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The dinasty of Stuarts

The ruling dynasty of Scotland from 1371 to 1714 and England from 1603 to 1714. The Stewart (Stuart is the French form of the name, which became accepted in England) dynasty took its name from the office of steward of Scotland.

The Stuarts were one of England`s least successful dynasties. Charles I was put on public trial for treason and was publicly beheaded; James II fled the country fearing a similar fate, and abandoned his kingdom and throne. James I and Charles II died peacefully in their beds, but James I lived to see all his hopes fade and ambitions thwarted, while Charles II, although he had the trapping of success, was a curiously unambitious man, whose desire for a quiet life was not achieved until it was too late for him to enjoy it. Towering above the Stuart age were the two decades of civil war, revolution, and republican experiment which ought to have changed fundamentally the course of English history, but which did so, if at all, very elusively. Whilst kings and generals toiled and failed, however, a fundamental change was taking place in English economy and society, largely unheeded and certainly unfashioned by the will of government. In fact, the most obvious revolution in seventeenth-century England was the consequence of a decline in the birth-rate.

James I

James VI of Scots and I of England (1566-1625). King of Scots (1567-1625) and of England and Ireland (1603-25). James, the first *Stuart king of England, was the son of * Mary Queen of Scots and her second husband, Henry, Lord * Darnley. When James succeeded to the Scottish throne in 1567, following his mother`s enforced abdication, he was only 13 months old. His long and troubled minority saw a succession of regents. Religious and aristocratic factions made various attempts to secure the king`s person, and civil war raged until 1573 when the earl of Morton took control of Scotland. In 1586 by the treaty of Berwick James was awarded an English pension; and his cousin Elizabeth I promised not to oppose his claims to the English succession unless he provoked her by his actions in Scotland. This sufficed to ensure James`s acquiescence to his mother`s execution in 1587 and his neutrality when the Spanish armada sailed against England in the following year. In 1592 James consented to an act of parliament establishing Presbyterianism in Scotland; with the support of Presbyterians he was finally able to subdue the Roman Catholic earls in the north. James did much to improve the system of civil government in Scotland and took the first steps towards initiating a regular system of taxation. He married Anne of Denmark in 1589.

When James succeeded to the English throne in 1603, he made it clear that there be no fundamental alteration to the Elizabethan church settlement and that he believed the Anglican Church and the monarchy to be interdependent. His slogan was `no bishop, no king'. One manifestation of the frustration of the religious minorities was the Roman Catholic inspired * gunpowder plot of 1604.

James` experience in Scotland failed to prepare him adequately for the English throne. He was soon in conflict with his parliaments (1604-11, the 1614 * Addled Parliament, and 1621-22) on the question of the extent of his sovereignty and its refusal to grant what he considered adequate revenue. On occasion he sought financial independence by means of extra parliamentary levies. His liking for young men, notably such court favorites as Robert * Carr and George Villiers (duke of * Buckingham), alienated many Englishmen. Soon after his accession James made peace with Spain, realizing England could no longer afford the crippling costs of war. He aspired to the role of the peacemaker of Europe, acceptable to both Catholics and Protestants. His efforts were ruined both by the strength of Protestant opinion in Britain and by the reluctance of Spain to form an alliance with him. After the outbreak of the Thirty Years` War (1618) on the Continent, James had to settle for a treaty with the Dutch and a French marriage alliance for his heir Charles.

Charles I

(19 November 1600 - 30 January 1649) was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649, and is a saint in the Church of England. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles believed was divinely ordained. Many of his English subjects opposed his actions, in particular his interference in the English and Scottish churches and the levying of taxes without parliamentary consent which grew to be seen as those of a tyrannical absolute monarchy.

Religious conflicts permeated Charles's reign. His failure to successfully aid Protestant forces during the Thirty Years' War, coupled with such actions as marrying a Roman Catholic princess, generated deep mistrust concerning the king's dogma. Charles further allied himself with controversial religious figures, such as the ecclesiastic Richard Montagu and William Laud, whom Charles appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Many of Charles' subjects felt this brought the Church of England too close to the Roman Catholic Church. Charles' later attempts to force religious reforms upon Scotland led to the Bishops' Wars, strengthened the position of the English and Scottish parliaments and helped precipitate the his own downfall.

Charles' last years were marked by the English Civil War, in which he fought the forces of the English and Scottish parliaments, which challenged his attempts to overrule and negate parliamentary authority, whilst simultaneously using his position as head of the English Church to pursue religious policies which generated the antipathy of reformed groups such as the Puritans. Charles was defeated in the First Civil War (1642-45), after which Parliament expected him to accept its demands for a constitutional monarchy. He instead remained defiant by attempting to forge an alliance with Scotland and escaping to the Isle of Wight. This provoked the Second Civil War (1648-49) and a second defeat for Charles, who was subsequently captured, tried, convicted, and executed for high treason. The monarchy was then abolished and a republic called the Commonwealth of England, also referred to as the Cromwell an Interregnum, was declared. Charles' son, Charles II, who dated his accession from the death of his father, did not take up the reins of government until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Charles II (29 May 1630 OS - 6 February 1685 OS) was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War. Although the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II King of Great Britain and Ireland in Edinburgh on 6 February 1649, the Parliament instead passed a statute that made any such proclamation unlawful. England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth, and the country was a de facto republic, led by Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell defeated Charles at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, and Charles fled to mainland Europe. Cromwell became virtual dictator of England, Scotland and Ireland. Charles spent the next nine years in exile in France, the United Provinces and the Spanish Netherlands. A political crisis that followed the death of Cromwell in 1658 resulted in the restoration of the monarchy, and Charles was invited to return to Britain. On 29 May 1660, his 30th birthday, he was received in London to public acclaim. After 1660, all legal documents were dated as if Charles had succeeded his father as king in 1649. Charles's English parliament enacted laws known as the Clarendon Code, designed to shore up the position of the re-established Church of England. Charles acquiesced to the Clarendon Code even though he himself favored a policy of religious tolerance. The major foreign policy issue of Charles's early reign was the Second Anglo-Dutch War. In 1670, Charles entered into the secret treaty of Dover, an alliance with his first cousin King Louis XIV of France. Louis agreed to aid Charles in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and pay Charles a pension, and Charles secretly promised to convert to Roman Catholicism at an unspecified future date. Charles attempted to introduce religious freedom for Catholics and Protestant dissenters with his 1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence, but the English Parliament forced him to withdraw it. In 1679, Titus Oates's revelations of a supposed "Popish Plot" sparked the Exclusion Crisis when it was revealed that Charles's brother and heir (James, Duke of York) was a Roman Catholic. The crisis saw the birth of the pro-exclusion Whig and anti-exclusion Tory parties. Charles sided with the Tories, and, following the discovery of the Rye House Plot to murder Charles and James in 1683, some Whig leaders were killed or forced into exile. Charles dissolved the English Parliament in 1681, and ruled alone until his death on 6 February 1685. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed. Charles was popularly known as the Married Monarch, in reference to both the liveliness and hedonism of his court and the general relief at the return to normality after over a decade of rule by Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans. Charles's wife, Catherine of Braganza, bore no children, but Charles acknowledged at least 12 illegitimate children by various mistresses. As illegitimate children were excluded from the succession, he was succeeded by his brother James.

James II & VII (14 October 1633 - 16 September 1701) was King of England and King of Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from 6 February 1685. He was the last Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Members of Britain's political and religious elite increasingly opposed him for being pro-French and pro-Catholic, and for his designs on becoming an absolute monarch. When he produced a Catholic heir, the tension exploded, and leading nobles called on William III of Orange (his son-in-law and nephew) to land an invasion army from the Netherlands, which he did. James fled England (and thus was held to have abdicated) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was replaced by William of Orange who became king as William III, ruling jointly with his wife (James's daughter) Mary II. Thus William and Mary, both Protestants, became joint rulers in 1689. James made one serious attempt to recover his crowns, when he landed in Ireland in 1689 but, after the defeat of the Jacobi forces by the Willamette at the Battle of the Boyne in the summer of 1690, James returned to France. He lived out the rest of his life as a pretender at a court sponsored by his cousin and ally, King Louis XIV.

dinasty stewart england ireland

James is best known for his belief in the Divine Right of Kings and his attempts to create religious liberty for English Roman Catholics against the wishes of the English Parliament. Parliament, opposed to the growth of absolutism that was occurring in other European countries, as well as to the loss of legal supremacy for the Church of England, saw their opposition as a way to preserve what they regarded as traditional English liberties. This tension made James's four-year reign a struggle for supremacy between the English Parliament and the Crown, resulting in his deposition, the passage of the English Bill of Rights, and the Hanoverian succession.

James, the second surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France, was born at St. James's Palace in London on 14 October 1633. Later that same year, James was baptized by William Laud, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. James was educated by tutors, along with his brother, the future King Charles II, and the two sons of the Duke of Buckingham, George and Francis Villiers. At the age of three, James was appointed Lord High Admiral; the position was initially honorary, but would become a substantive office after the Restoration, when James was an adult.

James was invested with the Order of the Garter in 1642, and created Duke of York on 22 January 1644. As the King's disputes with the English Parliament grew into the English Civil War James stayed in Oxford, a Royalist stronghold. When the city surrendered after the siege of Oxford in 1646, Parliamentary leaders ordered the Duke of York to be confined in St. James's Palace. In 1648, he escaped from the Palace, aided by Joseph Bam field and from there he went to The Hague in disguise. When Charles I was executed by the rebels in 1649, monarchists proclaimed James's older brother Charles II of England. Charles II was recognized by the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of Ireland and was crowned King of Scotland at Scone in Scotland in 1651. Although he was proclaimed King at Jersey Charles was unable to secure the crown of England and consequently fled to France and exile.

Like his brother, James sought refuge in France, serving in the French army under Turenne against the Froude, and later against their Spanish allies. In the French army, James had his first true experience of battle where, according to one observer, he "ventures himself and charged gallantly where anything is to be done". In 1656, when his brother, Charles, entered into an alliance with Spain-an enemy of France-James was expelled from France and forced to leave Turenne's army. James quarreled with his brother over the diplomatic choice of Spain over France. Exiled and poor, there was little that either Charles or James could do about the larger diplomatic situation, and James ultimately travelled to Bruges and (along with his younger brother, Henry) joined the Spanish army under Louis, Prince of Condй, fighting against his former French comrades at the Battle of the Dunes. During his term of service in the Spanish army, James became friendly with two Irish Catholic brothers in the Royalist entourage, Peter and Richard Talbot, and began to be somewhat estranged from his brother's Anglican advisers. In 1659, the French and Spanish made peace. James, doubtful of his brother's chances of regaining the throne, considered taking a Spanish offer to be an admiral in their navy. Ultimately, he declined the position; by the next year the situation in England had sufficiently changed, and Charles II was proclaimed King.

Mary II (1662-94). Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1689-94). Daughter of James II and Anne Hyde, Mary married William of Orange in 1677. Despite her father`s conversation to Roman Catholicism she remained a loyal Protestant. During the Glorious revolution of 1688-89 she insisted that her husband should share her throne, and they were crowned jointly in 1689. A gracious and sincere woman, she played little significant part in the making of political decisions. During William`s prolonged absences from England due to the war with France, Mary assumed with dignity the duties of head of state. She died childless.

Anne (1665 - 1714) Queen of England and Scotland (Great Britain from 1707) and of Ireland (1702-14), the last Stuart sovereign. In 1683 she married Prince George of Denmark. A devout Anglican, she supported the Glorious Revolution (1688), which deposed her father James II and brought her brother in a law and sister, William III and Mary II, to the throne. In 1701, after the death of the last of the five her children who had survived birth (she was pregnant 18 times), she agreed to the Act of * Settlement, providing for the Hanoverian succession. Anne initially backed the war policy of John Churchill, duke of *Marlborough, whose wife Sarah had long exerted a strong influence on her, and unwillingly accepted the government of the Whig *junto. In 1710, however, with the War of the Spanish Succession in stalemate and the Whig leadership unpopular, Anne returned to her earlier Tory principles. Mrs*Masham supplanted Sarah Churchill, and the Tories under Harley and Bolingbroke replaced the junto. Anne`s Anglican sympathies led her to set up * Queen Anne`s Bounty in 1704, but the most significant event of her reign was *union with Scotland.

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