ABSTRACT
Early on Christmas morning in 1688 a fishing boat emerged from the fog-shrouded English Channel and moored at the small French port of Ambleteuse lying between Boulogne sur Mer and Calais. A tall, dark-haired man of regal bearing, wrapped in a hooded cloak against the damp chill, hurried ashore to a coach that waited to take him to Versailles for an audience with his cousin, King Louis XIV of France. Awaiting James near Paris was his beautiful Italian wife, Queen Mary Beatrice d’Este of Modena, who had escaped from London weeks before disguised as a laundress. She had hidden their infant son in a bundle of linen in order to smuggle him out of the country. Because James II was fifty-two years old when he ascended the throne in 1685 and no Stuart had lived beyond the age of sixty, it was anticipated that his daughter Mary and her husband William would soon jointly rule Britain.
