Another from my failed attempt to do categories for winter reading program. The Stuarts are interesting, but it didn't grab me as much as Tudor drama does. That being said, it was a nice recall back to AP Euro and the doc we watched that had an overly dramatic reenactment of Charles I's beheading. ( )

I enjoyed this. It's easy light reading and fairly interesting. Extremely readable.
I don't know much about this period in history yet so I can't say if this was accurate or off. However, the author references Sir Walter Scott often and so I'm guessing not that accurate.
None the less an entertaining and light look at the Stuart Monarchs. ( )

Covering the history of the Stuart dynasty from the Middle Ages through the 18th century is a daunting topic and yet this volume manages to accomplish it in less than 400 pages. The result is, as might be expected, dense. At times, that density made this book difficult read, but I did appreciate the amount of detail and story the author managed to include. While I felt I understood much of the history surrounding the Stuarts prior to this book, I discovered new things and there a several topics and historical figures mentioned that I hope to explore further. ( )

Another from my failed attempt to do categories for winter reading program. The Stuarts are interesting, but it didn't grab me as much as Tudor drama does. That being said, it was a nice recall back to AP Euro and the doc we watched that had an overly dramatic reenactment of Charles I's beheading. ( )

From the Stuart History reading program. (See After Elizabeth, Nell Gwynn, Arbella, and Unnatural Murder). Author Allan Massie is a Scot and therefore expected to be sympathetic – and is, but not without also being able to call out stupidity and stubbornness when he sees it.

Nothing if not thorough, Massie starts all the way back in the 11th century, with Flaad Fitzalan, steward of the Count of Dol in Brittany. (Enthusiasts for the historicity of Holinshed’s Chronicles and thus Shakespeare’s Macbeth take “Flaad” to be a corruption of “Fleance”). One of Flaad’s sons turned up in Norman England, where Henry I gave him a post on the Welsh Marches, presumably because Breton and Welsh might be mutually intelligible – or at least more so than Welsh and Norman French. A couple of generations later the family turns up in Scotland as, not surprisingly, stewards. When King David II died without issue Robert the Steward became Robert II, King of Scots. (Massie points out that it was always “King (or, once, Queen) of Scots”, never of Scotland, emphasizing that the role was more like that of a clan chieftain than a national ruler). This led to a line of eight royal Stewarts (eventually changed to “Stuart”, supposedly because it was easier for French to pronounce). It was not good to be the King in medieval and Renaissance Scotland; despite various attempts to exercise royal power the King was never more than first among equals. The tendency for Stuarts to die young meant their heirs were often minors and thus prey to whatever noble family could get ahold of them. They didn’t do that much better after James VI of Scots became James I of England. Although James ruled reasonably well, his son Charles I was executed by Cromwell; and although Charles II rolled merrily along through the Restoration his brother James II was deposed by his own daughter Mary II. The line continued in exile (“over the water”), with James III (the “Old Pretender”) and Charles III (“Bonny Prince Charlie”, the “Young Pretender”) making ineffectual but bloody attempts to invade England. The direct line ceased in 1807 with the death of Charles III’s younger brother Cardinal Henry, who had crowned himself “Henry IX”. James III, Charles III, and Henry IX are all buried in St. Peters (with perhaps a sense of irony, George IV contributed to the cost of their monuments). The current candidate recognized by most Jacobites is Franz von Bayern, who manages to combine being Pretender to the Thrones of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Bavaria with being a Dachau survivor.

Massie is primarily a novelist and newspaper columnist rather than a historian, but I didn’t find any noticeable disagreements with other histories I’ve read (He does have an understandable tendency to quote Sir Walter Scott, but Scott was no mean historian himself). Well indexed; the chapter references sometimes seem a little sparse and there’s a “Notes for Further Reading” appendix instead of a bibliography. One disappointment is no illustrations; there’s a “List of Illustrations” in the front matter but they never appear in the text. ( )