Tudor bulls, meet 16th century German china shop.
- Thread starter Dr. Waterhouse
- Start date
"Brudna wojna" means Dirty War, and has perfect sense in context of bloody, ugly and dishonorable civil war, but not Dirt War, because 'brud' in polish is not used in meaning of arable (or any other) land, ground or soil.
Not that Dirt War cannot be used in english language historiography.
Would any of the following work better for 'dirt' in this sense?
grunt
niwa
rola
What does 'gleba' mean? which kind of 'soil' is it?
I would have though that 'zem' or some such would be what you'd want, but maybe that's only East Slavic?
grunt
niwa
rola
What does 'gleba' mean? which kind of 'soil' is it?
I would have though that 'zem' or some such would be what you'd want, but maybe that's only East Slavic?
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Thanks, everyone! Next up is going to be a lovely in-depth piece on the sunny continent of Friedrichsland that will give us some insight into what it's like there today. And then I think I might update us on what is going on with the Stuart kings of Scotland post Henry I.
Something else that might be fun is examining the lives of people familiar in our history whom we have not met in the timeline. This could be something of an interesting challenge, I think, and would help to flesh things out. Alternately, we could proceed through descriptions of the English colonies of North America as they exist in 1740, since they're ripening on the branch, as it were.
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Likely. Wojna Na Pola (War for Farmland, if my Polish does not betray me in terms of grammar) is also suitable.I'll work at it.Edit: Wojna Gleby? Would that be it?
Wojna Gleby doesnt work. "Wojna o pola", (war for farmfields, farmlands) yes, but better "Wojna o ziemię", war for land (war to gain control of the land, not to be confused with "Wojna o Ziemię" war for Earth
). None of them can be translated as Dirt War though, this wordplay simply does not work in Polish. You may try doing somethng like this:
"In <date> so called <name war> starts in Poland. Ambassador Whatshisface, a famous historian, in letter to Someone called it Dirt War, as it was fought by the dirt (poor commoners), for the dirt (land) and in dirty, the most cruel and bloody way.
Wojna o ziemie it is!
Wojna Gleby doesnt work. "Wojna o pola", (war for farmfields, farmlands) yes, but better "Wojna o ziemię", war for land (war to gain control of the land, not to be confused with "Wojna o Ziemię" war for Earth
You may try doing somethng like this:
"In <date> so called <name war> starts in Poland. Ambassador Whatshisface, a famous historian, in letter to Someone called it Dirt War, as it was fought by the dirt (poor commoners), for the dirt (land) and in dirty, the most cruel and bloody way.
The Understudy
Special Survey: The Stuarts of the Latter Seventeenth Century, Part I
Charles, Duke of Albany
When we consider the dynamism that characterized Scotland in the seventeenth century, it is easy to attribute it too much to just the bold personality of Henry the Wanderer. Previous Stuart rulers had been hamstrung by domestic discord as much as by the rivalry with England, discord with most often close family relations at its heart. Thus James III had been killed in a revolt led by his son James IV in 1488, James V had been plagued in his youth by the efforts of his uncle and stepfather to dominate him and rule through him, and Mary I had been abducted and ultimately deposed. Even James VI had faced serious discontent among his earls following his failure to take the English crown. Given the difficulty of ruling Scotland in the century before Henry I became king, how could he have been able to leave the country for so long to wage war in the Americas, or levy the taxes necessary to finance his long campaigns, without the slightest peep of insurrection? The answer lies partly in circumstance, partly in the nature of his own skillful rule, and partly in the character of his younger brother, Charles Duke of Albany, the regent during his long absences.
It would be easy to subscribe to the misconceptions actively fomented by Henry’s admiring biographers that portray the two princes as close and loving from earliest childhood, and imagine the robust and active Henry sheltering and helping his weaker, shy younger brother. Nothing could be further from the truth. Henry lorded his physical prowess over Charles mercilessly and teased him frequently to the point of tears. Moreover, this did not end as Henry matured, but continued into early adulthood. Moreover, as Henry’s relationship to King James became more difficult, the king began to favor his more respectful younger son over the Duke of Rothesay.
By the time this began to provoke speculation that Henry’s succession might be in some danger however, James’s health was already in serious decline. Henry had already assumed much of the power of the Scottish throne in advance of James’s death in 1625, and it was believed he negotiated the terms of his own engagement with the French princess Henrietta Maria in 1623. This meant that when Henry left Scotland to meet Henrietta Maria and return with her to Scotland, he essentially left Charles in control of the kingdom. The fact that he did so fully trusting his brother raised eyebrows at the Scottish court, yet it was a watershed in the two’s relationship.
His own long-delayed marriage achieved, Henry thereafter began seeking a match for Charles. Rather than seek a prestigious foreign match, he essentially invited competing offers from the leading Scottish nobles for the privilege of wedding a daughter to the Duke of Albany, and gave Charles his choice. His reasoning in doing so was that he did not want his younger brother to have foreign entanglements that would lead outside powers to attempt to subvert his rule or his children’s succession.
As a result of this process, Charles married Anne Livingstone the daughter of Alexander Livingstone, First Earl of Linlithgow. Linlithgow had sided with Mary during the Marian Civil War against those nobles using the infant James VI as a figurehead. Ironically, James VI had rewarded that simultaneous loyalty to his mother and disloyalty to himself with a series of honors, including the elevation of Lord Livingstone to the earldom on the occasion of Charles’s baptism. Significant also is that Lady Helen, Countess Linlithgow, was Roman Catholic. This created worries that despite Henry’s un-ambivalent love of Presbyterianism, Scotland was becoming “a reformed country with a papist court”, concerns which were of course only aggravated by the presence of Queen Henrietta Maria and her retinue.
Of course, what did more to stabilize Scotland’s royal family in these years than anything else was the fertility of the royal couple: Queen Henrietta Maria bore nine children in twelve years, with six reaching maturity, of which three were sons. By Henrietta Maria’s last pregnancy, Charles had fallen rather far in the royal succession. Moreover, the personal popularity of Henry and his embrace of Presbyterianism made the thought of trying to displace him seem suicidal. Even the Roman Catholic lords of the Highlands were gradually won over by the king’s permissiveness of their “Quiet Observance.” Beneath this liberality however, there was plainly a quid pro quo. Even those Scottish lords implicated in the Spanish Blanks Plot were permitted to return, and the private practice of Roman Catholicism was indulged, but only so long as no further intrigues against the crown were countenanced. For her part, Henrietta Maria emerged as an intermediary. Thus by the time Henry departed for the western shores of the Atlantic in 1643, after nineteen years of rule, Scotland was the most politically stable it had been in recorded memory. Of course, it helped still further that he took as many lords as he could of fighting age with him.
For his part, Charles Duke of Albany had spent the first two decades of Henry’s reign creating his own family, with his daughters Anne (1628), Henrietta (1630) and Charlotte (1631) followed by a son, James (1634). Henrietta and Charlotte died in infancy. He also dabbled in religious matters, enthusiastically championing the cause of episcopacy within the Scottish Church though accepting the authority of his brother as dispositive on the matter. He also served in Henry I’s council of state and involved himself in the running of his estates.
In the end, the dispositive matter was Charles’s own character. Far from a scheming younger brother in the mold of John I or Richard III of England, Charles was scrupulous, as zealous in respecting his brother’s authority and prerogatives as he was in expecting others to respect his own. And though he had reservations about Henry personally, he sincerely believed in the project of magnifying Scotland’s national greatness by expansion overseas. For this reason he was willing, perhaps even eager, to jail large numbers of Scots for non-payment of the special assessments for the War of the Three Kings in 1645. To many Scottish lords, the enthusiasm of the sickly Duke of Albany for a firm law and order policy was surprising.
Now, in his two decades on the throne before crossing the Atlantic Henry had shown neither interest nor aptitude for the grand game of European match-making. Worse still, Scotland’s war with the various powers of northern Europe had rendered null the prospects of matches with its usual marriage partners, such as Denmark. Thus when Charles began negotiating marriage alliances, it was because this fell to him out of necessity due to the rapidly aging princes and princesses in his charge. The leading contender for a match was Anne Marie Louise, Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston duke of Orleans and duchesse du Montpensier in her own right. Through her deceased mother Anne Marie Louise had inherited a vast fortune and an agglomeration of estates in some of the most productive agricultural land of France. What Anne Marie Louise lacked in rank she compensated in the material advantages of such a match. Henrietta Maria of course embraced the prospect, and negotiations were undertaken in earnest. For this purpose Charles I dispatched the trusted Marquess of Huntly, George Gordon.
Though once again religious differences proved to be a problem, the prospects of a renewal of the auld alliance for France, and the huge dowry Anne Marie Louise would bring to the perpetually cash-strapped Scottish court, was simply too attractive to forego. Thus in 1646, in what was now becoming the custom for Scottish monarchs, the Duke of Rothesay went to France to fetch home Anne Marie Louise of Orleans, and they were married in 1647. In the final agreement the French worries about the magnitude of Mademoiselle’s landholdings falling into foreign hands were satisfied by a complex triangular transaction: Mademoiselle was essentially forced to alienate a large part of her holdings to Louis XIV, who then contributed on behalf of Mademoiselle’s debt-ridden father a huge one-time payment to the King of Scotland in addition to the dowry provided by the Duke of Orleans.
Thus Anne Marie Louise essentially paid to become a queen. Only a few years later, her wealth would be funding the construction of the Scottish fleet with which her father-in-law would conquer the Rio de la Plata, and a few decades after that the remainder in French hands would help fund the fleet of airships with which her cousin would conquer the Netherlands.
Of course this began one of the most epically dysfunctional royal marriages in the history of Scotland, and it augured poorly for the couple’s future happiness that Mademoiselle had to be forcibly loaded onto the coach to take her away from Paris, so intent she was on marriage to the young Louis XIV. As Charles was heard to say over thirty years later, “had only we the sense to have let her stay!”
By the wedding of the Duke of Rothesay and Mademoiselle, the king had returned, and was well-pleased by Charles’s tenure as regent in his absence. This made it easier in 1651 for King Henry to leave again, this time to build upon his possessions in the New World by capturing Buenos Aires. It was a bold plan, one which he undertook only after granting to the Scottish lords he was leaving behind vast plantations in Jamaica, the organization of which would leave them happy and busy.
Though Henry’s expedition was successful from the beginning, it burned through the monetary contributions of Mademoiselle at a prodigious rate, and by 1653 Charles, once again regent, began to feel the pinch of the vast expenditures required by Henry’s eager embrace of the colonial embrace. Ironically, it was now that the Duke of Albany’s peculiar economic genius began to reveal itself, as he and his team of eager lawyers scoured Scottish statutes and feudal tenures for any duties, customs or usages which the crown could use to extract money. In normal times, such a squeezing of the lords and commons of Scotland would produce explosive resentment, but Henry’s “Madness of the South Seas” had now become a national passion, immensely popular. Charles for his part, always sure to cast his fiscal policies in terms of the necessity of supporting the king and preserving his life while he was in harm’s way abroad, was unassailable.
Charles’s other preoccupation was continuing the business of marrying off the next generation of Stuarts. In this with Henry’s support he pursued what has become known as a Brandon strategy, marrying off the princes and princesses to the nobility of the kingdom that otherwise might emerge as rivals to the royal house. Thus the Marquess of Huntly’s service in negotiating the marriage of Henry Duke of Rothesay to Mademoiselle was rewarded even before the king departed for points south by his son Gordon’s marriage to Princess Anne in 1650. In 1652 Princess Catherine married the heir of the Earl of Montrose, balancing the House of Gordon’s Catholic sympathies with the Douglases’ Protestant intensity. The Princess Henrietta refused to countenance a marriage, and given the size of the royal family she was indulged.
With Charles the duke of Albany, Henry I’s second surviving son William was created the Duke of Ross in 1639, and his third surviving son Robert was made the Duke of Lothian in 1641. It fell to Charles to negotiate their marriages, William to Anne Hamilton, daughter and likely heir of the Duke of Hamilton, and Robert to Margaret Leslie, daughter of the Duke of Rothes. The weddings were celebrated in 1653 and 1654. It was believed the Duke of Ross would recapture the lands of the dukedom of Hamilton if the current duke died without producing a male heir. Charles’ own son and heir James married Lady Elizabeth Percy, daughter of the English Earl of Northhumberland in 1653, and his daughter Anne married Alexander Stuart, the Fifth Earl of Moray in 1654.
The Scottish peerage thus liberally seasoned with Stuart princes and princesses, Charles continued to preoccupy himself with making certain his brother’s colonial projects were properly funded. On Henry’s return in 1657 he gave Charles the additional title of Lord Governor of Jamaica, which brought with it more estates and revenue than it did additional responsibility. Of particular interest to Charles was the human property attached, which numbered some 35,000 slaves.
Henry II also gave the Duke of Albany Dumferline Palace (joking that Charles had spent more time in the royal residences during his reign than he had), which was renamed the Palace of Albany and renovated over Charles and his son’s tenures as duke of Albany into a truly imposing residence. This became the principle site of the duke’s growing art collection. James produced Charles his first grandson in 1660, thus ensuring the continuity of what would become the House of Albany, which would continue as long as the Scottish monarchy, and terminate spectacularly along with it.
The king’s syphilis increasingly made him unable to carry out his duties in this years, but in 1660 it was the thirty-year-old future Henry II who became regent for his father rather than Charles. The Duke of Rothesay had developed during his long tutelage into a shrewd statesman. Under the influence of Henrietta Maria he had adopted significant French and episcopal sympathies, which until then had not been disrupted too badly by his tempestuous marriage to Anne Marie Louise. Moreover, in many ways the long absences of his father had made him more a product of his uncle than the king for good or ill, and Charles was a welcome presence in the younger Henry’s councils both while he was the Duke of Rothesay and, after, 1662, during his reign as Henry II. Only gradually did Charles withdraw from public life, and when he did all was certain it was the earned retirement of a sage rather than the discarding of a man past his prime.
Unfortunately, this also meant there was little Charles could do when many of his carefully made plans exploded, as the royal marriage of Henry II and Anne Marie Louise descended into nightmare, and the seeding of the secondary houses of Scotland with Stuart princes did not so much work to ensure their loyalty as to plant in them fresh dynastic ambitions. It is uncertain how much such matters weighed on his mind at all when the Duke of Albany finally expired in 1686 in his ninth decade of life, having enjoyed what so few of his Stuart forebears had, a natural lifespan.
NOTE: This revises the previous biography of Henry I, which had the future Henry II marry Princess Maria of the Netherlands.
NOTE: Previously in the eighteenth century I have described the Gordons of Huntly, a Scottish noble house, as having a hereditary earldom. In actuality, James VI made them marquesses in 1599. In forthcoming events they will become dukes.
Special Survey: The Stuarts of the Latter Seventeenth Century, Part I
Charles, Duke of Albany
When we consider the dynamism that characterized Scotland in the seventeenth century, it is easy to attribute it too much to just the bold personality of Henry the Wanderer. Previous Stuart rulers had been hamstrung by domestic discord as much as by the rivalry with England, discord with most often close family relations at its heart. Thus James III had been killed in a revolt led by his son James IV in 1488, James V had been plagued in his youth by the efforts of his uncle and stepfather to dominate him and rule through him, and Mary I had been abducted and ultimately deposed. Even James VI had faced serious discontent among his earls following his failure to take the English crown. Given the difficulty of ruling Scotland in the century before Henry I became king, how could he have been able to leave the country for so long to wage war in the Americas, or levy the taxes necessary to finance his long campaigns, without the slightest peep of insurrection? The answer lies partly in circumstance, partly in the nature of his own skillful rule, and partly in the character of his younger brother, Charles Duke of Albany, the regent during his long absences.
It would be easy to subscribe to the misconceptions actively fomented by Henry’s admiring biographers that portray the two princes as close and loving from earliest childhood, and imagine the robust and active Henry sheltering and helping his weaker, shy younger brother. Nothing could be further from the truth. Henry lorded his physical prowess over Charles mercilessly and teased him frequently to the point of tears. Moreover, this did not end as Henry matured, but continued into early adulthood. Moreover, as Henry’s relationship to King James became more difficult, the king began to favor his more respectful younger son over the Duke of Rothesay.
By the time this began to provoke speculation that Henry’s succession might be in some danger however, James’s health was already in serious decline. Henry had already assumed much of the power of the Scottish throne in advance of James’s death in 1625, and it was believed he negotiated the terms of his own engagement with the French princess Henrietta Maria in 1623. This meant that when Henry left Scotland to meet Henrietta Maria and return with her to Scotland, he essentially left Charles in control of the kingdom. The fact that he did so fully trusting his brother raised eyebrows at the Scottish court, yet it was a watershed in the two’s relationship.
His own long-delayed marriage achieved, Henry thereafter began seeking a match for Charles. Rather than seek a prestigious foreign match, he essentially invited competing offers from the leading Scottish nobles for the privilege of wedding a daughter to the Duke of Albany, and gave Charles his choice. His reasoning in doing so was that he did not want his younger brother to have foreign entanglements that would lead outside powers to attempt to subvert his rule or his children’s succession.
As a result of this process, Charles married Anne Livingstone the daughter of Alexander Livingstone, First Earl of Linlithgow. Linlithgow had sided with Mary during the Marian Civil War against those nobles using the infant James VI as a figurehead. Ironically, James VI had rewarded that simultaneous loyalty to his mother and disloyalty to himself with a series of honors, including the elevation of Lord Livingstone to the earldom on the occasion of Charles’s baptism. Significant also is that Lady Helen, Countess Linlithgow, was Roman Catholic. This created worries that despite Henry’s un-ambivalent love of Presbyterianism, Scotland was becoming “a reformed country with a papist court”, concerns which were of course only aggravated by the presence of Queen Henrietta Maria and her retinue.
Of course, what did more to stabilize Scotland’s royal family in these years than anything else was the fertility of the royal couple: Queen Henrietta Maria bore nine children in twelve years, with six reaching maturity, of which three were sons. By Henrietta Maria’s last pregnancy, Charles had fallen rather far in the royal succession. Moreover, the personal popularity of Henry and his embrace of Presbyterianism made the thought of trying to displace him seem suicidal. Even the Roman Catholic lords of the Highlands were gradually won over by the king’s permissiveness of their “Quiet Observance.” Beneath this liberality however, there was plainly a quid pro quo. Even those Scottish lords implicated in the Spanish Blanks Plot were permitted to return, and the private practice of Roman Catholicism was indulged, but only so long as no further intrigues against the crown were countenanced. For her part, Henrietta Maria emerged as an intermediary. Thus by the time Henry departed for the western shores of the Atlantic in 1643, after nineteen years of rule, Scotland was the most politically stable it had been in recorded memory. Of course, it helped still further that he took as many lords as he could of fighting age with him.
For his part, Charles Duke of Albany had spent the first two decades of Henry’s reign creating his own family, with his daughters Anne (1628), Henrietta (1630) and Charlotte (1631) followed by a son, James (1634). Henrietta and Charlotte died in infancy. He also dabbled in religious matters, enthusiastically championing the cause of episcopacy within the Scottish Church though accepting the authority of his brother as dispositive on the matter. He also served in Henry I’s council of state and involved himself in the running of his estates.
In the end, the dispositive matter was Charles’s own character. Far from a scheming younger brother in the mold of John I or Richard III of England, Charles was scrupulous, as zealous in respecting his brother’s authority and prerogatives as he was in expecting others to respect his own. And though he had reservations about Henry personally, he sincerely believed in the project of magnifying Scotland’s national greatness by expansion overseas. For this reason he was willing, perhaps even eager, to jail large numbers of Scots for non-payment of the special assessments for the War of the Three Kings in 1645. To many Scottish lords, the enthusiasm of the sickly Duke of Albany for a firm law and order policy was surprising.
Now, in his two decades on the throne before crossing the Atlantic Henry had shown neither interest nor aptitude for the grand game of European match-making. Worse still, Scotland’s war with the various powers of northern Europe had rendered null the prospects of matches with its usual marriage partners, such as Denmark. Thus when Charles began negotiating marriage alliances, it was because this fell to him out of necessity due to the rapidly aging princes and princesses in his charge. The leading contender for a match was Anne Marie Louise, Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston duke of Orleans and duchesse du Montpensier in her own right. Through her deceased mother Anne Marie Louise had inherited a vast fortune and an agglomeration of estates in some of the most productive agricultural land of France. What Anne Marie Louise lacked in rank she compensated in the material advantages of such a match. Henrietta Maria of course embraced the prospect, and negotiations were undertaken in earnest. For this purpose Charles I dispatched the trusted Marquess of Huntly, George Gordon.
Though once again religious differences proved to be a problem, the prospects of a renewal of the auld alliance for France, and the huge dowry Anne Marie Louise would bring to the perpetually cash-strapped Scottish court, was simply too attractive to forego. Thus in 1646, in what was now becoming the custom for Scottish monarchs, the Duke of Rothesay went to France to fetch home Anne Marie Louise of Orleans, and they were married in 1647. In the final agreement the French worries about the magnitude of Mademoiselle’s landholdings falling into foreign hands were satisfied by a complex triangular transaction: Mademoiselle was essentially forced to alienate a large part of her holdings to Louis XIV, who then contributed on behalf of Mademoiselle’s debt-ridden father a huge one-time payment to the King of Scotland in addition to the dowry provided by the Duke of Orleans.
Thus Anne Marie Louise essentially paid to become a queen. Only a few years later, her wealth would be funding the construction of the Scottish fleet with which her father-in-law would conquer the Rio de la Plata, and a few decades after that the remainder in French hands would help fund the fleet of airships with which her cousin would conquer the Netherlands.
Of course this began one of the most epically dysfunctional royal marriages in the history of Scotland, and it augured poorly for the couple’s future happiness that Mademoiselle had to be forcibly loaded onto the coach to take her away from Paris, so intent she was on marriage to the young Louis XIV. As Charles was heard to say over thirty years later, “had only we the sense to have let her stay!”
By the wedding of the Duke of Rothesay and Mademoiselle, the king had returned, and was well-pleased by Charles’s tenure as regent in his absence. This made it easier in 1651 for King Henry to leave again, this time to build upon his possessions in the New World by capturing Buenos Aires. It was a bold plan, one which he undertook only after granting to the Scottish lords he was leaving behind vast plantations in Jamaica, the organization of which would leave them happy and busy.
Though Henry’s expedition was successful from the beginning, it burned through the monetary contributions of Mademoiselle at a prodigious rate, and by 1653 Charles, once again regent, began to feel the pinch of the vast expenditures required by Henry’s eager embrace of the colonial embrace. Ironically, it was now that the Duke of Albany’s peculiar economic genius began to reveal itself, as he and his team of eager lawyers scoured Scottish statutes and feudal tenures for any duties, customs or usages which the crown could use to extract money. In normal times, such a squeezing of the lords and commons of Scotland would produce explosive resentment, but Henry’s “Madness of the South Seas” had now become a national passion, immensely popular. Charles for his part, always sure to cast his fiscal policies in terms of the necessity of supporting the king and preserving his life while he was in harm’s way abroad, was unassailable.
Charles’s other preoccupation was continuing the business of marrying off the next generation of Stuarts. In this with Henry’s support he pursued what has become known as a Brandon strategy, marrying off the princes and princesses to the nobility of the kingdom that otherwise might emerge as rivals to the royal house. Thus the Marquess of Huntly’s service in negotiating the marriage of Henry Duke of Rothesay to Mademoiselle was rewarded even before the king departed for points south by his son Gordon’s marriage to Princess Anne in 1650. In 1652 Princess Catherine married the heir of the Earl of Montrose, balancing the House of Gordon’s Catholic sympathies with the Douglases’ Protestant intensity. The Princess Henrietta refused to countenance a marriage, and given the size of the royal family she was indulged.
With Charles the duke of Albany, Henry I’s second surviving son William was created the Duke of Ross in 1639, and his third surviving son Robert was made the Duke of Lothian in 1641. It fell to Charles to negotiate their marriages, William to Anne Hamilton, daughter and likely heir of the Duke of Hamilton, and Robert to Margaret Leslie, daughter of the Duke of Rothes. The weddings were celebrated in 1653 and 1654. It was believed the Duke of Ross would recapture the lands of the dukedom of Hamilton if the current duke died without producing a male heir. Charles’ own son and heir James married Lady Elizabeth Percy, daughter of the English Earl of Northhumberland in 1653, and his daughter Anne married Alexander Stuart, the Fifth Earl of Moray in 1654.
The Scottish peerage thus liberally seasoned with Stuart princes and princesses, Charles continued to preoccupy himself with making certain his brother’s colonial projects were properly funded. On Henry’s return in 1657 he gave Charles the additional title of Lord Governor of Jamaica, which brought with it more estates and revenue than it did additional responsibility. Of particular interest to Charles was the human property attached, which numbered some 35,000 slaves.
Henry II also gave the Duke of Albany Dumferline Palace (joking that Charles had spent more time in the royal residences during his reign than he had), which was renamed the Palace of Albany and renovated over Charles and his son’s tenures as duke of Albany into a truly imposing residence. This became the principle site of the duke’s growing art collection. James produced Charles his first grandson in 1660, thus ensuring the continuity of what would become the House of Albany, which would continue as long as the Scottish monarchy, and terminate spectacularly along with it.
The king’s syphilis increasingly made him unable to carry out his duties in this years, but in 1660 it was the thirty-year-old future Henry II who became regent for his father rather than Charles. The Duke of Rothesay had developed during his long tutelage into a shrewd statesman. Under the influence of Henrietta Maria he had adopted significant French and episcopal sympathies, which until then had not been disrupted too badly by his tempestuous marriage to Anne Marie Louise. Moreover, in many ways the long absences of his father had made him more a product of his uncle than the king for good or ill, and Charles was a welcome presence in the younger Henry’s councils both while he was the Duke of Rothesay and, after, 1662, during his reign as Henry II. Only gradually did Charles withdraw from public life, and when he did all was certain it was the earned retirement of a sage rather than the discarding of a man past his prime.
Unfortunately, this also meant there was little Charles could do when many of his carefully made plans exploded, as the royal marriage of Henry II and Anne Marie Louise descended into nightmare, and the seeding of the secondary houses of Scotland with Stuart princes did not so much work to ensure their loyalty as to plant in them fresh dynastic ambitions. It is uncertain how much such matters weighed on his mind at all when the Duke of Albany finally expired in 1686 in his ninth decade of life, having enjoyed what so few of his Stuart forebears had, a natural lifespan.
NOTE: This revises the previous biography of Henry I, which had the future Henry II marry Princess Maria of the Netherlands.
NOTE: Previously in the eighteenth century I have described the Gordons of Huntly, a Scottish noble house, as having a hereditary earldom. In actuality, James VI made them marquesses in 1599. In forthcoming events they will become dukes.
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Thanks! Re maps, I actually did an excellent map of India at the end of the last burst of writing on the timeline, only to find out when I was done the file was too large. I'm going to re-do it on a smaller base map and then post it, before we begin dealing with the subcontinent in more detail in the next few decades.
They say you like the bad girls honey, is that true?
The Stuarts of the Latter Seventeenth Century, Part II
Henry and Mademoiselle
From the time Anne Marie Louise arrived in Edinburgh as the wife of Henry, duke of Rothesay, the Stuart court was transformed. It was not merely the presence of a new patron of the arts, given that both the queen and the Duke of Albany both supported the native talent of Scotland and imported a never-ending stream of poets, dramatists and painters from the Continent. Nor was it any new element of French sophistication, in that sense too Anne Marie Louise found Henrietta Maria already there. But what Mademoiselle (her title as the first-born daughter of the duc d’Orleans), the duchesse du Montpensier (her title by right, inherited from her mother), the duchess of Rothesay (her title by marriage to the heir of Scotland) or the future queen, possessed, was a sensibility of almost madcap energy, and abundant resources to carry out almost any project she could imagine. If her strong self-regard, restlessness and expensive tastes had not been conjoined to near-infinite charisma and a deep generosity of spirit, she could easily have been hated by the Scottish people as a proud Catholic foreigner. Her mother-in-law had herself had come dangerously close to incurring such passions. But Anne Marie Louise in her first reception with Presbyterian ministers in Edinburgh after her arrival joked that they probably knew the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church better than she did. Such stories almost immediately made her intensely loved, and the object of national fascination.
One anecdote, quite likely apocryphal, not from the time she first arrived but the early 1660s explains her complex relationship to the Scots. As Queen she would frequently exclaim, in French, her favorite maxim: “It’s our business to know our people's business!” thus signaling the start of some unplanned, well-meaning and usually quite dangerous adventure. Thus once on the way to her chateau in Fife she stopped her train of twenty carriages and entered, without warning, a small farmhouse where a family had just concluded its daily labors. She toured the fields, pastures and barn, bounced the family’s daughters on her knee and taught them a few words of French, and proceeded with all her retinue to have dinner with the family, enjoying their hospitality late into the evening, as pleased as if she was sitting at the courts of Elster or Versailles. In the early morning she arrived at the Chateau du Montpensier, content that she had given the family she had visited a story to tell their granchildren. The young noblewoman who was the Princess Margaret’s governess, however, looked stricken. “What is it, child?” asked an impatient Anne Marie Louise, certain that nothing of significance could possibly be wrong. At that point the governess explained what had never occurred to Anne Marie Louise: in imposing themselves thus upon the family, Mademoiselle had quite likely condemned them to a hungry winter, the party having devoured their entire store of food. Aghast at her own thoughtlessness, Anne Marie Louise emptied the larders of Montpensier and sent wagons groaning with food, including freshly killed geese, expensive imports like oranges, and the best cheeses from Paris, back to that same farm. Mademoiselle was in fact so generous that when the king arrived later that morning the only thing left for him to break his fast with after his journey was the servants’ potage.
She constantly spoke in maxims she thought expressed the deepest sagacity, though they induced groans behind her back. Though not the most attentive mother, she was deeply loved by her children and interacted with them without the slightest formality or pretense, sweeping with them through the palace from room to room, laughing and chattering and joining in their games. Rather than caring for opinions at court, Anne Marie Louise acted as if she was the only one in the country whose taste or morality mattered, and even the sternest disapproval she could write off as jealousy of her fabulous wealth, or the distortions of a rude upbringing at the edge of the world. She was a national joke, even as her every word and fashion was fanatically followed. For the Scots, she was unique, sui generis. She was Queen Mademoiselle.
For young Henry’s part in the early days, he was smitten. Though not a conventional beauty, the Duchesse du Montpensier’s vivacity and confidence was a supplement to what she had been given by nature. However, his ardor was not reciprocated. Not least this was because, lack of royal birth aside, Anne Marie Louise had set her sights still higher than being the consort of Scotland, and had hoped for an even more prestigious Habsburg or Bourbon match. It had also been that she had heard the swashbuckling exploits of Henry I and assumed his eldest and namesake to be very similar. Young Henry was as avid a hunter and outdoorsman as any male Stuart, though of course at the age of eighteen he had no military experience and was somewhat gawky. To Anne Marie Louise, this was reason enough to label him hopeless. She did not despise him, she merely paid him no mind at all.
Following their wedding at Holyrood Abbey in 1647 the young Duke of Rothesay pursued a close conjugal relationship with the duchess for almost a year to no avail. That he was apparently spurned shocked and surprised the court. That Anne Marie Louise coupled this behavior with entertaining so lavish (which she paid for herself out of the rents of her remaining French estates) that she threw the queen herself into her shade only magnified the awkwardness of the situation. Henrietta Maria, who had championed the match and considered herself a mother-figure for the young duchess, found herself unable to reach Anne Marie Louise and explain how this behavior was not merely unseemly, but dangerous to her own interests. In the end it was the king himself at a private audience with Anne Marie Louise at Stirling Castle in 1652 (immediately before he left on his second expedition for the Americas) who impressed upon her the necessity of amending her conduct. Thus by 1653 Anne Marie Louise bore the Duke of Rothesay his first son, also Henry. For the first time in living memory Scotland had three generations of the male line of the royal house alive and well. Even more than victorious wars or overseas colonies, this announced the newfound stability of Scotland under Henry II and the unprecedented security of the Stuart dynasty. However, the royal bairn’s health was never robust. Two miscarriages followed in 1655, and then in 1656 the duchess bore a second son, James, even as Henry lay dying. Mary was then born in 1658. She also suffered poor health, and died in her first year. Anne Marie Louise then bore Margaret in 1660 and Elizabeth in 1662.
Since James I’s consort Anne of Denmark had forcefully redefined the role of the queen in the raising of the royal princes and princesses, Scotland’s royal family had become a close emotional unit. It was assumed, therefore, when Anne Marie Louise began bearing children that she would settle down and preoccupy herself with their well-being to the exclusion of her lavish devotion to art and society. And at first this was the case. But beginning with little Henry’s illness and accelerating during the tragic ordeal of the young Princess Mary, Anne Marie plunged into a fantasy world of luxury, building her own palatial Chateau du Montpensier that was easily the equal in size and splendor of the official Scottish royal residences. There she resumed her entertainments, with her husband the Duke of Rothesay only occasionally in attendance. Increasingly, she was attended by a corps of dashing young noblemen and courtiers on whom she spent inordinate amounts of money and with whom she spent inordinate amounts of time. Meanwhile the households of the young Prince James was organized and managed by the aging Queen Henrietta Maria, who stepped in to amend Mademoiselle’s disinterest. The sheer unlikelihood of a future queen acting foolishly enough to put herself and her children at risk allayed any suspicions of infidelity on the part of the duke for a long while. Others’ were not so easily dispensed with.
Thus in 1661 when Anne Marie Louise became pregnant again, rumors at court and in the Scottish noble houses boiled over. The matter climaxed on a hunt, when the Duke of Rothesay overheard the Marquess of Argyll make a snide comment on the paternity of the new royal child. Young Henry knocked Argyll from his horse and challenged him to a duel on the spot. Cooler heads prevailed, and Argyll apologized profusely to Henry and left court immediately, not to reappear until after Anne Marie Louise’s death. But the very fact the question of Anne Marie Louise’s chastity had come so close to endangering the life to the heir of the Scottish throne meant the issue could not be avoided any longer. Thus when Henry I finally died in 1662 the new king personally undertook to reshape Anne Marie Louise’s household, reducing the number of servants even that she paid for herself, and expelling in particular a number of the handsome young men who had ostentatiously been hired to ornament her court at Montpensier. Chief among these was one Americus MacCullough.
In 1663 it was discovered MacCullough was living in Edinburgh and had been admitted to private interviews with the new queen of Scotland. The ensuing scandal was sufficient to hasten the death of Henrietta Maria, and it provoked the nightmare Henry had struggled mightily to avoid, that of fanning the question of whether Prince James, Princess Margaret, and Princess Elizabeth were bastards. This would especially become potent given the dynastic significance of the Princess Elizabeth. Well into the twentieth century, satirists and scolds alike could sneeringly speak of the royal houses not merely of Scotland, but of Germany and Russia as “those sons of gallant MacCullough.” For her part when confronted by the king Anne Marie Louise protested that her interviews with MacCullough were innocent, that she was attended by her ladies at the time, and that MacCullough himself was married. Nonetheless, the king took the course of expelling her French ladies and replacing them with dour Presbyterian matrons. By 1665, Anne Marie Louise had taken the unorthodox step of hiring lawyers to procure a divorce and return to France, even though it would mean surrendering her role as queen and contact with her children. Of course, not merely because of the embarrassment this would bring to the king but the importance of her dowry and property to the fiscal health of the Scottish kingdom, divorce was impossible. When confronted angrily by the king in front of the court over this course of action, she shouted at him imperiously that she would prefer “to die the death of Anne Bolene” than to live a prisoner. This was as close as she would ever come to admitting her adultery. By November 1666 MacCullough, his wife and four children were on ships bound for Buenos Aires, where he had received a lucrative offer of employment on the condition he never return to Scotland again.
Of course, one rationale for the marriage of Henry and Anne Marie Louise had been to secure a new Franco-Scottish alliance. Whether or not the difficulties of the marriage were the cause, Henry II first year on the throne ostensibly ruined that alliance by entering into an alliance instead with the German Empire even as it entered into war with the two European powers with whom Scotland had been until then inextricably linked, England and France. However, given neither the French were eager to field a ground force in North America to protect their colonies from the Scots nor the English to fight along their northern frontier, both powers were happy to provide their own payments to Scotland to prevent hostilities. Given that the funding of Scotland’s colonial enterprises was still a perpetual source of concern, Henry’s extractions from all three great European powers at the same time were more than a little welcome. The Scottish Navy did manage a combined victory with the Germans over the English in the Battle of Sable Island, but apart from that Scottish forces were not heavily involved in the fighting. Under these circumstances Henry could be forgiven for wanting hostilities to extend indefinitely, but by 1665 the war was over with Scotland’s reputation in Europe somewhat enhanced and Henry II’s war-making ability acquitted.
Thus debuted Henry II’s shrewd mixture of finance and statecraft.
Following the war, he launched a new effort to expand Scotland’s colonial enterprises by chartering the Royal Guinea Company. Essentially the king noticed that one of Scotland’s great expenses in maintaining Jamaica in particular was the purchase of slaves from traders of other European powers, and decided that if Scotland had its own public company transporting human chattel to the New World a flow of capital from Scotland to overseas powers could be staunched, especially if that company was granted a monopoly, which it duly was. Of course, in latter generations this involvement of the Scottish crown in the slave trade would be widely denounced as a national shame. But in 1668 it was seen as merely economic prudence. During these years Henry was widely popular, and his court was flush with money.
What these successes did not do however was alleviate the increasingly dire problem of the queen. Ever more unhappy, prone to ever more extreme behavior, and thus provoking ever greater sternness from Henry, Queen Mademoiselle was excluded from court after 1670. For his part, the French ambassador, now anxious to weaken the Stuarts and sunder their alliance with the Germans, vociferously protested the treatment of the queen as if she were being held in a dungeon. For her part, Anne Marie Louise had a succession of male friends who rose in her favor and who were then barred from court by the king. To what degree there was actual romantic interest, and to what extent Anne Marie Louise settled on them merely out of spite, is in the end anyone’s guess. But they hardly helped matters, even though beyond a certain point to be linked with the queen was seen as a rite of passage for young Scottish men of high birth, fair appearance, and fine tastes.
In 1671 Henry took the fateful step of appointing James Alexander to manage the queen’s household. Alexander was the illegitimate descendant of Alexander Stuart Duke of Ross, a younger brother of James V. The family had been trusted retainers of the Scottish kings ever since, with Alexander’s grandfather having died in one of the harsh winters spent by the King of Scotland’s army in North America, and his father having accompanied him on the long journey to found Australia and Stuartsland. Alexander was himself just the sort of cultivated young man on which the now middle-aged Anne Marie Louise was inclined to dote. Henry hoped for Alexander to be taken into the Queen’s confidence and thus monitor her activities on his behalf, and if possible orchestrate a reconciliation between the royal couple. The king held out the possibility of ennoblement as a reward for the young James Alexander if such could be managed. Whether at that time James was already an agent of Louis XIV or became one afterwards we do not know. However, it is almost certain from the beginning that Alexander began both feeding misinformation to the king and trying his utmost to romance the queen himself.
Almost immediately he achieved what his surviving correspondence calls “the much-sought closeness” with the queen. And it did not take much longer to begin influencing the previously apolitical Anne Marie Louise on Louis’s behalf. Scheme after scheme was placed before her to see what she would attract her interest: deposing her husband and replacing him with Prince James duke of Rothesay would not work, given that James was closer to the king than to her, and yet the queen could not be prevailed upon to act against her son and elevate Margaret to the throne to rule under her tutelage. Likewise, she rejected the possible return to France to marry the new Duke of Orleans, Louis XIV's younger brother. Alexander also acted energetically to place Anne Marie Louise in contact with a network of Roman Catholic nobles whose acceptance of the Protestant Stuarts apparently was far from unconditional. It is uncertain how serious Anne Marie Louise was, or to what extent she thought of the plots being put to her as games or wild jests at the expense of the king.
However, matters changed profoundly in 1672 when Europe was again plunged into war with the French invasion of the Netherlands. Once again England allied with France against its traditional Protestant allies, and once again Henry II sided with Germany and the Netherlands. This time, the Scottish king knew it would not be enough to send his navy into a few side-bar engagements. To earn the continued support of the Wettins he would have to commit himself in some serious way. Moreover, he knew the opinion of himself in the courts of Europe as a conniver rather than a warrior. To that end, and believing that the English would be overconfident with respect to their northern frontier after the long history of defeated Scottish invasions, Henry began preparing his army for a campaign in Britain itself. What complicated matters was that Louis XIV now saw fit to interrupt the flow of rents from the Queen’s remaining French estates to prevent Scotland from channeling them into the war effort, even as sotto voce through Alexander Louis was promising Anne Marie Louise these moneys and exorbitant sums besides to use in an uprising against her husband.
Trusting James Alexander completely, and leaving the fifteen-year-old Prince James as regent under the tutelage of his Uncle Albany, Henry embarked on his invasion of England in early 1673. Berwick was surprised and reduced as a diversionary attack, and as the English earls converged on the old contested redoubt at the eastern hinge of the Anglo-Scottish border, Henry launched his attack in the far west. In the battle of Westlinton the Scots routed the local defenders and forced the English within the walls of Carlisle. Not waiting for the English to muster a counterattack, Henry undertook to exploit the surprise to the utmost. He dashed east, attempting to isolate the English force that was now converging on his token force at Berwick. It doubled back south, but too late. The Scots then defeated another local force at Settle, leaving the panicking English to ponder the defense of York itself. The emotional tenor of the campaign was unmistakable: along with his own standard he carried into battle those of James IV, James V and Mary Queen of Scots.
It was at this moment of national triumph that James Alexander’s conspiracy reached fruition. Anne Marie Louise was convinced to participate in a plan by which she was told she would become the queen regnant of a new Catholic kingdom in Ireland, supported by France, that French agents were there already preparing an uprising, and that following the inhuman abuses of the Brandons in that country there was no question of the willingness of the Irish to rise in support of a Catholic alternative. In truth, there had been no steps for such an uprising: the actual French plan as it ultimately became known was for Queen Anne Marie Louise to be taken back to France, so that the flow of rents from her remaining lands to Scottish coffers would stop and either the King of Scotland be forced perhaps to pay some ransom for her release back to him or for some other advantageous marriage to be negotiated for her. The 200 men-at-arms she had been promised to accompany her to Ireland were actually hired from the retainers of Catholic highland lords to ensure her delivery to French vessels waiting offshore. They would be paid richly for the service, and that money would go towards further agitation against Scotland’s Protestant rulers. Parallel to this conspiracy, England had its own developing at the same time involving the Gordons of Huntly, and was also making use of James Alexander to facilitate it. The difference however was that the English had anticipated Henry II would be running the current war as he had the last one, from Edinburgh, and when he did otherwise the English plans were ruined.
Thus, at the same time the Scottish king and his army was marching through Cumbria Queen Anne Marie Louise departed her Chateau du Montpensier in Fife with the 200 men-at-arms she believed to be the core her new army and 200 more under her own pay (“Such was what Queen Mademoiselle considered pin money,” one nineteenth century historian opined). Such was the faith in which Henry held Alexander that the queen’s journey west was not questioned by authorities on the way, and the large armed force accompanying her was explained as a necessary caution of wartime.
James Alexander went ahead to Dumbarton Castle, which had been chosen to be the site of the rendezvous with the French fleet. Anne Marie Louise for her part was following prepared for glory, and planning a campaign for the liberation of Ireland making use of all the scant military understanding she had. It was now however the French plan began to unravel: Scottish ships traveling to supply the king’s army in the south spotted and engaged the French ships, which put to flight. Fearful the plan had been discovered when the French did not appear at the appointed time, Alexander bought the services of a local fishing boat and escaped himself, first across the straits to Ireland, and then to France. Meanwhile word of the Queen’s unplanned “progress” reached the duke of Albany in Edinburgh and he frantically wrote to the king to inform him of the crisis, while dispatching the herald Lyon King of Arms to inquire of the queen directly her plans. Lyon King of Arms followed the queen’s path, and reached the Queen two nights after she arrived at Dumbarton.
By now, with Alexander gone without explanation, no French ships present and no way to communicate with them available, and the armed men increasingly uneasy with the situation in which they found themselves, Anne Marie Louise was extremely distressed. To Lyon King of Arms she confessed the whole situation, and moreover threw herself at his feet to beg the King and Duke of Albany for forgiveness. Overwhelmed by this display, Lyon King of Arms reassured her that he could not imagine King Henry would let her come to harm after 25 years of marriage, seven pregnancies and five living children. Heartened, Mademoiselle gave Lyon King of Arms a sealed latter to relate to the King and Duke of Albany telling them the whole story as far as she knew it, complete, she claimed, with the names of the Scottish lords implicated in the secret dealings with France. She meant this to be the peace offering with which she would try to make right the breach of her husband’s trust.
The next morning Lyon King of Arms set out from Dumbarton back to Edinburgh, knowing that an armed force was already on its way from Edinburgh which he would likely meet on the road. After only a few hours on its way, the herald’s party was set upon, most likely by men of the company organized by James Alexander. Only one of Lyon's pages survived by virtue of a fast horse to relate as much of the story as survives. The Queen’s letter, which would have likely implicated some of the most powerful men in Scotland in a treason against the king, was taken from his body and has been lost to history. The next day their bodies were found on the road by the Edinburgh party. Advancing to Dumbarton, they found the castle abandoned, the small army assembled by Alexander and the queen vanished, and the gates open.
Searching the castle’s grounds, at the foot of the great Dumbarton Rock within the walls, they found the broken body of Anne Marie Louise, who had been thrown from the rock’s heights in what was almost certainly an effort to prevent Alexander’s co-conspirators from becoming known.
Nine days later word reached the king at a camp mere miles from York. He informed the army the queen had died from a fever and retired to his tent in grief, his generals certain that his spirit had been broken, and that, for all the bravado of the campaign to that point, Henry II was now in extreme danger, deep within Yorkshire and close to the populous counties from which the Brandons could quickly gather a large army. Moreover, the English had now had time since the initial strike at Berwick to organize and dispatch such an army north. Edward VII had not the temperament for half-measures, and it could not be imagined that he would respond to the boldest incursion upon his realm in over seventy years with a light touch. Looking at the standards of those three previous Scottish monarchs felled by the English, the Scottish soldiers perhaps could only wonder if they had come so far only to add another name to the list. The earliest day on which it was believed an English force could arrive came and went, with Scottish preparations of their position hopelessly disorganized, and the king more focused on a frantic, almost disbelieving, correspondence with Edinburgh and Dumbarton over events there than with those pertaining to his own immediate survival and that of his army.
Then finally an English party appeared. It was Richmond Herald, bearing not the standard of Edward VII but Mary II, Edward VII having died on the way north to confront the invading Scots. Somewhat embarrassed at his instructions, Richmond Herald offered the King of Scots* a piece of embroidery that the young queen had labored long at, of a thistle, which he said she had begun at such time as England and Scotland was at peace. She had completed it since Henry invaded, in the hope of “resuming our lands’ eternal neighborly friendship”, a phrase which, given Mary II’s love of England’s medieval history, one can only imagine her smirking over rapturously as she wrote it. Richmond Herald further informed the King of Scots the young queen was adamant the embroidered thistle would be the one concession he would receive from her: there would be no talk of ceding Berwick, no colonies, no ransoms, no subsidies, and no indemnities. However, if he insulted the young queen by refusing her gift and menaced her peace-loving kingdom further, the good Duke of Essex was on his way with an army of 90,000 men and was prepared, in words Richmond Herald said he relayed directly from Mary, to march to Thurso and kill every living thing on its way.
Of course we now know various parties did not at the time: the Duke of Essex’s force was not 70,000 but 26,000, slightly fewer than Henry’s; that Henry would leave with not just a very poor piece of royal needlework (which survives today in the People’s Museum at the former Floors Castle) but “a south sea island, goodly sized and fully slaved, apt to the cultivation of tobacco”; and that, despite the certainty of the Scottish generals at the time, Mary knew nothing of the tragedy of Anne Marie Louise or its effect on Henry II when she proposed peace.
All that aside, Henry’s prudence won out, and he chivalrously accepted “this most beautiful and queenly gift.”
Unfortunately, this would leave him free to become the person he would be for the rest of his life.
* Per the treaty ending between James VI and Frederick I ending the War of the English Succession, England was required to recognize for all time the equal stature of the kingdom of Scotland. Hence, Scottish monarchs could no longer be treated as feudal subsidiaries who had forgotten their allegiance, and kings and queens of Scots were in English eyes kings and queens of Scotland. Thus Mary's initial address of Henry was significant. Henry having sundered that treaty, Mary was thus tersely informing him the two kingdoms had returned to the contestant status they had under the Plantagenets and Tudors, and that she was fully willing to prosecute such a situation to the utmost, her reference to "eternal neighborly friendship" notwithstanding.
The Stuarts of the Latter Seventeenth Century, Part II
Henry and Mademoiselle
From the time Anne Marie Louise arrived in Edinburgh as the wife of Henry, duke of Rothesay, the Stuart court was transformed. It was not merely the presence of a new patron of the arts, given that both the queen and the Duke of Albany both supported the native talent of Scotland and imported a never-ending stream of poets, dramatists and painters from the Continent. Nor was it any new element of French sophistication, in that sense too Anne Marie Louise found Henrietta Maria already there. But what Mademoiselle (her title as the first-born daughter of the duc d’Orleans), the duchesse du Montpensier (her title by right, inherited from her mother), the duchess of Rothesay (her title by marriage to the heir of Scotland) or the future queen, possessed, was a sensibility of almost madcap energy, and abundant resources to carry out almost any project she could imagine. If her strong self-regard, restlessness and expensive tastes had not been conjoined to near-infinite charisma and a deep generosity of spirit, she could easily have been hated by the Scottish people as a proud Catholic foreigner. Her mother-in-law had herself had come dangerously close to incurring such passions. But Anne Marie Louise in her first reception with Presbyterian ministers in Edinburgh after her arrival joked that they probably knew the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church better than she did. Such stories almost immediately made her intensely loved, and the object of national fascination.
One anecdote, quite likely apocryphal, not from the time she first arrived but the early 1660s explains her complex relationship to the Scots. As Queen she would frequently exclaim, in French, her favorite maxim: “It’s our business to know our people's business!” thus signaling the start of some unplanned, well-meaning and usually quite dangerous adventure. Thus once on the way to her chateau in Fife she stopped her train of twenty carriages and entered, without warning, a small farmhouse where a family had just concluded its daily labors. She toured the fields, pastures and barn, bounced the family’s daughters on her knee and taught them a few words of French, and proceeded with all her retinue to have dinner with the family, enjoying their hospitality late into the evening, as pleased as if she was sitting at the courts of Elster or Versailles. In the early morning she arrived at the Chateau du Montpensier, content that she had given the family she had visited a story to tell their granchildren. The young noblewoman who was the Princess Margaret’s governess, however, looked stricken. “What is it, child?” asked an impatient Anne Marie Louise, certain that nothing of significance could possibly be wrong. At that point the governess explained what had never occurred to Anne Marie Louise: in imposing themselves thus upon the family, Mademoiselle had quite likely condemned them to a hungry winter, the party having devoured their entire store of food. Aghast at her own thoughtlessness, Anne Marie Louise emptied the larders of Montpensier and sent wagons groaning with food, including freshly killed geese, expensive imports like oranges, and the best cheeses from Paris, back to that same farm. Mademoiselle was in fact so generous that when the king arrived later that morning the only thing left for him to break his fast with after his journey was the servants’ potage.
She constantly spoke in maxims she thought expressed the deepest sagacity, though they induced groans behind her back. Though not the most attentive mother, she was deeply loved by her children and interacted with them without the slightest formality or pretense, sweeping with them through the palace from room to room, laughing and chattering and joining in their games. Rather than caring for opinions at court, Anne Marie Louise acted as if she was the only one in the country whose taste or morality mattered, and even the sternest disapproval she could write off as jealousy of her fabulous wealth, or the distortions of a rude upbringing at the edge of the world. She was a national joke, even as her every word and fashion was fanatically followed. For the Scots, she was unique, sui generis. She was Queen Mademoiselle.
For young Henry’s part in the early days, he was smitten. Though not a conventional beauty, the Duchesse du Montpensier’s vivacity and confidence was a supplement to what she had been given by nature. However, his ardor was not reciprocated. Not least this was because, lack of royal birth aside, Anne Marie Louise had set her sights still higher than being the consort of Scotland, and had hoped for an even more prestigious Habsburg or Bourbon match. It had also been that she had heard the swashbuckling exploits of Henry I and assumed his eldest and namesake to be very similar. Young Henry was as avid a hunter and outdoorsman as any male Stuart, though of course at the age of eighteen he had no military experience and was somewhat gawky. To Anne Marie Louise, this was reason enough to label him hopeless. She did not despise him, she merely paid him no mind at all.
Following their wedding at Holyrood Abbey in 1647 the young Duke of Rothesay pursued a close conjugal relationship with the duchess for almost a year to no avail. That he was apparently spurned shocked and surprised the court. That Anne Marie Louise coupled this behavior with entertaining so lavish (which she paid for herself out of the rents of her remaining French estates) that she threw the queen herself into her shade only magnified the awkwardness of the situation. Henrietta Maria, who had championed the match and considered herself a mother-figure for the young duchess, found herself unable to reach Anne Marie Louise and explain how this behavior was not merely unseemly, but dangerous to her own interests. In the end it was the king himself at a private audience with Anne Marie Louise at Stirling Castle in 1652 (immediately before he left on his second expedition for the Americas) who impressed upon her the necessity of amending her conduct. Thus by 1653 Anne Marie Louise bore the Duke of Rothesay his first son, also Henry. For the first time in living memory Scotland had three generations of the male line of the royal house alive and well. Even more than victorious wars or overseas colonies, this announced the newfound stability of Scotland under Henry II and the unprecedented security of the Stuart dynasty. However, the royal bairn’s health was never robust. Two miscarriages followed in 1655, and then in 1656 the duchess bore a second son, James, even as Henry lay dying. Mary was then born in 1658. She also suffered poor health, and died in her first year. Anne Marie Louise then bore Margaret in 1660 and Elizabeth in 1662.
Since James I’s consort Anne of Denmark had forcefully redefined the role of the queen in the raising of the royal princes and princesses, Scotland’s royal family had become a close emotional unit. It was assumed, therefore, when Anne Marie Louise began bearing children that she would settle down and preoccupy herself with their well-being to the exclusion of her lavish devotion to art and society. And at first this was the case. But beginning with little Henry’s illness and accelerating during the tragic ordeal of the young Princess Mary, Anne Marie plunged into a fantasy world of luxury, building her own palatial Chateau du Montpensier that was easily the equal in size and splendor of the official Scottish royal residences. There she resumed her entertainments, with her husband the Duke of Rothesay only occasionally in attendance. Increasingly, she was attended by a corps of dashing young noblemen and courtiers on whom she spent inordinate amounts of money and with whom she spent inordinate amounts of time. Meanwhile the households of the young Prince James was organized and managed by the aging Queen Henrietta Maria, who stepped in to amend Mademoiselle’s disinterest. The sheer unlikelihood of a future queen acting foolishly enough to put herself and her children at risk allayed any suspicions of infidelity on the part of the duke for a long while. Others’ were not so easily dispensed with.
Thus in 1661 when Anne Marie Louise became pregnant again, rumors at court and in the Scottish noble houses boiled over. The matter climaxed on a hunt, when the Duke of Rothesay overheard the Marquess of Argyll make a snide comment on the paternity of the new royal child. Young Henry knocked Argyll from his horse and challenged him to a duel on the spot. Cooler heads prevailed, and Argyll apologized profusely to Henry and left court immediately, not to reappear until after Anne Marie Louise’s death. But the very fact the question of Anne Marie Louise’s chastity had come so close to endangering the life to the heir of the Scottish throne meant the issue could not be avoided any longer. Thus when Henry I finally died in 1662 the new king personally undertook to reshape Anne Marie Louise’s household, reducing the number of servants even that she paid for herself, and expelling in particular a number of the handsome young men who had ostentatiously been hired to ornament her court at Montpensier. Chief among these was one Americus MacCullough.
In 1663 it was discovered MacCullough was living in Edinburgh and had been admitted to private interviews with the new queen of Scotland. The ensuing scandal was sufficient to hasten the death of Henrietta Maria, and it provoked the nightmare Henry had struggled mightily to avoid, that of fanning the question of whether Prince James, Princess Margaret, and Princess Elizabeth were bastards. This would especially become potent given the dynastic significance of the Princess Elizabeth. Well into the twentieth century, satirists and scolds alike could sneeringly speak of the royal houses not merely of Scotland, but of Germany and Russia as “those sons of gallant MacCullough.” For her part when confronted by the king Anne Marie Louise protested that her interviews with MacCullough were innocent, that she was attended by her ladies at the time, and that MacCullough himself was married. Nonetheless, the king took the course of expelling her French ladies and replacing them with dour Presbyterian matrons. By 1665, Anne Marie Louise had taken the unorthodox step of hiring lawyers to procure a divorce and return to France, even though it would mean surrendering her role as queen and contact with her children. Of course, not merely because of the embarrassment this would bring to the king but the importance of her dowry and property to the fiscal health of the Scottish kingdom, divorce was impossible. When confronted angrily by the king in front of the court over this course of action, she shouted at him imperiously that she would prefer “to die the death of Anne Bolene” than to live a prisoner. This was as close as she would ever come to admitting her adultery. By November 1666 MacCullough, his wife and four children were on ships bound for Buenos Aires, where he had received a lucrative offer of employment on the condition he never return to Scotland again.
Of course, one rationale for the marriage of Henry and Anne Marie Louise had been to secure a new Franco-Scottish alliance. Whether or not the difficulties of the marriage were the cause, Henry II first year on the throne ostensibly ruined that alliance by entering into an alliance instead with the German Empire even as it entered into war with the two European powers with whom Scotland had been until then inextricably linked, England and France. However, given neither the French were eager to field a ground force in North America to protect their colonies from the Scots nor the English to fight along their northern frontier, both powers were happy to provide their own payments to Scotland to prevent hostilities. Given that the funding of Scotland’s colonial enterprises was still a perpetual source of concern, Henry’s extractions from all three great European powers at the same time were more than a little welcome. The Scottish Navy did manage a combined victory with the Germans over the English in the Battle of Sable Island, but apart from that Scottish forces were not heavily involved in the fighting. Under these circumstances Henry could be forgiven for wanting hostilities to extend indefinitely, but by 1665 the war was over with Scotland’s reputation in Europe somewhat enhanced and Henry II’s war-making ability acquitted.
Thus debuted Henry II’s shrewd mixture of finance and statecraft.
Following the war, he launched a new effort to expand Scotland’s colonial enterprises by chartering the Royal Guinea Company. Essentially the king noticed that one of Scotland’s great expenses in maintaining Jamaica in particular was the purchase of slaves from traders of other European powers, and decided that if Scotland had its own public company transporting human chattel to the New World a flow of capital from Scotland to overseas powers could be staunched, especially if that company was granted a monopoly, which it duly was. Of course, in latter generations this involvement of the Scottish crown in the slave trade would be widely denounced as a national shame. But in 1668 it was seen as merely economic prudence. During these years Henry was widely popular, and his court was flush with money.
What these successes did not do however was alleviate the increasingly dire problem of the queen. Ever more unhappy, prone to ever more extreme behavior, and thus provoking ever greater sternness from Henry, Queen Mademoiselle was excluded from court after 1670. For his part, the French ambassador, now anxious to weaken the Stuarts and sunder their alliance with the Germans, vociferously protested the treatment of the queen as if she were being held in a dungeon. For her part, Anne Marie Louise had a succession of male friends who rose in her favor and who were then barred from court by the king. To what degree there was actual romantic interest, and to what extent Anne Marie Louise settled on them merely out of spite, is in the end anyone’s guess. But they hardly helped matters, even though beyond a certain point to be linked with the queen was seen as a rite of passage for young Scottish men of high birth, fair appearance, and fine tastes.
In 1671 Henry took the fateful step of appointing James Alexander to manage the queen’s household. Alexander was the illegitimate descendant of Alexander Stuart Duke of Ross, a younger brother of James V. The family had been trusted retainers of the Scottish kings ever since, with Alexander’s grandfather having died in one of the harsh winters spent by the King of Scotland’s army in North America, and his father having accompanied him on the long journey to found Australia and Stuartsland. Alexander was himself just the sort of cultivated young man on which the now middle-aged Anne Marie Louise was inclined to dote. Henry hoped for Alexander to be taken into the Queen’s confidence and thus monitor her activities on his behalf, and if possible orchestrate a reconciliation between the royal couple. The king held out the possibility of ennoblement as a reward for the young James Alexander if such could be managed. Whether at that time James was already an agent of Louis XIV or became one afterwards we do not know. However, it is almost certain from the beginning that Alexander began both feeding misinformation to the king and trying his utmost to romance the queen himself.
Almost immediately he achieved what his surviving correspondence calls “the much-sought closeness” with the queen. And it did not take much longer to begin influencing the previously apolitical Anne Marie Louise on Louis’s behalf. Scheme after scheme was placed before her to see what she would attract her interest: deposing her husband and replacing him with Prince James duke of Rothesay would not work, given that James was closer to the king than to her, and yet the queen could not be prevailed upon to act against her son and elevate Margaret to the throne to rule under her tutelage. Likewise, she rejected the possible return to France to marry the new Duke of Orleans, Louis XIV's younger brother. Alexander also acted energetically to place Anne Marie Louise in contact with a network of Roman Catholic nobles whose acceptance of the Protestant Stuarts apparently was far from unconditional. It is uncertain how serious Anne Marie Louise was, or to what extent she thought of the plots being put to her as games or wild jests at the expense of the king.
However, matters changed profoundly in 1672 when Europe was again plunged into war with the French invasion of the Netherlands. Once again England allied with France against its traditional Protestant allies, and once again Henry II sided with Germany and the Netherlands. This time, the Scottish king knew it would not be enough to send his navy into a few side-bar engagements. To earn the continued support of the Wettins he would have to commit himself in some serious way. Moreover, he knew the opinion of himself in the courts of Europe as a conniver rather than a warrior. To that end, and believing that the English would be overconfident with respect to their northern frontier after the long history of defeated Scottish invasions, Henry began preparing his army for a campaign in Britain itself. What complicated matters was that Louis XIV now saw fit to interrupt the flow of rents from the Queen’s remaining French estates to prevent Scotland from channeling them into the war effort, even as sotto voce through Alexander Louis was promising Anne Marie Louise these moneys and exorbitant sums besides to use in an uprising against her husband.
Trusting James Alexander completely, and leaving the fifteen-year-old Prince James as regent under the tutelage of his Uncle Albany, Henry embarked on his invasion of England in early 1673. Berwick was surprised and reduced as a diversionary attack, and as the English earls converged on the old contested redoubt at the eastern hinge of the Anglo-Scottish border, Henry launched his attack in the far west. In the battle of Westlinton the Scots routed the local defenders and forced the English within the walls of Carlisle. Not waiting for the English to muster a counterattack, Henry undertook to exploit the surprise to the utmost. He dashed east, attempting to isolate the English force that was now converging on his token force at Berwick. It doubled back south, but too late. The Scots then defeated another local force at Settle, leaving the panicking English to ponder the defense of York itself. The emotional tenor of the campaign was unmistakable: along with his own standard he carried into battle those of James IV, James V and Mary Queen of Scots.
It was at this moment of national triumph that James Alexander’s conspiracy reached fruition. Anne Marie Louise was convinced to participate in a plan by which she was told she would become the queen regnant of a new Catholic kingdom in Ireland, supported by France, that French agents were there already preparing an uprising, and that following the inhuman abuses of the Brandons in that country there was no question of the willingness of the Irish to rise in support of a Catholic alternative. In truth, there had been no steps for such an uprising: the actual French plan as it ultimately became known was for Queen Anne Marie Louise to be taken back to France, so that the flow of rents from her remaining lands to Scottish coffers would stop and either the King of Scotland be forced perhaps to pay some ransom for her release back to him or for some other advantageous marriage to be negotiated for her. The 200 men-at-arms she had been promised to accompany her to Ireland were actually hired from the retainers of Catholic highland lords to ensure her delivery to French vessels waiting offshore. They would be paid richly for the service, and that money would go towards further agitation against Scotland’s Protestant rulers. Parallel to this conspiracy, England had its own developing at the same time involving the Gordons of Huntly, and was also making use of James Alexander to facilitate it. The difference however was that the English had anticipated Henry II would be running the current war as he had the last one, from Edinburgh, and when he did otherwise the English plans were ruined.
Thus, at the same time the Scottish king and his army was marching through Cumbria Queen Anne Marie Louise departed her Chateau du Montpensier in Fife with the 200 men-at-arms she believed to be the core her new army and 200 more under her own pay (“Such was what Queen Mademoiselle considered pin money,” one nineteenth century historian opined). Such was the faith in which Henry held Alexander that the queen’s journey west was not questioned by authorities on the way, and the large armed force accompanying her was explained as a necessary caution of wartime.
James Alexander went ahead to Dumbarton Castle, which had been chosen to be the site of the rendezvous with the French fleet. Anne Marie Louise for her part was following prepared for glory, and planning a campaign for the liberation of Ireland making use of all the scant military understanding she had. It was now however the French plan began to unravel: Scottish ships traveling to supply the king’s army in the south spotted and engaged the French ships, which put to flight. Fearful the plan had been discovered when the French did not appear at the appointed time, Alexander bought the services of a local fishing boat and escaped himself, first across the straits to Ireland, and then to France. Meanwhile word of the Queen’s unplanned “progress” reached the duke of Albany in Edinburgh and he frantically wrote to the king to inform him of the crisis, while dispatching the herald Lyon King of Arms to inquire of the queen directly her plans. Lyon King of Arms followed the queen’s path, and reached the Queen two nights after she arrived at Dumbarton.
By now, with Alexander gone without explanation, no French ships present and no way to communicate with them available, and the armed men increasingly uneasy with the situation in which they found themselves, Anne Marie Louise was extremely distressed. To Lyon King of Arms she confessed the whole situation, and moreover threw herself at his feet to beg the King and Duke of Albany for forgiveness. Overwhelmed by this display, Lyon King of Arms reassured her that he could not imagine King Henry would let her come to harm after 25 years of marriage, seven pregnancies and five living children. Heartened, Mademoiselle gave Lyon King of Arms a sealed latter to relate to the King and Duke of Albany telling them the whole story as far as she knew it, complete, she claimed, with the names of the Scottish lords implicated in the secret dealings with France. She meant this to be the peace offering with which she would try to make right the breach of her husband’s trust.
The next morning Lyon King of Arms set out from Dumbarton back to Edinburgh, knowing that an armed force was already on its way from Edinburgh which he would likely meet on the road. After only a few hours on its way, the herald’s party was set upon, most likely by men of the company organized by James Alexander. Only one of Lyon's pages survived by virtue of a fast horse to relate as much of the story as survives. The Queen’s letter, which would have likely implicated some of the most powerful men in Scotland in a treason against the king, was taken from his body and has been lost to history. The next day their bodies were found on the road by the Edinburgh party. Advancing to Dumbarton, they found the castle abandoned, the small army assembled by Alexander and the queen vanished, and the gates open.
Searching the castle’s grounds, at the foot of the great Dumbarton Rock within the walls, they found the broken body of Anne Marie Louise, who had been thrown from the rock’s heights in what was almost certainly an effort to prevent Alexander’s co-conspirators from becoming known.
Nine days later word reached the king at a camp mere miles from York. He informed the army the queen had died from a fever and retired to his tent in grief, his generals certain that his spirit had been broken, and that, for all the bravado of the campaign to that point, Henry II was now in extreme danger, deep within Yorkshire and close to the populous counties from which the Brandons could quickly gather a large army. Moreover, the English had now had time since the initial strike at Berwick to organize and dispatch such an army north. Edward VII had not the temperament for half-measures, and it could not be imagined that he would respond to the boldest incursion upon his realm in over seventy years with a light touch. Looking at the standards of those three previous Scottish monarchs felled by the English, the Scottish soldiers perhaps could only wonder if they had come so far only to add another name to the list. The earliest day on which it was believed an English force could arrive came and went, with Scottish preparations of their position hopelessly disorganized, and the king more focused on a frantic, almost disbelieving, correspondence with Edinburgh and Dumbarton over events there than with those pertaining to his own immediate survival and that of his army.
Then finally an English party appeared. It was Richmond Herald, bearing not the standard of Edward VII but Mary II, Edward VII having died on the way north to confront the invading Scots. Somewhat embarrassed at his instructions, Richmond Herald offered the King of Scots* a piece of embroidery that the young queen had labored long at, of a thistle, which he said she had begun at such time as England and Scotland was at peace. She had completed it since Henry invaded, in the hope of “resuming our lands’ eternal neighborly friendship”, a phrase which, given Mary II’s love of England’s medieval history, one can only imagine her smirking over rapturously as she wrote it. Richmond Herald further informed the King of Scots the young queen was adamant the embroidered thistle would be the one concession he would receive from her: there would be no talk of ceding Berwick, no colonies, no ransoms, no subsidies, and no indemnities. However, if he insulted the young queen by refusing her gift and menaced her peace-loving kingdom further, the good Duke of Essex was on his way with an army of 90,000 men and was prepared, in words Richmond Herald said he relayed directly from Mary, to march to Thurso and kill every living thing on its way.
Of course we now know various parties did not at the time: the Duke of Essex’s force was not 70,000 but 26,000, slightly fewer than Henry’s; that Henry would leave with not just a very poor piece of royal needlework (which survives today in the People’s Museum at the former Floors Castle) but “a south sea island, goodly sized and fully slaved, apt to the cultivation of tobacco”; and that, despite the certainty of the Scottish generals at the time, Mary knew nothing of the tragedy of Anne Marie Louise or its effect on Henry II when she proposed peace.
All that aside, Henry’s prudence won out, and he chivalrously accepted “this most beautiful and queenly gift.”
Unfortunately, this would leave him free to become the person he would be for the rest of his life.
* Per the treaty ending between James VI and Frederick I ending the War of the English Succession, England was required to recognize for all time the equal stature of the kingdom of Scotland. Hence, Scottish monarchs could no longer be treated as feudal subsidiaries who had forgotten their allegiance, and kings and queens of Scots were in English eyes kings and queens of Scotland. Thus Mary's initial address of Henry was significant. Henry having sundered that treaty, Mary was thus tersely informing him the two kingdoms had returned to the contestant status they had under the Plantagenets and Tudors, and that she was fully willing to prosecute such a situation to the utmost, her reference to "eternal neighborly friendship" notwithstanding.
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I'm working right now on continuing our little catch-up of events in Scotland. After we finish with that, are there any other corners of our world in the early to mid-eighteenth century people want described in greater detail? Alternately, would people prefer to just advance bravely into the 1740's?
I'm beginning to see the need of some discussion of the state of the English constitution sans revolutions Glorious and otherwise, an explanation of what the hell is going in the Netherlands following General Wars III-V, and a more thorough treatment of the English colonies of North America than we've had thus far. Which of these do people find (A) more interesting or (B) more pressing in terms of being able to understand what's going on in the big picture?
I'm also very much aware that it's past time for attention to be paid to Angola, India, Dutchzil (Can you dig it?) and other points in the wider world, but I think those places are inevitably going to be the focus of the next several decades and perhaps we could chime in with some detail-pieces then.
Seriously, let me know what you want.
I'm beginning to see the need of some discussion of the state of the English constitution sans revolutions Glorious and otherwise, an explanation of what the hell is going in the Netherlands following General Wars III-V, and a more thorough treatment of the English colonies of North America than we've had thus far. Which of these do people find (A) more interesting or (B) more pressing in terms of being able to understand what's going on in the big picture?
I'm also very much aware that it's past time for attention to be paid to Angola, India, Dutchzil (Can you dig it?) and other points in the wider world, but I think those places are inevitably going to be the focus of the next several decades and perhaps we could chime in with some detail-pieces then.
Seriously, let me know what you want.
Which specific posts would you like linked? I'll be glad to oblige.
Just to make sure I understand, I would post urls of each individual post composing the timeline in a single post, which would basically look like a links page or a table of contents? It may take several posts.
Also, it won't just be the decades and the in-depth pieces, because some important things get articulated in answering questions and responding to points made by commenters.
Here's some idea of what a table of contents would be like:
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=9739009&postcount=721.
This is from the Axis China timeline.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showpost.php?p=9739009&postcount=721.
This is from the Axis China timeline.