A visit which the Duke of York paid to London in March 1682, ie memorable on account of a disaster which happened to the ship in which he sailed on his return to the north in May : it struck upon a sand-bank near the mouth of the Humber, when the duke and a few of his attendants, among whom was Mr. Churchill, afterwards the great Duke of Marlborough, were the only persona saved. The soli citude the duke was said to have shown on this occasion for the safety of his priests and his dogs contributed considerably to deepen the popular odium of which be was the object. Very soon after this he finally left Scotland, his government of which country had been throughout en oppressive and cruel tyranny, and again taking up his residence at the English court, became his brother's chief counsellor, and, much more than Charles himself, whose increased indolence and infirmities now more than ever indisposed him for exertion—the mainspring and director of the conduct of public affairs. To his instigation are chiefly attributed the general attack upon corpora tions, the executions of Russell and Sidney, and the other violent and despotic acts which crowd tho two closing years of Charles's reign.
On the death of his brother, 6th of February 1685, no opposition was made to the accession of James. In his address to the privy council he said, "I have been reported to be a man for arbitrary power; but that is not the only story that has been made of me; and I shall make it my endeavour to preserve this government, both in church and state, as it is now by law established." lu his very first measures how ever the new king showed, to borrow the expressions of Hume, "that either he was not sincere in his professions of attachment to the laws, or that he bed entertained eo lofty an idea of his own legal power, that even his utmost sincerity would tend very little to secure the liberties of the people." He began by issuing a proclamation ordering the customs and excise duties to be paid as usual, although the parlia mentary grant of them had expired with the termination of the late reign ; and this step, it appears, he took after a secret consultation with the French minister, Barillon, with whom arrangements were soon completed for the continuance of the pension that Charles had received from King Louis, and the general dependence of the goveru ment upon that of France. (Sir John Dalrymple, 'Memoirs of Great Britain,' Appendix, part r., pp. 100-113, and Fox, 'History of the Early Part of the Reign of James IL') In another direction James made an equally offensive display of his principles, by going openly and in great state to the illegal celebration of the mass; he even lost no time in sending au agent to Rome to make his submissions to the pope and to prepare the way for the readmission of England into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church.
He determined however to call a parliament, for reasons which he explained to Barillon partly in person, partly through the Earl of Rochester, lord treasurer. "Hereafter," said be, ‘. it will be much more easy for me to put off the assembling of parliament, or to main tain myself by other means which may appear more coovenieut for me. . . . I know the English ; you must not show them any fear in the beginning. . . . I will take good care to hinder parliament from meddling in foreign affairs, and will put an end to the session as soon as I see the members show any ill will." By the mouth of Rochester, he observed in addition that he would be too chargeable to Louis if he should be obliged to come to him for all the supplies he at present wanted ; what he was doing did not however exempt him from also having recourse to the French king for some assistance; he hoped that in the difficult beginning of his reign Louis would help him to support the weight of it; that this fresh obligation would eugage him still more not to depart from the road which he used to think the deceased king his brother should have kept with regard to the French monarch ; and would be the means of making him independent of parliament, and putting him in a condition to support himself without the assistance of that body, if they should refuse him the continuation of the revenues which the late king enjoyed. (Barillon 's 'Despatch'
of the 19th February.) When, a few days after, in compliance with these importunate solicitations, Louis transmitted bills for 500,000 livres, James expressed his gratitude in the most rapturous terms, even shedding tears as he spoke ; and Rochester, Sunderland, and Godolphin hastened to Barillon to tell him he had given life to the king their master. It was readily agreed, in requital of Louis's bounty, that the chief obstacle which stood in the way of the seizure by the French king of the Spanish Netherlands ehould be immediately removed, by the existing treaty between Spain and England being held to have terminated with the death of Charles.
These curious details of its commencement supply the key-note to the whole course of James's disgraceful reign. All that followed flowed naturally from such a beginning. The parliament met according to proclamation on the 19th of May, and, iu the usual temper of the nation at the accession of a new sovereign, was found abundantly compliant. The revenue which the king demanded was granted to him for life by the Commons, with little or no debate, and by a unanimous vote ; and ou almost every other subject that came before it that assembly manifested the same complete subserviency to the wishes of the court ; a strong attachment to the Established Church, and a still lingering horror of the popish plot, being the only disposi tions on the part of the generality of the members that gave James any trouble in managing them. The influence of the court indeed had been unscrupulously employed in ,,their election, and with so much success that James declared there were not forty of them whom he would not himself have named. A Scottish parliament, which had assembled a few weeks before that of England, responded to all the royal demands in a spirit still more slavish. Scotland indeed, by the unheard-of atrocities of the late king's government, had been now humbled for the moment almost to the point of utter despair. While the two parliaments were still sitting, both England and Scotland were invaded, the former by the Duke of Monmouth, the latter by the Earl of Argyle, both of whom had for some years been exiles in Holland. The disastrous issue of each of these attempts is well known. Argyle, after the dispersion of his few followers, was apprehended and executed at Edinburgh, on the 30th of June. Monmouth, whose landing did not take place till the 11th of that month, by which time Argyle was all but an unattended fugitive, was, after having met in the first instance with a much greater promise of success than his confederate in the north had experienced, defeated, 5th of July, in the decisive battle of Sedgemoor, and being •two days after found concealed in a ditch, was brought to London, and delivered to the executioner on the 15th of the same month. His uncle obdurately refused to grant him either his life or even the briefest respite. The suppression of Mon mouth's insurrection was followed by the savage military vengeance of Colonel Kirke, and the more revolting enormities of the western as it was jocularly called by the king, of chief-justice Jeffreys. Between the two the south-western counties were strewed with the corpses and the dismembered limbs of human beings, women as well as men, butchered by the sword or the axe.