"Compelling...A masterly feat...A magnificent, sweeping, authoritative, warm yet wry history."--The Wall Street Journal In this fascinating and intimate portrait of the Stuarts, author Allan Massie takes us deep into one of history's bloodiest and most tumultuous reigns. Exploring the family's lineage from the first Stuart king to the last, The Royal Stuarts is a panoramic history of the family that acted as a major player in the Scottish Wars of Independence, the Union of the Crowns, the English Civil War, the Restoration, and more. Drawing on the accounts of historians past and present, novels, and plays, this is the complete story of the Stuart family, documenting their path from the salt marshes of Brittany to the thrones of Scotland and England and eventually to exile. The Royal Stuarts brings to life figures like Mary, Queens of Scots, Charles I, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, uncovering a family of strong affections and fierce rivalries. Told with panache, this is the gripping true story of backstabbing, betrayal, and ambition gone awry.

Offers an irreverent take on the royal family that united Great Britain, chronicling the trials and triumphs of a dynasty that oversaw the rise of English Protestantism and the evolution of modern British democracy.

What if the ousted kings of England, the Stuarts, had claimed the North American colonies? We might have been free of the English a century earlier--no revolution needed! What set up this possibility? How did it happen that those foolish, brave, and unlucky Stuarts did everything wrong to ensure that their Scottish subjects migrated to North America as soon as there were any ships going in that direction? This amusing book is full of lost causes, wrongheaded kings, and sheer incompetence. Prince Charlie wasn't bonny at all, and Mary, Queen of Scots wasn't innocent. Read all about these feckless kings of Scotland and England, and about how they gave so much to the USA.

Published to accompany the exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

"Henry Benedict Thomas Edward Maria Clement Francis Xavier Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (6 March 1725? 13 July 1807) was a Roman Catholic Cardinal, as well as the fourth and final Jacobite heir to claim the thrones of England, Scotland, France and Ireland publicly. Unlike his father, James Francis Edward Stuart, and brother, Charles Edward Stuart, Henry made no effort to seize the throne. After Charles's death in January 1788 the Papacy did not recognise Henry as the lawful ruler of England, Scotland and Ireland, but referred to him as the Cardinal Duke of York.[2] He spent his life in the Papal States and had a long career in the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, rising to become the Dean of the College of Cardinals and Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia and Velletri. At the time of his death he was (and still is) one of the longest serving Cardinals in the Church's history."--Wikipedia.

This book reassesses the lives of the exiled Stuart Court in Italy which provided an important British presence in Rome.

Spanning from the inauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature. Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldry, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.