Grasping Stuart history means reaching back through time and taking the hands of people who’ve long gone. Their letters, quarrels and ambitions still pulse faintly in the archives, and when you study them closely you feel the warmth of lives that were once loud, messy and full of hope
Grasping Stuart history: Holding the hands of dead people
The Stuart Dynasty: An Antiquarian Pastime
The Stuarts have always appealed to me because their lives weren’t neat or polished. They stumbled through their own age with all its noise and uncertainty. Their triumphs feel fragile, their quarrels raw, their exile long and heavy with silence. They’re an exiled family with real human appeal, from James VI and I to Charles I, from Mary, Queen of Scots to the Jacobite claimants who kept the dynasty alive in name only.
A quiet, antiquarian hobby
My pastime with the Stuarts is a quiet one, almost antiquarian. I drift between books, old letters and half‑forgotten corners of history. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the tiniest details. I wouldn’t claim to specialise in the dynasty because I’m no expert, although I return to them often. Something about their rise and fall pulls me back. I read, imagine, linger and reflect on the Europeanisation of a former Scottish royal house. It’s not about collecting facts. It’s about the strange comfort of watching flawed lives unfold and realising that even kings weren’t free from folly or manipulation.
From Scottish promise to European exile
The dynasty came to the throne with Scottish promise and ruled the seventeenth century with confidence. Then came religious quarrels, civil war and the long road into exile. I imagine the sound of leather boots in Whitehall, the smell of candle smoke in a draughty chamber, the colour of velvet robes dulled by dust. I picture their rapid expulsion and their departure for Europe, their court shrinking and their voices growing quieter.
Their replacement, William III and II was himself a grandson of Charles I, which meant the Stuarts were replaced by another branch of their own family. History can be brutally ironic.
The court at Saint‑Germain
Their Europeanised court in exile at Saint‑Germain‑en‑Laye, on loan from their cousin the King of France, must have felt like a stage after the play had ended. Curtains still hanging, props left behind, the cast still present but the audience long gone. They called themselves kings, yet they ruled nothing.
By the time Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal York, sat in Rome at the start of the nineteenth century, the line had dwindled to a claimant king with twin regnal numbers and a title without power or an heir. A cardinal in scarlet robes, the last legitimate Stuart, holding a claim no one would ever honour. His brother, Charles Edward Stuart, had already faded into myth.
No scoreboard, no trophies
This antiquarian pastime has no scoreboard. There’s no medal for reading one more book about a forgotten claimant or ticking off another ruined palace. To an outsider it looks like nothing at all. Just me moving from one page to another, one archive to another, one half‑remembered anecdote to another. But the threads build slowly and after many years I’m comfortable with stories like those of the Stuart kings in exile.
A young man in a library
As a young man I looked awkward, even geeky, standing in a university library clutching old books that smelled faintly of damp. It wasn’t a popular thing to do in the 1980s but I thought, this is what I enjoy. Not the neatness of a finished story but the rough edges. The contradictions. The folly of humanity, and history is full of folly. Men with absolutist ideas who thought they were untouchable. Women who gambled on marriage and lost. Priests who promised certainty and found only doubt. Belief and ambition in the seventeenth century trip over each other constantly. It’s never tidy. That’s what keeps me coming back.
Age, brevity and the fall of a dynasty
I’m now 63 and I understand that life is brief. I’ve always had that sense of the end. Reading about the Stuarts as kings and as a family sharpens that feeling. They rose, they fell, they vanished. Their names survive but their power slipped away like water through their fingers. I find that oddly comforting. Nothing lasts, not even the grandest throne.
Watching and listening
So my pastime isn’t collecting or winning or finishing. It’s watching and listening. It’s walking through the half‑lit corridors of history and noticing the cracks in stories and the contradictions in accounts. I love comparing contemporaneous descriptions of the same event as if they were crime reports.
That’s enough for me, even if others see nothing more than an older man reading or searching an online archive. I don’t mind. I’m at the age where it doesn’t matter.
A pastime without trophies
If you were expecting a neat answer to the question of hobbies like stamps or football or fishing, you won’t find it here. What I’ve shared is an antiquarian pastime without physical trophies. I’ve developed a habit of noticing the liminal and the lost. It may look like nothing from the outside, but to me it’s a companion.
Mes remerciements à Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France) pour avoir mis ces images du domaine public à disposition. Leur engagement en faveur de la préservation et du partage des collections historiques enrichit un travail comme celui‑ci. – My thanks to Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France) for making these public‑domain images available. Their commitment to preserving and sharing historical collections enriches work like this