2,000 Years of Christ's Power Vol. 4: The Age of Religious Conflict by Needham Nick

Author:Needham, Nick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Christian Focus Publications
Published: 2016-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

2

James II and the Glorious Revolution

1. A new Catholic king

When James II (born 1633; reigned 1685–88) succeeded to the throne in February 1685, all seemed fair. The Whigs who had tried to exclude him from the monarchy had been smashed by Charles II; meanwhile James’ allies, the Tories, had made “passive obedience” a first article in their creed—it was never right to resist a lawfully crowned king. The only possible problem was that Tories were ardently Anglican, whereas James was Roman Catholic. Thus far, however, he had played his cards well, never criticizing the Church of England, but praising it for its loyalty to him. He was crowned according to a traditional Anglican ceremony, and he publicly promised to respect and maintain the Anglican Church, disavowing any intent to re-Catholicize England. If that relationship between monarch and Church ever broke down, James would be in trouble. Within three years, it was irreparably broken, and Tories joined with Whigs in ejecting James from the throne.

2. The Monmouth Rebellion and its aftermath

James reassured the country that he was no tyrant by holding a general election. The resulting parliament, which met in May 1685, was Tory-dominated, owing to the way Charles II had stripped towns and cities of their right to elect anyone as MP without royal consent. The Tory MPs were as loyal as James could have wished. They voted him for life the total income Charles had enjoyed.

But there was always going to be some opposition to James; the more fiercely Protestant sections of the population did not believe his moderate pose, and would be only too glad to see James fall. Only a month after parliament met, a violent popular rebellion broke out in the south-western counties (Devon, Dorset, Somerset). It was led by James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (1649–85), an illegitimate son of Charles II. Monmouth, a Protestant, had been the Whigs’ favoured candidate for the throne in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, and had then been implicated in the extreme Whigs’ Rye House Plot in 1683. He was now living in exile in the Dutch Republic.

Monmouth gambled that the strongly Protestant, indeed Nonconformist, people of the south-western counties would back his claim to the throne, and rise up against James, if he (Monmouth) only showed his face and waved the flag of Protestant revolt against a popish king. Many lower class Nonconformists did indeed rally to Monmouth when he landed at Lyme Regis in Dorset on June 11th, but none of the Protestant gentry or nobility would support his hare-brained scheme. Monmouth’s ragtag army was butchered by James’ professional forces at Sedgemoor in Somerset, on July 6th. Monmouth himself fled but was captured and executed only a week later.

The aftermath of the Monmouth Rebellion was harrowing for Nonconformists. James put judge George Jeffreys (1654–89) in charge of the trials of those taken prisoner during and after the uprising. Jeffreys’ conduct was fierce in the extreme; some 320 people were executed by hanging, and a further 800 or 900 shipped out as slave labour to the Caribbean plantations.

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