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

by Allan Massie

  16 Some (see previous note) have suggested Darnley had contracted syphilis. There is no evidence for this. Others have thought he was suffering from scabies, but as Eric Linklater remarked, scabies, however irritating, do not usually require the sufferer to be confined to bed. The illness was probably smallpox, albeit, given the speed of his recovery, in a mild form; or perhaps chicken-pox.

  17 The House of Kirk o’ Field no longer exists. It probably stood on the site of what is now the Old College of Edinburgh University, one of Robert Adam’s finest buildings.

  18 That it was Darnley’s decision to convalesce in Kirk o’ Field lends some credence to the case for Mary’s innocence and to the possible existence of a Catholic plot to kill her. Whether there was indeed such a plot or not, there is little doubt that most of the leading Protestant lords saw an opportunity to rid themselves of Darnley. Bothwell may have lit the fuse himself, but the likes of Moray, Morton and Ruthven were in it up to their necks.

  19 Fraser, op. cit.

  20 The official explanation, given by the Lord Justice Clerk in his report, is incredible. According to it, two of Bothwell’s men made two trips from Holyroodhouse to Kirk o’ Field carrying the gunpowder in portmanteaus on the back of a horse. It has been calculated by Major-General R. H. Mahon (The Tragedy of Kirk o’ Field) that this would have weighed about 500 lb. ‘Now that quantity of powder, as made in the sixteenth century, was ludicrously insufficient to blow up such a solid building. But there is uncontested evidence that the house was totally demolished, and the implication – impossible to avoid – is that it had been prepared for demolition before that busy Sunday, and perhaps well before it. There were cellars under the whole width of the house and they must have been filled with such a weight of powder that when a fuse was lighted the explosion had the violence of a landmine.’ Eric Linklater, The Royal House of Scotland (Macmillan, London, 1970; Sphere Books, 1972), pp. 107–8.

  21 Antonia Fraser, op. cit.

  22 Far from achieving sexual satisfaction with Bothwell, all the evidence is that Mary was in misery, and often in tears, throughout the weeks of their marriage. ‘From her wedding day she was ever in tears and lamentations’: Maitland of Lethington. See Fraser, op. cit.

  23 Mary told her brother-in-law, Charles IX of France, that Bothwell had taken her by force. Significantly, during her years in England, she kept miniatures of her first two husbands, Francis II and Darnley, but none of Bothwell.

  24 Bothwell’s wife Jean Gordon brought the divorce suit in a Protestant court, while Bothwell, to make assurance doubly sure, sought an annulment from the Catholic Church. There is no doubt that the two were in collusion. Jean Gordon did well out of the settlement, getting rich estates. She was married twice subsequently, and did not die till 1629, in the reign of Mary’s grandson, Charles I.

  25 Fraser, op. cit.

  26 After Carberry Hill, Bothwell first tried to raise a new army in Scotland, failed and withdrew to Orkney. He then sailed to Denmark, where he was imprisoned, perhaps at the suit of his discarded Danish mistress, Anna Throndsson. At first he was held in honourable confinement, and Frederick II, King of Denmark and Norway, refused requests either to return him to Scotland to be tried again for the murder of Darnley or to have him executed. Eventually, being no longer of any political or diplomatic value, his imprisonment became harsher, and he died, mad, in the manner described.

  27 Anna Throndsson, Bothwell’s Danish mistress, is the probable author of the doggerel verses. French being not only the language of polite love, but also that in which she and Bothwell may have usually conversed.

  28 Linklater, op. cit., p. 111.

  29 Fraser, op. cit.

  30 There is a brilliant account of Buchanan and an analysis of his arguments in The Invention of Scotland, Hugh Trevor-Roper (Yale University Press, 2008).

  31 John Cunningham, Church History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1882).

  32 The plot was the work of an Italian merchant, Ridolfi, its intention to murder Elizabeth, set Mary on the English throne and marry her to the Duke of Norfolk. A vivid recent account is to be found in Robert Hutchinson, House of Treason (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009), pp. 188 ff.

  33 After the final defeat of the Queen’s Scottish party in 1573, it was Englishmen, not Scots, who saw Mary as a figure of romance and plotted to free her.

  34 ‘The horrible manner of the age’: the penalty for treason was to be hanged, cut down before death might mercifully intervene, disembowelled, and then quartered.

  35 Fraser, p. 622.

  Chapter 10

  1 Sir Anthony Weldon was a court offical (Clerk of the Kitchen, 1604, Clerk of the Green Cloth, 1609–17). He was knighted in 1617, but dismissed the same year, by his own account for satirising the Scots. He took his revenge by writing The Court and Character of James I, published in 1650, the year after its author’s death. Weldon is racy, scurrilous, amusing and unreliable, but everyone who has written about James and the Jacobean court quotes him.

  2 The Danes were famous for heavy drinking. See Hamlet and the Prince’s remark that the drinking of toasts is ‘a custom more honour’d in the breach than in th’ observance’.

  3 Any account of the Gowrie Conspiracy can only be conjectural. An old Scots lady once looked forward to the Day of Judgement in the hope that she would then learn the truth about it. My interpretation owes much to the researches of Christian, Lady Hesketh, in the course of which she discovered this curious sequel: in 1610, ten years after the dramatic events at Gowrie House, Henry IV of France was assassinated in Paris, stabbed by a lawyer called Ravaillac in the rue de la Ferronerie. The murder weapon was a richly decorated hunting knife with a coat of arms and motto engraved on the blade. The coat of arms was not French. Where had Ravaillac got the weapon? The question was put pressingly in the hope that it would lead to the discovery of an accomplice, but Ravaillac’s answer was unsatisfactory: he said he had stolen it in a tavern. The dagger was kept as a souvenir by the future Maréchal de la Force. Some fifty years ago his descendant, the Duc de la Force, made enquiries into its provenance. They led him to Scotland and to the genealogist, Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that ilk. The motto read: ‘Haec Dextera Vindex Principis et Patriae’, and was accompanied by the initials I S R and an H surmounted by a coronet. Sir Iain identified the motto as that of John Ramsay, whom James VI and I had made Viscount Haddington in 1606. Ramsay is known to have travelled in France. Perhaps he boasted in an inn that this dagger had slain his king’s enemies, and Ravaillac, impressed by the story, stole it. If so, then the dagger that dispatched the Earl of Gowrie and his brother Alexander may have been employed to kill the King of France also.

  4 Carey himself wrote an account of his ride north, quoted frequently.

  5 Bacon’s judgement on his cousin smacks of resentment: ‘Fit to prevent things from growing worse but not fit to make them better’; Eric Linklater, The Royal House of Scotland (Macmillan, London, 1970; Sphere Books, 1972), p. 145.

  6 Sir Walter Scott, The Fortunes of Nigel, numerous editions.

  7 Arthur Melville Clark, The Man Behind Macbeth and Other Essays (Edinburgh, 1981).

  8 Sir John Harington, quoted by Linklater, op. cit., p. 248. Harington’s miscellaneous writings were not published till 1769.

  9 In departing from the family habit of naming his eldest son James, King James bore witness to his attachment to the Lennox side of his family. Henry was his father Darnley’s name, Charles that of Darnley’s younger brother. The choice of Elizabeth as his daughter’s name was a tribute to the English queen. To have called her Mary might have been regarded as provocative, especially since James’s succession to the English throne was not yet assured.

  10 The humiliation to which Essex was subjected had sore consequences for the Stuarts. His resentment made him one of Charles I’s opponents and the commander of the parliamentary army in the Civil War.

  11 Weldon (op. cit.) again.

  12 Ibid. Lively and always quoted, but to be regarded with a deg
ree of scepticism.

  13 Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p. 300.

  14 For an examination of James’s homoerotic inclinations, see David M. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland (Iowa City University Press, 1999) and Michael B. Young, James VI & I and the History of Homosexuality (Basingstoke and London, 2000).

  Chapter 11

  1 See J. E. Neale, Elizabeth and her Parliaments (1957), passim.

  2 C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace (1955).

  3 Hester W. Chapman, The Tragedy of Charles II (Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 18.

  4 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, various editions.

  5 Henry Guthrie, Bishop of Dunkeld, in Scottish Diaries and Memoirs (Eneas Mackay, Stirling).

  6 David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution 1637–44 (Edinburgh, 2003); pp. 116–26 are immediately relevant to this account.

  7 The Revd James Kirkton, ‘The Secret and True History of the Church of Scotland’, in Scottish Diaries and Memoirs, op. cit.

  8 Impeachment was a legal process in which the House of Commons acted as the prosecution and the House of Lords as judges. In the sevententh century the threat of impeachment was the most effective means of exercising control over the king’s ministers. It fell into disuse in the eighteenth century. Two twentieth-century American presidents, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, have been threatened with impeachment. The leaders of the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru talked of impeaching Tony Blair over the Iraq war. Nothing came of their threats.

  9 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, various editions.

  10 For an account of the Army Plot, see essay by Conrad Russell in Unrevolutionary England 1603–42 (London, 1990).

  11 Clarendon, op. cit.

  12 Russell, op. cit.

  13 Aubrey, op. cit, quoted in Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and his Friends (London, 1948).

  14 Quoted by Eric Linklater, The Royal House of Scotland (Macmillan, London, 1970; Sphere Books, 1972), p. 192.

  15 Ibid., p. 193.

  16 John Buchan, Montrose (World’s Classics edition). Buchan is sometimes too generous in his treatment of his hero. Nevertheless his biography of Montrose remains an oustandingly good and readable work.

  17 Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Scotland and Ireland 1645–53 (Oxford, 1992), p. 170.

  18 Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane, 2008).

  19 Ibid.

  20 Clarendon, op. cit.

  21 This observation is quoted by Buchan, op. cit. He ascribes it to John Row’s Life of Robert Blair.

  22 Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman (Penguin, 1972), p. 98.

  23 Hill, op. cit.

  24 John Laughland, A History of Political Trials (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2008), p. 26.

  25 A. L. Rowse, The Regicides and the Puritan Revolution (London, Duckworth, 1994), pp. 18–19.

  26 S. R. Gardiner, History of England from 1603–56, various editions.

  27 C. V. Wedgwood, The Trial of Charles I (London, Collins, 1964).

  28 Ibid.

  29 Guthrie, op. cit.

  30 Buchan, op. cit.

  31 Andrew Marvell, Poems.

  Chapter 12

  1 Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman (Penguin, 1972).

  2 Cardinal de Retz, Memoirs, various editions.

  3 P. Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland.

  4 Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, various editions.

  5 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, various editions.

  6 Hester W. Chapman, The Tragedy of Charles II (Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 109.

  7 Memoirs of James II, quoted in ibid.

  8 Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Memoirs, 1729 and later editions.

  Chapter 13

  1 Diary of Revd Alexander Jaffray (1614–73) first printed 1833.

  2 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, various editions.

  3 Diary of John Nicoll (?1590–?1667), in Scottish Diaries and Memoirs (Eneas Mackay, Stirling).

  4 Letters and journals of Robert Baillie (1599–1662), in ibid.

  5 Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Memoirs.

  6 Hester W. Chapman. The Tragedy of Charles II (Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 178.

  7 Ibid., p. 174.

  8 Ibid., p. 181.

  9 Charles told the story of his adventures after Worcester to anyone who would listen. The fullest and most nearly authentic record is that he dictated to Pepys. Even so, this was given and written down, at what was at least the second hearing, thirty years after the event.

  10 Clarendon, op. cit.

  11 John Evelyn, Diary, various editions.

  12 Hamilton, op. cit.

  13 There were rumours that Charles was so enamoured of Frances that he was prepared to divorce his wife in order to marry her, but this was no more than court gossip.

  14 Rochester, rake, poet, playwright and wit, was the son of Henry Wilmot, Charles’s companion on the escape after Worcester. Henry was rewarded for his loyalty and friendship with the earldom of Rochester. This, and the young man’s own wit, won him Charles’s indulgence.

  15 Charles delighted in nicknames. He himself was known as ‘Old Rowley’, the original Rowley being a famous stallion standing at stud in Newmarket.

  16 Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, various editions.

  17 Duc de Saint-Simon, Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency, 1752 and later editions.

  18 Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV (Everyman edition).

  19 Madame de Sevigné, Selected Letters (Everyman edition).

  20 All Charles’s acknowledged illegitimate children were given titles. On one occasion, when with the King, Nell Gwyn addressed her son as a ‘little bastard’ – a reminder that it was time the boy should be ennobled.

  21 The MP was Sir William Coventry, who had been secretary to the Duke of York.

  22 Burnet, op. cit.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Arthur Bryant; Charles II (London, 1930).

  26 Ibid.

  27 Dryden published the poem in 1681, by which time opinion was already moving against the Whigs.

  28 Chapman, op cit., p. 398.

  29 Ibid., p. 399.

  30 Lord Macaulay, The History of England (abridged edition, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Penguin, 1979).

  31 G. K. Chesterton, Essays.

  Chapter 14

  1 Anthony Hamilton, p. 320.

  2 Lord Macaulay, The History of England (abridged edition, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Penguin, 1979).

  3 Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, various editions, p. 240.

  4 Linklater, Royal House of Scotland, p. 229.

  5 Macaulay, op. cit.

  6 A. L. Rowse, The Churchills (Macmillan, Papermac edition, 1966), pp. 114–15.

  7 Madame de Sevigné, Selected Letters (Everyman edition).

  8 Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh.

  Chapter 15

  1 It was called the Convention Parliament because, in the absence of the King, it had not been summoned by royal writ.

  2 Lord Macaulay, The History of England (abridged edition, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Penguin, 1979).

  3 Ibid. Unattractive in many respects as William may have been, Macaulay’s admiration seems to me to be justified. If William displayed the resolution of his great-grandfather, William the Silent, hero of the Dutch revolt against Spain, the single-mindedness, to the point of obsession, which he brought to his long war against Louis XIV also calls to mind the obstinacy of so many of his Stuart ancestors.

  Chapter 16

  1 Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, various editions.

  2 Ophelia Field, The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Hodder & Stoughton, 2002).

  3 Ibid.

  4 Burnet.

  5 Sir John Clerk (1676–1755), in Scottish Diaries and Memoirs (Eneas Mackay, Stirling).

  6 If The Conduct of the Allies is one of the most powerful of p
olitical pamphlets, the Journal to Stella offers an incomparably vivid picture of the ebb and flow of politics in the last years of Anne’s reign.

  Chapter 17

  1 For Mar’s character and manouevring see: Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689–1746 (Eyre Methuen, 1980) and Daniel Szechi, 1715 (Yale, 2006).

  2 George Lockhart of Carnwath, Papers on the Affairs of Scotland (posthumously published, 1817).

  3 Lenman, op. cit.

  4 Blandford was the grandson of the great Duke of Marlborough. His account of his meeting with the Pretender was published in A Letter from an English Traveller at Rome to his Father in May 1721. He had of course family connections with the exiled Stuarts, his uncle, the Duke of Berwick, being James Edward’s illegitimate half-brother.

  5 Susan Maclean Kybett, Bonnie Prince Charlie (London, 1984): quite one of the most hostile biographies.

  6 Fitzroy Maclean, Bonnie Prince Charlie (London, 1988).

  7 Ibid.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid.

  10 The Chevalier de Johnstone (1719–c. 1800) was Charles Edward’s aide-de-camp. After the defeat of the rising he became an officer in the French army, and was present at the capitulation of Quebec where other former Jacobites were in the opposing British army. He wrote his memoirs of the ’45 in old age.

  11 Maclean, op. cit.

  12 James More Macgregor Drummond was acting as a government spy reporting to the Lord Advocate. The severe depiction of him in Stevenson’s Catriona gives a fair picture of his character and chequered career.

  13 David, Lord Elcho (1721–87), eldest son of the fourth Earl of Wemyss, was a Jacobite by birth, education and conviction. He met the Prince when he visited Rome in 1740 and served throughout the ’45. An admirer of Lord George Murray, he became very critical of the Prince. After the ’45 he lived in exile in France and wrote A Short Account of the Affairs of Scotland 1744–6.

  14 Alexander Carlyle (1722–1845), Church of Scotland minister and Whig, author of an autobiography.

  15 Elcho, op. cit.

  16 The Lyon in Mourning is a compilation of Jacobite letters and memoirs put together by Bishop Robert Forbes (1708–75).

  17 Alexander Cunyngham (1703–85) visited Rome in 1736–7 with the painter Allan Ramsay. They were presented to the Stuart princes by the Jacobite Earl of Dunbar and attended a ball given by a cardinal for Prince Charles’s birthday, ‘at which most of the English in Rome were present’.