On September 16, 1701, the deposed King of England, Ireland and Scotland died in exile. John Callow, writing for the BBC History Magazine webpage History Extra, describes the last years of James in France, at St. Germain-en-Laye:
As it was, James II had more and more time on his hands. Stripped of his military and diplomatic duties, and progressively less able to hunt as his sixth decade wore on, his need for rewarding activity and a set routine found a fresh expression in religious devotions, pilgrimages, and patronage. Yet this often took him away from the mainstream of Louis XIV’s increasingly intolerant vision of French Catholicism. He was enraptured by the starkly brutal form of monasticism practised by Trappist monks, who rejected the world – in all its forms – and actively desired death as a release from sin.
James also, probably unwittingly, came close to condoning heresy through his contacts among the Jansenists. Jansenism was a new movement within Catholicism that laid a greater stress upon original sin, as a cause of damnation, and the role of God’s grace and predestination in securing salvation. As such, it appeared to bring together what James had learned of Protestantism as a youth in England, and his experience of Catholicism on the Continent, as a soldier in the armies of France and Spain.
James knew, respected and sought to assist Antoine Arnauld, the intellectual powerhouse of the movement, whose unorthodox religious ideals and polemics aimed against William III as the “new Absalom, new Herod, new Nero” and the “new Cromwell”, had managed to render him a fugitive from both the French and Dutch authorities. To the horror of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s wife and an increasing power behind the throne, King James read books by Jansenist authors that were otherwise banned by the bishop of Paris. His protection and patronage of disgraced Jansenists stood in stark opposition to the policies of both the Gallican church under Louis XIV, and his wife’s court at St Germain after his death in 1701. . . .
James also wrote his memoirs, which Callow appreciates for their detail and vividness when describing military action:
Through these memoirs, we see the young James riding to war on a borrowed horse, buckling on his armour before a surprise attack, and meeting with fortune-tellers and wandering priests on clay-churned roads and in tattered army camps. When he writes about soldiers, they are real people, rather than faceless masses; they grumble about their lack of rations, long to return home to their families and fight over looted goods as readily as they do for the sake of honour or ideology.
Viewed from this angle, the final exile actually provided James with an unprecedented freedom for an early modern head of state, to reflect upon the trajectory and the wider meaning of his political career. It was not by chance that, in a court dominated by middle-aged and elderly adherents, the supreme form of expression chosen by the king should be the memoir. In this manner, James refashioned himself as a new ‘King David’, to be remembered “in all his afflictions”, while his image-makers displayed him, after the collapse of his military hopes at the sea battle of La Hogue, as a disinterested and wronged man of letters. Lost in his thoughts, one engraver pictured him poring over his books, oblivious to the pet dog jumping up at his arm chair, desperate to gain his attention. The crown of England is set aside on the table beside him and a new crown of thorns fastened by his ungrateful subjects to his care-worn brow.
This is not an unthinking or heavy-handed choice of imagery, and the king’s memoirs and works of religious devotion are not the products of an untutored, dull or unimaginative mind. . . .
John Callow's biography of James II in exile was published by The History Press in 2017. Callow also wrote a biography of James, the Duke of York before his exile, The Making of King James II: The Formative Years of a Fallen King.
