Scottish History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Scottish History’
Sir Walter Scott described how the long-forgotten crown jewels of the Scottish Kings came to light again.
After the Union of Scotland and England in 1707, Scotland’s crown jewels were locked away in Edinburgh Castle. Almost at once, the Jacobites who so bitterly opposed the Union began spreading rumours that the ‘Honours of Scotland’ had been stolen, and in 1794 King George III sent a party up to Edinburgh to prove them wrong.
Sir James Melville eavesdrops on Queen Elizabeth I’s music practice, and incurs Her Majesty’s displeasure.
In 1564, Mary Queen of Scots had recently returned to Edinburgh after the death of her husband King Francis II of France. Meanwhile down in London, her cousin Queen Elizabeth I kept asking Mary’s visiting courtier, Sir James Melville, which of the two Queens was the taller, the prettier, and the more musical?
Henry VII’s great-granddaughter Mary never grasped that even royalty must win the people’s respect.
Perhaps it was spending her formative years in the French court that did it, but after the teenage widow came back to be Queen of Scots, she never seemed to understand that on this side of the Channel, people-power was on the rise, and royalty could no longer behave as they pleased.
The Scots paid a heavy price for honouring their ‘Auld Alliance’ with France.
In September 1513, King James IV of Scotland found himself torn between ties of family and obligations of state. He chose the latter, and on a cold and lonely field in Northumberland, James and thousands of his loyal subjects paid dearly.
Loyal subjects of King James II continued to fight his corner after he, and any real hope of success, had gone.
The ‘Jacobites’ were loyal to King James II (who was also James VII of Scotland), the Roman Catholic king deposed by the English Parliament in 1688. James took refuge with Louis XIV in France, who saw restoring a grateful James to the English throne as a way to gain control of the world’s most powerful navy.
King Philip V of Spain sent a second Spanish Armada against Britain, but it suffered much the same fate as the first.
The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 forbade Philip V of Spain, grandson of Louis XIV of France, to claim the French throne. But his chief minister, Italian cardinal Giulio Alberoni, egged him on, triggering the ‘War of the Quadruple Alliance’.