Our First Revolution by Michael Barone

Author:Michael Barone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307394385
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

JAMES LEFT SALISBURY for London, where he arrived on the afternoon of November 26. Now both his daughters had deserted him. His older daughter, still back in The Hague, was obviously supporting her husband’s invasion, while his younger daughter had now slipped through his agents’ fingers and joined his enemies, as had her husband. His best general, the man whose whole career he made, had deserted him, as well as many of his officers, including his nephews Cornbury and Grafton. James, like his brother Charles, throughout his career put great stock in family loyalty; the children of the affectionate Charles I, through all their troubles, never deserted each other, even as they dropped one political ally after another; they were willing to take grave political risks, as Charles II had in the Exclusion Crisis, to remain true to family.

To the Stuarts, primogeniture was a principle of paramount importance, the only basis for their entitlement to the throne. They were not a rich family, apart from their claims on the throne and on other royal titles; the exiled Charles and James had much smaller incomes than their nephew William of Orange, who with his wide landholdings in France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Netherlands, was the richest man in the United Provinces even when he was a youth in the hands of his political enemies. They were not men endowed with the talents that brought Oliver Cromwell to the fore; nobody would have elevated them to power had they not been in line to the throne. Apparently James expected that his daughters would accept, out of family loyalty, their displacement out of the succession by the birth of Prince James Edward in June 1688. His behavior suggests this: his tardiness to believe that Mary’s husband was preparing an invasion against him; his refusal to heed the advice of Feversham and others to arrest Anne’s husband and Churchill, the guiding force in Anne’s household, even in the face of evidence of conspiracy. He had accepted his brother’s orders, even his orders to quit England, at great personal risk and despite his principled opposition to them; he had never questioned the authority of a brother who, after all, was only a few years older and with whose course he often strongly disagreed. He evidently found it hard to believe that his daughters would question his own authority.

Would he have acquiesced even if Charles had disinherited him by declaring Monmouth his legitimate successor, or if Charles had signed an exclusion bill? No one can be sure, but there is at least a possibility that James would have obeyed Charles in death as he always had in life; evidently James’s enemies who encouraged Charles to legitimize Monmouth and who believed that Charles could be pressured to sign an exclusion bill must have thought so. Now James, who had always been faithful to his family, was deserted by his family, in the interest of a man whom he had addressed in a letter as recently as September 17 as “my sonne, the Prince of Orange.

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