What was Culloden all about?
Charles Stuart had been awarded the title Prince of Wales when he was born in 1720. His father had become King James 8 & 3 on the death of James's father James 7 & 2, who had been the legitimate monarch of Scotland, and monarch of England and Ireland since 1685. King James 8 & 3 had been the previous Prince of Wales until inheriting the throne upon the death of his father in 1701.
The title "Prince of Wales" was traditionally given to the male heir to the English throne, where that heir was the king's son. James 7 & 2's son James (!) was born in 1687 while his father was king, and was accordingly given the Prince of Wales title.
There was a problem, however. England had been invaded in 1787 by a Dutch army organised by James 7 & 2's son-in-law, William, Prince of Orange. In the face of that army James 7 & 2 had fled England, never to return.
Upon fleeing, the English nabobs had declared James's wise act of evading ending up the same way as his father, Charles 1, with his head in a basket and his body twitching somewhere else as an effective act of abdication.
The nabobs, in an act of realpolitik, declared the Prince of Orange to be King William 2 & 3, and his wife, James 7 & 2's daughter, as Mary 2. In this way, the Stuarts ruled on.
The heir to William 2 & 3 and Mary 2 was agreed to be Mary's sister, Anne Stuart, unless William and Mary had a child. In 1694, Mary 2 died childless. William 2 & 3 ruled on, with Anne still heir. It was agreed if William remarried and had a child, that child would become heir. But he didn't, even to escape Jacobite accusations of homosexuality.
Throughout the 1690s, the ongoing childlessness of William, and of Anne's periods of ill health and regular stillbirths and miscarriages didn't cause any issues regarding the existence of an heir in the case of her carking it before Billy as Anne had a son, born in 1689.
Unfortunately, this lad died in 1700. Anne, as it happens, very sadly had her last pregnancy, as far as I'm aware, end in miscarriage in the same year. Although Anne was only 35, the English nabobs had no expectation of her having a successful pregnancy; correctly, as it turned out.
The nabobs had no particular reason to believe William 2 & 3 would die soon, but he showed no signs of remarrying and having legitimate children. If Anne predeceased him, or even if she inherited after his death, the time was fast approaching when England would be left without a clear heir, leading to the possibility of one of the Jimboes, either the former 7 & 2 or his son, managing to crawl their way back onto the throne.
Anne's son's death led to a greater degree of urgency among those English nabobs who weren't secret Jacobites. They became desperate to stop the Jimboes getting back on the throne.
Why? Well, it's a long and interesting story, but it's not for here. However, the short of it was that James the former 7 & 2 and James the would-be-if-he-could-be 8 & 3 were followers of a christian sect called Roman Catholicism. Most English nabobs were followers of various Protestant christian sects, principally the Church of England. That's really all I've got the time for at the moment. Sorry!
So, the English nabobs, without as far as is known consulting the Scots, resolved to have legislation passed both banning Roman Catholics from the throne, and specifying the rightful heir. While this wouldn't necessarily ensure the Jimboes didn't finagle their way back onto the throne, but it would make it more tricky.
Allegedly, to find a protestant heir the English nabobs had to pass over the first 55 heirs apparent as they were either Catholics, or married to people who were.
I understand several of these bozoes were approached, but were uninterested either in the job, or in changing christian sects from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.
Finally, at number 56 (or thereabouts) they hit paydirt. Number 56 was Protestant, raised in The Hague in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years War while her family was in exile, and therefore was known to William 2 & 3. William met her at a meeting in the Netherlands, sounded her out, and gave her prospective succession his approval.
Jumping at the chance, Sophia of the Palatine (or "Palatinate"), was Dowager Duchess of Brunswick and Lüneburg, and possibly and maybe arguably Dowager Electress or maybe even Electress of Brunswick and Lüneburg*. She was 35 years older than Anne Stuart, who was 35 at the time.
*"The Palatine" was the principality in what is now south western Germany of which Sophia's father was very briefly the Elector, before he and his wife, a daughter of James 6 & 1 of Scotland, England, and Ireland, fled to the Hague, where Sophia was born and raised, only moving back to the Palatine after her brother regained it.
"Dowager" just means Sophia was the widow of the previous Duke and mother of the current one.
Some sources reckon she was the Elector or Electress of Hanover. The Electors were the highest level of nobility under the Emperor and were nominally responsible for electing the successor of a dead emperor.
I've written "nominally" because by this time the list of choices was limited to one, whoever was the next Hapsburg family member in line.
In fact, Sophie could never have been the "Elector" as that was a title only granted to men.
Further, it's unclear to me whether or not Sophia's husband was entitled to call himself the "Elector" of Brunswick and Lüneburg. It's true he was made a "prince-elector" (that is, ready to become an elector) in 1692 (1696 in some sources) by the Holy Roman Emperor, the overarching ruler of the various Germanic principalities, based in Vienna. Brunswick and Lüneburg was to be the 9th Electorate in the empire.
However, the appointment still required the approval of the Imperial Diet (Parliament).
The idea of elevating the Duke to Elector had two motivations, and I'm unsure which was the most important, although I have my very strong suspicions. The duke had been providing substantial financial and military aid to the emperor and needed a reward to encourage him to keep up with the giving.
Further, it had also been a political move to increase the number of Protestant electors, to minimise the Protestants' constant carping about being dominated by Catholics.
However, the Roman Catholic electors and members of the larger Diet got peeved and ended up delaying the formal approval of the nomination until 1708, a full decade after Sophia's husband's death, and 16 years after the emperor mooting his elevation.
So, the first formally approved Elector of Brunswick and Lüneburg was actually the duke's heir, his and Sophia's son George, the reigning Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg.
On this basis, it would seem therefore that the first woman formally entitled to the honourific of Electress for that electorate was Sophia's daughter-in-law.
Whatever the case, even if she was entitled to call herself "Electress" while her husband was alive, and to continue doing so after his death, she was never the Electress of "Hanover".
While the common name for the Duchy and later the Electorate of Brunswick and Lüneburg was "Hanover", in Sophia's day that was not the formal name, nor was Brunswick-Lüneburg. "Hanover" which was simply the capital of the duchy.
Okay, back to the important stuff. Unlike Anne Stuart, in 1701, despite her age, Sophia was fit, healthy, and at least in her younger years more successfully fecund than Anne, with a number of living adult sons and daughters and legitimate grandchildren who were both Protestant and married to Protestants.
So the English nabobs reckoned they were onto a good thing, and let's face it they couldn't be worse than the male Stuarts had been already. In June 1701 legislation was brought into operation making Sophia and her descendants heirs after William and Anne, so long as those two remained childless, and so long as Sophia and her heirs remained Protestant.
Later, after a glitsch had been discovered in the succession plan, in 1705 legislation was passed giving Sophia and the "heirs of her body" English citizenship, so long as she and her heirs remained Protestant! This law stayed in place until 1948, and some of Sophia's descendants who benefited from it are still alive in the 21st Century!
Shortly after the English nabobs passed their 1701 legislation, in September 1701 one of their Jacobite bêtes noires carked it and Jimbo the former 7 & 2 stepped off his mortal coil.
However, his son showed he was just as serious a threat as his father. He declared himself James 8 & 3, and the French king Louis 14 recognised him as such. Of course, Louis was just up to his troublemaking best, and was on the opposite side to the English in the Spanish War of Succession.
In the malarkey about the succession, and the selection of Sophia and her descendants as the heirs to the heir you might have noted my specific references to the English nabobs. As far as we know, no consultation took place with the Scots. This expectation by the English they had the right to treat Scotland like the colonies of Wales and Ireland peeved them mightily.
This led the Scots to try to force the English to accept their right to appoint their own monarch who would specifically not be the same as the English monarch. Needless to write, the English refused, apparently unaccepting of any right to the consultation the Scots expected,
The Scots then tried to be smarter than their brains could allow, trying to force the English to accept the Scots' point of view by threatening English trade. What the silly buggers didn't understand was that the English had more control over Scotland's trade than vice versa.
Subsequently, the Scottish nabobs, driven into a corner with their naked bums in the air, ripe for a good English rogering, agreed their profits were more important than the interests of their fellow Scots.
Subsequently, in 1707 they signed into extinction the Scottish parliament. Worse, they signed away Scotland's independence by uniting the two monarchies under the title United Kingdom, a kingdom entirely controlled by the English.
After all this, to describe the Scottish Jacobites as very highly angry would be an infinitely huge understatement.
However, I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
Not long after James the former 7 & 2 carked it, in 1702 William 2 & 3 was unexpectedly also sent on his way to the infinite when his horse chucked him off, he broke a collar bone, and due to being laid up in bed caught pneumonia and fell right out of his future. Ironically, the horse had been seized from a Jacobite!
To explain, Jacobus is the Latin for James, hence the name given to their supporters was "Jacobites". This title should not to be mistaken for Jacobean, meaning something from the reign of James 6 & 1, or Jacobin, a completely unrelated republican club during the much later French revolution.
So, Anne Stuart duly became Queen Anne 1, although unlike William 2 & 3, her husband, a Protestant younger brother of the Danish king, did not become king, and Anne, unlike Mary 2, ruled in her own right.
There had been several unsuccessful efforts to get the make-believe James 8 & 3 in place as a real king, thus putting his son the make-believe Prince of Wales in place as a real prince. These were not just Scottish efforts, nor were they just Roman Catholic efforts.
As it happens, a particularly traditionalist and reactionary sector of the loosely connected conservative group called the Tories, despite mostly being strongly Protestant, indeed anti-Roman Catholic, implicitly believed the James's were wrongly robbed of their throne, and James 7 & 2's heir should be bunged on it ASAP.
These bozoes believed this was "right" even though the Jimboes and Chilla were Catholics. To them, William, Mary, Anne and the Georges were usurpers.
until 1745 Charles, Prince of Wales, had not set foot in either Scotland or England, and never set foot in Ireland. Further, his father James also never set foot in Ireland, left England never to return at a couple of months old in 1688, and had only spent 6 weeks or so in Scotland in 1715/16. I'm also fairly sure neither of them ever set foot in their putative principality of Wales!
Oh, by the way, for centuries the English had occupied Wales and, on paper and via the titles of both the king of England's oldest son and the kingdom itself, Wales was subsumed into England. Fortunately, the Welsh, or at least some of them, especially those of more traditional Welsh descent, particularly in the north, have not accepted they're English.
But as it happened, Charles Stuart was not the only person to reckon they were the Prince of Wales, just as James was not the only person to reckon they were the king of England, Ireland, and Scotland.
So in 1745 there were two Princes of Wales and two kings of Scotland, England, and Ireland. Two were recognised by most of the United Kingdom's subjects and the others claiming they were the rightful holders of that title, one on the basis of inheritance from his father, the improperly dethroned king James 7 & 2.
Or if that was unacceptable, after Anne 1 died he had also been 55 spots higher on the inheritance ladder than George 1, the Hanoverian usurper. In fact, he was on top of that ladder. The other claimed to be the Prince of Wales as the title had been granted to him by his father on the basis of being the king's oldest son and heir.
One guess which of these dumboes Charles Stuart was!
Highlanders were the first to collect under Charles Stuart's standard of , the claimed or "pretend" Prince of Wales. The title "Prince of Wales" is that given to whoever is the male heir to the English throne, and since the throne of Scotland. But Charles's army gradually included soldiers of Irish heritage, most of whom were Roman Catholics enlisted in the French king's army, English anti-catholic Stuart supporters who believed in the divine right of kings whatever their religion and who believed the present king and his father were usurpers, English catholic supporters; Lowlander supporters, both Catholic and Protestant, some Irish nationalists, and many Scottish nationalists who wanted their independence from England back.
The whole affair was a frightful schemozzle, and despite early successes because most of the English army was on the continent taking part in the so-called War of the Austrian Succession, believe it or not.
The weakest part of the whole rebellion was its useless, drunken, fancy-pants, layabout, militarily inexperienced, both strategically and tactically incompetent, and ineffably stupid leader. Chalie boy himself. Whenever I think of him for some reason I'm always reminded of Charley Farley BA (Calcutta) (Failed), the great comedic invention of the Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. Except there was nothing funny about Charlie Stuart.
So who was this useless wanker, and why did he think he had some right to turn up in Scotland and demand men follow him into rebellion. How did things get to this disastrous spot?
Charlie was the son of the equally uselessly dangerous loser James Stuart, who in turn was the son of the last Catholic king of England, James 7 and 2, who was such a useless loser he got chucked off the throne. Mind you, he wasn't quite as bad as his father, Charles 1 (who by that time was the first of his name in either Scotland or England), who not only lost his throne, but was so stupidly careless he lost his head as well.
William of Orange's mother was a sister of James the now former 7 & 2, so although not top of the list of Protestant bloodline successors to the throne, he had a good claim. However, top of the list was Willy's wife Mary, the older of James the former 7 & 2's two protestant daughters.
So James the former 7 & 2 was replaced on the throne by Mary 2, whom parliament decreed would rule jointly with her first cousin, who was also her husband, who was crowned as William 3 & 2.
Parliament thus bypassed the person at the very top of a full areligious list of the succession, apart from the recently self-deposed king whom parliament decreed had "abdicated" by buggering off in the face of William of Orange's invasion army - just as his useless whacker of a grandson was to do when the Battle of Culloden began to look like a loser for him.
Oh, the person otherwise at the top of the list? The Roman Catholic James, son of James the former 7 & 2, and Mary 2's older brother. And that useless whacker Charlie's useless whacker of a father.
All-in-all, the 1688 invasion and rebellion were successful. The new monarchs, in order to get themselves crowned, had agreed to a series of reforms, turning the power base in England more towards its parliament and courts. So everyone was happy, weren't they?
I mean, fortunately few deaths were incurred, at least prior to James the former 7 & 2's attempt to come back via Ireland. Oh, and not to forget the Protestant Viscount of Dundee's unsuccessful rebellion in Scotland fought between his army of supporters of James 7 & 2 and the more extreme Protestant "covenanter" supporters of William 2 & 3 and Mary 2. Dundee was killed while his troops won their first battle, but his former troops were beaten at their second and final battle, at least of this rebellion.
The particular covenanters who defeated the were Cameronians, a sect of the Protestant Presbyterian church especially fanatical and virulently violent towards anything smacking of "papism", meaning suspected of being plotted by Roman Catholics, and/or "episcopalianism", meaning putting bishops between the people and their preacher and their christian deity, as in both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic sects, and in reforms the English kings Charles 2 and James 7 & 2 were attempting to force on the mainly Scottish Presbyterians.
Perhaps fortunately for the Hanoverians, Charles didn't produce a legitimate heir, despite his last ditch effort to legitimise his daughter Caroline, so the last in the legitimate and direct Stuart bloodline seems to have been Charles' younger brother Henry, who as a Roman Catholic cardinal was not allowed to marry unless he chucked in his church position, which he was unwilling to do, so he was therefore unable to produce a legitimate heir.
However, that's 80 or 90 years away, and at the time of our current interrest, well mine anyway, the Stuarts are infighting between the Catholic and Protestant lines.
Willy 2 & 3's wife Mary 2 died of smallpox in 1694. Those of you opposed to childhood vaccinations should remember that. Why, you may ask. Children don't require vaccination against anything called smallpox. Is it like chicken pox?Well, of course you've not heard of it, and you're right children don't require vaccination against it. But the reason why is it has been wiped out worldwide following a massive and highly successful vaccination program!
Oh, I should mention a mob called the Jacobites. They were supporters of James the former 7 & 2, from the Latin for James, Jacobus.
Despite the similarity, this term should not be confused with:
So, the Jacobites reckoned Mary's sad death, without leaving a living child, was due penalty for her breach of the 5th commandment from their religious book, the Bible, which in translation apparently reads something like "you will honour your father". I wouldn't have thought such a comment accorded with what I know of the alleged views of their alleged deity's alleged son Jesus of Nazareth. But what the heck do I know, I'm not a christian.
And yes, I know, I over-egged the pudding with all those allegeds, but you've got to allow me a little fun. And if not, as I'm the writer, I'll take the chance anyway!
So, an apparently devastated Willy 2 & 3 ruled on. He was only 44 at the time and the nabobs thought he would probably remarry. Unfortunately, the option that he marry Mary's sister Anne wasn't possible as she was already married to George, the Protestant younger brother of the King of Denmark. If anyone considered the judicious use of poison or the generation of a terrible accident, such a course of action was not followed.
Anne was busily getting pregnant, but very sadly her daughters died of smallpox which they apparently caught from their father, and despite some 16 pregnancies she only produced one other child that lived beyond two years old. But the poor little bugger died at the age of 11 in 1700. Maybe those Jacobites were onto something! But who wants to believe in a deity who so cruelly visits a parent's alleged sins against their inoffensive little children, both born and unborn?
This again raised the matter of the succession. But James the former 7 & 2 had fortunately dropped off his coil in 1701. Currently, Willy's protestant Stuart sister-in-law Anne was his heir. His death reminded the English they still had a succession problem, as Mary 2 had died in 1694 without progeny, and Willy showed no signs of remarriage, least of all to his sister-in-law Anne Stuart, the next in line for the throne after him, whose last living child died in 1700.
If Willy 3 had married anyone other than Anne and had children, they wouldn't be in the bloodline of inheritance. Oddly, this was regarded as important at the time. I've no idea what would have happened had this occurred. However, I've read one source that stated parlaiment agreed that in such a situation the child would succeed William to the throne.
Such, however, did not occur. Willy 2 & 3 didn'tt marry anyone in the 7 or so years of life he had between Mary 2's death and his own, let alone generate any legitimate children.
The English had their fill of a Roman Catholic making promises prior to being crowned with James 2 & 7, so resolved that any future monarch must not be a follower of that christian sect and the English parliament brought in legislation to that effect.
When Willy's horse, ironically seized from a supporter of the James Stuarts, helped him into the great unknowable, the English nabobs overlooked any claim to the throne James the now completely former 2 & 7's son James had as he was Roman Catholic and refused to convert to a Protestant sect. Fortunately,
Mary 2's sister, James the former 2 & 7's last remaining Protestant daughter Anne, was still alive. So she had the crown of England popped on her head, and became Anne 1.
This first succession wasn't much of a problem, so long as you could hack having yet another woman on the throne. Believe it or not that's often been a problem for some people! Oh, and so long as you didn't believe James the exile had a prior claim to the throne, which, as it happened, James believed.
Poor Anne was very far from a well woman, and very sadly, despite many attempts, was unable to produce an heir. While she was not doing so, several Scottish parliamentarians accepted some outrageous bribes from the English nabobs. Subsequently, in a sign of things to come, they happily sold their fellow Scots down the river by uniting their parliament and that of England. Thus came the dissolution of Scotland's parliament, and the loss of whatever flimsy garment covered Scotland's nakedly obvious loss of independence to its larger, more powerful southern neighbour.
As time went on and Anne's illness and inability to bear an heir started the nabobs thinking again of the succession. They decided they wanted to firm things up before Anne died, rather than having to make a rushed decision after her death.
Of course, James the former 2 & 7's son James was on top of the list, but this helped him not at all. Allegedly, they pored over the records of around the first 50 or so possible claimants in line of succession, and to their despair they were all Roman Catholics. Finally, they landed on yet another woman.
However, the fat was in the fire when Anne, constantly ill and sadly also not having an obvious heir other than her brother James, died. Remember James? James 2 & 6's son. In 1714 he was in exile and, like his old man, was a Roman Catholic. Like his father after his father lost the throne in 1668 because he was a silly duffer about his Catholicism and refused to swap it even for High Church Anglican), died.
After James the former 2 and 6 died in exile, Charles's dad put a claimant for the Crown of Britain. James had lost a previous uprising in 1714 when his aunt Anne died and the British powers-that-be allegedly went for the 51st in line for the throne because the first 50, of which James was the first, were Catholic. The decision, bypassing all the Stuarts, brought the head honcho of a small principality in what we now know as Germany called Hanover. That was George 1 of Britain. Boss cocky at the time of Charles;s rebellion was his son, George 2.
Or so the story goes!
Great numbers of men were led to their deaths by that drunken womanising sot and his incompetent advisers, as Charles wouldn't listen to the few who showed any competence, including in the matter of the choice of battlefield. Normal practice if you had the ability to choose the site of battle was to choose a place suited to your own soldiers at the expense of the enemy. But Charles seems to have experimented with a new and revolutionary concept - choose a battlefield that doesn't suit your soldiers, but well suits your enemy.
Unfortunately, this radical idea was proven to be total bollocks at the expense of some 1500 Scots, not to mention Highland culture and the Gaelic language, in an embarrassingly disastrous defeat by the English, fighting on behalf of their German-speaking king. Well, German as a first language, to be fair. He spoke English with a very strong Hanoverian accent. It was his father, George 1, who was apparently completely unable to speak English.
Oh, yes, date and place. It was 1746, on the godawful flat, windswept, prickly bushed, boggy Drumrossie Moor (often incorrectly called Culloden Moor), part of an estate called Culloden in English, or Chùil Lodair in Scots Gaelic. I don't know what it was in either Charles or George 2's first languages.
While George 2 was the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle, he didn't do so on this occasion. That honour was given to a bloke known to at least some of his men as ‘Nolly Cumberland’. Officially, however, he was William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721-65), second son of the king.
William Augustus, known to his friends, or he would have been if he had any (!), as Billy Gus, gained the much better-known cognomen "Butcher" Cumberland after his brutally cruel repression following the collapse of Charles's Jacobite Rebellion (from Jacobus, the Latin for "James", as the rebellion was intended to bung Charles's dad James Stuart, son of James 7 of Scotland and 2 of England), on Britain's throne).
The Scots also named a weed "Stinking Billy" in response to the English naming a flower "Sweet William" after the genocidal scumbag.
The rest of Stinking Billy's military career shows just how incredibly incompetent as a general Charlie Boy was. A year before Culloden, Billy was absolutely walloped by the French during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) at a joint called Fontenoy. The year after Culloden, the French whacked the bejeezus out of him, or at least the blokes unfortunate enough to be generalled by him, at a place called Lauffeld.
Then, in the Seven Years War (1756-73) he made an agreement to surrender Hanover, his father's much-loved home state on the continent. Again, he lost to the French. This finally led to his dismissal by his father. However, the dolt
George 2, after his eldest son predeceased him, and as he also approached carking time, made a will, making his eldest son's son, George 2's grandson and the Butcher's nephew, heir to the throne.
This grandson, George 3 as he became known, was still young, so his grandfather's will made his mother regent, but against her wishes she had to act in accord with the directions of an advisory council chaired by Stinking Billy.
The Stinker then put in place most of the new king's ministers who, after Billy had conveniently gone to a place where hopefully the French beat him up every day, went on to advise poor George on how to deal with those damned cheeky bastards in the thirteen colonies below Canada who had begun demanding rights they had no right to (!).
Billy's appointees did so well at their task that the English were again walloped, mostly by the French again, who had more troops fighting for the independence of the thirteen colonies than Americans.
Okay dokey, back to Culloden, and its relevance to the story of the Macquaries. There are two quite contradictory stories regarding the Macquaries and Culloden.
Charles Stuart had been awarded the title Prince of Wales when he was born in 1720. His father had become King James 8 & 3 on the death of James's father James 7 & 2, who had been the legitimate monarch of Scotland, and monarch of England and Ireland since 1685. King James 8 & 3 had been the previous Prince of Wales until inheriting the throne upon the death of his father in 1701.
The title "Prince of Wales" was traditionally given to the male heir to the English throne, where that heir was the king's son. James 7 & 2's son James (!) was born in 1687 while his father was king, and was accordingly given the Prince of Wales title.
There was a problem, however. England had been invaded in 1787 by a Dutch army organised by James 7 & 2's son-in-law, William, Prince of Orange. In the face of that army James 7 & 2 had fled England, never to return.
Upon fleeing, the English nabobs had declared James's wise act of evading ending up the same way as his father, Charles 1, with his head in a basket and his body twitching somewhere else as an effective act of abdication.
The nabobs, in an act of realpolitik, declared the Prince of Orange to be King William 2 & 3, and his wife, James 7 & 2's daughter, as Mary 2. In this way, the Stuarts ruled on.
The heir to William 2 & 3 and Mary 2 was agreed to be Mary's sister, Anne Stuart, unless William and Mary had a child. In 1694, Mary 2 died childless. William 2 & 3 ruled on, with Anne still heir. It was agreed if William remarried and had a child, that child would become heir. But he didn't, even to escape Jacobite accusations of homosexuality.
Throughout the 1690s, the ongoing childlessness of William, and of Anne's periods of ill health and regular stillbirths and miscarriages didn't cause any issues regarding the existence of an heir in the case of her carking it before Billy as Anne had a son, born in 1689.
Unfortunately, this lad died in 1700. Anne, as it happens, very sadly had her last pregnancy, as far as I'm aware, end in miscarriage in the same year. Although Anne was only 35, the English nabobs had no expectation of her having a successful pregnancy; correctly, as it turned out.
The nabobs had no particular reason to believe William 2 & 3 would die soon, but he showed no signs of remarrying and having legitimate children. If Anne predeceased him, or even if she inherited after his death, the time was fast approaching when England would be left without a clear heir, leading to the possibility of one of the Jimboes, either the former 7 & 2 or his son, managing to crawl their way back onto the throne.
Anne's son's death led to a greater degree of urgency among those English nabobs who weren't secret Jacobites. They became desperate to stop the Jimboes getting back on the throne.
Why? Well, it's a long and interesting story, but it's not for here. However, the short of it was that James the former 7 & 2 and James the would-be-if-he-could-be 8 & 3 were followers of a christian sect called Roman Catholicism. Most English nabobs were followers of various Protestant christian sects, principally the Church of England. That's really all I've got the time for at the moment. Sorry!
So, the English nabobs, without as far as is known consulting the Scots, resolved to have legislation passed both banning Roman Catholics from the throne, and specifying the rightful heir. While this wouldn't necessarily ensure the Jimboes didn't finagle their way back onto the throne, but it would make it more tricky.
Allegedly, to find a protestant heir the English nabobs had to pass over the first 55 heirs apparent as they were either Catholics, or married to people who were.
I understand several of these bozoes were approached, but were uninterested either in the job, or in changing christian sects from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism.
Finally, at number 56 (or thereabouts) they hit paydirt. Number 56 was Protestant, raised in The Hague in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years War while her family was in exile, and therefore was known to William 2 & 3. William met her at a meeting in the Netherlands, sounded her out, and gave her prospective succession his approval.
Jumping at the chance, Sophia of the Palatine (or "Palatinate"), was Dowager Duchess of Brunswick and Lüneburg, and possibly and maybe arguably Dowager Electress or maybe even Electress of Brunswick and Lüneburg*. She was 35 years older than Anne Stuart, who was 35 at the time.
*"The Palatine" was the principality in what is now south western Germany of which Sophia's father was very briefly the Elector, before he and his wife, a daughter of James 6 & 1 of Scotland, England, and Ireland, fled to the Hague, where Sophia was born and raised, only moving back to the Palatine after her brother regained it.
"Dowager" just means Sophia was the widow of the previous Duke and mother of the current one.
Some sources reckon she was the Elector or Electress of Hanover. The Electors were the highest level of nobility under the Emperor and were nominally responsible for electing the successor of a dead emperor.
I've written "nominally" because by this time the list of choices was limited to one, whoever was the next Hapsburg family member in line.
In fact, Sophie could never have been the "Elector" as that was a title only granted to men.
Further, it's unclear to me whether or not Sophia's husband was entitled to call himself the "Elector" of Brunswick and Lüneburg. It's true he was made a "prince-elector" (that is, ready to become an elector) in 1692 (1696 in some sources) by the Holy Roman Emperor, the overarching ruler of the various Germanic principalities, based in Vienna. Brunswick and Lüneburg was to be the 9th Electorate in the empire.
However, the appointment still required the approval of the Imperial Diet (Parliament).
The idea of elevating the Duke to Elector had two motivations, and I'm unsure which was the most important, although I have my very strong suspicions. The duke had been providing substantial financial and military aid to the emperor and needed a reward to encourage him to keep up with the giving.
Further, it had also been a political move to increase the number of Protestant electors, to minimise the Protestants' constant carping about being dominated by Catholics.
However, the Roman Catholic electors and members of the larger Diet got peeved and ended up delaying the formal approval of the nomination until 1708, a full decade after Sophia's husband's death, and 16 years after the emperor mooting his elevation.
So, the first formally approved Elector of Brunswick and Lüneburg was actually the duke's heir, his and Sophia's son George, the reigning Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg.
On this basis, it would seem therefore that the first woman formally entitled to the honourific of Electress for that electorate was Sophia's daughter-in-law.
Whatever the case, even if she was entitled to call herself "Electress" while her husband was alive, and to continue doing so after his death, she was never the Electress of "Hanover".
While the common name for the Duchy and later the Electorate of Brunswick and Lüneburg was "Hanover", in Sophia's day that was not the formal name, nor was Brunswick-Lüneburg. "Hanover" which was simply the capital of the duchy.
Okay, back to the important stuff. Unlike Anne Stuart, in 1701, despite her age, Sophia was fit, healthy, and at least in her younger years more successfully fecund than Anne, with a number of living adult sons and daughters and legitimate grandchildren who were both Protestant and married to Protestants.
So the English nabobs reckoned they were onto a good thing, and let's face it they couldn't be worse than the male Stuarts had been already. In June 1701 legislation was brought into operation making Sophia and her descendants heirs after William and Anne, so long as those two remained childless, and so long as Sophia and her heirs remained Protestant.
Later, after a glitsch had been discovered in the succession plan, in 1705 legislation was passed giving Sophia and the "heirs of her body" English citizenship, so long as she and her heirs remained Protestant! This law stayed in place until 1948, and some of Sophia's descendants who benefited from it are still alive in the 21st Century!
Shortly after the English nabobs passed their 1701 legislation, in September 1701 one of their Jacobite bêtes noires carked it and Jimbo the former 7 & 2 stepped off his mortal coil.
However, his son showed he was just as serious a threat as his father. He declared himself James 8 & 3, and the French king Louis 14 recognised him as such. Of course, Louis was just up to his troublemaking best, and was on the opposite side to the English in the Spanish War of Succession.
In the malarkey about the succession, and the selection of Sophia and her descendants as the heirs to the heir you might have noted my specific references to the English nabobs. As far as we know, no consultation took place with the Scots. This expectation by the English they had the right to treat Scotland like the colonies of Wales and Ireland peeved them mightily.
This led the Scots to try to force the English to accept their right to appoint their own monarch who would specifically not be the same as the English monarch. Needless to write, the English refused, apparently unaccepting of any right to the consultation the Scots expected,
The Scots then tried to be smarter than their brains could allow, trying to force the English to accept the Scots' point of view by threatening English trade. What the silly buggers didn't understand was that the English had more control over Scotland's trade than vice versa.
Subsequently, the Scottish nabobs, driven into a corner with their naked bums in the air, ripe for a good English rogering, agreed their profits were more important than the interests of their fellow Scots.
Subsequently, in 1707 they signed into extinction the Scottish parliament. Worse, they signed away Scotland's independence by uniting the two monarchies under the title United Kingdom, a kingdom entirely controlled by the English.
After all this, to describe the Scottish Jacobites as very highly angry would be an infinitely huge understatement.
However, I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
Not long after James the former 7 & 2 carked it, in 1702 William 2 & 3 was unexpectedly also sent on his way to the infinite when his horse chucked him off, he broke a collar bone, and due to being laid up in bed caught pneumonia and fell right out of his future. Ironically, the horse had been seized from a Jacobite!
To explain, Jacobus is the Latin for James, hence the name given to their supporters was "Jacobites". This title should not to be mistaken for Jacobean, meaning something from the reign of James 6 & 1, or Jacobin, a completely unrelated republican club during the much later French revolution.
So, Anne Stuart duly became Queen Anne 1, although unlike William 2 & 3, her husband, a Protestant younger brother of the Danish king, did not become king, and Anne, unlike Mary 2, ruled in her own right.
There had been several unsuccessful efforts to get the make-believe James 8 & 3 in place as a real king, thus putting his son the make-believe Prince of Wales in place as a real prince. These were not just Scottish efforts, nor were they just Roman Catholic efforts.
As it happens, a particularly traditionalist and reactionary sector of the loosely connected conservative group called the Tories, despite mostly being strongly Protestant, indeed anti-Roman Catholic, implicitly believed the James's were wrongly robbed of their throne, and James 7 & 2's heir should be bunged on it ASAP.
These bozoes believed this was "right" even though the Jimboes and Chilla were Catholics. To them, William, Mary, Anne and the Georges were usurpers.
until 1745 Charles, Prince of Wales, had not set foot in either Scotland or England, and never set foot in Ireland. Further, his father James also never set foot in Ireland, left England never to return at a couple of months old in 1688, and had only spent 6 weeks or so in Scotland in 1715/16. I'm also fairly sure neither of them ever set foot in their putative principality of Wales!
Oh, by the way, for centuries the English had occupied Wales and, on paper and via the titles of both the king of England's oldest son and the kingdom itself, Wales was subsumed into England. Fortunately, the Welsh, or at least some of them, especially those of more traditional Welsh descent, particularly in the north, have not accepted they're English.
But as it happened, Charles Stuart was not the only person to reckon they were the Prince of Wales, just as James was not the only person to reckon they were the king of England, Ireland, and Scotland.
So in 1745 there were two Princes of Wales and two kings of Scotland, England, and Ireland. Two were recognised by most of the United Kingdom's subjects and the others claiming they were the rightful holders of that title, one on the basis of inheritance from his father, the improperly dethroned king James 7 & 2.
Or if that was unacceptable, after Anne 1 died he had also been 55 spots higher on the inheritance ladder than George 1, the Hanoverian usurper. In fact, he was on top of that ladder. The other claimed to be the Prince of Wales as the title had been granted to him by his father on the basis of being the king's oldest son and heir.
One guess which of these dumboes Charles Stuart was!
Highlanders were the first to collect under Charles Stuart's standard of , the claimed or "pretend" Prince of Wales. The title "Prince of Wales" is that given to whoever is the male heir to the English throne, and since the throne of Scotland. But Charles's army gradually included soldiers of Irish heritage, most of whom were Roman Catholics enlisted in the French king's army, English anti-catholic Stuart supporters who believed in the divine right of kings whatever their religion and who believed the present king and his father were usurpers, English catholic supporters; Lowlander supporters, both Catholic and Protestant, some Irish nationalists, and many Scottish nationalists who wanted their independence from England back.
The whole affair was a frightful schemozzle, and despite early successes because most of the English army was on the continent taking part in the so-called War of the Austrian Succession, believe it or not.
The weakest part of the whole rebellion was its useless, drunken, fancy-pants, layabout, militarily inexperienced, both strategically and tactically incompetent, and ineffably stupid leader. Chalie boy himself. Whenever I think of him for some reason I'm always reminded of Charley Farley BA (Calcutta) (Failed), the great comedic invention of the Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. Except there was nothing funny about Charlie Stuart.
So who was this useless wanker, and why did he think he had some right to turn up in Scotland and demand men follow him into rebellion. How did things get to this disastrous spot?
Charlie was the son of the equally uselessly dangerous loser James Stuart, who in turn was the son of the last Catholic king of England, James 7 and 2, who was such a useless loser he got chucked off the throne. Mind you, he wasn't quite as bad as his father, Charles 1 (who by that time was the first of his name in either Scotland or England), who not only lost his throne, but was so stupidly careless he lost his head as well.
William of Orange's mother was a sister of James the now former 7 & 2, so although not top of the list of Protestant bloodline successors to the throne, he had a good claim. However, top of the list was Willy's wife Mary, the older of James the former 7 & 2's two protestant daughters.
So James the former 7 & 2 was replaced on the throne by Mary 2, whom parliament decreed would rule jointly with her first cousin, who was also her husband, who was crowned as William 3 & 2.
Parliament thus bypassed the person at the very top of a full areligious list of the succession, apart from the recently self-deposed king whom parliament decreed had "abdicated" by buggering off in the face of William of Orange's invasion army - just as his useless whacker of a grandson was to do when the Battle of Culloden began to look like a loser for him.
Oh, the person otherwise at the top of the list? The Roman Catholic James, son of James the former 7 & 2, and Mary 2's older brother. And that useless whacker Charlie's useless whacker of a father.
All-in-all, the 1688 invasion and rebellion were successful. The new monarchs, in order to get themselves crowned, had agreed to a series of reforms, turning the power base in England more towards its parliament and courts. So everyone was happy, weren't they?
I mean, fortunately few deaths were incurred, at least prior to James the former 7 & 2's attempt to come back via Ireland. Oh, and not to forget the Protestant Viscount of Dundee's unsuccessful rebellion in Scotland fought between his army of supporters of James 7 & 2 and the more extreme Protestant "covenanter" supporters of William 2 & 3 and Mary 2. Dundee was killed while his troops won their first battle, but his former troops were beaten at their second and final battle, at least of this rebellion.
The particular covenanters who defeated the were Cameronians, a sect of the Protestant Presbyterian church especially fanatical and virulently violent towards anything smacking of "papism", meaning suspected of being plotted by Roman Catholics, and/or "episcopalianism", meaning putting bishops between the people and their preacher and their christian deity, as in both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic sects, and in reforms the English kings Charles 2 and James 7 & 2 were attempting to force on the mainly Scottish Presbyterians.
Perhaps fortunately for the Hanoverians, Charles didn't produce a legitimate heir, despite his last ditch effort to legitimise his daughter Caroline, so the last in the legitimate and direct Stuart bloodline seems to have been Charles' younger brother Henry, who as a Roman Catholic cardinal was not allowed to marry unless he chucked in his church position, which he was unwilling to do, so he was therefore unable to produce a legitimate heir.
However, that's 80 or 90 years away, and at the time of our current interrest, well mine anyway, the Stuarts are infighting between the Catholic and Protestant lines.
Willy 2 & 3's wife Mary 2 died of smallpox in 1694. Those of you opposed to childhood vaccinations should remember that. Why, you may ask. Children don't require vaccination against anything called smallpox. Is it like chicken pox?Well, of course you've not heard of it, and you're right children don't require vaccination against it. But the reason why is it has been wiped out worldwide following a massive and highly successful vaccination program!
Oh, I should mention a mob called the Jacobites. They were supporters of James the former 7 & 2, from the Latin for James, Jacobus.
Despite the similarity, this term should not be confused with:
- Jacobean, being a reference to things like furniture, writers, architecture, and the like from James 6 & 1's reign in England from 1603 to 1625, thus not ordinarily including the additional years he was solely King of Scotland after the Scottish nabobs forced his mother to chuck in the Scottish crown in 1567, when he was 13 months old; or
- Jacobin, a very radical political faction during the much later French Revolution.
So, the Jacobites reckoned Mary's sad death, without leaving a living child, was due penalty for her breach of the 5th commandment from their religious book, the Bible, which in translation apparently reads something like "you will honour your father". I wouldn't have thought such a comment accorded with what I know of the alleged views of their alleged deity's alleged son Jesus of Nazareth. But what the heck do I know, I'm not a christian.
And yes, I know, I over-egged the pudding with all those allegeds, but you've got to allow me a little fun. And if not, as I'm the writer, I'll take the chance anyway!
So, an apparently devastated Willy 2 & 3 ruled on. He was only 44 at the time and the nabobs thought he would probably remarry. Unfortunately, the option that he marry Mary's sister Anne wasn't possible as she was already married to George, the Protestant younger brother of the King of Denmark. If anyone considered the judicious use of poison or the generation of a terrible accident, such a course of action was not followed.
Anne was busily getting pregnant, but very sadly her daughters died of smallpox which they apparently caught from their father, and despite some 16 pregnancies she only produced one other child that lived beyond two years old. But the poor little bugger died at the age of 11 in 1700. Maybe those Jacobites were onto something! But who wants to believe in a deity who so cruelly visits a parent's alleged sins against their inoffensive little children, both born and unborn?
This again raised the matter of the succession. But James the former 7 & 2 had fortunately dropped off his coil in 1701. Currently, Willy's protestant Stuart sister-in-law Anne was his heir. His death reminded the English they still had a succession problem, as Mary 2 had died in 1694 without progeny, and Willy showed no signs of remarriage, least of all to his sister-in-law Anne Stuart, the next in line for the throne after him, whose last living child died in 1700.
If Willy 3 had married anyone other than Anne and had children, they wouldn't be in the bloodline of inheritance. Oddly, this was regarded as important at the time. I've no idea what would have happened had this occurred. However, I've read one source that stated parlaiment agreed that in such a situation the child would succeed William to the throne.
Such, however, did not occur. Willy 2 & 3 didn'tt marry anyone in the 7 or so years of life he had between Mary 2's death and his own, let alone generate any legitimate children.
The English had their fill of a Roman Catholic making promises prior to being crowned with James 2 & 7, so resolved that any future monarch must not be a follower of that christian sect and the English parliament brought in legislation to that effect.
When Willy's horse, ironically seized from a supporter of the James Stuarts, helped him into the great unknowable, the English nabobs overlooked any claim to the throne James the now completely former 2 & 7's son James had as he was Roman Catholic and refused to convert to a Protestant sect. Fortunately,
Mary 2's sister, James the former 2 & 7's last remaining Protestant daughter Anne, was still alive. So she had the crown of England popped on her head, and became Anne 1.
This first succession wasn't much of a problem, so long as you could hack having yet another woman on the throne. Believe it or not that's often been a problem for some people! Oh, and so long as you didn't believe James the exile had a prior claim to the throne, which, as it happened, James believed.
Poor Anne was very far from a well woman, and very sadly, despite many attempts, was unable to produce an heir. While she was not doing so, several Scottish parliamentarians accepted some outrageous bribes from the English nabobs. Subsequently, in a sign of things to come, they happily sold their fellow Scots down the river by uniting their parliament and that of England. Thus came the dissolution of Scotland's parliament, and the loss of whatever flimsy garment covered Scotland's nakedly obvious loss of independence to its larger, more powerful southern neighbour.
As time went on and Anne's illness and inability to bear an heir started the nabobs thinking again of the succession. They decided they wanted to firm things up before Anne died, rather than having to make a rushed decision after her death.
Of course, James the former 2 & 7's son James was on top of the list, but this helped him not at all. Allegedly, they pored over the records of around the first 50 or so possible claimants in line of succession, and to their despair they were all Roman Catholics. Finally, they landed on yet another woman.
However, the fat was in the fire when Anne, constantly ill and sadly also not having an obvious heir other than her brother James, died. Remember James? James 2 & 6's son. In 1714 he was in exile and, like his old man, was a Roman Catholic. Like his father after his father lost the throne in 1668 because he was a silly duffer about his Catholicism and refused to swap it even for High Church Anglican), died.
After James the former 2 and 6 died in exile, Charles's dad put a claimant for the Crown of Britain. James had lost a previous uprising in 1714 when his aunt Anne died and the British powers-that-be allegedly went for the 51st in line for the throne because the first 50, of which James was the first, were Catholic. The decision, bypassing all the Stuarts, brought the head honcho of a small principality in what we now know as Germany called Hanover. That was George 1 of Britain. Boss cocky at the time of Charles;s rebellion was his son, George 2.
Or so the story goes!
Great numbers of men were led to their deaths by that drunken womanising sot and his incompetent advisers, as Charles wouldn't listen to the few who showed any competence, including in the matter of the choice of battlefield. Normal practice if you had the ability to choose the site of battle was to choose a place suited to your own soldiers at the expense of the enemy. But Charles seems to have experimented with a new and revolutionary concept - choose a battlefield that doesn't suit your soldiers, but well suits your enemy.
Unfortunately, this radical idea was proven to be total bollocks at the expense of some 1500 Scots, not to mention Highland culture and the Gaelic language, in an embarrassingly disastrous defeat by the English, fighting on behalf of their German-speaking king. Well, German as a first language, to be fair. He spoke English with a very strong Hanoverian accent. It was his father, George 1, who was apparently completely unable to speak English.
Oh, yes, date and place. It was 1746, on the godawful flat, windswept, prickly bushed, boggy Drumrossie Moor (often incorrectly called Culloden Moor), part of an estate called Culloden in English, or Chùil Lodair in Scots Gaelic. I don't know what it was in either Charles or George 2's first languages.
While George 2 was the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle, he didn't do so on this occasion. That honour was given to a bloke known to at least some of his men as ‘Nolly Cumberland’. Officially, however, he was William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721-65), second son of the king.
William Augustus, known to his friends, or he would have been if he had any (!), as Billy Gus, gained the much better-known cognomen "Butcher" Cumberland after his brutally cruel repression following the collapse of Charles's Jacobite Rebellion (from Jacobus, the Latin for "James", as the rebellion was intended to bung Charles's dad James Stuart, son of James 7 of Scotland and 2 of England), on Britain's throne).
The Scots also named a weed "Stinking Billy" in response to the English naming a flower "Sweet William" after the genocidal scumbag.
The rest of Stinking Billy's military career shows just how incredibly incompetent as a general Charlie Boy was. A year before Culloden, Billy was absolutely walloped by the French during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) at a joint called Fontenoy. The year after Culloden, the French whacked the bejeezus out of him, or at least the blokes unfortunate enough to be generalled by him, at a place called Lauffeld.
Then, in the Seven Years War (1756-73) he made an agreement to surrender Hanover, his father's much-loved home state on the continent. Again, he lost to the French. This finally led to his dismissal by his father. However, the dolt
George 2, after his eldest son predeceased him, and as he also approached carking time, made a will, making his eldest son's son, George 2's grandson and the Butcher's nephew, heir to the throne.
This grandson, George 3 as he became known, was still young, so his grandfather's will made his mother regent, but against her wishes she had to act in accord with the directions of an advisory council chaired by Stinking Billy.
The Stinker then put in place most of the new king's ministers who, after Billy had conveniently gone to a place where hopefully the French beat him up every day, went on to advise poor George on how to deal with those damned cheeky bastards in the thirteen colonies below Canada who had begun demanding rights they had no right to (!).
Billy's appointees did so well at their task that the English were again walloped, mostly by the French again, who had more troops fighting for the independence of the thirteen colonies than Americans.
Okay dokey, back to Culloden, and its relevance to the story of the Macquaries. There are two quite contradictory stories regarding the Macquaries and Culloden.