Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 29.djvu/203

 the hands of the commissaries of the republic (ib. pp. 91 seqq.). The manuscripts of the king's ‘Original Memoirs,’ carried to France by Terriesi in 1688, and continued by James in his exile, were during the revolution cleverly carried for transmission to England as far as the house of a trustworthy person living near St. Omer, and there destroyed in a panic by the man's wife (preface to, Hist. of James II; and cf. Les derniers Stuarts, i. 113 seqq.). But most of the documents are printed in the ‘Life of James II,’ by Clarke. The last will of James, dated 6 Sept. 1701, and signed for the king by Middleton, exists in a copy in the French foreign office, and in draft among the ‘Nairne Papers’ at Oxford (ib. p. 118). He advises his son not to trouble his subjects in the enjoyment of their religion, rights, and liberties. The advice bequeathed by James to his son (ib. pp. 617–42), and deposited by him in the Scots College, is said by Macpherson (i. 77 n.) to have been drawn up by him when in Ireland in 1690.

James II had by his first wife eight, and by his second wife seven, children, of the latter of whom only James (the subsequent ‘Old Pretender’) and the youngest, Louisa Maria Theresa, whose death in 1712 caused so profound a sorrow at St. Germains, survived him (see, Pedigree of the House of Stuart, 1889). His acknowledged illegitimate children were—by Arabella Churchill: (1) James Fitzjames, duke of Berwick, born 1670; (2) Henry Fitzjames, duke of Albemarle, ‘the Grand Prior,’ born 1673; (3) Henrietta, married to Sir Henry (afterwards Lord) Waldegrave, her father's ‘ambassador’ in France; and (4) another daughter, who died a nun; by Catharine Sedley (Lady Dorchester), a daughter known as Lady Catharine Darnley, married to Lord Anglesey, and after being divorced from him to Sheffield, duke of Buckinghamshire [q. v.]

James had in his youth the worst possible training; and through the greater part of his life he was the slave of the immorality then universal in his rank, in which he contrived to caricature the excesses of his brother. He neither gamed nor drank, and his early service in the field, his love of the sea, and his fondness for outdoor exercises, prevented him from becoming a ‘saunterer’ like Charles. He showed personal courage in his youth, and in the two great sea-fights in which he held the command. His seamanship was by no means titular only, but shows itself in much of his correspondence with Dartmouth and others (cf., v. 246). He was capable in the details of business, and possessed some literary ability. Although the breakdown of the naval administration under him has no parallel in shamefulness, it is certain that he both sought to improve the management of the navy, and to awaken king and parliament to a sense of its defects. He is said to have kept a journal from the time of his stay in the Scilly Isles. In his later years his pen was never out of his hands, as his numerous declarations attest. In the last period of his life he fell back, apparently with unabated zest, upon religious composition. His patronage of Wycherley may be attributed in some degree to his literary insight as well as to his sympathy with the ‘supposed virtues’ of the ‘Plain Dealer’. The charge of personal cruelty rests mainly on the severities in Scotland, on his supposed injunctions to Jeffreys for the Bloody Assizes, his callousness at the wreck of the Gloucester, and one or two isolated anecdotes (, p. 273). On the whole it seems insufficiently made out. He was obviously a political and a religious bigot. In the early days of Charles II's reign his firmness was favourably contrasted with the fickleness of the king; but Clarendon concluded that it was due to obstinacy of will rather than to intellectual conviction (, Life, iii. 64). ‘The king,’ said Buckingham, ‘could see things if he would; the duke would see things if he could’ (, i. 304). His fidelity to old servants might be amply illustrated. His confidence once gained was estranged with even too much difficulty. To his brother he was always loyal. He was an affectionate father, and was cut to the heart by the conduct of his two eldest daughters.

His conversion to the church of Rome made the emancipation of his fellow-catholics in the first instance, and the recovery of England for catholicism in the second, the governing objects of his policy. During his brother's reign the alliance with France was for James but the means to an end; in his own he thought himself strong enough to accomplish that end without joining Louis in an offensive war against the United Provinces. In the crisis of his destinies his judgment deserted him, and by his fatuous flight he placed his throne in William's power. But even when he was in conflict with the de facto government of his country, tradition credited him with a vein of patriotic sentiment of which no part of his career shows him devoid.

In person James was rather above the middle height and of a commanding appearance. He was stiffer and more constrained than his brother, whom he resembled in the cast of his features, although his complexion was fair. He was not incapable of a graceful courtesy or a kindly warmth if he chose