John Brown Read Free Page A

Stewart was proclaimed King of England in London. He had reigned in Scotland as King James VI ever since his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced to abdicate on 24 July 1567. On 5 April 1603 James disappeared down the road to Greenwich, with his ‘gowff clubbis’, to be at the hub of his new United Kingdom. Thereafter royal visits to Scotland became rare for some 220 years.
    James VI and I returned to Scotland once, in 1617, in an attempt to impose Anglican ritual upon the recalcitrant Scottish Kirk; he stayed for seven months. James’s second son Charles I, who was born on 19 November 1600 at Dunfermline, Fife, visited Edinburgh as monarch and on 18 June 1633 was crowned with Scotland’s own regalia. During June 1650 Charles II landed in Scotland and on 1 January 1651 was crowned King of Scots at Scone; he never returned to Scotland after his Restoration in 1660. In 1679 James, Duke of York, later King James II, stayed at Holyrood Palace, to the disgust of strict Presbyterians who loathed his religion and his predilection for drama and court entertainments. Nevertheless James returned to Edinburgh in 1680 as Lord High Commissioner, bringing with him his wife Anne Hyde and his daughter Princess Anne, who was to rule as Queen Anne, the last of the Stewart monarchs.
    There were no further royal visits to Scotland until 1715, when Prince James Francis Edward Stewart, the only surviving son of James II landed at Peterhead in an attempt to win back the British throne from the grasp of the Hanoverian succession. Again in 1745, Prince James’s son Charles Edward Stewart, great-grandson of Charles I, took up the cudgels against George II, but all his hopes were strangled at Culloden field on 16 April 1746, when Charles’s Jacobite army was utterly destroyed by the forces of his cousin, the Hanoverian Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Prince Charles’s desperate flight to France from the shores of Loch nan Uamh aboard L’Heureux on 19 September marked the end of this phase of royal visits to Scotland.
    Almost seventy years later, the Scots were startled to learn that their new monarch King George IV, who had succeeded his father George III in 1820, intended to visit Scotland. The Scots aristocracy were sent into a flurry of consternation and activity as no one could remember how a royal progress should be organised. As royal pageant-master, Sir Walter Scott dug and delved in the nation’s archives in order to create a tartan panorama to welcome the monarch. His efforts were based mostly on invented Highland mythology, customs and dress, but the jubilation, processions and presentations lasted for ten days from Tuesday 13 August. The Scots would never see their like again.
    Twenty more years passed before Scotland received another visit from a British royal personage. In the meantime the exiled royal Bourbons of France, Charles X, Comte d’Artois and King of France, Louis and Marie Theresa, Duc et Duchesse d’Angoulême, Charles and Caroline, Duc et Duchesse de Berri, and Henri, the titular Henri V of France, along with his sister Princess Louise, were all state guests at Holyrood Palace variously during periods in 1796 and 1830. Five years after her accession to the throne of Great Britain, after the death of her uncle King William IV at twelve minutes past two in the morning of 20 June 1837, Queen Victoria herself decided to take an early autumn holiday in Scotland.
    During June 1842 Queen Victoria asked her Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel to set in motion the arrangements for her Scottish jaunt. To the Queen’s great surprise she was told that Peel and the Tory ministers in the Cabinet did not advise such a journey. They noted that the areas of northern England through which she would have to travel were rife with ‘Chartist sympathisers’. These were the agitators who demanded a ‘People’s Charter’ of parliamentary reform; only a few years previously, in 1839, they had signed a petition in the