The deposal of James II was less revolution than evolution, setting England firmly on the path towards parliamentary democracy.
Few monarchs have inherited such a seemingly strong position as James II did in 1685. The Earl of Peterborough wrote within a few days of James’s accession: “Everything is very happy here. Never king was proclaimed with more applause than he that reigns under the name of James II […] I doubt not but to see a happy reign.” Yet less than four years later, James had lost his throne and fled abroad. Why did things go so wrong for him so quickly; and how decisive were these events?
The key to James’s downfall lay in a fundamental problem: the monarchy’s strongest supporters were the Tory Anglicans who were deeply committed to the crown and to the Church of England; but James was a devout Catholic who wished to repeal the various penal laws then in force against his co-religionists. James did not believe he needed to impose Catholicism: he thought that once the anti-Catholic penal laws, some of them dating back to Elizabeth I’s reign, were repealed, there would be a surge of voluntary conversions to Rome.
Ultimately, those penal laws could only be repealed by act of parliament. In the meantime, James therefore employed the powers of the royal prerogative to mitigate the effects of those laws. Initially he used the royal dispensing power to exempt named Catholics from the Test Acts, which banned them from public office and military commissions. Then he used the royal suspending power to suspend the penal laws entirely. Then he set about packing parliament to ensure the return of an assembly sympathetic to the repeal of those laws. Had James succeeded, Catholicism might have returned in England and royal authority might have been reasserted: in short, England might have come to resemble the France of James’s first cousin, Louis XIV.
Instead of acting decisively and trying to drive William back into the sea – which might have had a chance of success – James lost his nerve
James’s policies soon aroused fears of “popery and arbitrary government”, but whereas Whigs had no problems with resisting a Catholic monarch, Tory Anglican supporters of the monarchy found the idea of taking up arms against an anointed sovereign completely abhorrent. As the Marquess of Halifax put it in 1687, “We are not to be laughed out of our doctrine of non-resistance and passive obedience on all occasions.”
Two developments in the summer of 1688 helped to change their minds, however. First, James’s wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a male heir who would be brought up as a Catholic and take precedence over James’s two Protestant daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne. This raised the spectre of a Catholic dynasty extending far into the future. The second development came when seven bishops, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, submitted a petition challenging the king’s power to suspend the penal laws by a Declaration of Indulgence. James responded that the bishops’ petition was “the standard of rebellion” and he prosecuted them for seditious libel. The bishops were acquitted, amid scenes of popular rejoicing, but a cross-party group of senior political figures decided it was time to act.
At the end of June 1688, a group of seven Whigs and Tories – later called the ‘Immortal Seven’ – wrote to William of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic and husband of James’s elder daughter Mary, explaining that most English people were “generally dissatisfied with the present conduct of the government, in relation to their religion, liberties and properties (all of which have been greatly invaded)”. They urged him to intervene. William promised to contribute “all that lies in us for the maintaining, both of the Protestant religion and of the laws and liberties of those kingdoms” and “to have a free and lawful parliament assembled as soon as is possible”. To that end, he mounted an expedition to England in the autumn of 1688.
At this point, James went to pieces. Instead of acting decisively and trying to drive William back into the sea – which might have had a chance of success – James lost his nerve and suffered a mental and physical collapse, one symptom of which was repeated heavy nosebleeds. Before the year was out, James had fled to France, where he spent the rest of his life until his death in 1701.
Had James succeeded, Catholicism might have returned in England and royal authority might have been reasserted
The outcome was a ‘Revolution Settlement’ that erected safeguards against any return of “popery and arbitrary government”. Parliament declared that James had “abdicated” and the throne was “thereby vacant”. They filled it by making James’s son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary, joint king and queen. The Bill of Rights of 1689 declared the royal suspending power illegal and the dispensing power, “as it hath been assumed and exercised of late”, was likewise made illegal. The raising of money by the royal prerogative was henceforth also illegal, as was the maintenance of a standing army without parliament’s consent. In 1689 and over the decade that followed, a series of measures rebalanced the relationship between crown and parliament, ensuring regular parliaments and the financial accountability of the monarchy. Many of these measures were summed up in the 1701 Act of Settlement, which also stipulated that the monarch “shall join in communion with Church of England”. Thus Protestantism survived, the symbiosis between the crown and the Church of England was preserved, and the monarch’s wings were clipped.
These were momentous events. In 1689, the lord chancellor, John Lord Somers, was able to sum up the English constitution thus: “Our kings must act by law and not absolutely; so that our government being not arbitrary, but legal, not absolute, but political, our princes can never become arbitrary, absolute, or tyrants without forfeiting at the same time their royal character, by the breach of the essential customs of their regal power, which are to act according to the ancient customs and standing laws of the nation.”
It would be no exaggeration to say that the events of 1688-89 set England on a path of constitutional evolution towards a limited monarchy within a Protestant context. It was very different from the Catholic absolutism of France, and very unlike what might have happened had James II succeeded in his policies. Whether or not we regard this as ‘glorious’, it was certainly a decisive moment.
