James II (feb 7, 1685 – dec 23, 1688)

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second surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, he ascended the throne upon the death of his brother, Charles II. By his first marriage to commoner Anne Hyde, his surviving children were Mary and Anne. He married Catholic Mary of Modena in 1673.
Members of Britain's Protestant political elite increasingly suspected him of being pro-French and pro-Catholic and of having designs on becoming an absolute monarch. When in 1688 Mary of Modena produced a Catholic heir, a son called James, leading nobles called on his Protestant son-in-law and nephew William III of Orange to land an invasion army from the Dutch Republic, which he did in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. James fled England (and thus was held to have abdicated). He was replaced by his Protestant eldest daughter Mary II and her husband William III. James made one serious attempt to recover his crowns from William and Mary when he landed in Ireland in 1689. After the defeat of the Jacobite forces by the Williamites at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, James returned to France. He lived out the rest of his life as a pretender at a court sponsored by his cousin and ally, King Louis XIV.
James is best known for his struggles with the English Parliament and his attempts to create religious liberty for English Roman Catholics and Protestant nonconformists, against the wishes of the Anglican establishment. This tension made James's four-year reign a struggle for supremacy between Parliament and the Crown, resulting in his deposition, the passage of the Bill of Rights, and the accession of his daughter and her husband as queen and king.

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