James II and VII is one of those historical figures who has a contested reputation, one that brings forth exaggeration and polarization. For contemporaries this is seen in contrasting reflections on the political aptitude of the last monarch of the British Isles to be removed by revolution. James was, according to the Benedictine Joseph Johnston, ‘the Greatest Politician … mighty, carfull and laborious in all his affaires’ – ‘never was there such a prince in England these hundred years to be compared to him’. Meanwhile in ‘The Snare’, an anonymous rhymed verse from the late 1680s that emphasizes political weakness, James and the ghost of his elder brother are imagined to be in conversation, when Charles warns:
Brother, when I your name and place did bear
I sought the peoples love before their fear
And by that means both fear and love I gott
From the richer min to the ruffel coat
And now you find what I have oft declar'd
The vulgar must be loved or they'll be feared
They'll suffer long and much, but once enraged
Devouring flames more easy are asuag'd
…
I know it suits not with your haughty mind
To stoop to any thing of humane kind
But patience upon force has oft been known
To be endured, tho coveted by none
You see, while others run you prepare
Your self in headlong fall into the snare
In historiography the passage to that snare has had many strands or narratives.