Why the Stuarts Still Matter

The descendants of the Servant of God, Mary Queen of Scots, include Blesseds and Servants of God and Orthodox Saints as well as an Anglican "Saint".

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe, KC*SS, STM

The man in the moon
May wear out his shoon
By running after Charles his wain

But all’s to no end,
For the times will not mend
Till the King enjoys his own again

Yes, this I can tell
That all will be well
When the King enjoys his own again

—Cavalier Ballad

Late January and early February feature several anniversaries observed by various enthusiasts across the globe: January 25 is Burns Night, beloved by Burns and St. Andrew’s Societies as well as Scots in general everywhere; January 30, the day on which Charles I was murdered by Oliver Cromwell in 1649; January 31, when his great-grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie (de jure Charles III) died in Roman exile in 1788; and February 8, the date upon which Mary Queen of Scots was judicially murdered on orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I.  These three Monarchs were all members of the ill-starred House of Stuart, in praise of whom Burns wrote some of his most poignant songs and poems.  Despite the beauty of the latter, one might well ask what the tragic history of an ever-defeated family has to do with us?  The answer is – quite a bit, really.

Mary Queen of Scots came to a tragic end, but she had two victories – religious and temporal – over her murderers, in both England and Scotland.  The second was relatively simple: her son James VI became James I when his mother’s chief murderess died without descendants.  He brought his mother’s body to Westminster Abbey, with honours worthy of a Queen.  The first is that, beyond that, she herself is a Servant of God.  Her grandson, Charles I, was the only individual the Church of England ever tried to canonise – and is revered by some Catholics for his attempts at reunion (and the role they played in his murder).  His son, James II, is in his turn a Servant of God.  Of her many other descendants, Tsar Nicholas II is a canonised saint among the Orthodox Churches.  For Catholics, Louis XVI is certainly a martyr if not yet a saint, and his sister, Madame Elizabeth, has just been made a Servant of God.  Bl. Maria Cristina of Savoy was beatified a few years ago, and her son Francis II, last King of the Two Sicilies, was recently made a Servant of God.  Most notably, both Bl. Emperor Karl and his wife, Servant of God Zita, descended from the redoubtable Queen of Scots.  Such extraordinary progeny should catch our attention.  Indeed, the mixture of piety, warfare, politics, culture, art, and romance that has always characterised the House of Stuart would be worthy of remembrance even if it had not left such a long mark on the present.

Hailing originally from Dol in Brittany, Alan fitz Flaad came to England not long after the Norman Conquest.  One of his sons stayed in England, becoming the ancestor of the current Dukes of Norfolk and other noble houses.  The other went to Scotland, where he became Hereditary High Steward – his progeny adopting the title as their surname.  The sixth of these, Walter Stewart (1293–1326), married the daughter of King Robert the Bruce (of William Wallace and Braveheart fame), and fought alongside him in the Battle of Bannockburn gaining further favour.  Their son Robert was heir to the House of Bruce; when his uncle David II died childless in 1371, he became King Robert II.  His son would be Robert III; but his son would be James I, and the remaining Stuart Kings of Scots would be called James until Mary’s father, James V.  In all that time, the various branches multiplied, so that in addition to the Royal line clans like the Stewarts of Appin emerge, who were related to the Kings but could be just as restive as any of the others.  In addition to trying to keep some unity among the clans, the Stuart Kings had to deal with both the Norwegians and the English, although the latter threat was somewhat balanced by the “Auld Alliance” with France.

As noticed, after Elizabeth died, Mary’s son James VI became James I of England.  Although not the friend to the Catholic Church that his mother and most of his offspring would be, he began the settlement of English North America, which is why the first capital of Virginia was Jamestown and the Mayflower Compact speaks of “our dread Sovereign James I.”  The Protestants revere his King James version of the Bible, and certainly it has played a huge role in English-language literature ever since.

His son, Charles I, ended up fighting the Oligarchy that controlled parliament for mastery of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the attached colonies.  It was an epic struggle that saw Catholics and High Anglicans combine with the Celtic Fringe to fight Puritans, Ulster Scots, and great Bourgeoisie.  As recounted in The Cousins’ Wars by Kevin Phillips, it also set the stage for the following conflicts – the Jacobite Wars, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War – which transformed the Anglosphere into the anti-Catholic and ever-expanding colossus it has become.  Although the defeat of Charles I’s great-grandson, Bonnie Prince Charlie, at Culloden in 1746 ended the practical possibility of a Stuart Restoration, the Stuart cause was remembered and referred to by a great many worth-while folk to follow.  A delegation from the Continental Congress offered Bonnie Prince Charlie the Crown of America in 1781 – one wonders what would have happened had he accepted!

Part of this was because they had rooted themselves deeply in their Catholicism and their various countries’ legendry and folklore.  As Murray Pittock writes:

Subsequently, it was to be ‘those who supported the Divine Right of Kings’ who ‘upheld the historicity of Arthur;’ whereas those who did not turned instead ‘to the laws and customs of the Anglo-Saxons.’ Arthur remained a figure central to Stuart propaganda. Stuart iconography celebrated the habits and beliefs of the ancient Britons. In particular, the Royal Oak, still a central symbol of the dynasty, was closely related to ideas about Celtic fertility ritual, and the King’s power as an agent of renewal: ‘The oak, the largest and strongest tree in the North, was venerated by the Celts as a symbol of the supreme power.’

It was thus fitting that an oak should protect Charles II from the Cromwellian troops who wished to strip the sacred new Arthur of his status. The story confirmed the King’s mystical authority, and also his close friendship with nature. Long after 1688, the Stuart dynasty was to be closely linked with images of fertility. In literature, Arthurian images of the Stuarts persisted into the nineteenth century. This ‘Welsh messiah, the warrior who will come to overthrow the Saxons and Normans,’ was an icon of the Stuarts’ claim to be Kings of all Britain, both ‘Political Hero’ and ‘National Messiah,’ in Arthurian mould.

Arthur’s status as a legendary huntsman (‘the figure of the Wild Huntsman is sometimes identified with Arthur’) was also significant. The Stuarts made much of hunting: it helped to confirm their heroic status as stewards of nature and the land. In doing this, they identified themselves not only with Arthur, but with Fionn, the legendary Gaelic warlord who was in the eighteenth century to be the subject of James Macpherson’s pro-Stuart Ossian poems. Fionn, legends of whom abound in Scotland, was also, like Arthur, scheduled to wake and deliver the nation when danger threatened. In identifying with both figures, the Stuarts were able to simultaneously present themselves as Gaelic and British monarchs.

This symbolism was used with peculiar adroitness in Ireland, where the Stuarts were almost never identified with Arthur, but rather with Fionn and heroes from Fionn’s own time. Charles Edward was compared to Fergus, Conall, Conroy, and Angus Oge, while his grandfather became for some a symbol of Ireland herself, a Fenian hero in the making, a foreshadower of the sacrificial politics of such as Pearse: ‘Righ Shemus, King James, represented the faith of Erin, and so became her comrade in martyrdom.’ In famous eighteenth century songs like ‘the Blackbird,’ Ireland was presented as an abandoned woman, waiting for the return of her hero-King.

The same symbolism was used in Scotland. ‘The Gaelic messianic tradition’ of Fionn suggested that the Stuart King would one day return to bring light and fecundity to the land. In the Highlands of Scotland, the events of Jacobitism themselves passed into folklore, like the older stories to which they were related. More educated Jacobite sympathisers compared the Stuarts to the heroes of the Roman Republic, to Aeneas, or to the saints. But the view of them as sacred monarchs of folkloric tradition and power was one which endured among all ranks.

This hold on the imagination of their former realms outlasted both the death of the Bonnie Prince in 1788 and his Cardinal brother in 1807.  Already, with the recognition of George III as King by the Holy See in 1766 (on the death of James III, Prince Charlie’s father) the practical loyalty of Catholics had begun to shift.  George III’s being the first of his line to have English as his first language and to take up many of the Stuart concerns (including, before France entered the American War in 1778, Catholic Emancipation) helped seal the loyalty – and it also helped that the King supported his Stuart rival after the latter lost all of his possessions to the French Revolution. 

The rise of Romanticism in the British Isles – presaged by Jacobite sympathiser Robert Burns and spurred by his disciple, Sir Walter Scott, not only rehabilitated Catholicism and the Middle Ages, it did so for the Stuarts and the Jacobites.  George IV himself was so enchanted with Scott’s work that he threw himself into Welsh, Irish, and Scots literature and folklore, and was a closet Jacobite, despite his own family’s origins.  As a result (and his visits to Scotland and Ireland), he was much more popular among the Celts than the English.

During the long reign of Queen Victoria, the Oxford Movement, the wave of conversions to Catholicism, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the defeat of such kindred Continental Movements as French Legitimism, Carlism, Miguelism, and the like, led to a Neo-Jacobite Movement in the 1880 and 90s – in both Britain and America.  Never a mass movement, it nevertheless encompassed a great many intellectuals and artists who are well know even to-day.  It also had a great effect on such men as Chesterton and Belloc – in many ways the Stuarts shaped their vision, as they did for the Inklings, whose own vision of Kingship in their various works owed a great deal to the reality of the Stuarts.

So what was that reality, and why we should care?  As the rundown of both Mary’s saintly descendants’ works and the exploits of her direct male descendants shows, they epitomised a self-sacrificial leadership that attempted to participate in Christ’s Kingship by emulating His sacrifice.  They upheld the rights of the low against the high – and vice versa.  Unlike their centralising successors, the Stuarts believed in ruling each of their Kingdoms separately, and according to their own laws – and maintaining local liberties.  What we still consider to be democracy, they and their adherents saw for what it is – rule by Oligarchs, something some of us picked up during COVID.  Above all, they saw God and His Church as the centre of life, law, and society. 

In their realms, as with their relations on the Continent, the opposite views have prevailed, and in our day are completely triumphant to the point that what they stood for is completely off the political menu.  Most “acceptable” parties represent one faction or another of the dominant Oligarchy.  “The “unacceptable” parties against which firewalls are erected are composed of the disaffected, produced by decades of noneducation, unchurching, and ever lower imposed standards of immorality.  They are an unstable coalition of views, fuelled by a praiseworthy disgust with what they have, but little or no knowledge of real alternatives.  We are continually urged by media to passionately throw ourselves into whatever is on offer.  This seems a foolish endeavour.

Let us look for leaders who resemble the Stuarts – or rather, their better representatives.  Men who have a deep Catholic Faith, who have been and are willing to risk themselves for their fellows, who are concerned with every aspect of the lives their fellows actually lead, from economics to culture.  There are few of any such in the field to-day, to be sure.  But then let us look at those who followed them and try to emulate the best of their loyalty.  Perhaps we shall have the best of rulers when we ourselves are the best of subjects.

On a final note, before Queen Elizabeth II died, it was often said that her son, who had crossed swords with many “experts” over liberalising trends in various areas of modern life from architecture to education, would not take the name “Charles III” when he died.  This, it was said, would be far too Stuart and Catholic; rather he would be George VII, in emulation of his grandfather.  But in the end, Charles III was indeed the name he took.  I would be the last to claim that His Majesty is anything like as great as his Stuart predecessors; but it is nice to think that there is someone – anyone – in public life, who thinks them at all worthy of trying to emulate.