The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (48 page)

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 unruly 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.

Like many who write about Scottish history, I owe a heavy debt to the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott, and to his
Tales of a Grandfather
, written for his grandson Johnny Lockhart, and favourite reading of mine as a child. Thomas Carlyle wrote that Scott had reminded people that men and women in the past were not abstractions but composed of flesh, bones and blood. I hope I have always remembered this and remained aware that events now in the past were once in the future, the outcome unknown to those who had to determine on a course of action.

Lord Rosebery, Prime Minister in the 1890s, himself a fine historian, once remarked that every Scot was at least half a Jacobite at heart. As a child, enthralled by Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
and the Jacobite novels of D. K. Broster, I was wholehearted in my Jacobitism. The commitment faded with the years, but something of it remains.

I am indebted to two other dead novelists, John Buchan, whose biography of Montrose stimulated my interest in the seventeenth century, and Eric Linklater, the finest Scottish novelist of the mid-twentieth century, who showed in his own book about the Stuarts,
The Royal House of Scotland
, that history could be agreeably written with a light hand.

More immediately, I am grateful to my agent, Peter Robinson, to Will Sulkin, who commissioned the book, and to my editors at Jonathan Cape, first Ellah Allfrey and then Alex Bowler, who has seen the book carried forward to publication. I thank both of them for their patience, understanding, enthusiasm and encouragement. I should also thank Noel Gillett for bearing with my technological incompetence and sorting out computer problems.

Finally, my chief debt is, as ever, to my wife, Alison, who has made my life as a writer possible. Without her I would have written less, and worse.

Notes and Sources

Prologue

1
Lord Macaulay,
The History of England
(abridged edition, ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Penguin, 1979), pp. 109–11.

2
Anthony Hamilton,
Memoirs of the Count of Grammont
, trans. Horace Walpole, with additional notes by Sir Walter Scott and Mrs Jameson (Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1904), pp. 332, 334. Grammont was a soldier and courtier; the most interesting parts of the book recount his time at the English court in the decade after the Restoration of 1660.

Chapter 1

1
Boece published his somewhat fanciful
Scotorum historiae
in Paris in 1522. It was translated into Scots by John Bellenden, poet and priest, in 1536. Raphael Holinshed (d.? 1580) drew on it for his
Chronicles
(1577), which Shakespeare used as his source book for
Macbeth
.

2
The Scots were only one of the four peoples who eventually came together to form the Scottish nation. The others were the Picts, who lived north of the River Tay, the Welsh-speaking Britons in the south-west of the country, and the Angles in the south-east Borders and the Lothians.

3
Walter of Coventry,
Memoriale
, ed. William Stubbs. Quoted by Michael Lynch,
Scotland: A New History
(Century, 1991), p. 87.

Chapter 2

1
David Bruce was for a long time regarded or dismissed as a king of lamentable ineptitude, the unworthy son of his great father. Modern historians, engaged on revisionism, have judged him more generously. Michael Lynch in
Scotland: A New History
(p. 136), writes: ‘The older picture of a worthless incompetent, attracted to a procession of dominating women, which was encouraged by the moralising censures of pro-Stewart commentators such as Bower, has been replaced by a cooler assessment, based on analysis of the growing activity of the king’s administration – a model for later Stewart kings such as James I or II.’ Walter Bower (1383–1437), Abbot of Inchcolm, was the author of the
Scotichronicum
, the history of Scotland in his own time.

2
John of Fordoun (
c
.1320–84) was the author of the
Chronica Gentis Scotorum
. Bower’s book is a continuation of his work.

3
Gaelic was sometimes called Erse, on account of the Irish origins of the Scots, and sometimes Scots. By the ‘Teutonic’, John of Fordoun meant the northern variety of Old English or Anglo-Saxon spoken throughout northern England and southern Scotland, originally between the Humber and the Forth, though by Fordoun’s time up the eastern seaboard of Scotland to Aberdeen. In the sixteenth century this language would come to be known as Scots or Scottis, to distinguish it from English.

4
John Mair (or Major)(1469–1550) was a historian and philosopher, born in North Berwick, educated at the universities of Cambridge and Paris, and later Professor of Theology at the University of Glasgow. After teaching at the Sorbonne, he bcame provost of St Salvator’s College, St Andrews. He was the author of the
Historia Majoris Britanniae
(1521).

5
Jenny Wormald, ‘The House of Stewart and the Realm of Scotland’ in
Scotland Revisited
(London, 1981).

6
Jean Froissart (
c
. 1333–1405),
Chronicles
.

Chapter 3

1
The North Inch is now a cricket and recreation ground.

2
The stands were erected at a cost of just over £14.

3
Bonthron in the novel is a follower of Sir John Ramorny, Rothesay’s Master of the Horse, who turns against him and betrays him.

4
In his customarily extensive notes to the novel (numerous editions), Scott quotes not only the medieval chroniclers, but also the Latin text of the ‘Remission’ granted by King Robert to Albany and the Earl of Douglas. This was first printed by the Scottish judge Lord Hailes (1726–96), who observed that ‘The Duke of Albany and the Earl of Douglas obtained a remission in terms as ample as if they had actually murdered the heir-apparent’, such terms indeed as to leave little doubt that they were responsible for Rothesay’s death.