Loyal Parliament

In May 1685 the Parliament treated James generously in financial matters, but by November of the same year it had developed concerns about the direction he was taking, so he prevented it from meeting again.

Between 1679 and 1681 the Whigs had failed in their attempts to pass the Exclusion Bill to exclude James from the throne, but his brother Charles II had had great trouble in defeating this campaign.

The king had summoned parliament for 19 May, when it first met, and on 22 May John Trevor, a Tory and a supporter of James, was confirmed as Speaker of the Commons.

[7] At the outset of the 1685 debate in the Commons on this matter, Sir Edward Seymour, a Tory, moved that the House conduct an investigation into irregularities about the election of some of its members before granting any revenues to the king, but no-one seconded this motion.

The parliament proceeded to give James tonnage and poundage for life and it also gave him high impositions on sugar and tobacco, in defiance of the protests from producers and traders in those commodities.

As Macaulay later pointed out, the thirty men chosen were all "in politics vehemently opposed to the prisoner", and fifteen were colonels of regiments, appointments from which the king could remove them.

Following the Rebellion, it became clear that unlike his brother, Charles, James had no intention of letting go of the extra forces he had raised and planned to maintain a much larger standing army than before.

Although he summoned a parliament in September 1688, with the intention of having it meet in November, the elections to the Commons were cancelled, due to the imminent invasion of William of Orange.

It consisted of the House of Lords and the surviving members of the Commons from the Oxford Parliament of 1681, the last of Charles II's reign.