The Stuarts in 100 Facts

by Andrea Zuvich

  94. ‘COLONEL’ BLOOD NEARLY STOLE THE CROWN JEWELS … AND WAS ULTIMATELY REWARDED

  In 1671 the Crown Jewels were nearly stolen. Self-styled ‘Colonel’ Thomas Blood’s daring attempt to steal the Crown Jewels is one of the most often-told facts about the Stuart era. Blood struck up a friendship with the Keeper of the Jewels and on 9 May, he and several other men visited the Tower. They beat the Keeper hard on the head, gagged and bound him before turning their attentions to what they’d come for. They bashed down the crown, and the orb and sawed the sceptre in half, then hid these precious items among their clothing. It just so happened that the Keeper’s son arrived in time to see what was going on and a chase ensued, but the villains were apprehended. This hadn’t even been Blood’s first crime. Back in 1663, the former Irish Parliamentarian had attempted to take control of Dublin Castle, but was thwarted and was forced to flee in order to save his life. He also tried to kidnap the Duke of Ormond on a couple of occasions.

  Blood went back to the Tower – this time as prisoner – but he managed to get an audience with the king, who visited him in his cell. Whatever was spoken in that private interview worked out in Blood’s favour. King Charles II, instead of severely punishing Blood for his crime, ended up giving him a reward – lands in England and Ireland. On 1 August 1671, Charles’s Secretary of State, Lord Arlington, noted that Thomas Blood had been given a pardon from any and all crimes from 1660 to that point. Why did Charles do this? I don’t believe anyone’s been able to figure that out.

  The coronation regalia Blood tried to steal were actually quite new. During the Commonwealth, Parliament decided to do away with all vestiges of monarchy. Cromwell ordered all of the royal regalia to be burned and melted down, and so it was done. Only a few items were smuggled away in time and preserved, including a coronation spoon. Most of the Crown Jewels we can see in the Jewel House at the Tower of London today were made for Charles II in 1661 for his coronation. Other items are from subsequent monarchs.

  95. MANY OF CHARLES I’S REGICIDES MET GHASTLY ENDS

  A regicide is the act of killing a king, and the word is also given to a person who takes part in the killing of a king. At the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the executed king’s son – now Charles II – understandably wanted revenge for his father’s murder. This topic, about the fates that befell those men who had signed Charles I’s death warrant in 1649, has been the subject of several books, most notably Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s The King’s Revenge and Charles Spencer’s Killers of the King. Some regicides fled abroad to Europe, some to the colonies in the New World (the Americas). Others stayed put, and were subjected to some cringe-worthy executions.

  Regicide was tantamount to treason, and the punishment for treason was ‘hanging, drawing and quartering’ (though it must be said, that saying is literally out of order – traitors were drawn in a sledge first, then hanged until they passed out, cut down from there and revived in time to feel their intestines removed and burned in front of them. Their genitals would be cut off, followed by their head, and then their body was quartered).

  In the pamphlet The Speeches and Prayers of Some of the Late King’s Judges, published in 1660, the purported last speeches of the following ten men were documented: Major-General Thomas Harrison, John Carew, Justice Cooke, Hugh Peters, Thomas Scott, Gregory Clement, Colonel Adrian Scrope, Colonel John Jones, Colonel Daniel Axtell, and Colonel Francis Hacker. Harrison was of the radical Fifth Monarchists and he was one of the first to receive the penalty for treason.

  Others fled, but that didn’t save them. Lord de Lisle, one of the king’s judges, was killed at Lausanne about twenty miles from Geneva. According to a letter located in State Papers, Geneva at the UK National Archives, two mysterious men one day appeared in a small village. Then, near the entrance of a church one of these men shot Lisle dead as he made his way to attend church. The two men fled as quickly and stealthily as they had come. William Goffe, John Dixwell, and Edward Whalley all fled across the Atlantic to the colonies there, where they lived the rest of their lives in hiding.

  What about those who had died before the Restoration? Death was no deterrent for the king’s vengeance. Cromwell, who had been so gleeful when he signed the king’s death warrant, had died in 1658 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Charles II had him disinterred and subjected Cromwell’s corpse to a posthumous traitor’s execution. The same fate also befell Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton – his corpse was also exhumed. John Bradshaw, another regicide who had been buried in Westminster Abbey, was disinterred upon Charles II’s orders as well. All three had their heads mounted on spikes outside Westminster Hall – the place where they signed for the death of their king all those years before. But Charles II, in spite of this vengeance, was not a bloodthirsty man and he soon tired of all the death.

  96. HOOKE SHOWED US ANOTHER WORLD WITH HIS MICROSCOPE

  Microscopy is a study of objects with the use of a microscope. This means that you can have a look at blood, urine, a sliver of potato, and you’ll see some amazing (and some creepy) things. Both the word microscopy and what it entails first came about during the Stuart era, around 1660 or so. In the Dutch Republic (the present-day Netherlands), Anton van Leeuwenhoek made some great advances in the field of microscopy. Not only did he greatly improve microscope functionality, but some of the things he studied under his microscope included bacteria and even his own semen (when he observed spermatozoa, he concluded that each sperm contained a mini person, which goes along with Preformationism – a popular theory during the Stuart era). Although van Leeuwenhoek is often called ‘The Father of Microscopy’, he wasn’t the only one observing and researching with the aid of a microscope.

  Over in England, Robert Hooke made major strides in microscopy. Hooke has had the misfortune of being one of those figures who gets neglected a lot and there’s no justification for that. He was a brilliant scientist who discovered the theory of elasticity (Hooke’s Law) and was the inventor of a variety of scientific instruments. Throughout the 1660s and 70s, he was the Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society and then Professor of Geometry at Gresham College.

  But it was his ground-breaking and bestselling 1665 book, Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, Made By Magnifying Glasses; With Observations and Inquiries thereupon, which made Hooke great. In Micrographia, Hooke discovered and coined the term cell – which those of us who studied biology at school remember to be the smallest or most basic unit of life. The illustrations in Micrographia are some of the most famous scientific drawings ever, let alone from the seventeenth century, the most recognisable being the drawing of a flea, with the various parts of its body labelled. Hooke also examined his urine under the lens of his microscope and found, gravel’, which when magnified looked rather a lot like jewels. He also had a look at things such as a stinging nettle leaf and the illustration for this clearly shows all the thorny bits. Hooke and all those who worked in microscopy showed that there was a whole new world to explore – found with a microscope.

  Hooke was a good friend of Christopher Wren and the pair often collaborated in both scientific and architectural pursuits. Unfortunately, Hooke was not without rivals. It has long been suggested that Isaac Newton played a major role in Hooke’s legacy because they had had hostile interactions with each other. Figuratively speaking, it’s a crime that so few people know about Hooke. But you do now, so that’s a start!

  97. CELIA FIENNES WAS A STUART-ERA FEMALE TRAVEL EXPERT

  Celia Fiennes was an independent-spirited aristocratic lady who was born in Wiltshire in 1662, during the Restoration. Fiennes is important because she travelled extensively throughout England between 1682–1712, noting her thoughts as she went along. The most surprising element of her travels is that she was neither married nor escorted properly for the time (she usually only had servants with her). In her writings, Fiennes describes her travels to English towns and cities such as Bath, Yeovil and Daventry, among others. She v
isited several stately homes (including Woburn Abbey) and palaces, including her visit to Hampton Court Palace, where she had a look around Queen Mary II’s temporary apartments in the old Tudor Water Gallery. She also explored northern areas such as Preston, Manchester, Durham, and the beautiful Lake District. Fiennes described in detail the appearances of the areas and houses she saw, and even commented that Hyde Park was ‘green and full of deer, there are large ponds with fish and fowle’.

  Fiennes was even a spectator during the funeral of Queen Mary II in 1695, and she described the ceremony in detail. Nowadays, Celia Fiennes is best known for her travel memoirs, which were finally published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Through England on a Side Saddle, and now The Journeys of Celia Fiennes. In these writings, which she wrote solely for her family, she described her remarkable journeys on horseback throughout England. Although these writings were meant for her family only and never published during her lifetime, the wealth of information contained in them was too great to be kept hidden.

  98. ASHMOLE AND BODLEY LEFT US A MUSEUM AND A LIBRARY

  The great Ashmolean Museum and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford are two of the most renowned institutions in the world, and both were founded in the Stuart era. Sir Thomas Bodley was a courtier during the reign of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth, and when he retired from all that he put all his efforts into founding a library (which opened in 1602). This wasn’t the first library at the university, for back in the fifteenth century, Humphrey of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Gloucester, donated a couple of hundred books. Sadly, during the English Reformation many books and furniture were removed. The oldest reading room at the current Bodleian is called Duke Humphrey’s Library after the duke. Sir Thomas Bodley died on 28 January 1613, but his great library has been very useful for scholarly research ever since.

  The Ashmolean Museum boasts a great assortment of objects from throughout history. There are items from the Stuart age, including musical instruments (including a Stradivarius guitar), earthenware bowls and a large selection of paintings including an incredible collection of seventeenth century Dutch still-lifes. Even gloves belonging to Queen Anne when she was Princess of Denmark are on display (Anne attended the museum’s opening on 21 May 1683). The creator of this magnificent museum was the great English antiquarian Elias Ashmole (1619–92). His own collections were substantially increased with the addition of John Tradescant’s collection of curiosities (Tradescant was Ashmole’s friend).

  Ashmole was more than a collector of strange and wonderful objects: he was also a politician. If his belief that spiders would ward off the plague is anything to go by, Ashmole was rather superstitious. Ashmole was also a Freemason. Like many gentlemen of his class, he had interests in alchemy and science. In keeping with these interests, he was the author of several works, including Theatrum Chemicum Brittannicum, The Glory of Light and The Antiquities of Berkshire. Ashmole died in 1692.

  99. A ROYAL BIRTH STARTED A REVOLUTION

  When King James II’s wife Mary of Modena gave birth to a son in the summer of 1688, it sent in motion events that culminated in the Glorious Revolution. Almost immediately after James Francis Edward Stuart’s birth, rumours circulated that the boy was a changeling who had been smuggled into the delivery room in a warming pan. The false story continued that the queen had given birth to a stillborn child and this other newborn was put in its place. This silly rumour stuck and the child maliciously became known as the ‘warming-pan baby’.

  King James II was already rather unpopular by the time he ascended the throne in early 1685 following the death of his brother, King Charles II. James, whom some had nicknamed ‘Dismal Jimmy’, lacked many of the personable qualities that had made Charles popular. James was, by contrast, without a sense of humour and staunchly Catholic in a time in which many were openly hostile to Catholicism. Once upon the throne, he soon had to deal with a rebellion – led by his eldest nephew, the Duke of Monmouth – and although the rebellion was stamped out quickly, the brutality of the punishments impacted further upon the king’s increasingly negative reputation.

  During his reign he had dissenting bishops put on trial and gave major government positions to Catholics – all of this added further to his unpopularity. Just over the English Channel, the autocratic Catholic Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes and issued the Edict of Fontainebleau. French Protestants, the Huguenots, were in effect told that they had to convert to Catholicism or face fines or worse. These were the dragonnades, and thousands of Huguenots fled into more religiously tolerant countries, such as the Dutch Republic and England. The fear was that James would pull a move similar to his French cousin or, worse, that he might continue where Mary I – ‘Bloody Mary’ – had left off, and begin a systematic persecution of Protestants in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

  Although James and Mary of Modena had had sons before, they had all died and his heir remained his daughter from his first marriage (to Anne Hyde), Mary, Princess of Orange. The baby boy’s birth not only meant that Mary was no longer next in line for the throne, but that a Catholic succession was assured. This situation proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Mary, crucially, had been brought up in the Anglican Church and was a popular heir, especially as she had married her first cousin and hero of Protestant Europe, William of Orange.

  When Mary chose to support her husband over her father, her decision changed the course of the British monarchy. William and Mary were, in effect, constitutional monarchs, and with their agreement to the Bill of Rights (which gave more power to Parliament, thus decreasing royal power) the beginning of constitutional monarchy began. Mary’s new baby brother would never inherit his throne and would become known as ‘The Old Pretender’, and his son, after him, ‘The Young Pretender’.

  100. STUART MISFORTUNES LED TO HANOVERIAN POWER

  Following the Restoration in 1660, there was a great hope that with the return of the king there would be continued peace throughout the land and a secured, Protestant succession. Unfortunately, things did not work out that way, and Charles II (as we have already learned) was very good at impregnating his numerous lovers. Sadly, although he did get his wife Catherine of Braganza pregnant, she had a great deal of trouble conceiving and was ultimately unable to provide an heir. After Charles’s death, James II came to the throne. Ironically, although they were also plagued by a series of misfortunes, he and his wife Mary of Modena eventually did have a healthy son and heir, who because of his parents’ Catholicism, was cut off from his birthright.

  James’s daughters, Mary and Anne, who came to the throne after his exile, did not fare as well. Anne, though blessed with a loving and stable marriage to Prince George of Denmark, had one of the most tragic gynaecological histories of any monarch in British history. In 1684, the then-Princess Anne married George of Denmark and quickly became pregnant – beginning a long and painful series of miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths. Smallpox, which Anne had had before in 1677, came to her door again. There is reason to suggest that in March of 1695, Anne may have also suffered from a phantom pregnancy, or pseudocyesis, a condition in which a woman believes she is pregnant. This is something that Frederick Holmes, in his book The Sickly Stuarts, suggests probably affected her elder sister, Mary, as well. William and Mary, who had been married since 1677, were plagued by at least two miscarriages and died childless. Mary, as Princess of Orange, was expected to provide an heir; this intense psychological desire may have caused her to have symptoms akin to those associated with pregnancy.

  By the end of 1700, Anne’s only surviving son, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was dead at the age of eleven. And so, despite Anne having had between sixteen and eighteen pregnancies (there is some debate as to the actual number), none of her children survived. The resulting Act of Settlement in 1701 meant that anyone who professed to be a Catholic would be automatically excluded from the line of succession.

  As a result, a great many people who were mo
re closely linked to throne by blood were excluded in favour of the Hanoverians. The reason for this was quite simple. Electress Sophia of Hanover (sister of Rupert of the Rhine) was the daughter of Stuart Princess Elizabeth, who was in turn the daughter of King James I. As this line was predominantly Protestant, they became the heirs to the Protestant Stuarts’ throne. And thus, an indirect Stuart descendent still sits on the throne to this day.