Heirs To James VII
At the time of James's accession he had no heir-apparent; of the three sons born to his late wife Anne Hyde and the one born to second wife, Mary of Modena, only one had survived past the age of three. The heiress-presumptive to the throne was therefore the King's eldest daughter
- Mary. She had married her first cousin William III, Prince of Orange in 1677 and lived with him in the Netherlands. Her half-brother
- James Francis Edward was born on 10 June 1688, and became heir-apparent, Duke of Rothesay and Duke of Cornwall at birth.
The King's Roman Catholic faith and policy of religious tolerance towards Catholics, particularly the Declaration of Indulgence, alarmed the Anglican hierarchy in his realm of England. James's imprisonment of seven Bishops who protested at his policy, and then the birth of a Catholic male heir, which raised the prospect of a Catholic dynasty on the throne, led a group of English noblemen to invite the King's Protestant nephew and son-in-law, William of Orange, to invade. This became known as the Glorious Revolution, and resulted in James's flight to France in December 1688. The English Parliament declared the throne vacant and offered it to William and his wife Mary. All these events in England had no bearing on the constitutional situation in Scotland, and it was only on 11 April 1689, the day of William and Mary's coronation in England, that the Estates of Scotland declared that James VII was no longer King, and offered the Crown jointly to the King and Queen of England. They accepted on 11 May, becoming William II and Mary II of Scots.
Read more about this topic: List Of Heirs Of Scotland
Famous quotes containing the words heirs, james and/or vii:
“...the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 8:12.
“If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I cannot be indifferent to the assassination of a member of my profession, We should be obliged to shut up business if we, the Kings, were to consider the assassination of Kings as of no consequence at all.”
—Edward VII (1841–1910)