Poll - Who's side are you on in 1688?

what could they have possibly done? Accept illegitimate children of James II? That would have been a big problem. Call on Italian and French relations? Really there wasn't much to be done but die out and give it over to the protestants.

the thing is that james the old pretender found a wife pretty hard, and bonnie prince charlie even harder, due to their uncomfortable situation. had they been princes and kings they would have found better wives and maybe prince charlie would have had more children

Ilyala is right, IMO. This is o/t but if James II had remained King his son might well have been matched with some Catholic French princess, instead of the rather obscure Pole he ended up with. The same goes for Bonnie Prince Charlie - though of course he wouldn't have existed unless James 'III' had married Clementina Sobieska.

what could they have possibly done? Accept illegitimate children of James II? That would have been a big problem. Call on Italian and French relations? Really there wasn't much to be done but die out and give it over to the protestants.

I've always regarded the whole catholic/protestant rivarly as nothing more than an excuse to fight, nothing more.

James II was a soveriegn was grown detached from his people long before he ever became king. He wanted to be an absolute monarch in an age of british history when that was no longer proper.

i totally agree with you, russman. in the end, it wasn't about religion. the peaceful people were peaceful regardless of it. the petty ones always found something to fight about.

i don't think that james was wrong because of his religion. i think he was wrong because of his way of ruling. maybe he was also sabotaged, as modena pointed out in another topic. but other people could have reacted better to that