The Stuart Line.
Henceforth, for much time to come, we shall meet—when we encounter British royalty at all—with men of the house of Stuart. But how comes about this shifting of the thrones from the family of Tudor to the family of Stuart? I explained in a recent chapter how the name of Tudor became connected with the crown, by the marriage of a Welsh knight—Owen Tudor—with Katharine, widow of Henry V. Now let us trace, if we can, this name of Stuart. Henry VII. was a Tudor, and so was Henry VIII.; so were his three children who succeeded him—Edward, the bigot Mary, and Elizabeth; no one of these, however, left direct heirs; but Henry VIII. had a sister, Margaret, who married James IV. of Scotland. This James was a lineal descendant of a daughter of Robert Bruce, who had married Walter Stuart, the chief of a powerful Scotch family. That James I. of whom I have spoken, who was a delicate poet, and so long a prisoner in Windsor Tower, was great-grandson of this Stuart-daughter of Robert Bruce. And from him—that is from James I.—was directly descended James IV., who married the sister of Henry VIII. James IV. had a son, succeeding him, called James V. who by a French marriage, became the father of that Frenchy queen, poor Marie of Scotland, who suffered at Fotheringay, and who had married her cousin, Henry Darnley (he also having Stuart blood), by whom she had a son, James Stuart—being James VI. of Scotland and James I. of England, who now succeeds Elizabeth.
This strong Scotch strain in the Stuart line of royalty will explain, in a certain degree, how ready so clannish a people as the Scotch were to join insurrection in favor of the exiled Stuarts; a readiness you will surely remember if you have read Waverley and Redgauntlet. And in further confirmation of this clannish love, you will recall the ever-renewed and gossipy boastfulness with which the old Scotch gentlewoman, Lady Margaret Bellenden, in Old Mortality, tells over and over of the morning when his most gracious majesty Charles II. partook of his disjune at Tillietudlem Castle.
But we have nothing to do with so late affairs now, and I have only made this diversion into Scotland to emphasize the facts about the Stuart affiliation to the throne of England, and the reasons for Scotch readiness to fling caps in the air for King Charlie or for the Pretender.