The King Over the Water: A Complete History of the Jacobites

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Despite Henry's urgings, Clement XIII refused to recognise his brother as Charles III; Charles died of a stroke in Rome in January 1788, a disappointed and embittered man. A Convention of the Scottish Estates took a different approach, and declared that James, by his wrongdoing, had forfeited the crown. After he fell into financial difficulty during the French Revolution, he was granted a stipend by George III. Senior surviving descendant of Henry Cardinal of York's great aunt, Henrietta of Orleans, who was the youngest sister of James II/VII. The collapse of the South Sea Company, established in an absurd attempt to trade with countries with whom England was also at war – an early example of a speculative bubble – also damaged the king’s reputation.

Many Jacobite folk songs emerged in Scotland in this period; a number of examples were collected by Scott's colleague James Hogg in his Jacobite Reliques, including several he likely composed himself. The King over the Water, though, is his best work because it plays to his gifts of being largely persuasive and consistently employing a briskness in pace, a clarity of style and a genius for capturing the character of those long dead, long-forgotten and, perhaps, never remembered. Desmond Seward, a popular historian of the Plantagenets and the Tudors, has attempted to tell this story in a complete and accessible form. A French diplomat observed James had 'a heart too English to do anything that might vex the English. Jacobites argued monarchs were appointed by God, or divine right, and could not be removed, making the post-1688 regime illegitimate.Although the Stuarts were useful as a lever, their foreign backers generally had little interest in their restoration. In the 30 years between the two largest risings – the Fifteen and the Forty-Five – repeated Jacobite pleas for further action were politely but firmly turned down. Sunderland secretly co-ordinated an Invitation to William, assuring Mary and her husband, and James's cousin, William of Orange of English support for armed intervention.

Upon Charles Edward Stuart's death in 1788, Henry, as Charles's only brother, was the last surviving legitimate descendant of James II/VII. By 1748, food shortages among the French population made peace a matter of urgency, but the British refused to sign the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle while Charles remained in France. In 1642, the Catholic Confederacy representing the Irish insurgents proclaimed allegiance to Charles, but the Stuarts were an unreliable ally, since concessions in Ireland cost them Protestant support in all three kingdoms. Fortune seemed to turn in favour of the Jacobites (from the Latin Jacobus, meaning James) with the accession of George I to the throne in 1714.Franz, Duke of Bavaria (born 1933), a direct descendant of Charles I, is the current legitimate heir of the house of Stuart. Yet hiding in plain sight throughout this history is a reminder of the principal constraint on Jacobite initiative. World English rights in Desmond Seward’s history of the Jacobite Movement have been bought by Birlinn.

Although the line of succession can continue to be traced, none of these subsequent heirs ever claimed the British throne, or the crowns of England, Scotland, or Ireland. Establishing the ideology of active participants is complicated by the fact that "by and large, those who wrote most did not act, and those who acted wrote little, if anything.

The agency is sad to report the unexpected death of Desmond Seward, aged eighty-six, an agency client since January 2001 and a full-time historian and biography for over fifty years. Scots fought for the Jacobites in 1715, compared to 11,000 who joined the government army, and were the majority of the 9,000 to 14,000 who served in 1745.

From the 1720s on, many Catholics were willing to swear loyalty to the Hanoverian regime, but not the Oath of Abjuration, which required renouncing the authority of the Pope, as well as the Stuarts. The tables below set out the male-preference primogeniture line of succession, unaltered by those statutes.

However, George blamed the 1710-to-1714 Tory government for the Peace of Utrecht, which he viewed as damaging to his home state of Hanover. Now under the banner of James II’s grandson, Charles Edward Stuart, the ‘Bonnie Prince’, they initially achieved an astonishing victory against the Whig Government’s forces at Prestonpans.