If it is
Baker or
Miller or
Taylor or
Carpenter or
Fisher or
Cook,
it means that at some time one of your ancestors was a
baker, or
miller, or
tailor, or
carpenter, or
fisher, or
cook.
If your name is Stuart or Steuart or Stewart or Steward, it means that at some time one of your ancestors was a steward for in olden days people knew very little about spelling, and they spelled the same name in different ways. A steward was a chief servant.
There was a family named Stuart in Scotland, and from chief servants or stewards they had become rulers of the Scots. Mary Stuart, whom Elizabeth had beheaded, was one of them.
As Queen Elizabeth never married, she had no children to rule after her. She was the last of the Tudor family. So the English had to look around for a new king, and they looked to Scotland.
Now, Scotland, as I have told you, was then a separate country and not a part of England as now. The son of Mary Stuart was then king of Scotland. His name was James Stuart. As he was related to the Tudors, the English invited him to come and rule over them. He accepted the invitation and was called James I. So we speak of his reign and that of his children as the reign of the Stuarts.
The Stuart family reigned for about a hundred years, that is, from 1600 to 1700, all except about eleven years when England had no king at all.
Many times the English must have been very sorry that they had ever invited James to be their king, for he and the whole Stuart family lorded it over the English people. They acted as if they were “lords of creation,” and the English people had to fight for their rights.
A body of men called Parliament were supposed to make the laws for the English people. But James said that Parliament could do nothing that he didn’t like, and if they weren’t very careful he wouldn’t let them do any governing at all. James said that whatever the king did was right, that the king could do no wrong, that God gave kings the right to do as they pleased with their subjects. This was called the Divine Right of Kings. Naturally the English people would not put up with this sort of thing. Ever since the time of King John they had insisted on their own rights. The Tudors had often done things that the people didn’t like, but the Tudors were English. The Stuarts, however, were Scotch, and the people looked on them as foreigners; what they permitted in one of their own family they wouldn’t stand in these strangers whom they had invited into their family. So, of course, a quarrel was bound to start. But the real fight came with the next king and not with James.