James II and VII of Great Britain (14 October 1633 (Julian calendar) – 16 September 1701) was the brother of Charles II and succeeded him in 1685. He came to the throne with widespread public sympathy and a Royalist parliament.
To show how terrible a King he was, compare him to his father and brother; it took Charles I almost twenty four years to squander it all and lose his head and his brother, Charles II, ruled peacefully for twenty three years. It took James three years to bugger it all up.
He had converted to Catholicism and was bent on returning Britain to its loyalty to Rome. However, 150 years after the Reformation and 120 after the Elizabethan Settlement, the British people weren’t about to do that. They might have grudgingly tolerated his Catholicism as a blip and an aberration given that his heirs were staunchly Protestant, but there was one problem: they were his daughters, and under the male-preference primogeniture succession practiced at the time, any son would displace them and become the Heir Apparent. The birth of that son, James Francis Edward, in 1688 caused a panic within the government. Then seven leading statesmen had an idea...
They invited the king's Protestant son-in-law William of Orange (married to James's Protestant daughter Mary, the previous Heiress Presumptive, and an heir to the throne in his own right as a grandson of Charles I) to invade England and save them from the Catholic tyrant. James fled to France, where he died as a pensionary of his cousin Louis XIV.
James's scions would try to win back the throne in what became known as the Hanover-Stuart Wars to no avail. With the death of his childless grandsons Charles Edward ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") and Henry (who had become a Cardinal), the male Catholic Stuart line ended. All Jacobite "claimants" to the throne since 1807 descend from James's younger sister Henrietta, though none of them ever publicly exercised this claim.note
Today James gets a bad rap for his absolutist politics and lack of political finesse, not to mention centuries of extra tarnish thrown on by his Protestant enemies and 19th-century Whig historians. However, we should take pains to note that one of the proximate causes of James's overthrow was the letter of the Seven Bishops, a response to the Declaration of Indulgence, which aimed towards religious toleration for both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters (basically, total freedom of religion for Christians, which was more than you could get in most of Europe at the time). The people who brought in the Dutch were mainstream Anglicans, many of whom wanted a return to the restrictions on civil liberties for non-Anglicans, and all of whom (correctly or incorrectly is itself a controversial debate) saw James's policies of tolerance as being aimed at making England (and Scotland) officially Catholic.
Fun fact: the City and State of New York are named after him, as being the second son of the King, he was the Duke of York prior to his accession; the colony, taken from the Dutch during his brother's reign, was named after him, not the city Oop North.
