Stewart, HOUSE OF. The Norman Alan Fitzflaald (died c. 1114) got from Henry I. the lands and castle of Oswestry in Shropshire. His elder son, William Fitzalan (c. 1105-60), remaining in England, became the ancestor of the Earls of Arundel, from whom, through an heiress (1556), that earldom has passed to the Dukes of Norfolk. The second son, Walter (died 1177), coming to Scotland in the service of David I., had large possessions conferred on him in Renfrewshire, Teviotdale, Lauderdale, &c., along with the dignity of Steward of Scotland, which became hereditary in his family, and gave his descendants the surname of Stewart, by some branches modified to Steuart or the French form Stuart. The Fess Chequy (q.v.), adopted as the arms of the Stewarts, is emblematical of the chequer of the Stewart's board. The connection between the Stewarts and the Fitzalans was shown by Chalmers to have been well known and acknowledged so late as 1336, when Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, for 1000 marks surrendered to Edward III. his 'hereditary right' to the Stewardship of Scotland, which was supposed to have reverted to him through the forfeiture of the Scottish line.
For seven generations the Stewardship descended without a break from father to son. Walter, the grandson of the first Steward, held in addition the office of Justiciary of Scotland, and was one of the ambassadors sent in 1239 to fetch Marie de Couci, second wife of Alexander II. His third son, Walter, called Balloch, by his marriage with the daughter of Maurice, Earl of Menteith, got that earldom, which, by his great-granddaughter, Margaret, was conveyed to Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany, son of Robert II. Alexander, fourth Steward (1214-83), was regent of Scotland in Alexander III.'s minority; he commanded at the battle of Largs (q.v.) in 1263, and, invading the Isle of Man, annexed it to the Scottish crown. From his second son's marriage with the heiress of Bonkyl sprang the Stewarts of Darnley, Lenox, and Aubigné. James, the fifth Steward (1243-1309), was one of the six regents of Scotland after the death of Alexander III. Walter, the sixth Steward (1293-1326), occupies a conspicuous place among Bruce's companions-in-arms. He did good service at Bannockburn, and four years later successfully defended Berwick against Edward II. in person. His marriage in 1315 with Marjory, Bruce's daughter, eventually brought the crown of Scotland to his family—'It cam with ane lass,' in James V.'s well-known words. His son by Marjory, Robert, seventh Stewart (1316-90), on the death of David II. in 1371 ascended the throne as Robert II. He was twice married; first, in 1349, to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Adam Mure of Rowallan, and secondly, in 1355, to Euphemia, Countess of Moray, daughter of Hugh, Earl of Ross. Elizabeth Mure was related to him within the prohibited degrees, so in 1347 he had obtained a papal dispensation (only discovered in the Vatican in 1789) for the marriage, legitimising those children who had already been born. Hence, in later times, the descendants of this first marriage came to be branded with the suspicion of illegitimacy, while those of the second union would boast their preferable claim to the throne. His third son, Robert (c. 1349-1420), was in 1398 created Duke of Albany; the fourth, Alexander, who in 1374 got the earldom of Buchan on the forfeiture of the Comyns, is infamous in history as the 'Wolf of Badenoch.'
Between 1371 and 1714 (343 years) fourteen Stewarts sat upon the Scottish, and six of these also on the English, throne. A race unhappy as few, they were Robert II. (1316-90); Robert III. (c. 1340-1406), who died of grief, his elder son murdered, his second an English captive; James I. (1394-1437), for eighteen years a prisoner, afterwards murdered; James II. (1430-60), killed at the siege of Roxburgh; James III. (1451-88), murdered, with his son in rebellion against him; James IV. (1473-1513), slain at Flodden—his much-loved mistress, Margaret Drummond, was poisoned; James V. (1512-42), who died broken-hearted by the rout of Solway Moss; Mary (1542-87), beheaded at Fotheringhay, thrice a widow, and for twenty years a captive; James VI. and I. (1566-1625); Charles I. (1600-49), beheaded; Charles II. (1630-85), for fourteen years an exile; James VII. and II. (1633-1701), for twelve years of his youth an exile, and again for the last twelve of his old age; and Mary (1662-94) and Anne (1665-1714), his daughters, who supplanted him, and both died childless. Thus five of the fourteen met with a violent death; two died of grief; and eight succeeded as minors. All the above receive separate articles; but here may be noticed the son and the grandsons of James VII. and II.
By his second queen, Mary of Modena, James had one son, JAMES FRANCIS EDWARD, born at St James's Palace on 10th June 1688. Forty-two privy-councillors, ladies of rank, &c. (more than half of them Protestants) were present in the bed-chamber; but the warming-pan fiction fastened on him the nickname of Pretender. Six months later he was conveyed by his fugitive mother to St Germain, where his boyhood was passed, and where, on his father's death in 1701, he was proclaimed his successor. In an attempt, in March 1708, to make a descent upon Scotland, the young 'Chevalier de St George,' as he was styled by his adherents, showed some gallantry, but was not suffered to land; and after his return he served with the French in the Low Countries, at Malplaquet charging twelve times, and in the last charge receiving a sword-thrust in the arm. But in Mar's ill-conducted rebellion (see JACOBITES) he showed himself heavy, spiritless, even fearful, when, too late in the day, he landed at Peterhead (22d December 1715), and sneaked away six weeks afterwards from Montrose. France was now closed to him by the treaty of Utrecht, and almost all the rest of his fainéant, dissolute, prayerful life was passed at Rome, where he died on 1st January 1766. In 1719 he had married the beautiful and high-spirited Princess Clementina Sobieski (1702-35). She bore him two sons, but in 1725 was so disgusted by his preference for the titular Countess of Inverness as to retire for a while to a nunnery. He is buried in St Peter's.
His elder son, CHARLES EDWARD LOUIS PHILIP CASIMIR, known variously as the 'Young Pretender,' the 'Young Chevalier,' and 'Bonny Prince Charlie,' was born at Rome on 31st December 1720. His education was irregular, but from childhood he raised the hopes of the Jacobites by the promise of a bright and chivalrous nature. He first saw service at the siege of Gaeta (1734); fought bravely at Dettingen (1743); and next year repaired to France, to head Marshal Saxe's projected invasion of England. But the squadron which was to have conveyed the transports with 15,000 troops to Kent fled before the British fleet; the transports themselves were scattered by a tempest; and for a year and a half Charles was kept hanging on in France, until at last, sailing from Nantes, he landed with seven followers at Eriska in the Hebrides on 2d August 1745, and on the 19th raised his father's standard in Glenfinnan. The clansmen flocked in; on 17th September Edinburgh surrendered, though the castle still held out; and Charles held court at Holyrood, the palace of his ancestors. There followed the victory over Sir John Cope at Prestonpans (q.v.), the march upon London with 6500 men, the fatal turning at Derby (6th December), the victory over Hawley at Falkirk (17th January 1746), the crushing defeat by the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden (16th April), and Charles's five months' hidings and wanderings, with £30,000 set on his head, in the Hebrides and the western mainland, till on 20th September he got shipping from Moidart to Brittany. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) caused his forcible expulsion from France, and thereafter he lived successively at Avignon, Liège, Basel, Florence, and Rome. He seems to have paid two or three secret visits to London between 1750 and 1760; in 1766 succeeded to his father's empty titles; in 1772 married the ill-fated Countess of Albany (q.v.); and for forty years a miserable drunkard, died at Rome, 31st January 1788. By his Scottish mistress, Clementina Walkenshaw, he left a natural daughter, Caroline (1753-89), whom he had created Duchess of Albany. He was buried at Frascati, but translated to St Peter's.
See also COPE (SIR JOHN), CULLODEN, and MACDONALD (FLORA); Ewald's Life of Prince Charles Edward (1875); and A Lang's Pickle the Spy (1897).
His brother, HENRY BENEDICT MARIA CLEMENT, Duke of York, Cardinal, and Bishop of Frascati, was born at Rome, 5th March 1725. After the failure of the '45, when he had hastened to Dunkirk to support Prince Charles Edward, he resolved to take orders, and in 1747 received a cardinal's hat from Benedict XIV. Clement XIII. consecrated him Bishop of Corinth in partibus, and subsequently appointed him to the suburban see of Frascati, where he took up his residence. He enjoyed, through the favour of the French court, the revenues of two rich abbeys, as well as a Spanish pension; and the liberal charity with which he dispensed his income endeared him to his flock. On his brother's death in 1788 he caused a medal to be struck, bearing the Latin legend, 'Henry IX., king of England, by the grace of God, but not by the will of men.' The French Revolution stripped him of his fortune, but in 1796 he sold his family jewels to relieve the necessities of Pius VI. In 1798 the French plundered his villa, and he had to flee for his life to Venice. He returned in 1801 on the restoration of the papal authority, George III. having meanwhile in 1800 granted him a pension of £4000. This last, perhaps best, of the Stuarts died at the age of eighty-two on 13th July 1807. The crown-jewels, carried off from England by James II. 119 years before, were bequeathed by him to George IV., then Prince of Wales, who in 1819 caused Canova to erect a monument in St Peter's that bears the names of 'James III., Charles III., and Henry IX.'
Next to the exiled Stuarts in representation of the royal house as heir-of-line came the descendants of Henrietta (q.v.), Charles I.'s youngest daughter, who in 1661 was married to Philip, Duke of Orleans. From this marriage sprang Anne-Mary (1669-1728), who married Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy (q.v.) and king of Sardinia; their son, Charles Emmanuel III. (1701-73), king of Sardinia; his son, Victor Amadeus III. (1726-96), king of Sardinia; his son, Victor Emmanuel I. (1759-1824), king of Sardinia; his daughter, Mary (1792-1840), who married Francis, Duke of Modena; their son, Ferdinand (1821-49), who married Elizabeth of Austria; and their daughter, Maria Teresa (born 1849), who in 1868 married Prince Louis of Bavaria, and whom, as 'Mary III. and IV.,' the 'Legitimist Jacobites' of 1891 put forward as the 'representative of the Royal House of these realms.' Rupert, her son, was born at Munich on 18th May 1869, and is ninth in descent from Charles I.
The branch of the family which the Act of Settlement (1701) called to the throne on the death of Queen Anne were the descendants of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of James VI. and I. by her mother, the Princess Elizabeth (q.v.), Electress Palatine and Queen of Bohemia. By that act not only were the above-mentioned descendants of Charles I.'s daughter, Henrietta of Orleans, excluded, but also the Roman Catholic descendants of the Princess Elizabeth's sons. Her Majesty Queen Victoria is twenty-second in descent from Walter Fitzalan, sixteenth from Robert II., and eighth from James VI. and I.
Before proceeding to glance at the cadets of the House of Stewart we may notice here ARABELLA STUART, who, born in 1575, was the daughter of the Earl of Lenox, Darnley's younger brother, so a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII., a third cousin to Queen Elizabeth, and a first cousin to James VI. and I. She lost her father at two, her mother at six, and was brought up by her maternal grandmother, the imperious Bess of Hardwick. At the age of twenty-seven, shortly before Elizabeth's death, she was suspected of having a lover in the boy William Seymour, who had Tudor blood in his veins; but on James's accession she was restored to favour, only, however, to contract a secret marriage in 1610 with him. Both were imprisoned, and both escaped—Seymour successfully to Ostend, she unsuccessfully in man's attire, for she was retaken in the Straits of Dover. She died, insane, in the Tower of London, 25th September 1615.
See the Life of her by Elizabeth Cooper (2 vols. 1866) and that by Mary E. Bradley (2 vols. 1889).
The cadets of the house may be divided into four classes: (1) descendants of Robert II.; (2) descendants of natural sons of his descendants; (3) descendants of natural sons of Stewart kings; and (4) legitimate branches of the Stuarts before their accession to the throne. To the first belong the Stuarts of Castle-Stewart, descended from Robert, Duke of Albany, Robert II.'s third son, through the Lords Avondale and Ochiltree. They received the titles of Lord Stuart of Castle-Stewart in the peerage of Ireland (1619), Viscount Castle-
Stewart (1793), and Earl (1809). To the second class belong the Stuart Earls of Traquair (1633-1861), descended from a natural son of James Stewart, Earl of Buchan. To the third class belong the Regent Moray (q.v.), the Marquis of Bute, and the Shaw-Stewarts; and to the fourth belong the Earls of Galloway (from a brother of the fifth High Steward), the Lords Blantyre, the Stuarts of Fort-Stewart, and the Stuarts of Grandtully (from the fourth High Steward; the last baronet died in 1890).
See, besides works cited at JACOBITES, under the different Stewart sovereigns, and in Marshall's Genealogist's Guide (2d ed. 1885), Stewart genealogies, &c. by Symson (1712), Hay of Drumboote (1722), Duncan Stewart (1739), Noble (1795), Andrew Stewart of Castle-milk (1798), A. G. Stuart (for Castle-Stewart branch, 1854), Sir W. Fraser (for Grandtully branch, 1868), W. A. Lindsay (1888); William Townend, History of the Descendants of the Stuarts (1858); the Marchesa Campana de Cavelli, Les Derniers Stuarts à Saint-Germain en Laye (2 vols. 1871); Percy M. Thornton, The Stuart Dynasty (1890); Gibb and Skelton, The Royal House of Stuart (1890), with fine illustrations of relics shown at the Stuart exhibition of 1888-89; and Hewison, Bute in the Olden Time (2 vols. 1894-95).