The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (2 page)

Monmouth may never have legitimately borne the name of Stuart; yet in person and fortune, he was in many ways characteristic of that remarkable family: he charmed easily, inspired devotion, failed his followers, showed himself to be possessed of lamentable judgement, and ran headlong to misfortune. He was Stuart through and through; Stuart to the bone.

The man against whom he led a rebellion, the man who sent him to the block, was his uncle, James VII and II, formerly Duke of York. He had played with Monmouth when his nephew was a beautiful and charming boy, but between 1678 and 1681 he had endured attempts by political enemies suspicious of his Roman Catholicism to exclude him from the throne in favour of his brother’s bastard. Now he had his revenge.

Chapter 1

The Stewards: Origins in Legend and History

Macbeth, in his second encounter with the three weird sisters, asks:

Yet my heart

Throbs to know one thing: tell me – if your art

Can tell so much – shall Banquo’s issue ever

Reign in this kingdom?

Advised by the witches that for his peace of mind he should ‘seek to know no more’, he yet insists and is then presented with the apparition of the long line of Banquo’s descendants, ‘a show of eight kings’.

Macbeth
was played before the first Stuart king of Great Britain and Ireland, James VI of Scots and I of England, and this scene served as a compliment to him. Imaginative Scottish historians had long before ascribed a satisfyingly ancient ancestry to the House of Stewart, tracing their descent from Banquo. Hector Boece (
c.
1465–1536), the first principal of the University of King’s College, Aberdeen, tells the story, which Shakespeare was to repeat, of how witches met Macbeth and Banquo on a stretch of wild moorland. In Bellenden’s translation of Boece’s Latin,
¹
they promised Banquo that ‘you sall never be king, bot of ye sall cum mony kingis quilkes be lang progressioun sall rejose the croun of Scotland’. Macbeth, angered and disturbed by the prophecy, commissioned Banquo’s murder, but the victim’s son, Fleance, escaped and made his way to France, where he married and so became the founder of the royal House of Stewart.

It was nonsense, an agreeable fiction, but one that by the time of James VI and I was sufficiently widely believed for Shakespeare to retail it. And why not? Most royal genealogies were fanciful, descent being traced from pagan gods or mythological heroes.

The truth was more prosaic. The Stewarts came out of Brittany, land of salt-marshes and moors, saints and dolmens. Nothing is known of any member of the family before the late eleventh century – conveniently for the legend, or fabrication, since Macbeth became King of Scots in 1040. When they emerge into the light of history, it is as steward or seneschal to the Counts of Dol on the south shore of the Gulf of St Malo. In 1097, the then head of the family accompanied the Count and his feudal superior, Robert, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of William the Conqueror, on the First Crusade, and did not return.

He was succeeded in the office of steward by his brother Flaald, whose name was taken by chroniclers to be a corruption of Fleance. One of Flaald’s sons, Alan, crossed the Channel in the service of the third Norman king of England, Henry I. He was evidently trusted, for in 1101 Henry appointed him Sheriff of Shropshire with responsibility for the collection of taxes and administration of justice, and the additional duty of guarding the Welsh Marches. The Breton language that Alan spoke is close to Welsh and was probably still closer then; no Normans would have spoken it, and so Alan’s ability to communicate with the Welsh tribal chiefs would have recommended him for the post.

One of Alan’s sons, Walter Fitzalan, advanced the fortunes of the family further. He entered the service of Henry’s brother-in-law, the Scottish prince David, the youngest son of Malcolm III (Shakespeare’s Malcolm) and Margaret, the saint-queen, herself a descendant of Alfred the Great and so also of Cerdic, founder of the royal house of Wessex. David spent his adolescent years at the Anglo-Norman court. In 1114 he married a widow some years his senior, and acquired the earldoms of Huntingdon and Northampton. It was doubtless the connection with Henry I that brought Walter Fitzalan to David’s notice. He presumably showed himself competent and reliable, and David may have come to look upon him as a friend. At any rate, when David inherited the Scottish throne in 1124, Walter came north with him as a member of his household. He continued to enjoy the King’s favour, was granted estates in Ayrshire and Renfrewshire, and was appointed High Steward of Scotland.

The word ‘steward’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘stig’, meaning a hall, and ‘weard’, which is ward, guardian or keeper. In modern usage it has retained, or reverted to, something close to that original sense. In the twelfth century, however, a steward was no mere domestic servant or household official, but a high officer of state, with responsibility in Scotland for the management of the royal revenue and expenditure, while he might also on occasion exercise a military command. The office of high steward became hereditary in the family of Walter Fitzalan, and the third to occupy it seems to have adopted Steward or Stewart (the words being interchangeable) as a family name. Subsequently dependants, retainers and tenants on the various Stewart estates would also go by their lord’s family name. No one now supposes that the clan and family names of Scotland necessarily represent blood relationships, though they may often do so of course. When Stevenson, in
Kidnapped
, has his military adventurer Alan Breck Stewart proudly declare, ‘I bear a king’s name’, his boast does not extend as far as claiming a family connection.

The Stewarts were only one among a number of Anglo-Norman or Anglo-Breton families to come by invitation to Scotland in David’s reign, or in the reigns of his sons, Malcolm IV and William the Lion. Though descended in the male line from the Gaelic-speaking kings of the Scots,
²
they took the Norman monarchy of England as their model, and, early in the twelfth century, it was observed that ‘the more recent kings of Scots profess themselves to be rather Frenchmen [that is, Normans] both in race and in manners, culture and language, and they admit only Frenchmen to their friendship and service’.
³
The Stewarts belonged to that category, as did the Balliols, Bruces and Comyns, and all were welcomed by kings seeking to impose a feudal superstructure on Celtic tribal society, in order to extend and cement royal authority.

We know nothing of the character of any but the last of the men who for seven or eight generations held the office of high steward, serving every king from David I to David II, Robert the Bruce’s son. It is reasonable to suppose that they were for the most part able and loyal; able because they were maintained in office; loyal because there is no record of them engaging in open or active rebellion. On the contrary, indeed: they were employed in suppressing rebellions and were rewarded with the grant of forfeited or confiscated lands. We know little of their marriages, though some will have been with the daughters of the old Celtic aristocracy. And we do not even know at what stage they stopped speaking Norman French as their first language, choosing instead to converse in Gaelic or the northern variety of English that would, centuries later, be termed Scots. One of them, Alexander, the fourth to hold the office of high steward, became a Crusader like his first-recorded Breton ancestor, but he was more fortunate and returned home safely. He was sufficiently well thought of to act as regent during the minority of Alexander III (1249–82), and commanded one wing of the army that defeated the Norwegians at Largs in 1263.

His son, James, first to bear the Christian name by which eight of the Stewart kings would be known, was one of the guardians of the realm after Alexander III was killed in a riding accident, and as such was among those who invited Edward I of England to adjudicate between the various candidates, or ‘competitors’, for the throne when it fell vacant on the death of the late king’s granddaughter, the little ‘Maid of Norway’, in 1286. Edward first compelled the competitors, among them the grandfather of Robert the Bruce, to acknowledge him as overlord of Scotland, and then in 1292 selected John Balliol as vassal king. Balliol soon chafed at his subordinate position, sought to establish his independence, and made an alliance with France. Edward marched north in the summer of 1296, stripped Balliol of his crown, and proceeded to try to incorporate Scotland into his empire as he had already done with Wales.

The Scots resisted, thus sparking the long and heroic Wars of Independence, the proving-ground of Scottish nationality. James the Steward was among those who defied Edward, fighting alongside William Wallace and Andrew Murray at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. Ten years later, he was one of the first to rally to Robert the Bruce, when he declared himself King of Scots. James married Egidia de Burgh, a daughter of the Norman Earl of Ulster, this alliance offering further evidence that the Stewarts were now in the leading rank of the Scots nobility. He died in 1309, leaving as his heir a young son, Walter.

It is with this Walter that the Stewarts’ advance to the throne begins. At the age of nineteen, he fought at Bannockburn, in the division commanded by his uncle, Sir James Douglas, Bruce’s chief lieutenant, and in the evening of that famous victory was knighted by the King on the field of battle. He had evidently made an impression, for the next year, 1315, he was married to Marjorie Bruce, King Robert’s daughter by his first marriage.

More than two hundred years later, James V, dying in Falkland Palace, was told that his wife, Marie de Guise, had given birth in Linlithgow to the daughter who would come to be known as Mary, Queen of Scots. The disconsolate King is said to have sighed, ‘It cam wi’ a lass and it’ll gang wi’ a lass.’ As deathbed lines go, this one is at least well invented, even though as a prophecy it was to prove well wide of the mark.

But the lass it cam wi’ was Marjorie Bruce, and her short life was as unfortunate at that of any of her more famous descendants. In 1306, after King Robert’s hurried and scarcely regular coronation at Scone, she had been sent with her mother and other female relatives, under the guardianship of the King’s youngest brother, Nigel, to the presumed safety of Kildrummy Castle, perched above the River Don in Aberdeenshire. But the castle was betrayed, Nigel was killed, and when they tried to flee north, the royal women and their companions were captured and handed over to the English.

King Robert had been one of the many Scottish barons who had accepted Edward as overlord of Scotland and sworn allegiance to him. He may even have been a favourite of the English king. If so, his defiance – rebellion in Edward’s eyes – was all the more infuriating, and now Edward, unable to seize Bruce himself, took cruel revenge on the captured women. The Countess of Buchan, who had placed the crown on King Robert’s head, and the King’s sister Mary were imprisoned in cages hung from the battlements of the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh respectively. Edward ordered that another cage be prepared for the nine-year-old Marjorie in the Tower of London. But when the old king died, his gentler son, Edward II, commuted the sentence, and Marjorie was instead sent to be held in a convent in Yorkshire. She remained there till the year after Bannockburn, when she was returned to her father in exchange for English prisoners taken in the battle; and was straight away married to young Walter Stewart.

Marjorie was King Robert’s only living legitimate child, but with the outcome of the war still uncertain, few can have thought a female succession desirable. Accordingly, a parliament meeting in Ayr determined that, if King Robert should die, he should be succeeded by his brother Edward. Marjorie is said to have consented to this arrangement; she would have had little choice but to do so.

Then, in 1316, the pregnant Marjorie fell from her horse, gave birth to a boy, probably prematurely, and perhaps by a Caesarean operation, and died. She was no more than twenty. That child, named Robert after his grandfather, would be the first Stewart king, but he had to wait a long time to inherit the crown. King Robert married again, and his new wife, another de Burgh from Ulster, bore him a son. He would become David II and would reign from 1329 to 1371. He was Robert Stewart’s uncle, but eight years younger than his nephew. A Stewart succession still seemed unlikely.

Chapter 2

Robert II (1371–90): The First Stewart King

David II’s reign was troubled, and the King, a minor when he came to the throne, was in effective control for less than half of it. The early years saw a renewal of the war with England, and of civil strife between the adherents of the Bruces and the Balliols, arising from the young English king Edward III’s attempt to install John Balliol’s son, Edward, as a puppet king in Scotland. The attempt failed, and Edward III turned his attention to war with France. David, having attained his majority, and faithful to the French alliance, invaded England, but was wounded, defeated and taken prisoner at Neville’s Cross in 1346, the year of Edward’s great victory over the French at Crécy. He was kept captive there for eleven years, and released only on the promise of a payment of 100,000 marks. Robert Stewart acted as regent in the King’s absence, without notable success. He made no attempt to seize the throne for himself, perhaps because he was loyal, perhaps because he was too weak to do so. It was only the King’s sudden death at the age of forty-six, when he was about to marry for the third time in the hope of at last producing a legitimate heir, that opened the way to the Stewart succession.
¹

Robert II was fifty-five when he became king, on the verge of old age by medieval standards. He was a great nobleman, head of an extensive family connection, with estates scattered across central and southern Scotland. He was king by hereditary right, but he was never to be more than first among equals.