The Year of the Prince: The House of Stuart Sequence, #1

By George Kearton

The Jacobite Uprising of 1745 is one of those parts of British history that we all think we know a little bit about. The romantic story of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" and his gallant Highlanders invading England, only to turn back at Derby and subsequently be defeated at Culloden is part of the cultural glue that holds 'Great Britain' together.

But what if things had turned out differently?

Could the Prince and his Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English supporters have reached London, deposed George II and driven him into exile in Hanover? And how would our history have changed if the House of Stuart had been restored to the British throne in 1745?

Presented as a historical text, 'The Year of The Prince' tells the tale of a history which might have been and chronicles a successful Jacobite Uprising with many different consequences for Great Britain. It is the first of five volumes in 'The House of Stuart Sequence'. Future volumes will tell of the ongoing effects of a Stuart Restoration on the history of Great Britain, Europe, the Americas and beyond. The whole series will travel the years from 1745 to 1900 by which time we discover 'A World Turned Upside Down'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sea Lion Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386530985

Book preview

The Year of the Prince

George Kearton

Sea Lion Press

"Here’s to The King sir!

Ye ken who I mean sir!

And ev’ry honest man that would do it all again.

Hear now the trumpets sound,

An’ tooty-taity on the drum.

Up wi’ your sword and down wi’ your gun!

Aye, and into the hills again….

Here’s to the King!"

An 18th century Jacobite toast

For over 50 years at the beginning of the eighteenth century, thousands of Britons would not drink to the health of their regnant Royal Family.

Instead, after passing an open hand surreptitiously over their glass, they would drink a toast to The King over the Water; a reference to the heirs of the exiled House of Stuart.

The final Stuart attempt to regain the throne failed in 1745.

But what if history had turned out differently?

An introduction by the author

I love reading alternative history. The challenges to the imagination of a road not taken are immense. Many authors have played with history; many of their works are inspiring, exciting and display wondrous imagination.

The genre is, or should be, characterised by an often very minor point of departure from our known past and, following this departure point, the fate of individuals, nations and continents will gradually change almost beyond recognition.

The possibilities are endless – wars may not happen, technological advance may happen at a different pace and in a different place. Politics may take very strange routes; individuals we know in our histories may still be born but their careers, their lives, their importance, their fate and their destinies may be the exact opposite of what we know from our own lives and heritage.

Some writers of alternative history sadly feel the need to use the ‘McGuffins’ of time travel, space-time warps or even interventions by aliens, vampires, werewolves, zombies and other fictional beings. Such types of alternative history can be, and often are, very enjoyable but my personal enjoyment of them is lessened by the ‘adventures’ of their very fictional heroes who can have but little real influence on the possibilities for large-scale change that alternative histories should be able to offer.

An exception to this is the wonderful book For Want of a Nail by Robert Sobel. His point of departure is the Battle of Saratoga during the American Revolution. In Sobel’s ‘world next door to ours’ the British win this battle and the American Revolution fails.

It is the consequences of that failure that divert Sobel’s world onto its new path and he takes his reader through 200 years of the ‘history’ of the Confederation of North America and the United States of Mexico.

And, recognizing the military, geographic and political significance of his new American states, Sobel also draws in potential futures for Europe and the rest of the world as well.

It must be made clear; Sobel’s book is not, stylistically, a novel. It is written as a text book. This approach has been criticised by some; to me it is the book’s greatest strength, as it is only this approach which allows the author to properly paint his grand global canvas.

I have thus, quite deliberately, tried to imitate Sobel’s style. This is not a novel; there is little, if any, dialogue, there is only one fictional character (whose identity is revealed at the end of the book) and the changes to ‘history’ are what, to my mind, would be the logical actions of those concerned when faced with changing circumstances.

The Year of the Prince and its successor volume The King Shall Have His Own Again are thus my attempts to play what if around the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, which was the last military attempt by the exiled House of Stuart to reclaim the throne of Great Britain.

Volumes one and two (a two-part sequel, The Stuart Century, covering the years 1800 to 1900, is in the course of preparation) take us to the year 1800 – but to an 1800 which has changed in many ways following the restoration of a Stuart king to the throne in 1746.

The books are dedicated to Sir Charles Petrie, whose short essay If – A Jacobite Fantasy (published in ‘The Weekly Westminster’ in January of 1926) set me to thinking.

In order to set the scene, I start with a real world background of the Stuarts.

The Stewart Clan and the Stuart Dynasty

The Stewart family originated in France and acquired their surname from the word steward (a steward was a high-ranking court officer, usually responsible for the management of a royal or noble household).

From the town of Dol in Brittany, members of the family joined William the Conqueror in 1066 to invade and conquer England. As a reward and part of the spoils, they were granted several English estates.

In about 1150, Walter Fitz Alan (the Steward) moved to Scotland and King David of Scotland granted him lands in Renfrewshire. His descendants served as High Stewards to the King for over 200 years.

In 1371 the 7th High Steward, Robert Stewart (who had married into the royal Bruce family) became King Robert II of Scotland. He was the first monarch in a Scots line which was to be uninterrupted until a major change of fortune for the family in 1603.

The royal name was changed from Stewart to Stuart during the time that Queen Mary of Scots spent as a young bride in France. Linguistically it is assumed that this was because of the perceived difficulties of pronouncing a non-existent letter w in the French of the time.

The Tudor Queen Elizabeth I of England died in 1603 and the heir to the throne of England was King James VI of Scotland. He became King James I in England and was succeeded by his second son who became Charles I in 1625. From their beginnings in France and Scotland, the Stuarts had now become major players in the latter-day ‘Matter of Britain’.

Charles’ reign was to be troubled by disputes with Parliament over taxation, over the powers of Parliament and over religion. Following a bloody Civil War, Charles was executed by order of Parliament in January of 1649.

His son (also Charles) returned from exile and attempted to regain his father’s throne but his mainly Scottish army was defeated at Worcester in 1651. Charles only made good his escape by hiding in the branches of an oak tree; hence the very large number of English public houses called The Royal Oak even today.

After Worcester, England became a Republic under the rule of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, an army officer who had been largely instrumental in persuading Parliament to order the execution of Charles I.

Cromwell died in 1658 and was ‘succeeded’ by his third son Richard, who proved so ineffectual that, by 1660, a group of army officers (led by the Scottish General George Monck) had invited Charles to retake the throne as King Charles II. This was done and so, for the first time, the Stuarts were restored to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Charles II died without a legitimate direct heir in 1685, converting to Catholicism on his deathbed. His brother James, Duke of York and already a Catholic, succeeded to the throne as James II.

James was to marry twice. His two daughters by Anne Hyde (the Protestant daughter of a commoner when they married, though her father Edward later became Earl of Clarendon and Chief Minister to Charles II) were both to become Queens of England.

After her death in 1671 James was to remarry. His marriage to Anne had been for love: his marriage to the Catholic Mary of Modena in 1673 was a matter of statecraft and also an attempt to produce a male heir.

By 1685 when Charles II died, no ‘next generation’ male heir had appeared. The English Protestant nobility felt secure in their belief that no such heir would be born so they were relatively happy for a temporary Catholic succession which, it seemed to them, would be followed by the accession of the safely Protestant Mary, already married to the staunchly Protestant Dutch Prince William of Orange.

In June of 1688, after fifteen years of childless marriage, Mary of Modena gave birth to a son; James Edward Francis.

Rumours about the legitimacy of this Stuart heir swirled about the Court and the country. He was alleged to be supposititious and it was claimed that a living child had been smuggled into Mary’s birth-chamber in a bed warming pan in order to replace a stillborn royal child. One rumour had it that the baby was actually the newborn son of courtier Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe who was married to the Queen’s seamstress.

The King countered by producing a list of over 70 witnesses who had been present at the birth and a subsequent Privy Council investigation declared that the rumours were untrue.

Leading members of the Protestant Anglican nobility had already been in contact with Mary and with William of Orange and now their plans went a stage further. Within only a few days of the new royal birth they had written to William and asked him to invade England and take the throne.

Following this invitation from The Immortal Seven (six Lords and a Bishop), William laid his plans and, in November of 1688, he landed with a force of some 15,000 men at Torbay.

His army was largely mercenary, consisting of Dutch, German, Swiss and Swedish troops including a contingent of Laplanders. 200 Blacks from the New World (the Dutch colony of Surinam)