Within half-an-hour of his brother’s death, James was seated as the King in Council. He declared that he would govern by the laws, and maintain the established church. Loyal addresses from all parts of his dominions were poured in upon him; and the commencement of his reign gave promise of stability and popularity. In a lesser degree he had his brothers vices; but he had shewn considerable aptitude for public business, and was not deficient in personal courage. In 1665, he had, in a war with Holland, taken the command of the Channel fleet. On the 3rd of June a great battle was fought off the Norfolk coast, within sight of Lowestoft. When the fight was at its hottest, the Dutch admiral’s ship blew up, and a Dutch fire-ship grappled with and destroyed an English ship. James had twice to shift his flag, as his ships were successively disabled. After an obstinate contest the Dutch ships sailed for the Texel; James pursued for a time,—eighteen of the enemy’s ships being taken or destroyed.

But his accession to the throne was not to be unchallenged. The Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyle met in Holland, and concerted simultaneous insurrections in England and Scotland.

Monmouth landed at Lyme, in Dorsetshire, on 11th June, and marched to Taunton, in Somersetshire, at the head of 5,000 irregularly armed troops. He had married the heiress of Buccleuch, and in other ways became associated with the nobility; stories had been set afloat of a marriage between his father and his Welsh mother, Lucy Walters, and he was looked on by many as the true heir to the throne. At Taunton he was received with acclamations; twenty young ladies presented him with a pocket-bible, a flag, and a naked sword. He had himself proclaimed King. After a good deal of tentative marching through the western counties, he fell back on Bridgewater, and three miles from this town, at Sedgemoor, a battle was fought, in which he was utterly defeated. He himself fled before the close of the fight; and was afterwards captured hiding in a bean-field.

He was taken to London, and at his own solicitation had an interview with the King. A larger-minded man than James would have been moved to generosity, at the sight of his brother’s son grovelling on his knees before him, and humbly suing for mercy; but generosity towards fallen enemies was not a distinguishing trait in the Stuart character. And this young man had long been a thorn in James’s path; so now no mercy for him—his doom was immediate execution.

And terrible was the vengeance of the King on not only the leaders of the insurrection, but on inferior participants, and on all who had given aid or countenance thereto. There were a number of military executions; and then Jeffreys was let loose upon the western counties. His “bloody assize” was a very devil’s carnival of barbarity and death. The campaign was opened at Winchester with the trial of Alice Lisle, the aged widow of one of Cromwell’s lieutenants, for affording food and shelter to two of the fugitive insurgents. Jeffreys bullied the jury into a verdict of guilty, and then he sentenced her to be burned alive that same afternoon. Horror-stricken, the clergy of the cathedral obtained a respite for three days. Noble ladies, whom she had befriended in the time of the Commonwealth, solicited her pardon from the King. Her son in the army had served against Monmouth. And James was actually moved to change her sentence from burning alive to beheading! And so it was executed. In this judicial massacre, more than three hundred persons were put to death, and very many who escaped death, suffered mutilation, imprisonment, or exile. Hundreds of the prisoners were presented to the courtiers,—to be sold for ten years as slaves in the West Indies. The twenty young ladies of Taunton, who had figured in the ovation to Monmouth, were assigned to the Queen’s maids-of-honour, and they sold pardons to the girls at the rate of a hundred pounds a head!

The accession of James brought no relaxation in the oppressive laws bearing upon Scottish presbyterianism. It was still in the power of the military to apprehend and interrogate, to torture, to confiscate the goods, and even to take the lives of those suspected of nonconformity, or of assisting outlawed persons. It was therefore to be expected that any attempt to throw off the galling yoke would have general sympathy and support. Argyle had himself been the victim of unjust persecution; and yet his invasion of Scotland was as futile and disastrous as that of Monmouth was of England.

Argyle was a Highland chief, influenced by his old family feuds; and his foremost idea was to fight the clans which were the hereditary enemies of his house, and also loyal Jacobites. So with about three hundred men he landed on the western peninsula of Cantyre, and was joined by about a thousand of his Campbell clansmen. He proposed marching to Inverary; but the other leaders were afraid of their little army being shut up in the highlands, and thought that the western shires—in which the covenanters were numerically strong, and where they had already boldly faced the government troops—would be a better field for operations. There was as usual in such differences, much wordy recrimination; time was lost; and when at length a movement was made into Lanarkshire, long, weary marches, with mistakes in the route, disheartened and demoralized the insurgents. The royal troops, in superior numbers, were fast closing in on Argyle, and, without a battle, his following fell to pieces, and himself was made prisoner. He was taken with disgraceful indignities to Edinburgh, and his old, most iniquitous sentence was carried out. Like his father, he met his fate with firmness; he said the grim instrument of death was “a sweet Maiden, whose embrace would waft his soul into heaven.” Upwards of twenty of the more considerable of his followers also suffered death.

As shewing the mean and cruel spirit of James, we may mention that on medals which he had struck, commemorative of his triumphs over Monmouth and Argyle, one side bore two severed heads, and the reverse two headless trunks.

And now in his plenitude of power, James began to shew openly what was his great intention, namely, the subversion of the Protestant faith, and the restitution of papal sway in Britain. His brother had so far paved the way for such a change, that he had taken advantage of the reaction of loyalty at the Restoration, of the general disgust at that detestable imposture, the Titus Oates’ “popish plot,” and of the discovery of the atrocious Rye House plot, to make his government despotic. He had, by his foul example, sown the seeds of immorality and corruption broadcast through the national life. Religious fervour and high political principle seemed to have vanished from the land,—servile submission to kingly authority was preached by divines, sung by poets, and practised by statesmen,—as the only safeguard against sombre puritanism, political strife, and the misrule of the mob.

And now here was a zealot,—seeing sycophants all around him; men of position hasting to gain his favour through the Romish confessional; a servile parliament granting him bountiful supplies; and a powerful French king sending him subsidies,—with the property, the liberties, the very lives of his subjects at his disposal,—can we wonder that he thought that his authority could be stretched to lording it also over their consciences?

A century and a half previously, Henry VIII. had abrogated the authority of the Pope in England, and James may have believed that what one despotic king could do, another could undo. Of three things we hardly know which most to wonder at:—the daring of the attempt—or, how nearly he succeeded in his designs—or, that amidst so much apathy, servility, and corruption, he did not, for a time at least, accomplish his ends. But the Reformation was, on the face of it, a natural outcome of a new dawn, after the long night of the dark ages in Europe. It was, with the revival of letters, the new geographical and scientific discoveries, and the general spirit of adventure and research, a stepping-stone towards progress and enlarged political and intellectual freedom; whilst the proposed retrocession to Rome meant going backwards, and a wilful surrender to the old bondage and authority.

James publicly attended the rites of his church; he surrounded himself by Catholic priests, a leading Jesuit, Father Petre, being his political confidant; he entertained at his court—for the first time in England since the days of Queen Mary—a papal nuncio. He placed the Church under the control of a High Commission of seven members, Jeffreys, now Lord Chancellor, at the head. In chartered towns, Catholics were to be eligible to serve as mayors and aldermen. He began the formation of a large standing army, and, in defiance of the Test Act, and in assertion of his dispensing power, he largely officered this army by Catholics. The university of Oxford had, in the previous reign, declared that in no case was resistance to the royal authority justifiable, and it had now to reap the bitter fruits of its servile declaration. The King appointed a Roman Catholic to the deanery of Christ Church; another to the presidency of Magdalen College, and twelve Catholic fellows were appointed in one day. Oxford now began to see that passive obedience might well stop short of a surrender of religious principles; it resisted the royal mandates; and it would not submit, although twenty-five of its fellows were expelled.

And a contagion of conversion broke out in the higher social ranks. Noble lords and ladies of fashion went to mass and confession; processions of Catholic priests were daily met in the streets of London; Catholic chapels and monasteries were becoming numerous, their service bells ringing perpetually.

In Scotland, the Chancellorship was bestowed on one of the King’s time-serving converts, Drummond, Earl of Perth. He co-operated with the Earl of Sunderland in England, in driving on James to the most extravagant reactionary measures. By a new court order all persons holding civil offices in Scotland were ordered to resign, and to resume their offices without taking the test oath, ordered in 1681, they taking, for thus breaking the law, a remission of penalties from the Crown; all not obtaining such remission to be subjected to the said penalties. That is,—all officials were ordered to break the law, and were to be subject to penalties for such infringement,—unless by getting the King’s pardon they acknowledged his power to abrogate the law! And this test oath had been the contrivance of James himself when in Scotland,—forced upon Presbyterians at the sword’s point, and held so sacred that Argyle had been condemned to death for taking it with a slight qualification.

The short reign of James was one of the saddest periods in Scottish history. He had refused to take the usual coronation oath, which included the maintenance of the established church. In spite of this refusal—which impaired the validity of his right to rule—a weakly compliant parliament expressed the loyalty of absolute submission. The law against conventicles was extended to the presence of five persons, besides the family attending domestic worship. If the meeting was held outside the house—even on the door-step—it was to be considered a field-conventicle punishable by death. But on the question of repealing the penal acts against Catholics, Parliament proved refractory, and it was forthwith dissolved.

The King issued a proclamation depriving the burghs of the right of electing their own magistrates. When, to favour Roman Catholicism, he issued his Declaration of Indulgence, by which there was to be general liberty of worship; yet—strange anomaly—the laws against field-preaching continued in full force. Under these laws, James Renwick, a delicate, but enthusiastic field-preacher, was executed in Edinburgh in February, 1688. He was the last in the fearfully long roll of covenanting martyrs.

The Declaration of Indulgence, permitting all professions of religion to worship in their own ways, was published by James—solely on his own authority—in April, 1687. At the first blush we may be inclined to call this general indulgence a step in the right direction,—even although we know that under the cloak of toleration to all forms of faith, the King’s main object was to legalise Catholic worship and ritual. We now say, from the more liberal stand-point of the nineteenth century, that the penal laws against the exercise of Catholic rites were tyrannical and unjust. But we have to consider the times in which these laws were introduced, when after a long and bitter struggle the papal yoke had been thrown off,—when the severities of Rome against those she termed heretics were fresh in the memory,—and that she never abates one jot of her assumption to be the one authoritative church—claiming the entire submission of Christendom. And Dissenters knew that the King was here bidding for their support against the established church. They saw that Tyrconnel, the King’s Viceroy in Ireland—a country where James did not require to keep up appearances—was fast arming the Catholics, preparatory to a total subversion of Protestantism; and thus the Presbyterian and other dissenters saw in the Episcopal Church the rallying point of religious freedom; they overlooked its past subserviency to power and its harshness to themselves, in consideration of its present danger, and the stand it was now preparing to make in the common cause.

In April, 1688, the king ordered his Declaration to be read in all the churches. The London clergy met and signed a refusal to comply with the order, and the primate, Sancroft, and six other bishops, presented a petition to the king against being compelled to read a document which assumed the legality of the dispensing power. Only in seven of the London churches, and a few in the country, was the Declaration read. The king was furious, and summoned the bishops before the privy council; on their acknowledging their signatures to the petition, they were committed to the Tower. Their passage down the Thames was a public ovation; from crowded quays, bridges, and barges arose enthusiastic shouts of encouragement; the very officers of the Tower went on their knees for the episcopal blessing. In their imprisonment, the bishops were visited daily by nobles and leading men; and—which irritated James most of all—a deputation of dissenting ministers went and thanked them in the name of their common Protestantism.

And just at this time an event occurred which had a remarkable bearing on the history of the period. On June 10th, 1688, James’s queen gave birth to a son. The news had been circulated that a child was expected; the faithful ventured to prophesy a prince; a blessing vouchsafed by the intervention of the Virgin Mary, in response to prayers and pilgrimages. But Protestant England had both feared and doubted. The Court and its household were, almost exclusively, composed of Catholics, and when the birth of a prince was announced, it was generally believed that a strange child had been smuggled into the palace, and was then being passed off as the king’s son. There now seems little doubt but that the infant was really the offspring of the king and queen. Thus, to his father’s joy, and to Catholic anticipations of the throne being after him still occupied by a king of the old faith—but with general doubts and misgivings—with repudiation instead of welcome, came into the world the ill-fated prince, known in our history as James the Pretender.

On June 20th, the trial of the bishops took place before the Court of King’s Bench. They were charged with having “published a false, malicious, and seditious libel.” Of the four judges, two were for the petition being a libel, and two were against. The jury had to decide the question, and were locked up during the night. At ten o’clock next morning, when the Court again met, there was a silence of deep suspense before the verdict was pronounced. When the words “not guilty” fell from the foreman’s lips, a great cheer arose, which penetrated into the crowded street, and was speedily wafted over London, extending even to the troops on parade at Blackheath. It was a day of general congratulation and rejoicing; and bonfires and illuminations went far into the summer night.