James II and VII

The last Roman Catholic monarch to reign over England, Scotland, and Ireland, James was born at St James's Palace on 14 October 1633, the second surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, a daughter of the Bourbon king Henry IV. Created Duke of York, he escaped to the continent during the Civil War and spent the Interregnum in exile, serving with distinction in the French army under Turenne and later in Spanish service.

At the Restoration in 1660 he returned as heir presumptive to his brother Charles II and served as Lord High Admiral, commanding at sea against the Dutch; the captured New Amsterdam was renamed New York in his honour in 1664. In 1660 he married Anne Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon, who bore him two surviving daughters, Mary and Anne, both raised as Protestants by the king's order. James himself converted to Catholicism around 1668-69, and after the Test Act of 1673 resigned his offices rather than deny his faith. That year he married the Catholic Mary of Modena, of the house of Este. His religion provoked the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, an unsuccessful parliamentary campaign to bar him from the succession.

He became king on 6 February 1685 and crushed the rebellion of his nephew the Duke of Monmouth that summer. But his efforts to secure toleration and office for Catholics — the Declarations of Indulgence, the prosecution of the Seven Bishops, the purging of corporations — alienated the political nation. The birth of his son James Francis Edward on 10 June 1688 raised the prospect of a Catholic succession, and seven leading figures invited James's son-in-law and nephew, William of Orange, to intervene. William landed at Torbay in November 1688; James's support dissolved, and he fled to France in December. Parliament treated the throne as vacant and settled it jointly on William and James's daughter Mary.

James attempted recovery through Ireland, where his cause was defeated at the Boyne in July 1690. He passed his remaining years at Saint-Germain-en-Laye as a pensioner of Louis XIV, increasingly devoted to religious observance, and died there on 16 September 1701. His exiled son's claim sustained the Jacobite movement for two generations.