The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (51 page)

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 political 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’.

18
The story of Charles’s miserable marriage is well told by Maclean, op. cit., unsympathetically by Kybett, op. cit.

19
Hamilton would have his own matrimonial troubles when his wife Emma became Admiral Nelson’s mistress. He was however a more accommodating cuckold than Charles Edward.

Envoi

1
Queen Victoria,
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands
, quoted by Eric Linklater,
The Royal House of Scotland
(Macmillan, London, 1970; Sphere Books, 1972).

2
Compton Mackenzie,
The Four Winds of Love
(Chatto & Windus).

3
Ian Mortimer,
Edward III
:
The Perfect King
(Jonathan Cape, 2006).

4
Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland
(HarperCollins, 1994).

Notes on Further Reading

This book has been a long time in the making, for I have been reading about the Stuarts since I was a child. My introduction to Stuart history was by way of Scott’s
Tales of a Grandfather
, cited in the text, and by various of the Waverley novels in which members of the family feature. Among them are
The Fair Maid of Perth
,
The Fortunes of Nigel
,
The Tales of Old Mortality
,
Waverley
itself and my own favourite,
Redgauntlet
. If anything in this book sends readers back to Scott’s novels and to his narrative poem
Marmion
, with its splendid description of the Flodden campaign, they will be well rewarded and I shall be satisfied. Scott is the greatest of historical novelists and all who write about seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Scottish history are in his debt.

As readers will have recognised, this book makes no pretence to be a work of academic history, though I am grateful to many academic historians, and many of the books I have used are listed in the Notes and Sources section. Agnes Mure Mackenzie’s
The Rise of the Stewarts
has been superseded by modern historians. It remains, however, a mine of information and entertainment, while her portraits of the Stewart kings are intelligently sympathetic. There are modern academic biographies of all the Jameses, one of the best of which is Norman MacDougall’s
James IV
. For a briefer and sometimes highly critical survey, I would refer readers to Gordon Donaldson’s
Scottish Kings
.