bloody-coronation-1024x683As this excellent article reminds us, there were eight pre-union Stewart monarchs, or nine if you exclude James VI, who had already reigned in Scotland for nearly forty years before inheriting the English throne. Of these, excepting the two Roberts, only two turned up for a pitched battle with against an English army and only one was actually killed by English troops and the other by accident. A third delegated his fighting duties, although he was quite ill and died within three weeks. Two of them managed to be killed by fellow Scots and another lived in exile in England for twenty years before being beheaded for frequent plotting.

The strangest thing is that, throughout this period, the Scots throne always passed that monarch’s heir, whether six days old or fifteen and no matter in what circumstances they died. One of them, James I, married Richard III’s apparent cousin, James IV married his great-niece and Mary died at his birthplace.


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  1. […] now through the Bohemian marriage of James VI and I’s daughter. The reigns of the first three Stewarts were narrated, the weaknesses of Robert II and Robert III, the absence and the authoritarian […]

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  2. […] Could he have ended his days in Scotland, under a safe conduct complicated by the Sauchieburn rebellion, or was that a red […]

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  3. […] and the future Richard III would have been at or near the scene. He became King of Scotland in his minority, as did his successor, reigned in an era when the later “British Isles” consisted of […]

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  4. […] which detailed tribal influence over events such as the ascent of Robert I and subsequently the Stewarts to Mary’s troublesome reign and deposition, Blood of the Clans deals with Scottish events […]

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  5. […] her son was born alive and survived to 74, eventually succeeding his uncle as Robert II, the first Stewart King and progenitor of the Scottish […]

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  6. […] bestowed by posterity. In 1503, when Margaret was on her way to Scotland to be the queen of King James IV, she too halted at the abbey in York. It seems her retinue was so vast it had trouble squeezing […]

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  7. […] to reproduce, left the throne to the Brandon/ Grey descendants of his sister Mary ahead of the Stewart descendants of his sister Margaret, who did inherit in 1603. It leads through the Seymour and Grey […]

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  8. […] the above link shows, the real Laurence Bruce lived from 1547-1617, with Stewart connections, and was probably from a branch of the great family with a brother named Robert. In any […]

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  9. […] as it affected the Swynford/ Beaufort case. There is also a little confusion between the later Stewart kings. The third and fourth books cover the evidence in the “Perkin” case and for the […]

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  10. […] battle was joined on 2nd October. Haakon led the Norwegian army in person, opposed by Alexander (Stewart) of Dundonald, then the hereditary High Steward. Sources (1) attest that about a thousand invaders […]

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