(sold for $36.0)

1686, Great Britain, James II. Scarce Silver 3 Pence  Coin. VF

Condition: VF Mint Year: 1686 Mint Place: London Reference: KM-450.  Denomination: 3 Pence Diameter: 17mm Weight: 1.27gm  Material: Silver

Obverse: Laureated bust of James II of England left. Legend: IACOBVS . II . DEI . GRATIA Reverse: Crowned value numeral (III). Legend: MAG . BR . FRA . ET . HIB . REX . 16 - 86 .

James II and VII (14 October 1633O.S. – 16 September 1701) was King of England and Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from 6 February 1685 until he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was the last Roman Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland.

The second surviving son of Charles I, he ascended the throne upon the death of his brother, Charles II.   Members of Britain's political and religious elite increasingly   suspected him of being pro-French and pro-Catholic and of having designs   on becoming an absolute monarch. When he produced a Catholic heir, the tension exploded, and leading nobles called on his Protestant son-in-law and nephew, William III of Orange, to land an invasion army from the Netherlands, which he did. James fled England (and thus was held to have abdicated) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was replaced by his Protestant elder daughter, Mary II, and her husband, William III. James made one serious attempt to recover his crowns from William and Mary, when he landed in Ireland in 1689 but, after the defeat of the Jacobite forces by the Williamite forces at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690, James returned to France. He lived out the rest of his life as a pretender at a court sponsored by his cousin and ally, King Louis XIV.

James is best known for struggles with the English Parliament and his attempts to create religious liberty for English Roman Catholics and Protestant nonconformists against the   wishes of the Anglican establishment. However, he also continued the   persecution of the Presbyterian Covenanters in Scotland. Parliament, opposed to the growth of absolutism that was   occurring in other European countries, as well as to the loss of legal   supremacy for the Church of England,   saw their opposition as a way to preserve what they regarded as   traditional English liberties. This tension made James's four-year reign   a struggle for supremacy between the English Parliament and the Crown,   resulting in his deposition, the passage of the Bill of Rights, and the Hanoverian succession.