he brings in Irish Catholic fighters and officers and begins to dismiss and replace many of his Protestant officers and commanders in his own army and replace them with Catholics and both actions later. This generated fear, anger and resentment within his own officer corps, so over the course of a few weeks, many of his important army officers who had served him, including the one who had helped him put down the Monmouth Rebellion, , they defected to William and at the same time some major cities, including York, were taken by insurrections by the middle-class Protestant nobility, just when the Protestants were the majority and were strongest in the cities, so many cities They immediately fell into the hands of these pro-William insurrectionists.

Then came a personal blow in November. 18 when Princess Anne's own youngest daughter, the king, wrote an open letter of support approving Williams' actions and approving her demand for an investigation, so she may be thinking about her own place in the line of succession, Perhaps he is thinking about his Protestant loyalties, but for some reason it seems that now the entire royal family is also rallying around William, so James, in late November, sends his immediate family abroad for his security and is reportedly currently undecided and suffering from severe nosebleeds, probably due to hypertension due to great fear and anxiety.

On the situation on December 11, James himself finally tried to flee abroad and when leaving London he threw the Great Seal of the State into the Thames trying to prevent William from taking over the government if he took the city but in his way when trying to reach France. , some fishermen recognized him and arrested him and took him back into custody to London, where a committee of William's supporters had already taken control of the city, so they were kept prisoner by this revolutionary committee of William might and on the 20th December. The committee then passively released him and allowed him to flee abroad again basically because he was just a political liability, they didn't see him as much of a threat and they didn't want to force the new government to execute him. as some kind of traitor, so they just let him go and he fled abroad, to France, on Christmas Eve, the committee in London formally asked William and Mary to come to the city and take over the government.

James's remaining forces quickly collapsed and disbanded in the country, so there was a period of crisis, you could say a kind of interregnum in which James was still alive but was abroad. William and Mary were now in the country, but what were they going to do? What was your status? Were they really going to get ahead? With this type of false investigation into the birth of the young prince, there is a period of uncertainty until on February 6 the English Parliament meets in Westminster and declares that James had abdicated by virtue of fleeing the country and that this act was indeed a confiscation. of the throne then offered the crown jointly to William and Mary, true, Mary was technically the direct successor if you exclude James's young son, Mary, was the successor, so you know she should have been monarch, but there you know that everyone They knew William was the one. who had actually accomplished this whole feat, had taken this big gamble of invading the country, was married to Mary, was a nephew, so they threw him out and offered the crown jointly to William and Mary to be co-rulers and they left.

However, they made this offer on the condition that they accept the so-called Bill of Rights which would limit royal powers and hopefully prevent further constitutional crises like the one that had just happened to James on February 11. William and Mary accept and are jointly proclaimed king and queen of England and on the 13th the president of the House of Commons reads the Bill of Rights declaring certain rights and prerogatives of Parliament and Protestant subjects. Now the situation is more complicated in Scotland. There are a few more James supporters in Scotland, so it takes a little longer. I won't enter Scotland here.

I'm focusing on England for this conference, but on April 4, about two months later, the Scottish Parliament also meets and declares that James will be overthrown from the throne. and a week later, on April 11, he proclaims William and Mary as king and queen and they are jointly crowned on May 11, so power appears to have effectively passed to William and Mary in England and Scotland, but now, does what happens to the colonies? The colonies are too. significant parts of the picture at this point, so most colonial governments in North America and the Caribbean quickly proclaimed that William and Mary were, they tended to be strongly Protestant and over the course of 1689, as official announcements From this change they came to the In the colonies, the colonial governors and councils proclaimed William and Mary as the new rulers, but there were two exceptions: Maryland, which was a traditionally Catholic colony led by the Culvert family of proprietors, who were English Catholics , and in Maryland, the governor and council kept quiet and simply refused to formally acknowledge that anything had happened, so they were overthrown by an insurrection led by Protestant planters who overthrew the proprietary government and created a new regime that deprived of their rights to Catholics, so now Catholics were politically excluded in Maryland as they were in England, the other colony where the government refused to recognize the acclamation to the throne of William and Mary, was naturally the Dominion of New England, this new entity that had been created by James, which was very large and expansive and had different offices and councils, some in Boston and others. in New York so the government also remained silent and tried to stay in power but then they were overthrown in Boston by an insurrectionary militia that was headed by a so-called Committee of Public Safety reminiscent of what would happen later in the French Revolution and then , in New York, was overthrown by a rebel band led by a German Protestant settler named Jacob Liesler, who took it upon himself to act on behalf of this new Protestant government and who basically became a small revolutionary dictator in New York.

Liesler and the Committee of Public Safety held power for several months until William and Mary were able to send new governors to replace them. Liesler at first refused to recognize and hand over power to this royally appointed governor, so he was taken prisoner and hanged. In all, by the summer of 1690, William of Orange's victory seemed to be complete in England, Scotland and the overseas colonies, but meanwhile what was happening in Ireland, Ireland was also a kingdom belonging to James. Ireland was predominantly Catholic and was politically favorable to James, so it formed a natural base of resistance and a possible base for James' Counter-Strike against William's new regime, so the Irish counter-offensive began in March 1689, Just a few months before William and Mary had actually been proclaimed and crowned in Scotland James gathered his supporters, including French troops and mercenaries, and landed in Ireland in March 1689.

The Irish Parliament supported him, condemned the Revolution and, furthermore, , enacted an act of religious toleration, following James's preferred policy of abolishing all restrictions and penal laws against Catholics in July. 1690 William landed in Ireland with a large English force and was able to confront and defeat James at the Battle of the Boyne. James then fled abroad again, to France, and this was seen in Ireland as a cowardly act and came to be called in Irish. Sheamus over Chaka or James and as a result of this, many of James' strong supporters inIreland, Scotland and England basically gave up on James II, seeing him more or less as a lost cause, but they still wanted, for religious and political reasons, they wanted to see a restoration of Catholic stewards and Catholic views and ideals. which they represented in their eyes and centered their hopes on the young Prince Right, also called James, whom they saw as James III and these supporters of James came to be called Jacobites just after James. the Latin form of James Jacobus, so the Jacobite movement was put into abeyance for a time after James's defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland, but would return in later years centering and rallying around Prince James, who then passed to be called James.

Okay, so you have this divergence where certain parties, indeed actions in the British Isles direct their hopes and their loyalties towards the exiled Catholic stewards, but in the meantime, what about the mainstream Protestant majority and the now ascendant party wig that now effectively maintained power well? They came up with a new political arrangement, so we saw William and Mary take over the government together, although in reality the ruler was actually William. Mary was relatively withdrawn, she was not as interested in politics and William was more active, more ambitious and, furthermore, he. He was simply taken more seriously as a man, so he was actually the effective ruler, but the rationale for his accession to the throne was so flimsy that it depended on several very tenuous claims stacked on top of each other, eh, it depended on the idea. that the Young Prince was illegitimate, of which there was no real evidence;

It depended on the idea that James had abdicated his throne by retiring to France and, furthermore, it depended on the idea that Parliament in its authority could somehow grant a joint title of government to two rulers and All these things really had no meaning. precedents and therefore the subtext here was very clear: in reality, Parliament had chosen the rulers it preferred and therefore this showed that when the time came, Parliament was truly Supreme and while this new King William of Orange who now became King William III, although this king could set policies in various kingdoms, especially in military and foreign policy, however, ultimately, if he surpassed certain limits, he could be replaced and this new state of Things in which Parliament was effectively Supreme were detailed in a series. of new laws, on one hand there was the Coronation Oath Act which added and revised the oaths that monarchs had to take upon assuming the throne, they had to undertake to honor and uphold the laws enacted by Parliament, so basically ruled out this whole idea of ​​suspending the power that the king could simply throw out laws of Parliament and also required the Monarch to undertake to protect, quote, the true profession of the gospel and the reformed Protestant religion established by law, so there was no In this way, regardless of the personal views or convictions of the Monarch they could not re-Catholicize the country and this was elaborated later in the so-called Bill of Rights that I mentioned before and the Bill of Rights contained several limits on royal power, it declared that The king could not suspend the laws.

Not collecting taxes without the consent of Parliament could not maintain a standing army in the country without the consent of Parliament and could not impose excessive bail or cruel and unusual punishment, so it is very easy, of course, to look back in retrospect and see how all kinds of Bill of Rights provisions seem to prefigure the American Bill of Rights and a kind of modern liberal democracy, but historically it's important to look at this prospectively to look at how these things emerged as responses to what had happened before, as ways of trying to prevent the things that James II had done and, furthermore, also his father Charles I, who had done things like collect taxes.

Imposing a tax on ships without the consent of parliament. forming a standing army and even this provision against excessive bail, fines or cruel and unusual punishment. It sounds almost like a perfect precursor to the American Bill of Rights, but it was actually a response to George Jeffries and his draconian measures, you know, after the Monmouth Rebellion, the Bill of Rights also established certain rights and prerogatives of subjects Protestants. true, it doesn't really say anything about if you're not a protestant, apparently you're still a suspect, but protestant subjects have the right to petition the crown for redress of their grievances, they have the right to bear arms and join the militia, and they have the right to elect members of parliament freely without interference and, again, all of these things are direct responses to what happened to James' right, the imprisonment of the seven bishops for petitioning against the king's acts for the dismissal and plundering of the army and officers of the militia, which again the Bill of Rights allows the king to do that, but not the Protestants and the ability to elect Parliament without interference and, furthermore, as to Parliament as an institution, the Bill of Rights requires that Parliament meet frequently, he doesn't say exactly how often, but presumably at least every few years, and that members of parliament have the right to speak freely in debates without punishment, which remains a very important provision of the British constitution today .

It's called parliamentary privilege. A Member in a Parliament meeting can say anything. they want over whoever they want without being penalized, so with this change in power, as I said, the real power of parliament is now not interested in being Supreme and informally it is understood that Parliament will be administered through voluntary alliances and self-organization between the MPS, which will be managed through a two-party system the right and wig and conservative parties that had formed during the papal plot and the exclusion crisis remain permanently becoming lasting elements of British politics it is understood that power in the government will be passed back and forth between these two parties and one of them, by the way, the conservative party still exists and is in power today, so the whigs and the conservatives have opposite views on English society and the wigs, at least at this time, now have the upper hand, are really the real powers behind the throne now in the English government, the Whigs are adamant in preventing any Catholic succession to the throne, while the Tories, for On the contrary, they may sometimes entertain the idea of ​​a possible Catholic restoration.

This is one of the things that sets the Tories apart from the wigs they can tolerate. the idea that perhaps the Catholic stewards could return to the throne, but only on the clear condition that the Protestant Church of England is protected, they are fully committed to a Protestant National Church, so, broadly speaking, this is The agreement that arises from this overthrow of power and this revolution has a much disputed meaning and the legacy that the traditional British wig understands is that this was a great advance and a great victory for Liberty. Sympathizers traditionally call it the Glorious Revolution because it managed to overthrow the Tyrant without bloodshed or with very little violence, so it was a bloodless Revolution that guaranteed the rights and freedoms of the English against tyranny, but on the other hand there have also been more critical historians who take a much more cynical view of the kind of wigs running the circles that orchestrated this Revolution and this kind of individualistic commercial imperial society that they were trying to build.

So many other historians don't call this a revolution at all, seeing it rather as a simple seizure of power by a rising new city-based wealthy elite that was advancing on its own. selfish interests and, for example, Marxist historian Peter Linebaugh refers to the event as citing William's coup d'état, which I really enjoy because you see it spread throughout the books of him as the Hanged Man of London. He just calls it that and doesn't even bother to explain. which refers to the Glorious Revolution as it has been traditionally called, simply calls it William's coup d'état and there are others who have even gone further and called it, quote, the oligarchic revolution of property rights and you can see that in some ways like The central legal and social question underlying this whole constitutional crisis was the particular rights and powers over private property, who, and even at this point, still have specific rights over the land, who has control over the land, what they can do with it, but if these events are seen in a positive way. or negatively, the wig's understanding of England as a community of free men who have certain private rights and prerogatives, including the right to own and control private property represented through Parliament and the laws of parliament, this understanding of English society is became canon law and again, although the Conservative party persists and alternative understandings or ways of imagining England do not disappear, they are decidedly marginalized.

The Whig vision of England is now on the rise and as I mentioned before, this shift in power and this shift in thinking really paves the way for modern trade and imperial Britain that we know today, I hope to get there and how that led to New Britain and the British Empire in later years. I will deal with it another time and, furthermore, the modern history and the meaning of this same monarchy and This line, this very complicated and intricate dynastic line to this day, I hope to discuss soon with a historian of modern Britain who, with good luck, we'll be able to record and release in November, so if you want to listen to all my stuff, including the exclusive Patron stuff, again please. go to my patreon page link that should be in the description thank you foreigner thank you