King James II by Peter Lely

With the accession of this Catholic King of England in 1685, as Poet Laureate, Dryden became a Catholic too , but failed to reconvert when the Protestant Willian of Orange became King in 1688, and so lost his post. The issue of the Catholic affiliations of many earlier English poets have now become a subject of scholarly interest, not just with Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell, but Shakespeare himself. James II was somewhat akin to Shakespeare's Richard II, talented but ineffective: both kings ultimately surrendered their crowns without a fight. Courtesy of the Yorck Project, under GNU Free Document License.