JAMES II. (1633-1701), king of England, and as king of Scotland James VII., second surviving son of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, was born at the palace of St James’s, October 15, 1633, and was created duke of York in January 1643. During the civil war he was taken prisoner by Fairfax at Oxford in 1646, but in 1648 he made his escape to Holland. After the second failure of the Stuart cause he served for some time in the French army under Turenne, but at the command of his brother he in 1656 accepted a military commission from Spain. At the Restoration in 1660 he was appointed lord high admiral and lord warden of the Cinque Ports. For the management of the civil administration of the navy he had the qualification of industry and careful regard to details; and if his victory over the Dutch in 1665 was principally a happy stroke of good luck, and his drawn battle with De Ruyter in 1672 was more to his antagonist’s credit than to his, still the fact that his career as an admiral was free from disaster shows that his seamanship must have been at least respectable. Outside, however, the sphere of practical routine, James was blind and insensate, and his whole political conduct—while it indicated that he could stoop to compromise and deception when he deemed these necessary—was marked by a heedlessness and perverse obstinacy possible only to a rigid and contracted understanding preoccupied with a single purpose. He possessed the vices of his race without its virtues and redeeming points, and in him the propensity to despotism developed itself in a form unmitigated by any mildness or amiable weakness of temper, unenlightened by any gift of foresight or practical wisdom, and unadorned by any personal accomplishment. Although at the Restoration his sympathies were so little Catholic that he supported the policy of Clarendon, whose daughter Anne he secretly married in September 1660, publicly acknowledging the union in the December following, he soon thereafter became a convert to Romanism, and in 1672, in opposition to the expostulations of his brother, openly avowed his change of faith. Anne Hyde having died in 1671, he also persuaded his brother to defy the wishes of both Houses of Parliament by permitting him in 1673 to marry the Catholic princess Mary of Modena. On account of the Test Act, passed in this year, he had been compelled to resign his office of admiral, and, although the marriage in 1677 of his daughter Mary to William, prince of Orange, somewhat allayed the distrust with which he was regarded, it was deemed advisable on the discovery of the Popish plot in 1679 that he should retire for a time to Brussels. Afterwards he was appointed lord high commissioner to Scotland, where his arbitrary bigotry found congenial employment in the persecution of the Covenanters; but in 1684 Charles ventured to dispense in his case with the Test Act, and restored him to his office of admiral.

The influence of the loyal enthusiasm which surrounded the last days of Charles in 1685 was felt in the calm acquiescence with which the nation witnessed James’s succession to the throne on February 6, and his coronation on April 23,1686. The trust awakened by his promise to preserve the Government both in church and state as by law established was indeed almost immediately rudely shaken by his public celebration of mass, by his prohibition of preaching against Catholicism, and by his appointment of Catholic officers to the army; but that the goodwill at least of the Commons was still strong was manifested by the grant of a revenue of two millions, and by the enactment of severer measures against treason. If the loyalty of the nation had begun to waver, it was also for the time strengthened by the premature and headstrong attempts at rebellion by Argyll in Scotland, and Monmouth in England. The renewal of the Covenanting persecutions had, however, branded the name of James with the hatred of the Scottish people, and the butchery of the Bloody Assizes, which in England followed the discomfiture of Monmouth, left behind it a widespread horror, the repression of which only wrought effects on the mind of the nation the deeper and more ineffaceable. But James was too intent on his one aim—the establishment of irresponsible despotism—to scrutinize or consider the indirect consequences of his acts. In that aim was necessarily involved the restoration of Popery, because James was a Papist, but happily the accidental prominence given to this secondary and subordinate aim made the other impossible of success. In his imprudent zeal to accomplish his purpose, James outran the wishes even of Rome, but that was because the purpose which to the one was secondary was to the other primary. James required both a large standing army and freedom from the control of parliament; but for these ends a foreign source of money supply was at first necessary, and this he could only obtain by an arrangement which, while it was unpalatable to himself and loathsome to the nation, was far from acceptable to the pope,—namely, by becoming the temporary vassal of Louis of France, whose ambitious designs, notwithstanding his intense and virulent Catholicism, had awakened the jealousy of Rome. Besides, many of the individual acts of James were prompted by the Jesuits, with whom the pope was then at feud. The progress of James’s ill-starred design was marked by clear and well-defined steps. While all England was shocked by the cruelties following the revocation by Louis of the edict of Nantes, James resolved to demand the repeal of the Test Act, and when this was refused by parliament he fabricated by means of corrupted judges a semblance of legal sanction for his disregard of its provisions, and not only encamped an army on Hounslow Heath, chiefly officered by Catholics, but manifested his determination that henceforth to be a Catholic should be a recommendation and not a bar to the highest offices of state, by creating Father Petre and five Catholic peers privy councillors. An appearance of liberality was indeed given to his policy by a declaration of indulgence to Protestant dissenters, but this only quickened suspicion as to his ultimate purpose. Moreover, while a commission was illegally appointed to restrain the discussion of political subjects by the clergy, the publication of Romanist sentiments was freely permitted, monasteries and Catholic schools were being rapidly augmented, and an attempt was made to swamp the Protestantism of the universities by conferring the principal dignities as they became vacant on Catholics. This final step, and a second declaration of indulgence of April 1688, which contained a provision for the prosecution of those clergymen who might refuse to read the declaration in their pulpits, dissipated the last atoms of veneration in the minds of the Tories for the divine right of the king; and after the birth of a son to James in May of the same year nearly every party in the state was prepared to support the invitation to William of Orange to aid in the restitution of the liberties of the country. The discussion of the motives which induced William to accept this invitation, and the results which followed his landing in England, belong properly to the article on William III. James, finding the bulwarks of despotism crumbling around him, after refusing the advice of a council of lay and temporal peers to open negotiations with William, made a pretence of yielding only to gain time to escape, and by his cowardly flight, which he persevered in even after being intercepted and brought back to London, rendered the coronation of Mary and William indispensable. All hope in England was for the time lost, and as by his action on the Test Act he had alienated the sycophantic estates of Scotland, the rising in the Highlands afforded no permanent benefit to his cause; but in Ireland it might be possible for him still to enjoy, though in diminished lustre, the glories of sovereignty until he should be restored to his wider dignities. If his policy towards Ireland had been dictated by the position in which he was now placed, it failed of its purpose, for even before the arrival of William he discovered that he had to fight his way to dominion, and finally, notwithstanding the aid of French troops, his craven irresolution in the face of danger lost him the battle of the Boyne, July 1, 1690, after which he made a hurried escape to France. An expedition to England in his favour was projected by Louis in 1692, but was frustrated by the defeat of the French fleet off Cape La Hogue on May 17, and another invasion planned to follow on the success of an assassination plot on February 10, 1696, was foiled by the discovery of the treachery. James died at St Germain, September 1701.

The principal contemporary authorities for the reign of James are the Dianes of Evelyn, Pepys, and Luttrell; Burnet’s History of His Own Times’, Sir William Temple’s Memoirs-, Life of James I I. , London, 1705; Bishop Kennet’s History of England; The Ellis Correspondence, London, 1829; and the Life of James II., collected out of Memoirs written by his own hand, by J. C. Clarke, 1816. See also the Life by C. J. Fox; C. T. Wilson, James II. and the Duke of Berwick, 1876; and the histories of Macaulay, Lingard, and Ranke.