Little wat ye wha's comin



This "Highland Muster Roll" is said to date from the Fifteen, the first of the two disastrous Jacobite Rebellions, one in 1715 and the other in 1745.

The Stuarts were less than impressive as a royal house, though hard to beat from the point of tragic romance and inspiration for centuries of really good novels and music.  The memorable Mary Queen of Scots wasn't easy to take seriously as a monarch.  After she languished in prison for years and was beheaded by Elizabeth I, her son became James I of England (and VI of Scotland) in 1603, when Elizabeth died without issue.  We'll cut James I some slack because of the Bible.  After his death in 1625, however, his moderately useless son and successor Charles I channeled his grandmother by contriving to get himself executed by Parliament in 1649.  Then, after an Interregnum of eleven years, in 1660, Charles I's son Charles II was ecstatically welcomed back in the Restoration, but the honeymoon didn't last long.

On his death without legitimate issue in 1685 (his impressive list of little FitzRoys notwithstanding), Charles II was succeeded by his younger brother James II (and VII of Scotland).  James II got everyone's knickers in a twist with his crypto-Catholicism and other unpopular traits.  After producing two reasonably solid Protestant daughters, he terrified everyone in 1688, in only the third year of his reign, by producing a male Catholic heir, the man who would have been James III but instead comes down to history as James "the Old Pretender."

Upon the birth of the Old Pretender, James II's elder daughter Mary had to be asked to come over from Holland with her husband William of Orange, who was also a Stuart of sorts.  James II, having fled to the Continent in 1688, was conveniently considered to have abdicated.  (He made an abortive attempt at recapturing his throne in 1689, then took shelter with Louis XIV of France until his death in 1701.)  William and Mary assumed the throne jointly in 1688 as Mary II and William II (and III of Scotland).  They produced no heirs.  After Mary's death in 1694 and William's in 1702, Mary's younger sister Anne reigned until her death in 1714, leaving no surviving issue despite 17 pregnancies.  At this point, the succession becomes hopelessly confused, because James II and his son and grandson were still pressing their noses against the windowpane from exile, but when the dust settled everyone had agreed that the great point was never to let anyone associated with James II get near the crown again.  In 1707, planning ahead, Parliament had passed an Act awarding the throne in advance to a second cousin from Germany called George, who was maternally descended from James I.  George I ruled from 1714 through 1727 and was succeeded by George II.

Meanwhile, James II's son, the Old Pretender, entertained designs on the English and Scottish thrones in a more or less serious fashion for his entire life (he died in exile 1766), of which the Fifteen, in the first year of George I's reign, was the most serious example.  The Old Pretender's son Charles (a/k/a the Young Pretender or Bonnie Prince Charlie) carried on the family tradition in the equally disastrous '45 Uprising, during the reign of George II, after which the whole Stuart business was more or less thoroughly crushed.  The Young Pretender died in exile 1788.

The Georges may have been Stuarts of a sort, but they associated themselves more strongly with the name of Hanover.  The name George lives on in a series of infuriated Jacobite Rebellion songs about little German nitwits names Geordie.

8 comments:

Grim said...

I think James I and Charles II weren't bad as British monarchs go. You're forgetting, perhaps, how unimpressive some of their predecessors and followers were. I could name John, Edward II, Henry VI, Henry VIII -- a tremendously important figure in British history, for all the wrong reasons -- George III...

Joseph W. said...

Now there is an exercise in damning with faint praise, which you might've increased further by adding Mary....

Still, we Americans owe some gratitude to the house of Stuart.

Firstly for the "Salutary Neglect" with which they treated their colonies...which is what allowed them to proceed with self-rule and taxation with representation for so long that, in that wonderful, evolutionary, common-law way, they began to recognize as rights. (At least one governor of Massachusetts explicitly recognized this...and advised his people to avoid confrontations with Great Britain for exactly that reason; to give the precedent time to settle in.)

And secondly for two of the Founders' favorite precedents...the beheading of Charles I and the dethronement of James II, and what those things meant for representative government as opposed to strict primogeniture and divine right.

Also, I think the entire House of Stuart helped to cement the image of kings as ridiculous social figures rather than scary war leaders (as they'd been a couple centuries before)...the better to convince us to throw them off.

Okay, so they weren't planning to do any of those things - I'll take 'em where I can get 'em. I've got a personal debt to Alexander VI, too...

Grim said...

Well, you can also thank James I for the plantationing of Ireland -- not that it did much good there, but it created that class called 'Scots-Irish' who formed the backbone of the Americans in subsequent generations.

But then you have to thank their successors for the hard work done in assisting with the Clearances, which resulted in the movement of vast numbers of Scots to the New World before the American revolution. Western North Carolina is essentially Scottish to this day. Georgia's particular character was partially established by James Edward Oglethorpe's importation of a whole bunch of veterans of the '45 to secure his southern border against Spanish incursions. Which they did!

Grim said...

Although I have to say that I'm not sure how much different the world would have been if Charles I hadn't been beheaded. Strict primogeniture and divine right were a Tudor defense against a return to the Wars of the Roses -- during the Yorkist period, it had seemed perfectly plausible to replace and kill kings from time to time.

The Stewart insistence on 'divine right' was ridiculous, of course, because the Scottish royal line had been founded on the principle that kingship was partially elective. The Declaration of Arbroath said explicitly that, while Robert was their king by the grace of God, they'd kill him and replace him if he didn't do his job.

Tom said...

I just wish they'd stop calling what they're speaking English. Call it Scottish and stop confusing everyone.

Grim said...

Well, they do -- except it's called "Scots."

Eric Blair said...

You forgot the revolt of 1689.

But you know, the Scots turned Charles over to Parliment in return for the promise that the religion of the islands would then be the Scottish Presbyterian rite (or what ever you want to call it)

And Cromwell promptly reneged on that.

And the "Glorious" revolution of 1688, had a religious dimension that is usually ignored today, although James II had many flaws as well. I've read enough to suggest that if he'd actually stayed in England and led it, the English army would have fought for him against William. But his fleeing to Ireland basically caused the officer corps to switch sides.

Grim said...

My mother was a Duncan. Pride of place!

"Dunniewassel" I guess you know, since I know that you know the Ballad of Bonnie Dundee. Sir Walter Scott used it too, to mean, "A clansman of superior degree."