Bonnie King Charlie

By Tim Venning

Tim Venning returns with a series of essays exploring different paths for the British monarchy from the Jacobite risings and beyond. What if the Stuart line had not died out? What if William and Mary had lived longer? And what if either Jacobite rising had succeeded? All this and more from the mind behind 'Caesars of the Bosphorus' and 'King Charles or King Oliver?'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sea Lion Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215719343

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE: THE LAST STUARTS – WILLIAM, MARY, AND ANNE

What if the Stuart line had not died out in 1714?

The heirs: Protestant and Catholic

The most pressing political campaign at the end of William III’s reign in 1700-02 was to ensure that the Stuart throne did not pass after him and his sister-in-law Anne to a Catholic, be it his late wife Mary’s half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, or a more remote relative. James’, Mary’s, and Anne’s deposed father, James II and VII, had failed to restore himself to his British thrones by invasion from France in the years 1689-1701 and died in September 1701, though he had secured most of Ireland with a French army in 1689-91 and had also been recognised in parts of Scotland. Nor had the support for his claim by Louis XIV of France, with whom England was then at war, enabled Louis’ fleet to invade England on his behalf, though there had been a ‘near miss’ in 1690. William had duly forced Louis to recognise him as King of Great Britain in the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, but the threat of an invasion by ‘tyrannical Papists’, led by France, to restore the absolutist Stuart line expelled in 1688 had not gone away. William had never been popular in Great Britain, his far more acceptable wife Mary II (James II and VII’s legal heiress, if her half-brother was accepted as an impostor) had died young in December 1694, and English national opinion was sporadically active against the abrupt, asthmatic, and morose half-Dutch William throughout his reign. Nor was it clear how many members of the elite had kept in touch with the exiled Stuart court in France as an ‘insurance policy’ in case they returned as opposed to actively plotting treachery. Once William III’s nephew, Anne’s son William, Duke of Gloucester, died aged eleven in 1700 the English political elite turned their attention to finding a Protestant heir to follow Anne – with the problem that most of her Stuart relatives were Catholics and/or connected to France.

The Act of Settlement of 1701, which came into operation as the Hanoverian Succession when Anne died on 1 August 1714, arranged contingency plans for the likely event of Anne, now thirty-six, not conceiving again following the recent death of her son, William, Duke of Gloucester, aged eleven. It transferred the throne of Great Britain and Ireland to the line of the youngest daughter of Charles I’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia and the Palatinate, excluding closer personnel who were all Catholics to prevent a repetition of James II’s reign. Legally the next heir after James’ excluded son by his second marriage, the supposed ‘warming-pan-baby’ fake Prince James Francis Edward (born June 1688), was Anne Marie, the surviving younger daughter of the King’s late sister Henriette Anne (‘Minette’), Duchess of Orleans (1644-1670). She was, however, both a Catholic and married to a Catholic, the French King’s cousin and client-ruler Duke Victor Amadeus of Savoy.[1] Louis XIV, her ineffective father Philippe’s dominant elder brother, had arranged this marriage to help tie Savoy to a close French alliance. The ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth of Bohemia, who easily outlived her two brothers, Prince Henry (d. 1612) and King Charles I (executed 1649), and died at sixty-five early in 1662, had married Elector Frederick of the German Palatinate (Lower and Upper) in 1613, shortly after the surprise death of Prince Henry. The Palatinate family were the younger – Protestant – line of the House of Wittelsbach, Catholic sovereigns of Bavaria. In 1619, the rebellious Protestant population of Bohemia deposed their Catholic Habsburg sovereigns and invited the Wittelsbachs in as the new rulers. Frederick thus acquired a second Electoral vote in the college of seven Electors that chose future Holy Roman Emperors, increasing the number of Protestant votes and the chances of a Protestant replacing the long line of Catholics and ending the Habsburg grip on the title since 1452. (Henry VIII had sought to achieve this in 1519, and Cromwell did so too in 1658, in alliance with Cardinal Mazarin.) They ruled but for one winter, hence the nickname, and were expelled by Habsburg troops the following year after the battle of the White Mountain; the Habsburgs’ Bavarian allies then overran the Palatinate too. This placed the new and repressively Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II, ruler of the ‘Austrian’ Habsburg lands and Hungary, back on the Bohemian throne and, by involving his Spanish relatives in the plan, put them at odds with Elizabeth’s father, James I of England and VI of Scotland, and revived English anti-Spanish feelings in a country still in thrall to the memories of the Spanish Armada attack in 1588. This crisis opened the Thirty Years’ War, and there was fervent enthusiasm (if less financial generosity) in James I’s final Parliaments in 1621-4 for organizing the reconquest.

Elizabeth, popular with the English as a Protestant heroine, mostly lived in Holland at The Hague and finally returned to England in 1660. Her second and third sons, Rupert and Maurice, had been active in their uncle’s cause in the Civil War, following which they had to go into exile and Maurice ended up drowned in a Caribbean hurricane while serving with the Cavalier fleet. Her eldest son Charles – who had been suspiciously sympathetic to Parliament’s cause on earlier visits to London and had been suspected of aiming for his uncle’s throne as a client of the rebellious Parliament[2] – regained the Lower Palatinate on the Rhine in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia as the Thirty Years’ War ended, but Bavaria kept the Upper Palatinate on the Danube. He died in 1680, having broken up with his first wife and remarried to his mistress. His son Charles’ death without male heirs in 1685 led to Louis XIV’s attempt to seize the state in the name of the first Charles’ daughter Elizabeth Charlotte (‘Liselotte’), second wife of his homosexual brother, Philippe of Orleans, who was the widower of Charles II of England’s sister Henriette Anne. Transferring the British crown to the eldest Protestant in Elizabeth’s family in 1701 named Elizabeth’s youngest daughter Sophia as heir, and left out the immediate legitimate heir in the Palatinate line, ‘Liselotte’, as she was a Catholic and a senior Royal of the much-feared national foe France, along with her son and daughter by Orleans. The son, Duke Philippe (born 1674), became Regent of France from 1715-22; the daughter married into the House of Lorraine, Catholic allies of the French, with her son Francis marrying the Habsburg heiress Empress Maria Theresa and assuming the Imperial title in 1745. Elizabeth’s second son, the famous Royalist cavalry commander Prince Rupert (1619-82), had avoided marrying until his late middle age, although he was too busy campaigning in firstly the Thirty Years’ War in Germany (where he was captured and spent two years in prison) and then in the English Civil War in his early adulthood, when a marriage would normally have been arranged. Nor was he popular in England then, his depredations of Parliamentary towns in the manner of German warfare having won him the nickname of ‘Prince Robber’. After his English service ended in 1645 with the fall of Bristol to the Parliamentarians (for which his uncle Charles I blamed and sacked him), he was a landless exile associated with a deposed royal dynasty and so he was no ‘catch’ for any ambitious European royal family, but after the Restoration in 1660 he returned to Britain aged forty and could have married had he so wished. He set up house as constable of Windsor Castle with two successive mistresses and eventually married the latter, the pioneering actress Margaret ‘Peg’ Hughes; their daughter Ruperta was born illegitimate and so unable to succeed to the throne. Had he helped out the Stuarts by a ‘proper’ and appropriately royal marriage once it was clear that Charles II’s wife was barren and his brothers were dead or Catholic, a child born to Rupert in England in the 1670s could well have been chosen as the next-but-one sovereign in 1700.

Elizabeth’s younger sons were also dead by 1700, with Maurice having been drowned in 1652 and the impetuous Edward (1625-63) having married a rich Catholic Italian-French princess of the Gonzaga dynasty (dukes of Mantua) in 1645 and converted to Catholicism to please her family. Her parents had been based in France until her father inherited Mantua in 1630 and remained French in cultural and political orientation. Edward’s daughters then grew up in the staunchly Catholic orbit of Louis XIV’s court and married Catholics too, and after the Restoration neither they nor their parents bothered with their English links. Sophia (born 1630), the youngest of the Winter Queen’s four daughters, was the only one still alive and Protestant in 1700 – two older sisters, the multi-talented linguist and philosopher Elizabeth (a correspondent of Descartes) and the artist Louise, were abbesses. Like Edward, Louise (abbess of Maubuisson in France) was a potential Stuart heir who had unexpectedly defied her Protestant mother and ignored the family’s victimisation by the international Catholic royal elite by running off from their Dutch home in The Hague to become a Catholic under the influence of the French. Only Sophia had kept to her mother’s Protestant links, and had married Ernest Augustus, one of the contending princes of a minor branch of the ancient House of Brunswick in northern Germany who, by a mixture of luck and shrewdness, consolidated enough of his family’s property into one state to have it raised to an Electorate (as ‘Hanover’) in 1692. As far as dynastic legitimacy is concerned, the Orleans line (which gained the French throne in 1830 under Louis Philippe) and the House of Habsburg-Lorraine both survive to this today as more senior descendants of the early Stuarts than the Hanoverians, but have remained Catholic.

The 1701 Parliamentary choice of Anne and her heirs for the throne after William III depended on the exclusion of all nearer relatives to Queen Anne who were Catholic. Quite apart from the closer heirs of the Palatinate line, there was the line of Charles II’s youngest sister Henrietta Anne/‘Minette’ in France. Without the arrangement of her conversion to Catholicism and a French marriage in 1661 by her ever-zealous grandmother Queen Henrietta Maria, Minette’s children would have been the next heirs after James II’s daughters. Indeed, Minette had been such an enthusiastic Catholic (and so ignorant of political reality in England, which she had left as a baby to be brought up in France) that she had been heavily involved in the secret negotiations between her brother Charles II and her brother-in-law Louis XIV in 1670 which ended in an apparent secret treaty providing for French military help when Charles converted to Catholicism too. Her mother, the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria, not at all concerned for her children’s chances in England as Catholics if the Commonwealth ever fell, had tried to convert as many of them as possible in the 1650s – Charles II included. A Protestant marriage for Minette would have made her heirs the probable choice of successor to Anne in 1701 had she not died in 1670 (rumoured to be by poison); the Catholic fervour of Henrietta Maria thus indirectly aided the assumption of the British throne by the present occupants and played a major role in British politics for the next 300 years. But it should be noted that, in any case, Charles II did not have many alternative Protestant husbands for his sister in 1660-2 except less prestigious (or useful) German princes. The only militarily valuable Protestant ally of England, Sweden, had an under-age King (born 1655) and no close male relatives of the right age; a Catholic match was thus more likely.

As it was, Minette’s daughters had stayed Catholic as French royal ‘pawns’ and made Catholic marriages too. The elder, Marie Louise (born March 1662), married the deformed last Spanish Habsburg, Charles/Carlos II, in 1679 as arranged by Louis XIV, had a miserable marriage with no prospect of children, resigned herself to an isolated existence eating too much with her husband under the control of his Catholic zealot ministers, and died suddenly in 1689 (allegedly poisoned). Had she been alive in 1701, as the widowed Queen of Spain, she is unlikely to have been prepared to abandon her lifelong religion to become heiress to England, though she had no reason to obey Louis, who had packed her off to Spain to marry an infertile and unhealthy genetic oddity without a thought – and had reputedly told her as she left France that he hoped never to see her return. The younger daughter, Anne Marie (born August 1669), was married off by Louis to Duke Victor Amadeus of Savoy, his cousin and political ‘satellite’ who from 1702 was fighting on the French side against Britain in the War of Spanish Succession. The Savoyard line of descent was regarded by Jacobites as the next legitimate Stuart line and thus the rightful sovereigns when the direct line died out in 1807, and survives (via the Royal families of Modena and Bavaria) today. Indeed, by this Catholic line of descent the Royal family of France were closer to the Stuart throne than the Hanoverians until the direct Bourbon line failed in 1883, due to Victor Amadeus’ and Anne Louise’s daughter marrying Louis XIV’s grandson the Duke of Burgundy (d. 1712). Also closer to the Stuarts were the junior line of the Bourbons whose heir Louis Philippe was invited to assume the throne of France at the July Revolution in 1830 – he was a direct descendant of Liselotte. Thus, technically the closest Stuart heir by male descent at the beginning of the twenty-first century was Franz of Wittelsbach (born 1933), rightful King of Bavaria.

Charles II’s Protestant siblings: Henry, Mary, and Elizabeth. Had they not died young, how would Late Stuart politics have been affected?

The succession of Sophia (who died at 84, just before Queen Anne, in summer 1714) and her son George Ludwig (born May 1660) relied on Stuart mortality as well as Catholic conversions and marriages. For a start, Charles II and James II’s next brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester – considered for the crown by the New Model Army leaders in 1648-52 – died of measles at the age of 20 in December 1660. He was still Protestant, despite the efforts of Henrietta Maria in the 1650s,[3] and – if alive and still in England with his niece Anne in 1701 – would have been the obvious choice to be the next King once her son died. He had been considered by the Army ‘Grandees’ as a potential puppet-King who could be trained up to rule properly in 1648, causing Charles I to warn him against accepting the Crown just before he was executed, and had been mentioned again in 1651-2. He had been in Parliament’s hands since the Civil War ended, along with his two younger sisters, being brought up by reliable moderate Parliamentarian peers (the Earls of Northumberland and then Leicester); Cromwell and Parliament sent him abroad to rejoin his family in 1652. He had the sense to resist his mother’s attempts to turn him Catholic in his mid-teens – suggesting a degree of political realism and determination not to mess up his elder brother Charles’ chances of being recalled as King after Cromwell died, a possibility that seemed remote at that point. His elder brother James, by contrast, notoriously converted to Catholicism privately in the late 1660s then admitted this openly in 1673, throwing the succession to his Protestant but childless elder brother into doubt. Henry would have been a less obvious beneficiary of ‘Exclusion’ in 1678-81 than his nephew the Duke of Monmouth, Charles’ eldest illegitimate son, who was preferred over James’ Protestant daughter Mary by the insurgent ‘opposition’ anti-Catholic Whigs as they used dominance of the 1679-81 Parliaments to demand a change in the succession. This was probably because Monmouth was a personal friend of the Whig leaders and so easier for them to trust, and it centred on the dubious question of whether or not Charles had really married Monmouth’s mother Lucy Walter – as Monmouth alleged – and the document still existed (in a notorious ‘Black Box’) and could be found.[4] The fact that Charles’ courtiers had been keen to search and/or confiscate some of Lucy’s papers in the 1650s, after she fell out with Charles, may indicate that she had such a document, and it was also supposed to have been found in the nineteenth century by her descendants and burnt as embarrassing to Queen Victoria.[5] But choosing Monmouth would have implied that Charles II was a liar in his earlier denials about marrying Lucy, who had died well before he married Catherine of Braganza (1658/1662) so there was no question of bigamy by him, and the King is unlikely to have given in to pressure on this by his Whig foes on principle. It would also exclude the legitimate next heir to James, Princess Mary (James’ elder daughter), who ‘moderates’ such as the Marquis of Halifax considered making ‘Regent’ for James as a powerless King so as to keep political power out of James’ hands. The ‘legitimist’ argument for preserving the line of succession and just omitting James as Catholic would still have been vested in Mary, as next heir to James, had Henry been alive in 1679-81.

It is possible that, as Henry had the political sense in his teens to refuse to convert to Catholicism, he would have been able to advise James against precipitate action in favour of Catholics in 1685-8, serving as a counterbalance to his brothers’ zealot advisers – but if so, his advice would probably have been ignored. James tended to listen to people who would agree with him and to ignore unwanted advice, even from his elder brother Charles II. His Protestant elder brother and ‘in-laws’ the Hydes had no influence on him, so Henry would hardly have done so either. It is unclear if Henry would have been likely to flee with his brother James in 1688, which would have disqualified him from consideration as a future heir unless, on James’ death, he recognised Anne rather than ‘James III’ as rightful heir. Given the usual Royal career of military service, he could have replaced the distrusted Duke of Monmouth (his nephew and Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son) as commander-in-chief c. 1680 and so had valuable military connections to either help or hinder James in 1688. As he was a Protestant, James is unlikely to have kept him on as commander-in-chief as late as 1688 despite the political usefulness of having a Protestant military chief to reassure his nobles; the King’s zealously conversion-minded priests like Father Petre would have been keen to see Henry replaced. Indeed, there could have been Catholic fear of Henry’s potential for leading a coup – particularly if he had expressed doubts over the identity of James II’s new son in June 1688 in alliance with his niece Anne (who in real life seems to have considered that Mary Beatrice’s pregnancy could be a fraud). If he backed his nephew and niece, William (Stadtholder of the Dutch United Provinces since 1672) and Mary, in 1688-9 he would have been an ideal leader for the ‘regency’ council of nobles when William reached London and then a senior commander and adviser for them in the 1690s, albeit possibly distrusted by William for dynastic ambitions or anti-Dutch views. As he was the next legitimate male heir to the throne after Mary and her sister Anne, he would have been named after them as heir in the Act of Settlement in 1701 rather than William’s children by a subsequent wife – William was the son of Henry’s eldest sister Mary, the eldest of the daughters of Charles I, and thus was genealogically junior to Henry. This would have pushed William’s children down the line of succession, had he had any. Indeed, if Henry had had children they also would have been ahead of William’s children when Anne died in 1714, and presumably he would have taken care to marry a Protestant princess – probably from Germany, given that there were none in Protestant Sweden of the right age to marry him in the 1660s. Charles X of Sweden left only one small son when he died in 1660, although he did have a half-German niece – his sister Christine’s daughter, Christine of Baden-Durlach (born July 1645), who was the right age to marry Henry as she was four years his junior and who in real life married Margrave Adolf of Brandenburg-Ansbach in 1665.

A connection of the Danish royal family was also possible, possibly Anna Sophie (1647-1717), eldest daughter of the autocrat King Frederick III (ruled 1648-1670), who was an ally of the exiled Stuarts in 1650s – so ‘persona grata’ to Charles II – but was also his cousin, son of Charles’ and Henry’s grandmother Anne of Denmark’s brother King Christian IV. This marriage of cousins might have been frowned upon, though it was usual among some European Catholic dynasties (eg the Habsburgs), but if it had occurred it would have had to be planned before 1663, when in real life Anna Sophie was engaged to the future Elector John George III of Saxony (also born 1647, accession 1680, died 1691). Had it occurred, the strong-willed Anna Sophie, a learned young woman who had considerable influence on the Saxon court in real life, would have been a useful ‘Duchess of Gloucester’ and possibly as shrewd as Henry in keeping to a determinedly Protestant line against her Catholicizing brother-in-law James II. The marriage would also have saved her and Saxony from the embarrassment of having to cope with her wayward elder son in real life, Elector John George IV (ruled 1691-4), who bullied and apparently tried to murder his unwanted wife, Eleonore of Ansbach (born a princess of Saxe-Weimar), in order to make way for his mistress – who was rumoured to be his half-sister. (The incident may also have affected British history, as Eleonore’s daughter by her previous husband, the future Queen Caroline of Great Britain, witnessed the crisis; did it make her emotionally tougher but more insecure?) An alternative wife for Henry would have been from Denmark’s junior line of the adjoining Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp, which would have had useful long-term consequences as the new ‘Great Power’ in the Baltic in the 1710s, Peter the Great of Russia, married his daughter Anna into that family.

Though Henry is unlikely to have been alive, aged 74, in 1714 to succeed Anne, this is possible. (The previous Stuart males to live to that age had been Robert II of Scotland, who lived to 74 in 1390, and his second son, Duke Robert of Albany, who probably reached 80.) If he had made a sensible Protestant marriage in the 1660s, probably into a North German or Danish Lutheran royal house, his children would have been eligible for the Crown in 1701. A son would probably have been in his thirties – and so, possibly, already married with children. They would then have succeeded Anne on the throne in 1714, excluding the Hanoverian family – though the ambitious Electress Sophia is capable of having married off her son, George Ludwig (born in 1660), to a daughter of Henry’s if the latter was his closest heir and so would have ended up as Queen. In this case, a ‘Queen Charlotte’ or ‘Queen Henrietta’, daughter of Henry and born c. 1662-70, would have been ruling in the 1710s and 1720s with George Ludwig as Consort – and the latter would not have had the embarrassment of having divorced and imprisoned his wife, as in reality. The Prussian ambassador to Hanover, Sponheim, endeavoured to suggest a marriage between Sophia’s eldest son, George Ludwig, and James’ second daughter, Anne (four and a half years younger), in the late 1670s, at a time when it was not certain that Anne’s elder sister Mary would be childless. Sophia sniffed that Anne’s mother, Anne Hyde, was too low-born for such a marriage, but George did visit London during a tour in late 1680 and met Anne, apparently backed by her sister’s husband William of Orange (who presumably wanted his sister-in-law tied to a fellow Protestant to decrease her Catholic father’s influence). The envoy from Anne’s stepmother Mary of Modena’s homeland heard that Anne was in love with George, but the plan was not followed up; possibly a veto from Charles II was why it was abandoned.[6]

George then married his paternal first cousin, Sophia Dorothea, daughter of his uncle George (d. 1705), in order to strengthen his claim to succeed her son-less father in his part of the Hanoverian family dominions (the duchy of Calenburg) as part of his parents’ plan to consolidate all of the latter in their own immediate family. Given his father Ernest’s obsessive desire to consolidate the family’s domains and increase their status (soon to be rewarded with an Electorship in 1692, putting them in the front rank of Imperial princes), marrying George to Anne in 1680-1 would have meant abandoning the means chosen to fulfil the Calenburg annexation plan. This was possible, and arguably would have saved George from a horrendous marriage to a wayward and impulsive girl alien to his dour character, but was unlikely as then Sophia Dorothea would have had another husband who could claim the inheritance to Calenburg. The potential marriage of George Ludwig and Anne could have landed England with their offspring as King or Queen from 1714, had Anne had more luck with her children surviving, and the quiet, obstinate, hard-drinking and military-minded George is unlikely to have had much of an impact as Consort on Anne’s reign, given his military priorities in the war of 1702-13. A loyal son of his ambitious parents and committed to Hanover’s Continental expansion, he would have been less easily settled into the role of a politically neutered ‘Prince Consort’ after 1702 than Anne’s real-life consort George of Denmark (who did not constantly act on behalf of his native country in England, unlike George of Hanover did). The noisily patriotic ‘Tories’ of the 1700s could easily have taken against George for encouraging his wife and her ministers to assist Hanover’s aims in the War of Spanish Succession, which implicitly were at England’s expense, and accused him and his allies of sacrificing English/British lives in the war for Germans’ benefit. George would have been at odds with the 1710-14 Tory ministry as it sought to disentangle Britain from the war and abandon its Continental allies; he could easily have clashed with Anne’s ministers Harley and St. John for their ‘dishonourable’ secret negotiations with France and asked Anne to dismiss them, arousing Tory journalists’ abuse . But at least Anne would not have been able to distance herself from her Hanoverian relations as her distasteful and unwanted heirs had her husband been the heir to Hanover. If she and George had a child, the latter would probably have been over 18 in 1714 and so able to rule themselves, but a child-ruler would have aroused Tory fears over George’s probable German entanglements as regent. If they had no surviving children, one of George’s brothers would have succeeded her.

Charles II’s eldest sister, Mary the Princess of Orange (William III’s mother), also died in the December 1660 epidemic, aged 29, having played a major role in assisting her brothers’ exile in the 1650s and triumphant return from Holland. Her closeness to Charles II would possibly have made her a useful source of political advice to him had she lived – her portrait was still in his private apartments at Whitehall Palace when he died, twenty-four years later. If she had remarried after her first husband, the Dutch Stadtholder William (II) of Orange, died in 1650, her children would have been next in line after Henry’s family in 1701. Given her need to conciliate the Protestant Dutch States-General in the 1660s in case her young son William (born November 1650) needed votes to be elected Stadtholder in coming years, her husband would have needed to be Protestant. But such a husband could have been found from the Dutch or North German nobility, and she was young enough to have children even after 1660. In this scenario, a child of hers by her second marriage would have been aged around 40 in 1701, and a prime candidate to succeed to the British throne after Anne in 1714. They might also have kept up the British-Dutch ‘union of crowns’ of 1689-1702 if William III had given them his patronage in his lifetime, subject to the fact that at this time each Dutch ‘Stadtholder’ had to be elected as such by each of their seven provinces plus the national States-General and the latter might have jibbed at choosing a Briton over William III’s fully Dutch cousins.

Alternatively, the early death of Charles II’s second surviving sister Elizabeth (born 1635) in 1650 was also unexpected and put her out of the reckoning. Henrietta Maria had abandoned her younger children to Parliamentary care in 1642 rather than take them on her travels; the latter was indeed more of a risk to their health, but she did not show any sign of realising that they could be used as hostages. (Parliament duly held the children prisoner in the City as Charles I advanced in December 1642 as potential negotiating-counters.) They would not have been pawns of politics in England for a decade if they had been removed by an armed escort to the safety of a pro-Royalist area, most obviously the Catholic household of the Paulet family at strongly-fortified Basing House in Hampshire in January 1642 and thence Western or Northern England. They could have left by ship to join the Queen on her fund-raising trip to Holland, to be put in their sister Mary’s care. But Elizabeth and Henry had been left under Parliamentary supervision in various country houses near London in 1642-8, been available to meet their father just before he was executed, with the Earl of Northumberland looking after them, and had then been placed in the care of a pro-Parliamentarian peer, the Earl of Leicester (father of the Cromwellian Lord Lisle and the radical Algernon Sidney) at Penshurst Place in Kent. After the King’s execution it was decided not to attempt to make Henry sovereign; negotiations began for them to join their mother and siblings abroad and they were transferred to Carisbrooke Castle to await shipment. Instead, Elizabeth caught a chill in the rain on her father’s 1647 bowling-green and died.[7] She was duly buried in nearby Newport. Without this avoidable tragedy she would have been available to make a marriage in the 1650s (or 1660s, if no Continental Royal wanted a homeless Stuart until after the Restoration put their political value up). Henrietta Maria would have tried to marry her off to a Catholic, possibly to her nearly-coeval cousin Louis XIV (born 1638), though with scant hope of that succeeding due to the prior importance of France ending the Spanish war with a Spanish marriage, as happened in real life in 1659/60. She was five years older than Louis’ bisexual transvestite brother Philippe, Duke of Orleans (born 1640), for whom Henrietta Maria eventually secured her youngest daughter, Minette. The Spanish branch of the Catholic Habsburgs was nearly extinct in the male line by the 1650s and the Austrians preferred marrying their own cousins, though from the Restoration Elizabeth might have been considered a suitable match for the frequently-widowed Emperor Leopold I (born 1640). Little is known of her character, but she had the strength of will and common sense to occupy herself learning foreign languages in her time awaiting release into her exiled mother’s hands in 1649-50 and could well have been shrewder about insisting on marrying a Protestant than her younger sister was – or, if she had married a Catholic, in asking one of her children to become Protestant once Parliament’s hostility to Catholics was apparent. Even if Elizabeth had been still alive and had been unavailable to Parliament as a Catholic in 1701, probably living abroad, there was the chance that an ambitious child of hers might be prepared to convert to Protestantism for the English throne. In the tradition of Henrietta Maria’s father, Henri IV, London was worth a Communion.

The early deaths of the final Stuarts of the main Protestant line. What if they had lived longer?

(a) William III and Mary II

Firstly, Mary II died at 32 in December 1694 of smallpox at Kensington Palace. She was usually in excellent health unlike her younger sister Anne, though with (two?) stillbirths early in her marriage in 1677-8 and then apparently no further conceptions.[8] Her marriage had been stable, despite her differences in temperament from her austere and somewhat dour husband and the possibility that this had a role in a cooling-off of their initially passionate relationship, where she had possibly caused the first miscarriage by her constant journeyings in uncomfortable carriages on bumpy roads to visit him at the front during the finale of the 1672-8 Franco-Dutch war. The incident of his probably long-standing sexual relationship with her lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Villiers (revealed by her meddling servants to her father’s ambassador in The Hague and then used by James II to try to break them up in 1685), may indicate that the marriage had problems, rather than William just pursuing the usual sexual ‘perks’ of a 17th Century monarch. Given their sense of political duty, however, no pre-1689 divorce was likely – despite James’ hopes and apparent meddling for this aim once he was tipped off about the Villiers affair. The austerely Calvinist William’s early hostility to his wife’s Anglican beliefs and resistance to letting her set up an Anglican chapel at his court also abated, so their different beliefs did not drive a wedge between them as to her chaplains’ complaints about the Villiers relationship. Nor is it clear if the close personal bond between William and his friend and minister, Hans Willem Bentinck (later first Earl/Duke of Portland), was homosexual – or, if so, was a symptom or result of a cooled-off marriage from which no heirs were likely. All the indications are that, by 1688-9, Mary was as much in love with her husband as ever, was used to a quiet existence away from politics, and had no confidence in her own ability to take initiatives such as might have enabled ambitious English politicians to seek to use her against her husband as Queen – indeed, she was unwilling to move into the ‘limelight’ of front-line politics and serve as his regent when he had to go to Ireland to fight her father in summer 1690.

Mary would normally have been expected to outlive her husband, eleven and a half years her senior, who was never strong and spent much of his life from 1672-8 and 1689-97 on campaigns living in draughty tents. The asthmatic and semi-tubercular warrior-king, visibly ageing in his final years after all his campaigns and even in 1689 too frail to stand the river-fogs and city smog of Whitehall, died in March 1702 at the age of fifty-one. A chill caught dozing by an open window at Kensington Palace after breaking his collar-bone at Hampton Court turned to pneumonia[9] – the broken collar-bone, which he had recently suffered in a riding accident, was not more than a contributory factor despite the legend of this, though it had had to be re-set after being jolted in his journey back to Kensington and was not healing as swiftly as expected. This may indicate that in his condition any moderately serious illness or accident was likely to be dangerous. William’s death meant that he did not take command in the climax of the anti-French struggle he had waged for thirty years, with Louis XIV having accepted the rash bequeathal to his grandson Duke Philip of Anjou of all the Spanish empire by King Charles in November 1700 and so alarming his long-term foes in England, the Dutch Republic, and the Holy Roman Empire. The Jacobites apparently toasted the ‘little black gentleman’, the mole who had rid them of their arch-enemy by causing William’s riding accident, although in reality it appears that William was recovering from his riding accident normally until he caught a chill.

Though William’s death from pneumonia as early as March 1702 was avoidable, his health had been declining for years. It is probable, given his frailty, that he would not have survived more than a year or two of harsh campaigns in Flanders in the 1702-13 war. Accordingly, it is not a realistic scenario to contemplate a ‘What If?’ based on William avoiding his bout of pneumonia in March 1702 and being in command of the Allied campaigns in place of the Duke of Marlborough (real-life commander-in-chief in the war) for all of the next decade. The rainy climate of the ‘Little Ice Age’, and month after month living under canvas at the front in the Spanish Netherlands from 1702-10, were likely to have at least invalided William out of the war within a few years, making him rely on a deputy – for which role Marlborough was lined up in 1701-2. But William had survived the campaigning of the early-mid 1690s without much ill effects and would probably have lived through another year or two at least, barring a serious chill caught while living under canvas during the campaigning season. If he had been alive in 1704, he not Marlborough would have been in command of the Allies in the Netherlands as Louis’ army moved East to aid Bavaria against the Emperor, and his reaction to the threat to Vienna would have been vital to the future of the war. Would he have risked marching to the Danube, as Marlborough did, or sent a subordinate? As he appointed the Duke (then only an Earl) as his commander-in-chief in 1701,[10] forgiving him for his duplicitous correspondence with James II in the 1690s, he would logically have sent Marlborough to aid the Emperor – and thus the outcome of a crushing British victory at Blenheim would have been as in real life. The question is if William would have had to cede operational command in the Netherlands to Marlborough after that as his own health declined, and if not, whether he would have been more cautious than Marlborough as a commander (for example, in risking Dutch troops in the battlefield for fear of angry reactions to a high casualty-list). If William had chosen to remain away from the front line for most of the campaigns due to his poor health, he could have survived longer than if he had been living under canvas, though his Continental preoccupations mean that he would probably have centred himself at The Hague, not in London.