Generations of schoolchildren have been taught to believe that the coming of William of Orange to England in 1688, and the ousting of the legitimate king, James II, from the throne of England, was a “Glorious Revolution”. In reality it was a shabby usurpation brought about by a fickle mob, unscrupulous propaganda and a posse of Protestant grandees. This book, first published by the popular historian and man of letters, Hugh Ross Williamson, in 1955, and now elegantly reprinted, tells the true story. Concentrating on the last 6 months of James’s reign, it is a fascinating, albeit melancholy, chronicle.

James, second son of the ill-fated Charles I, succeeded to the throne in 1685 when his brother, Charles II, died without legitimate heirs. Unlike the so-called “Merry Monarch”, James seems to have been more like his father in temperament: brave, stubborn, autocratic and deeply principled. In contrast to his brother, who cannily converted only on his death-bed, James had become a Catholic several years before his accession; his second wife, Mary of Modena, was a Catholic princess. The birth of a legitimate son in 1688 precipitated the King’s downfall. Although this birth of the Prince of Wales had been witnessed by 40 persons (no prudery in those days) scurrilous rumours were put about that he had been substituted for a stillborn baby and smuggled into the royal apartments in a warming-pan.

Ross Williamson emphasises that the King, though in a difficult position as the Catholic monarch of a country that had been Protestant for over 100 years, recognised and accepted the status quo; all he demanded was liberty of conscience for Catholics and other dissenters. In his Declaration of Indulgence of 1687, he had stated that “conscience ought not to be constrained nor people forced in matters of mere religion.” This was a reasonable view – but formulated in an unreasonable age. James, anticipating the later Catholic Emancipation, was 150 years ahead of his time. His appeal for tolerance was deliberately misinterpreted by his enemies, hard-faced men who had done well out of the Protestant years and who now saw their power being threatened. They harnessed the hysteria of the London mob, which behaved much as the shallow but highly influential media behaves today towards Catholics when they defend the moral law. The author describes “a glare of bonfires, round which the mob danced in drunken glee, toasting the damnation of Papists.”

What the book brings out is the isolation of the King, estranged from his two (Protestant) daughters, Mary and Anne, at enmity with his son-in-law, William, who was scheming to usurp him, misunderstood by the country he loved and betrayed by the army in which he had served with distinction as Duke of York during his brother’s reign. “You know that I have often risked my life in the days before I came to the throne”, he proudly reminds his enemies.

Rather than drag his subjects into another civil war – the memory of his father’s battles 40 years before being still raw in the memories of many – James chose to retreat against William’s advance. He was apprehended in Kent and taken to Faversham where, in a sad little anecdote, we learn that “the Mayor…realizing he was penniless, combined with the doctor, the vicar and the schoolmaster to present him immediately with 30 guineas.” Even sadder are James’s words on embarking for France: “I shall come back.” A forlorn hope; he was to end his days in exile. His son, styled the Old Pretender, never set foot in the country of his birth; and his older son, Prince Charles Edward, the darling of the clans at Glenfinnan during the ’45 uprising and known forever as “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, was to die a drunkard in Rome. Thus the Stuart cause, and a Catholic monarchy, languished and died.

Fr Nicholas Schofield, a priest of the Westminster archdiocese, has written a lucid and informative introduction to this volume. Fisher Press is to be commended for re-issuing a spirited tale by Ross Williamson (himself a well-known convert), one that throws light on a neglected corner of our national history.

© 2007 Francis Phillips

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