The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

by Allan Massie

  In 1772 he was persuaded it was his duty to marry, so that he might perpetuate the Stuart line. A bride was found in a nineteen-year-old German princess, Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. For a while he stopped drinking, or at least moderated his consumption, and tried to perform his marital duty. But his wife soon found him ‘the most insupportable man who ever existed, a man who combined the defects and failings of all classes, as well as the vice common to lackeys, that of drink’.18 In 1773 the English ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton, reported that Charles was ‘universally looked upon as in a great degree out of his Senses and would be deserted if a few people did not go to him out of compassion for his Wife, whom he never quits a moment’.19 Two years later, refused an audience by Pope Clement XIV, the couple removed to Florence, and there the marriage came effectively to an end after Charles drunkenly assaulted his wife and she left him for the poet Vittorio Alfieri, with whom she had been having an affair.

  Charles followed them back to Rome, and was reconciled with the Cardinal, who had never ceased to care for him, and joined by his daughter, whom he created Duchess of Albany. ‘The poor old man is almost always asleep,’ reported one English observer, ‘& has I believe but very little sense of his Misfortunes.’ The observer, Charles Parker, was mistaken. Far from having little sense of his misfortunes, Charles was obsessed by them. Charlotte warned visitors not to speak of the rising or ‘his Highlanders’; such talk reduced the King to tears.

  As he lay dying in the Muti, a piper played ‘Lochaber No More’. Death came in the early morning of 30 January 1788, but was officially dated a day later, because the thirtieth was the anniversary of the execution of Charles I.

  The King’s body was carried to the cathedral of Frascati, where he lay in state dressed in royal robes and with a replica of the English crown on his head. The Cardinal said a Requiem Mass, and declared himself Henry IX. He struck a coronation medal that pronounced him king ‘non desideris hominum, sed voluntate dei’ – ‘not by the wish of men, but by the will of God’.

  Charlotte survived her father by little more than a year, dying of a liver complaint.

  In 1796 the Cardinal fled from Frascati when the armies of the French Revolution invaded Italy and seized his property. He had already sold much of his private treasure to support the Pope, whose revenues had been appropriated by the French, and lived for some time in penury in Venice. In 1800, however, this was relieved when his very distant cousin, George III, granted him a pension, and he was able to return to Frascati, where two years later he entertained the Pope with some of his old splendour. In 1804 he refused an invitation to accompany His Holiness to Paris for the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of the French. To have done so would have been a denial of all that the Stuarts had represented; the King of France, his slightly less distant cousin Louis XVIII, might be in exile, but he was still the rightful king, and Napoleon was a usurper.

  Henry died in 1807, at the age of eighty-two. He was buried in St Peter’s, where Canova’s white marble monument commemorates James VIII and III, Charles III, and Henry IX, kings who never reigned. It was commissioned by the Pope, and George IV, as Prince Regent, contributed to the cost.

  But there was still one survivor: Charles’s wife Louise. With her lover Alfieri she had visited England in 1790 and been introduced to George III’s wife, Queen Charlotte. They then established themselves in Paris, and after Alfieri’s death in 1803, Louise removed to Florence, where she had lived so unhappily with her husband. She insisted that her servants address her as ‘Your Majesty’, and that they should walk backwards when leaving her presence. She dined off plates decorated with the royal coat of arms: play-acting to the last, which didn’t arrive till 1824, seventy-nine years since Charles Edward had embarked on the disastrous romance that, for all its failure and futility, has ensured that he remains, along with his great-great-great grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, the best remembered of his glittering and so often unfortunate family.

  Envoi

  ‘It cam wi’a lass and it’ll gang wi’a lass.’ James V’s doleful prophecy was not fulfilled. The second lass, his infant daughter Mary, married her Stuart cousin, Darnley, and the male line was perpetuated. It had indeed come by way of a lass, Marjorie Bruce, but it went with a cardinal. Appropriately enough, for it was the Stuarts’ obstinate attachment to the Roman Church that cost them the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, and made it impossible to regain them.

  It had been a long adventure. If the story of a descent from Banquo was a myth invented to elevate the consequence of this family that had its earliest known origins in the salt-marshes of Brittany, nevertheless by that marriage of Walter Stewart to Marjorie Bruce, the Stuart kings were descended by way of David I of Scotland from Kenneth MacAlpine – who had first in 843 united the little Scottish kingdom of Dalriada with Pictland – and, through his marriage, from the Pictish monarchs whose line stretched back to the mists of Caledonian antiquity. Through David’s mother, Margaret, they could boast of descent from Alfred the Great and the old royal line of Saxon Wessex.

  James I’s marriage to Joan Beaufort, granddaughter of Edward III of England, gave his children a descent from the first Plantagenet King of England, Henry of Anjou, and also, by way of Henry’s mother Matilda, from William the Conqueror. Subsequent marriages enriched the royal ancestry of the later Stuarts. James IV was the son of a Danish princess; James V on his mother’s side a grandson of the first Tudor king of England, Henry VII. The marriage of James VI to Anne of Denmark brought more Danish royal blood into the Stuart line. Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria, was the daughter of the first Bourbon King of France, Henry of Navarre – himself descended from the long line of Valois and Capetian kings that stretched back in the female line to Charlemagne and Charles Martel – and of Marie de Medici, from the great Florentine family of merchant-princes. James VIII and III had an Italian mother, Mary of Modena, and his sons, Charles Edward and the Cardinal of York, could boast of the Polish hero-king John Sobieski as their maternal grandfather.

  Moreover, if the legitimate male line expired with the Cardinal, the Stuarts themselves were not altogether extinct.

  In 1873 Queen Victoria recorded in her journal a voyage she had made on a little steamer up the west coast of Scotland. Among her companions was Cameron of Lochiel, and as they sailed into Loch Arkaig, her private secretary, General Ponsonby, remarked on the significance of the occasion and setting. It was, Victoria wrote,

  a striking scene. There was Lochiel, as he [Ponsonby] said, ‘whose great-grand-uncle had been the real moving cause of the rising of 1745 – for without him Prince Charles would not have made the attempt – showing your Majesty (whose great-great-grandfather he had striven to dethrone) the scenes made historical by Prince Charlie’s wanderings. It was a scene one could not look on unmoved.’ Yes, and I feel a sort of reverence in going over these scenes in this most beautiful country, which I am proud to call my own, where there was such devoted loyalty to the family of my ancestors – for Stewart blood is in my veins, and I am now their representative, and the people are as loyal and devoted to me as they were to that unhappy race.1

  Victoria was deeply attached to the idea of her Stewart ancestry. If she owed her throne to the Act of Settlement of 1701 that had bestowed the crown on her great-great-great grandfather, George, Elector of Hanover, his own hereditary claim derived from his grandmother, Elizabeth, the Winter Queen of Bohemia, daughter of James VI and I. Victoria may have been a Hanoverian, child of half a dozen generations of German kings, princes, and princesses, but she felt herself to be Stuart, Stuart certainly rather than Tudor, and indeed declared that she could never forgive Elizabeth of England for ‘her cruelty to my ancestress Mary Queen of Scots’.

  There are frequent calls for the repeal of the Act of Settlement in order to end its discrimination against Roman Catholics, and on these occasions journalists are required by their editors to write articles suggesting that there are people with a better right to the t
hrone than Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The leading or favoured candidate is the claimant to the throne of Bavaria, being the senior legitimate descendant of Charles I’s youngest child Henriette-Anne (Minette). It is all nonsense, of course, a mere game. The British monarchy is a parliamentary one, and has been so since 1688. Arguably long before the revolution of that year, both the English and Scottish monarchies depended as much on consent, as expressed in Parliament or the Council of the Realm, as on strict hereditary right. Indeed, though Charles I at his trial declared that the English monarchy had never been elective, the pre-Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxon monarchy had had at least an elective element, as had the tribal monarchies of Germany, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

  Nevertheless, ever since the Stuart cause was dead, there have been sentimental Jacobites forming societies to honour the exiled family and talk wistfully of a restoration. They have mostly been silly and futile. Compton Mackenzie, though himself inclined to a sentimental attachment to the Jacobite idea, offers a comic picture of the West London Legitimist League in the first volume of his long novel The Four Winds of Love. The League’s only sensible member is an elderly French aristocrat who, when asked by the young hero whether Jacobitism can ever again become a vital issue, replies: ‘If by Jacobitism you mean the restoration of the present Queen of Bavaria to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, Jacobitism is dead. There are at the present moment over seven hundred people with more right to the throne than Victoria, but there is not a practical claimant among them. Indeed I am quite sure that the large majority are unaware that they have any claim at all. Moreover, the present dynasty of the country is essentially popular…’2

  Seven hundred? There may be more than that number now, but it is of no significance.

  Yet if the male line of legitimate descent from Mary, Queen of Scots ended with the Cardinal of York, the number of people with, in Queen Victoria’s phrase, Stewart blood in their veins is legion. In Scotland, for instance, the Duke of Hamilton is a descendant of James II (of Scotland), the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry a descendant of Charles II, by way of Monmouth’s marriage to Anne Scott, Lady of Buccleuch. The Duke of Argyll is descended from the early Stewarts through the Douglas mother of the first Marquis, Montrose’s antagonist. The Earl of Moray descends from Mary, Queen of Scots’ illegitimate half-brother, Lord James Stewart. The Stuart connection of the Duke of Atholl goes still further back, well into the Middle Ages; and Murrays of Atholl were, as we have seen, engaged in every Jacobite rising. Indeed there is scarcely a single Scottish hereditary peer whose title dates from before the nineteenth century without a Stuart ancestor somewhere in his family tree.

  Three English dukes – Grafton, St Albans and Richmond and Gordon – are descended from Charles II and one or other of his mistresses. The eighteenth-century Whig politician Charles James Fox, fierce critic of George III, was another who could claim Stuart blood, for his father Henry Fox had made a runaway love-match with Caroline Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond and a great-granddaughter of Charles II. This was regarded as a misalliance, for Henry Fox was a commoner whose own father, Sir Stephen Fox, though a royal servant who had stood by Charles I on the scaffold, had once been a humble, if unusually ambitious, choirboy in Salisbury Cathedral.

  Numerous noble families in Germany, France, Spain and Italy may claim Stuart connections, many by way of Elizabeth of Bohemia, some by way of the late medieval Stewarts who settled in France, others through the illegitimate offspring of Charles II and James VII and II. The most famous of these, James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, became a Spanish grandee. His descendants are to be found in South America as well as Spain.

  More than ninety per cent of English people are descended from Edward III (king 1327–77), according to a recent biographer.3 At first sight this appears far-fetched; yet the argument can be made convincingly. It may well be that a comparable percentage of Scots and people with Scottish ancestry are descended from the first Stewart king, Robert II. He had at least fifteen children by his two marriages – probably more, for the number of daughters from his second marriage is uncertain. There were also eight sons among his nineteen known illegitimate children. Even if, on a conservative estimate, only half these thirty to forty children had offspring who lived long enough to be parents themselves, and we grant each of these only two children who lived to be adults, one still has eighty breeding descendants among his grandchildren. In reality the number was almost certainly greater. One can see how quickly his family tree would branch out, and how some of Robert II’s more remote descendants would not be noble but might be found at lower levels of society. Admittedly the ruthless policies of the first two Jameses cut a swathe through the extensive Stewart cousin-age, but there were many who lived to have children themselves, and these children had to find a place for themselves in the world. Among Robert II’s more remote and surprising descendants is Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Her husband, the Prince of Wales, is also of course descended from the first Stewart king.

  Daughters of the medieval Stewart kings tend to disappear from history, except for the minority among them who made distinguished marriages. Robert II had probably as many as ten daughters from his two marriages, and his eldest son, Robert III, had four. By no means all survived to have children themselves, but the posterity of those who did bear children is mostly unrecorded. James II’s daughter Mary married James, Lord Hamilton, and her descendants, the semi-royal Hamiltons, are innumerable.

  Moreover, six Stewart kings – the two Roberts, James IV and James V, Charles II and his brother James VII and II – between them fathered more than sixty illegitimate children, perhaps as many as seventy. Only a small number of the descendants of these sons and daughters born, as the saying went, on the wrong side of the blanket are known to history – not surprisingly, since we are ignorant even of the names of some of these bastard royals themselves. But there can be no doubt that they dispersed the Stewart blood and genes widely. The extensive family of the Stuarts of Bute, for instance, is descended from one of Robert II’s illegitimate children; the great Aberdeenshire family of Gordon (Marquesses of Huntley and Marquesses of Aberdeen) from a daughter of James I.

  It has been calculated that the population of Scotland at the time of the Union of the Crowns was about 800,000.4 It was certainly much lower when Robert II became king in 1371, for that was only twenty years after the great outbreak of plague known as the Black Death, which, according to John of Fordoun, may have killed as much as one-third of the population. King Robert, whatever his incapacity as king, played his part in repopulating his country, and the branches of his family tree have spread ever since. Families may die out in the (legitimate) male line, but they seldom do so altogether. Cadet branches continue to flourish; heredity by way of the female line may go unremarked or be forgotten. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that Robert II was as much the ancestor of the Scottish people today – and of the twenty-million-strong Scots diaspora – as Edward III was of the English nation – many of whom will of course also be descended from the first Stewart King of Scotland.

  Queen Victoria, reflecting on the misfortunes of the later Stuarts – misfortunes to which, as already observed, she owed her throne – spoke of them as ‘that unhappy race’. Historians, especially those of a romantic or Jacobite turn of mind, have endorsed her opinion, which is indeed justified, but also misleading. Certainly the Stuart monarchy ended in failure. James VII and II was forced into exile by the Dutch invasion and the revolution he had provoked. His sons and grandsons were kings in name only, condemned to drag out their lives in the bleak obscurity of their shadow courts. Before them, Mary and her grandson Charles I may also be accounted failures.

  Yet to dwell on their follies and misfortunes is to ignore the qualities and achievements of the other members of the family. The two Roberts may not have amounted to much, but they survived and kept their kingdom together. At least five of the first six Jameses were men of quite unusual ability who governed an unr
uly kingdom effectively. They compare well with their contemporaries who were kings of England and France. They were not only able, but tough, and from the return of James I from English captivity in 1424 to the death of James VI and I in 1625, Stewart kingship in Scotland was remarkably successful despite the interruptions caused by minorities and the turmoil of Mary’s brief reign. If James VI’s attention to government slackened after he inherited the English throne, and if Charles I by pursuing unwise policies alienated his subjects and provoked rebellion in all three of his kingdoms, Charles II, astute, cynical and determined, re-established the power of the Crown – only to have his legacy squandered by the folly of his brother James.

  In the popular imagination the Stuarts may be figures of romance, commemorated in song and myth. Romance is never wholly false or without foundation; that Mary and ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ are the two best-remembered Stuarts is evidence of its potent spell. So too are the gates of Traquair House in the Borders and of Trinity College, Oxford, both closed until the Stuarts return again. So too is the Jacobite lament ‘Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?’. But romance is only part of the Stewart and Stuart story; the other part is the record of men who established and maintained effective government, welded Scotland together, and then, by means of the chance of inheritance and the cautious diplomacy and political skill of James VI, achieved the regnal union of England and Scotland. It was a long journey from the salt-marshes of Brittany to the gloom of the Palazzo Muti, but a family that maintained itself in power for more than three centuries cannot be dismissed as a failure.

  Acknowledgements

  This book has been a long time in the making. My first debt is to all those who aroused my interest in history, and those who taught me so many years ago. Most of them are now dead, but my gratitude to them is still alive. The earliest among them was my grandmother, Elizabeth Mary Forbes, who, like Queen Victoria, could not forgive Elizabeth of England for her ‘cruelty to poor Mary’, Queen of Scots.