A Person Who Had No Right to Rule

Abstract

On 6 February 1685 Charles II the crypto-Catholic died, and his brother the Duke of York, whom the Whigs had tried so strenuously to exclude from the throne, quietly succeeded as James II. ‘He came in like a Lamb’, Defoe tells us, perhaps sharing in the brief period of optimism, when ‘so great on a sudden were the hopes of this King, that Edward III and Henry V, the most glorious Monarchs of England, were like on his Account to be hissed out of our English Chronicles’.¹ But by the end of April, ‘ill Omens at his Coronation’ could be interpreted as signs of divine displeasure;² and Defoe soon convinced himself that James had no right to the throne:

For my part, I thank God, that when he was King, I never owned him, never swore to him, never prayed for him (as King) never paid any act of homage to him, never so much as drank his health, but looked on him as a person who, being Popish, had no right to rule.³