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Historical person
James II of England was the Catholic king of England, Scotland and Ireland deposed in the Glorious Revolution. His efforts to expand toleration and royal authority alarmed Protestant elites, and the birth of a son helped trigger William of Orange’s invasion in 1688.
James's open Catholicism and attempts to suspend laws restricting Catholics and Protestant dissenters generated increasing opposition among political and religious elites. The birth of a Catholic male heir in 1688 helped provoke the invitation to William of Orange, whose invasion caused James's regime to collapse. James fled to France, attempted unsuccessfully to recover his throne in Ireland, and spent the rest of his life in exile under the protection of Louis XIV.
Angus Donald’s Blood’s Revolution begins with Holcroft Blood serving James II at Sedgemoor before the king’s authoritarian policies push former supporters towards the movement that will depose him. Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Micah Clarke both place James on the royal side of the Monmouth Rebellion, showing the Bloody Assizes and the defeat of Protestant rebels from different fictional viewpoints. G. A. Henty’s Orange and Green follows the deposed king into Ireland, where James’s attempt to recover his crowns leads to the Boyne and the siege of Limerick. Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver approaches him from Restoration politics and science, carrying its characters through the crisis that ends with James fleeing England in the Glorious Revolution.
Series
The Holcroft Blood trilogy follows a mathematically gifted gunner through the political and military crises of Restoration Britain. Blood’s Game begins with his service to the Duke of Buckingham and his father Colonel Blood’s attempt to steal the Crown Jewels. Blood’s Revolution moves through Sedgemoor and the conspiracy…
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The Baroque Cycle follows Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe and Eliza through the political, scientific and financial transformation of Europe between the Restoration and the Hanoverian succession. Historical figures including Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Louis XIV share the narrative with fictional natural philosophers, soldiers, spies, merchants and…
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The Morland Dynasty is a thirty-six-book family saga tracing the fictional Morlands of Yorkshire from 1434 to the approach of the Second World War. Beginning with the marriage of Robert Morland and Eleanor, a ward of the Beaufort family, the sequence follows successive generations as Morland Place grows…
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The Stuart novels explore the dynasty from the restoration of Charles II through the Revolution of 1688 and the early eighteenth-century struggle over succession. Court intrigue, royal favourites, hidden marriages and confessional rivalry reveal a monarchy repeatedly threatened by its own family divisions.
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The English Commonwealth Sequence follows connected lives across the upheavals that began with civil war and continued through the Restoration and the succession crisis of 1685. Silver Guard opens amid the First English Civil War, Grey Adventurer follows the consequences of the Stuart return in London and colonial…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
