James II (2)

James II, school of Peter Lely
Public domain

Catholicising policies

Though the king had initially failed in his attempt to achieve toleration of Catholics through Parliament, he did what he could to improve their plight. In September 1685 he decided to re-establish diplomatic relations with Rome and he picked as his ambassador the devoutly Catholic Earl of Castlemaine. In November the papal envoy arrived (though James showed himself surprisingly independent of papal control).

Ministers and bishops were horrified when he allowed the establishment of seminaries in London and patronised Catholic presses. He even sent a priest to Holland in an unsuccessful attempt to ensure Mary’s conversion.

Unable to achieve toleration of Catholics through Parliament,  James fell back on the dispensing power - the right to dispense individuals from the operations of acts of Parliament. The Catholic convert, Obadiah Walker, the Master of University College, Oxford, was given a royal dispensation to withdraw from Anglican worship and hear mass in his lodgings

In June 1686 this power was tested in Godden v. Hales before the judges of the common law courts. Shortly before the trial, James canvassed the judges and dismissed six of them. Eleven of the twelve judges then upheld the monarch’s dispensing power.

However, though James seemed to have the law on his side, by 1688 less than a quarter of the JPs and deputy lieutenants were Catholics. Disappointed, James poured money and effort into a missionary campaign and arranged for personal interviews with leading politicians in order to bring about their conversions. But his efforts were probably doomed to fail as the stories of the cruelties of the French dragonnades had intensified English anti-Catholicism.

James and the Church of England

In spite of its doctrines of non-resistance and passive obedience, the Church of England was jealous of its privileges and deeply resentful of the Catholicising policies. In March 1686 James issued a set of 'Directions to Preachers' ordering the clergy to steer clear of provocative topics like attacks on Rome. In May, John Sharp, dean of Norwich and rector of St Giles in the Fields, disobeyed. James ordered Henry Compton, bishop of London, to suspend him from preaching. Compton refused, and this highlighted James’s inability to control the Anglican clergy. In an attempt to put this right, he established a Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes under Jeffreys in July. Its first act in September was to suspend Compton from his bishopric.

Henry Compton, suspended
bishop of London,
By Godfrey Kneller
Public domain

This was followed by the dismissal from office of his two Protestant brothers-in-law. The Earl of Clarendon, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, went in the summer of 1686 and was replaced by the Catholic Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell at the end of the year. Tyrconnell then began a vigorous purge of Protestants in local government and the army. Corporations were re-organised after they were issued with quo warranto writs, and the number of Catholics in the Irish army increased. 

The other brother-in-law Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, was was given the chance to show his support for James’s plans by turning Catholic. When he refused he was dismissed as Lord Treasurer on 27 December 1686. By the start of 1687, therefore, the king now had no chief ministers who were unequivocal Anglicans.

Turning away from his Anglican power-base, James sought an alliance with the Protestant Dissenters. During 1686 he made several overtures to individual Dissenters, of which the most prominent was William Penn, whom he dispensed from the penal legislation. In November 1686 he established a Licensing Office where dissenters could buy certificates of dispensation. By the beginning of 1687 the persecution of Dissenters had virtually ceased.

Penn, a genuine believer in religious toleration, seemed to be a useful ally. He organized petitions of thanks from some dissenting congregations, and in November 1686 he went to Holland to get the support of William and Mary for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. But William said that he was prepared to allow Catholics to worship unmolested, but not to admit them to public office.

The Declaration of Indulgence: The hounding of Rochester and Clarendon out of office was part of a new and more vigorous phase.  On 4 April 1687 he announced the corner-stone of his new policy: a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended all the penal laws and the Test and Corporation Acts. This was to claim a prerogative for the crown parallel with the dispensing power: the suspending power. However, James’s reliance on the Dissenters to provide him with a packed parliament was a serious miscalculation based on an overestimate of their numbers. He also underestimated Dissenting distrust of his motives. In the summer of 1687 the dismissed minister, Lord Halifax published a Letter to a Dissenter. You are ‘to be hugged now, only that you may be the better squeezed at another time’. James’s policy only served to unite Anglicans and Dissenters.

The Magdalen College Affair: In April 1687 James began a long campaign to force the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, to accept a reputed Catholic, Anthony Farmer, as their president. (He had already forced the fellows of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, to accept a Catholic convert as their master.) In defiance of the king, the fellows promptly elected their own candidate. In October the Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes deprived all twenty-five Fellows of their fellowships.  In the following March a Catholic, Bonaventure Giffard, was imposed on the college and mass was publicly celebrated in its chapel.

The Purging of the Corporations: On 2 July 1687 James dissolved Parliament and clearly hoped that a new parliament would repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. From the autumn of 1687 he and his advisors began systematically to build up a powerful electoral organization, purging JPs who did not support repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and issuing quo warranto writs against recalcitrant boroughs. By the spring of 1688 14 of the twenty-four Lords Lieutenant, three-quarters of all JPs and over 1,200 members of town corporations had been dismissed.

The queen becomes pregnant

In October 1687 Queen Mary Beatrice knew she was pregnant, though the pregnancy was not announced until December.  

Mary of Modena
by Simon Pietersz Verelst
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Once the news became public Catholic zealots were convinced that the child would be a boy; Aphra Behn wrote A Congratulatory Poem … on the Universal Hopes of All Loyal Persons for a Prince of Wales. In this atmosphere of increased confidence, James's Jesuit confessor, Father Petre, was made a privy councillor. The Catholic triumphalism convinced Protestant conspiracy theorists that a spurious child was being foisted on the nation. The conflicting dates given to the queen's expected date of confinement seemed to lend justification to this belief. From March 1688 onwards, James's daughter, Princess Anne of Denmark, went out of her way to plant this notion in her sister’s mind. William was told by his private English contacts that Mary was being deprived of her her right to the throne, and that a pro-French Catholic dynasty would be the result. At the end of April three English envoys visited him at his new palace of Het Loo.

The seven bishops

On 27 April 1688 James re-issued the Declaration of Indulgence, with a postscript stating his intention to call a Parliament by November at the latest. On 4 May he issued an order to the Anglican clergy to read it from their pulpits first in London and then in the rest of the country.

On 17 May William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury and six other bishops (William Lloyd, bishop of St Asaph; Francis Turner, bishop of Ely; John Lake, bishop of Chichester; Thomas Ken, bishop of Bath and Wells; Thomas White, bishop of Peterborough; Jonathan Trelawney, bishop of Bristol) signed a petition to the king claiming that they refused to publish the Declaration because it ‘is founded upon such a dispensing power as hath often been declared illegal in Parliament’. James declared: ‘This is a standard of rebellion. … I will be obeyed’. But to his dismay many leading Dissenters supported the bishops. To add to his problems, it was not clear what law the bishops had broken. 

On 8 June, the bishops were brought before the Court of Kings Bench on a charge of scandalous libel (altered a few days later to the more serious charge of seditious libel), and were sent to the Tower pending the hearing of their case. This immediately turned them into martyrs and revealed the limitations of the Anglican doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance.

The birth of the Prince of Wales

On 10 June Mary Beatrice gave birth in St James's Palace (very publicly and a month earlier than expected) to a son, christened James Francis Edward, opening up the prospect of a Catholic dynasty. Mary and Anne were displaced, as was Mary’s husband, William. Mary and Anne were both firmly convinced that the pregnancy was false and the child spurious. James was thought to be unhealthy and the queen’s medical history seemed to make pregnancy unlikely. Anne, who was in Bath and therefore did not witness the birth, believed she had been duped over the dates. Mary was therefore very ready to believe that she had been cheated of her inheritance and that the Church of England was in grave danger. Her belief was reinforced a series of scurrilous Dutch pamphlets.

The story that an infant had been smuggled into the queen's bed in a warming pan is, of course, without foundation. The interesting question is why so many people believed - or, more accurately, needed to believe - such an absurd fabrication!

The seven bishops acquitted

On 29 June the seven bishops were brought from the Tower to Westminster Hall to be tried in front of a large and partisan crowd. Two of the four judges condemned the dispensing power: ‘If this once be allowed of, there will need no Parliament, all the legislature will be in the King’. On 30 June the jury acquitted the bishops of seditious libel. That night there were bonfires in London.

A Victorian representation of the trial of the seven bishops
Public domain

The invitation to William

On 30 June seven leading Protestants representing Whig and Tory opinion (Admiral Edward Russell, Henry Sidney, Lord Lumley, Bishop Compton and the Earls of Shrewsbury, Devonshire and Danby) wrote to William of Orange pledging their support if he brought a force to England. They told William that he had been wrong to compliment James on the birth of his son and that ‘nineteen parts of twenty of the people … are desirous of a change.’ But William’s decision had already been made, and the letter from the ‘Immortal Seven’ had come as no surprise.

Conclusion

1. James's actions were those of an old man in a hurry. He did not believe he had long to live and wished to get the rights of Catholics firmly entrenched in law before he died.
2. His great mistake was to fail to recognise the fact that his power base rested with the Tory shires and the Church of England. If he alienated them, he had no allies left.
3. The birth of the Prince of Wales was a disaster for James, as it opened up the prospect of a Catholic dynasty.
4. James's fate was now bound up with the European situation - in particular the foreign policy of Louis XIV and William's decision to invade.