16 September - the anniversary of the death of our last ruling Catholic monarch, King James II and VII

King James II of England and Ireland and VII of Scotland was born on 14 October 1633, at St. James's Palace in London, the third son of King Charles I and Princess Henrietta Maria of France, Queen Henrietta-Maria of England.

 

Prince James was made HRH Duke of York at his birth and was baptised into the Anglican Church by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. He was made Lord High Admiral of England in 1638 and a Knight of the Garter in 1642.

During the Civil War against his father James lived in the Low Countries and France, where he returned to exile later in life. He was commissioned in the French Army and served under the Vicomte de Turenne and was created Duke of Normandy by King Louis XIV of France in 1660, the same year that he returned to England with his brother who was restored as King Charles II, whereupon he married Lady Anne Hyde, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon.

In 1670 both James and Anne converted to the Catholic faith but Anne died the following year. 

When the Test Act was passed in 1673, requiring the holders of all public offices to receive communion according to the rites of the Church of England, and to abjure the Catholic belief in transubstantiation, James renounced his offices which caused his Catholic conversion to become public knowledge.

In the same year James married Princess Maria of Modena, daughter of Alfonso IV, Duke of Modena.

Princess Mary of Modena, later Queen Mary of England, Scotland and Ireland 

From around this time, two parties formed in Parliament, based upon the old division of Roundheads and Cavaliers, but now called "Excluders" and "Abhorrers", the first seeking to exclude the Catholic James from succession to the throne, and the latter abhorring such an unconstitutional idea. Each party was alter given a derogatory name, the first "Whig", after the Scots Covenanter Whiggamore cattle raid, and the latter "Tory" after the Irish word for a bandit toraigh.

Nevertheless, James did succeed his brother and was crowned King in 1685 - privately by the Catholic rites and then publicly, on 23 April, St George's Day, at Westminster Abbey according to the rites of the Church of England.
 

King James II and VII after his coronation

However, the Whig Excluders did not rest and eventually staged a treacherous revolution against their rightful king in due course.

The pretext for this treason was, ironically, King James's commitment to liberty of conscience, a doctrine the Whigs claimed to profess but, in reality, denied.

King James issued a Declaration of Toleration for Scotland on 12 February 1687 and a Declaration of Indulgence for England on 4 April 1687, re-issued in 1688 with an order to be read in all churches.

It was this latter command that was used by the rebels as a pretext. Seven Anglican bishops petitioned the King in his own courts against James's order to read the Declaration. Concurrently, "the Seven", 5 peers and 2 commoners, treacherously invited the King's  Protestant son-in-law and nephew, William, Prince of Orange, to come over the channel and invade England by force of arms.

Their stated aim was to abolish freedom of religion and conscience and once again re-impose - by force - Anglicanism, upon the Three Kingdoms of England (and Wales), Scotland and Ireland, whether the people wanted it or no.

On 5 November, William, Prince of Orange landed at Brixham, Devon, with 15,000 men. King James went out with the Army to meet the Dutch invasion on Salisbury Plain and would undoubtedly have stood a good chance of doing so successfully but for the treacherous desertion to the enemy of his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General John Churchill, together with 400 officers and men under his malign influence.

 

After the meeting of the council of war on the morning of 24 November 1685, Churchill, accompanied by some 400 officers and men, deserted the royal camp and rode towards the Dutch invader in Axminster, leaving behind him a derisive letter of apology and self-justification: 

"...I hope the great advantage I enjoy under Your Majesty, which I own I would never expect in any other change of government, may reasonably convince Your Majesty and the world that I am actuated by a higher principle..."

Initially, planning to rendezvous on Salisbury Plain with the King and there to kidnap him and take him to William, Churchill was thwarted because James had a very fortuitous serious nose-bleed that morning so that he was unable to make the rendezvous. Churchill then deserted to the Dutch usurper, William of Orange.

 

In fact, Churchill was only ever motivated by one principle, that of his own enrichment and ambition. this he achieved to the highest degree by being ennobled by the Orangeman as Duke of Marlborough and amassing one of the greatest fortunes in Europe.

 

John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough, traitor and deserter who profited financially by going over to the invading William of Orange

 

 

After this, James's prospects of success vanished and he was obliged to flee to France but with the intention of re-gaining his throne at the first opportunity from the traitors and invaders.

 

Meantime, a Convention of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, assembled at Westminster, and published a bogus declaration that James had "abdicated" the government. Shortly after, a cowed Convention of the Scottish Estates declared similarly.

King James remained at the Château of St Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris until his death, not only recognised by King Louis XIV of France as rightful King but regularly visited by the bishops of the non-juring Church of England who had refused to take an oath of loyalty to the new regime of William of Orange who now claimed to rule with his wife, King James's daughter, Mary. These bishops only recognised King James as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, despite his being a Catholic, and always sought his approval or appointment of the non-juring bishops and senior clergy.

It was on 16 September 1701 that King James II and VII died, in the odour of sanctity, attended and fortified by all the rites of our Holy Mother the Church.

His body was received by the English Benedictines then resident in Rue St Jacques, Paris, ironically, later the headquarters of the French Revolutionaries who were, for that reason, called Jacobins. These same Jacobins and their odious followers were later responsible for the desecration of the tomb of King James.

The religious cult of King James II and VII was begun and preserved by these same English Benedictines and continues to this day.

After his death, the Whig conspirators secured a new settlement of the royal line through the Act of Settlement 1701 which, together with the Bill of Rights of 1689, completely destroyed the old Constitution and substituted, illegally and unconstitutionally, a new one.

The Act was passed to settle the succession to the English and Irish crowns and thrones on the Electress Sophia of Hanover (a granddaughter of James VI of Scotland and I of England and Ireland) and her non-Roman Catholic heirs. It arose at the death of King James and the failure of heirs to William and Mary and to Queen Anne, the other daughter of King James, who had been allowed to succeed because she remained Protestant, unlike her mother and father.

Fully 57 members of the family had a better right to the throne than the Electress Sophia of Hanover, but they were excluded by this illegal and unconstitutional Act for the sole reason that they were Roman Catholic.

In 1707, the independent Kingdom of Scotland came to an end by means of a huge Whig bribe paid to influential members of the Scottish Estates (as the Scottish parliament has historically been called) who voted for the Act of Union. It was opposed by Scottish Jacobites like George Lockhart of Carnwath, founder of the Scottish Tory Party which was, in those day, almost entirely Jacobite which meant they were supporters of the rightful heirs of King James II and VII (from the Latin Jacobus for James).

 

George Lockhart of Carnwath, Scottish Jacobite and founder of the Scottish Tory Party, opposed the Scottish Act of Union with England that centralised power at Westminster

 

 

The Whigs were, like the European Union political leaders of today, centralisers and centralists who believed in taking away power from the small states and regions and giving it to a highly centralised government.

 

Thus the old Constitution, with the King at its apex, came to an end and a new Parliamentary sovereignty was created that was, in effect, superior to the King and determined the succession according to its own, new, revolutionary ideas, rather than by the traditional and constitutional royal primogeniture.

 

The new entity so created was called "Great Britain" and idea alien to the old Constitution of the ancient Three Kingdoms.

 

Having reduced Scotland to a subordinate state, they later succeeded in doing the same to Ireland with the Act of Union of 1800 and so created the "United Kingdom" of Great Britain and Ireland, ruled from Westminster under one only Parliament.

 

Electress Sophia died on 8 June 1714, before the death of Queen Anne on 1 August 1714, and so Sophia's son became King George I of Great Britain and Ireland, the first of the Hanoverian dynasty.

Under the Act of Settlement 1701, anyone who becomes a Roman Catholic, or who marries a Roman Catholic, becomes disqualified to inherit the throne. The act also gravely limits the power of the monarch.

King James III and VIII, son of King James II and VII, and the true King of England, Scotland and Ireland, but excluded from the throne purely because he was a Roman Catholic

 

The Act of Settlement thus also became part of the law of all the imperial territories of the British Empire and, later, of the nations of the British Commonwealth so that it cannot effectively be altered without the consent of those Commonwealth realms, as they are now called.

The century and a half after the so-called Bill of Rights of 1689 was one of the most oppressive in British history and saw the introduction of the savagely inhuman, brutal and grotesquely unjust Penal laws that removed the human rights of Roman Catholics and religious dissenters and persecuted the ordinary people of England, Scotland and Ireland in a manner that will always remain a permanent disgrace to the British nation and Commonwealth.

Under this Code Catholic men could be hanged, drawn and quartered and Catholic women burned at the stake, ostensibly as traitors but, in reality, as victims of the denial of religious liberty and martyrs to their faith.

This evil code was not finally disposed of until as late as 1828 with the Catholic Emancipation Act.

The true legacy of King James II of England and Ireland and VII of Scotland was, and is, his commitment, at once, to both religious liberty and to the Catholic faith.

His sons became the cynosure of the Jacobite movement which attempted to restore them to the throne in 1715 and 1745 in the two Jacobite uprisings to restore the Crown and ancient Constitutions of these Islands.

 

 

The Stuart Royal Arms

Aymez Loyaute!

 

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