DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

( 2 ) this race, but it may be expedient to refer to the Revolution of 1688, which drove James II. from his throne and his country. A bigoted adherent to the Roman Catholic faith, narrow-minded and obstinate, James II., assuming that he reigned by divine right and that his royal prerogative was unlimited, had exercised a contemptuous disregard for the religious and civil liberties of his subjects. But Parliament, by transferring the crown from him and his male descendants to his Protestant daughters Mary and Anne, and after Queen Anne’s death, in 1714, to their kinsman, the Elector of Hanover, and by de- creeing that none but a Protestant prince could reign in England, secured the nation from the des- potic pretensions of an autocrat. The Stuarts, however, refused to acknowledge the verdict of the country. James II. died in France in 1701, a victim to his errors, albeit a martyr to his faith. His son, known in history as the Old Pretender and the Chevalier de St. George, had settled in Rome. Countenanced by the King of France and the Pope, he based on his notion of divine right his claims to the throne, called himself James III. of England, and, aided by the Jacobites, as the adherents to his cause were styled, fostered in 1715 an ineffectual movement in Scotland to regain his inheritance. The nation, however, was weary of revolution, disorder, and change, and the mass of the English