James II

W. A. Speck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317888734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Forced out of power in the"Glorious Revolution" of 1688, and defeated in the subsequent battle of the Boyne by William of Orange, the short reign of James II has an importance that reaches far beyond his three years in power. An ardent Roman Catholic, his efforts to return England to the Catholic faith resonate to this day in Northern Ireland. Similarly, his attacks on the representative institutions that had been developing since the Restoration, alienated an initially enthusiastic parliament. William Speck looks at all these issues through the figure of the King. Far more broad-ranging than other histories of James II, the book examines James' role in the American colonies - assigned to him by his brother Charles II - his role in Scotland between 1679 and 1862, and his final exercise of power in Ireland.

Chapter One
Duke of York

James was born in 1633, the second son of King Charles I and his French queen Henrietta Maria. As a child he enjoyed the apparent security of his father’s personal rule, with no overt challenges to the regime. Then that world came tumbling down with the Bishops’ war in Scotland, the rebellion in Ireland and the onset of the civil wars in England. James himself fled from London with his parents in 1642. He was actually in Hull when his father was refused entry into the port by Sir John Hotham. He also witnessed the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham and the battle of Edgehill. James took refuge in the court at Oxford, and was even summoned to the House of Lords there as duke of York in 1644. When the city fell in 1646, James was captured by agents of the Long Parliament and taken to London. There his own servants were dismissed from his service, ‘not so much as excepting a dwarf whom his Royal Highness was desirous to have retain’d with him’.¹ The duke himself was placed under the care of the earl of Northumberland. After two years in captivity he managed to escape in female disguise down the Thames from London Bridge to Gravesend and then over to Holland. Did he recall his earlier successful flight down the Thames at the age of 14 when he made his abortive attempt to get to France by the same route in December 1688?

James fled initially to Holland, where he stayed with his sister Mary and her husband William II of Orange from April 1648 until January 1649. He then made his way to France to join his mother, and to hear the news that his father had been executed. His métier as a younger son was that of a military man, having already been made Lord High Admiral of England in 1638 and appointed as a colonel in the army in 1643. While he was an infant these appointments were purely nominal. He had enjoyed a brief command over some parliamentary ships which mutinied in June 1648 and placed themselves at his disposal; however, the youthful ad-miral had not been able to exert his authority over them, and when his brother Charles joined him at The Hague he took over their command.

In September 1649 the royal brothers removed themselves from their mother’s influence at St Germain by going to Jersey in the Channel Islands. Charles went to The Hague in January 1650, leaving James behind as governor of Jersey, a position he held until that summer, his first real command. In Jersey he became acquainted with Sir John Berkeley and Sir Edward Carteret who were later to become involved with him in the colonisation of New Jersey. Carteret acted as deputy governor of Jersey under James, whose first experience of government ended when his brother ordered him to join their mother in Paris.

After learning of Charles’s defeat at Worcester, James accepted that the royalist cause in England was lost, at least for the time being. He therefore enlisted, at the age of 18, in the army of Louis XIV, who was then a minor. The army was at the time protecting the young king from the Frondeurs, rebels who were allegedly challenging the influence in royal counsels of Cardinal Mazarin. James regarded this as a mere pretext, seeing parallels between the situation in France and that in England, where his father was executed shortly after his own arrival in Paris. Thus of the Fronde he wrote, The Crown was reduced to a most deplorable condition … Few there were who preserved their loyalty to the King, and even they whose interest should have attached them to the safety of the State were the chief instruments of those troubles which distracted it; grounding themselves on that common and plausible pretence which has occasioned so many rebellions in all ages, – namely, the removing evil counsellors from about the person of the king.’² James had clearly concluded that demands for the removal of ministers were covert attacks upon the king himself. He criticised the concessions his father made to his opponents, particularly his sacrifice of the earl of Strafford, deducing that they were acts of weakness which led to his downfall and ultimately to his death. He determined never to show signs of such weakness’ himself when he became king.

James served under Marshal Turenne from 1652 to 1655. He came to admire the great Huguenot commander, who in turn appreciated the young duke’s military capabilities, for James proved an able officer, a stickler for discipline but not lacking in valour. His devotion to the military career found expression in his Memoirs which largely consist of a detailed compilation of the actions in which he and Turenne were engaged. They do indeed make rather tedious reading, showing an obsession with detail which raises questions about James’s ability to discern the wood from the trees even at this stage of his career. When James joined Turenne, the Frondeurs, led by the Prince of Conde, had taken up their position at Etampes. Turenne decided to take the town and James was present at this hot attack’ and, in the words of Edward Hyde, ‘behaved himself with extraordinary courage and gallantry’.³ The Frondeurs withdrew from Etampes and fell back towards Paris. Turenne fought his way through them and, though he was diverted by invading Spanish troops and another incursion by the treacherous duke of Lorraine, by the end of 1652 he had installed the royal court in the capital. James became Turenne’s right-hand man in these engagements, informing him of the enemy’s movements since Turenne had poor eyesight.

The summer campaign of 1653 was marked by the siege of Mouzon. James was in the thick of the fighting at this siege, at one time fearing for his life when a shot from the town came close to blowing up three barrels of powder near him. In another incident he was saved from being fired at from the walls only because the governor, according to James, ‘knowing me by my Starr, had forbid his men to fire upon the Company’.⁴ After a seventeen-day siege, Turenne’s troops took Mouzon. Shortly after, Rocroi fell to the Spanish. That year’s campaign was then effectively over, so James returned to Paris, in Edward Hyde’s words, ‘full of reputation and honour’. This view was vindicated by the duke’s promotion to the rank of lieutenant-general before the next campaign.

James’s main involvement in the campaign of 1654 was at the siege of Arras. In the preliminary skirmishing James was in the front line, and several comrades were shot around him. When the final assault came, he was in command of cavalry on Turenne’s left. He advanced towards the town, crossing over the river. Seeing himself outnumbered, he paused for reinforcements, ignoring the duke of Buckingham’s exhortations to advance. While he waited, his men joined with others who were plundering the Prince of Lorraine’s tent ‘so that at last there were none left with me but Officers and the twelve Cornetts’, he recorded, which being in full sight of the Enemy, I expected every moment to be charg’d and beaten’.⁵ He retreated to the river, where he saw a squadron of horse on the other side, and led them across the bridge back towards the town. When the men he had left behind came towards them in full retreat, however, they panicked and fled too. James found it impossible to stop them. The whole episode records not only the confusion of a siege, but also the difficulties facing the newly-promoted lieutenant-general in maintaining control of the men under him. This could be attributed to his youth – he was still only 20 years old – and relative inexperience. But even his own account also raises some doubts about his abilities as a commander, despite the accolades he received from Turenne and others. Maybe James was not as good a military leader as he was made out to be; and maybe in 1688, and again in 1690, when facing the Prince of Orange, he himself realised this. After losing his own men he went back to the bridge, where he came across four squadrons of horse which he took under his command. Turenne ordered James to join him in the final assault on the besiegers, in which they were defeated and Arras relieved. James was then sent to bring the French court to the town. After that the campaign rather petered out, and in the middle of December James returned to Paris.

Before he set out for his last campaign under Turenne in 1655, James wrote a letter to Charles in May expressing interest in a Catholic plot to kill Cromwell. Although nothing came of it, his apparent acceptance of assassination was at odds with the public policy of his brother. James remained consistent in this, for he was prepared to condone a plot to assassinate William III in the 1690s.

In the summer of 1655 the duke joined the French army as it was advancing against the Spanish defences in Hainault towards the River Scheldt. In mid-August they crossed the river on a bridge of boats, and laid siege to Conde. It capitulated on 19 August, so they went on to besiege St Ghislain. James took up quarters in a house so close to the town that it was not fired at, the defenders not supposing that anybody would stay within reach of their guns; ‘so that’, he observed, ‘I remain’d there in great security during the time the Siege lasted’.⁶ It lasted only three days before the town was taken. Turenne was now in enemy country, and during the next month he stripped it of all the forage his forces could harvest, James joining in the foraging. Early in November, Turenne was summoned to the court at Compiegne, leaving the army under the command of the duke, as he was then the only Lieut Generali remaining with it … there being no probability of Action’.⁷ Meanwhile a treaty between the English Republic and France was concluded, ‘by virtue of which’, James wrote, ‘I was presently to leave the Country’.⁸

In 1656, therefore, James left France and joined his brother in Bruges. He was very reluctant to do so, and even tried to persuade Charles that he would best serve their cause by staying with the French army. Charles, however, insisted that he left their service. He also insisted that James should dismiss his secretary Sir John Berkeley from his service. Charles apparently held Berkeley responsible for James’s vacillation over leaving the service of the French. James for his part, though he obediently went to Bruges in September 1656, obstinately took Berkeley with him. There he came under pressure to dismiss his favourite from courtiers like Sir Henry Bennet, who took the king’s side in the quarrel. The duke found an ally in his sister Princess Mary of Orange, who visited Bruges in December. She was accompanied by her maid of honour Anne Hyde, whom James had met previously when they paid a visit to France in February, and who was to become his wife. Backed by Mary, James dug in his heels and left the court with Berkeley. At first they headed towards France, but finding it impossible to go through Flanders undetected, went to The Hague instead. This was the first and only time that James defied his brother. He wrote a letter to him apologising for his behaviour, attributing it to Violent persons’ in the king’s service, following it up with a list of charges against them. He does not appear to have seen the irony in blaming evil counsellors for the rupture between them, and declaring himself an obedient subject to the king, when in the case of the Frondeurs he dismissed such arguments as hypocrisy. Nor was this dismissal confined to the opponents of Louis XIV. As we have seen, James also accused Charles I’s enemies of the same pretence.⁹ He was convinced that giving in to demands that ministers should be responsible to parliament had contributed directly to the breakdown of government and ultimately to the kings death. To employ the same argument against his brother as parliamentarians had used against their father, therefore, was to say the least disingenuous. Charles, with calculated magnanimity, sent a message to the duke offering reconciliation, even to the point of allowing him to retain the services of Berkeley, and sending Bennet out of harm’s way as his envoy to Madrid. On one crucial point, however, James was brought to heel. He had objected to entering the service of Spain and thereby opposing his old comrades in arms, above all Turenne. On his return to Bruges early in 1657 he enlisted in the Spanish army.

James joined his new comrades in arms in May. He found them to be extremely formal, and clearly lost patience with their inability to react quickly, unlike their French ally the Prince of Conde and the commander of the opposing forces his old friend Turenne. Much of the summer was spent in fruitless marching and countermarching. Then, late in August, the Spaniards laid siege to Ardes, but withdrew to Dunkirk at the approach of Turenne who proceeded to besiege Mardyck. James also fought his fellow Englishmen at the battle of the Dunes in 1658. This was to be his last action in the field until the battle of the Boyne. His heart was not with his new employers, however, for he continued to admire Turenne and to entertain a sneaking regard for the martial valour of his own countrymen.

His military experiences led him to take a soldiers view of the world. To James, the code of honour was central to the bond between the commander-in-chief and his officer corps. Its breach by John Churchill in the crisis of 1688 was to unnerve him more than any other event in the Revolution. He also felt that it was a betrayal of the chain of command, respect for which was crucial not only for military but also for political discipline. As we shall see, his treatment of the disobedient Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, was more that of a superior officer condemning insubordination from subalterns than of a king admonishing recalcitrant clergymen. His Memoirs show the remarkable degree to which his mind was very much that of a soldier. In them he recorded how, having despaired of returning to England following the failure of Booth’s rising in 1659, he was actually preparing to go to Spain in 1660 to be Lord High Admiral there when that Voyage was happily prevented by the wonderfull changes which were almost daily produced in England’.¹⁰ Events moved remarkably quickly to the Restoration of his brother as King Charles II and his own return to England and power.

James had lived through turbulent times, from which he deduced several conclusions which affected his view of the political scene. One was that politics were in a constant state of flux: nothing could be taken for granted in a world subject to bewildering changes. Another was that his father had lost his throne, and then his life, because he had not shown sufficient firmness when faced by opposition.

James was to become Lord High Admiral not of Spain but of his native land. There has been much dispute about his impact on the Royal Navy. Where traditionally he was regarded as an effective administrator, in recent years it has been asse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Note on dates
• Prologue
• 1 Duke of York
• 2 James II 1685–1686
• 3 James II 1687–1688
• 4 The Revolution
• 5 James VII
• 6 James and Ireland
• 7 James and North America
• 8 James and Europe
• Epilogue
• Bibliographical essay
• Index