David Starkey TV - Lucy Worsley TV - James II -
The elected returned parliaments in 1679 and again in 1680 in which there was a clear majority for James’s exclusion. Charles would have to fight for his brother’s right to the throne. And with it for the very idea of hereditary monarchy itself ... Faced with two successive parliaments in which there had been a clear majority for the exclusion from the crown of his brother James, Charles dissolved them both. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e1: The Return of the King, Channel 4 2006
James had done something that many people thought had made him ineligible to the kingship of Protestant England: he converted to Catholicism. There were attempts in Parliament to have him excluded from the succession. But the protests had died away. The climate had changed. Monarchy by David Starkey s3e2: The Glorious Revolution
The Tories now supported a Catholic king. ibid.
James II was England’s first Catholic king for over a hundred and fifty years. ibid.
An Act of Parliament called the Test Act forbade the employment of Catholics in any public post including the army. ibid.
In March 1689 James landed in Ireland with 20,000 French troops. The Catholic Irish flocked to their King. Like the English they had become pawns in someone else’s chess game ... Two armies, two worlds faced each other across the River Boyne. ibid.
The problem for James II was that he converted to Catholicism. Dr Lucy Worsley, Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History II: Bad Blood: Stuarts to Hanoverians, BBC 2012
Matters were come to such a head that the monarchy must be either more absolute or quite abolished. James II, to brother Charles II