UNIQ+ Intern, Thomas Fallais, and David Scott, editor of the House of Lords 1640-1660 section, consider the deaths of three prominent royalist brothers, and how they were remembered.

The Stuart brothers George Lord d’Aubigny, Lord John Stuart and Lord Bernard Stuart came from a powerful aristocratic family. Their father, Esmé Stuart, 3rd duke of Lennox, was a cousin and favourite of King James I, and their elder brother James, who succeeded as 4th duke of Lennox in 1624, became a gentleman of the bedchamber to King Charles I and lord steward of the royal household, the most senior position at court. However, only one of the six Stuart brothers would survive to see the Restoration in 1660, with three alone – George, John and Bernard – dying in combat in the English civil war.

At the outbreak of war in England in the summer of 1642 the three brothers became cavalry officers in the king’s army. All three fought at the first major battle of the war in October at Edgehill, where George was killed taking part in such a one-sided cavalry charge that it prompted suspicions that he had been accidentally shot by one of his own troopers. The royalist statesman Edward Hyde, the future earl of Clarendon, who was a friend of the 4th duke of Lennox, described George as ‘a gentleman of great hopes, of a gentle and winning disposition, and of very clear courage…’ (Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1888), ii. 368).

Lord John Stuart was just 22-years of age when he, too, made the ultimate sacrifice to the royalist cause – in his case, at the battle of Cheriton in Hampshire in March 1644. Commanding the royalist cavalry he was mortally wounded and was carried from the battlefield to Oxford, the king’s wartime headquarters. Hyde, who was then living in the city, wrote several years later that Lord John

died of his wounds within three days [of Cheriton], to the great grief of the King … He was the second brother of this noble family who had lost his life in this fatal war, and was a man of great courage, and, with a different roughness in his nature from all the rest of his race [i.e. family], had proposed to himself the profession of a soldier…’ (Clarendon, History, iii. 313)

Lord Bernard Stuart fought on and even survived the royalists’ crushing defeat at Naseby in June 1645, which ended any real prospect of the king winning the civil war. But like his two brothers, he would not live to see the war’s outcome. That September, at the battle at Rowton Heath, just outside Chester, he was killed within sight of the king himself, who was observing the engagement from the city walls. This, for Hyde, was perhaps the cruellest blow of all to the Stuart family: ‘He was a very faultless young man, of a most gentle, courteous, and affable nature, and of a spirit and courage invincible; who[se] loss all men exceedingly lamented and the King bore it with extraordinary grief’ (Clarendon, History, iv. 115-16).

By ‘all men’, Hyde meant, of course, all royalists. The parliamentarians, on the other hand, far from lamenting Lord Bernard’s death used it as a prime example of royalist hubris. Reflecting on the battle at Rowton Heath, and on Lord George’s fate in particular, the editor of the leading parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus declared that God and the nation’s destiny had pronounced against the king, and that resistance to these forces was not only futile but immoral: ‘it is not for men to fight against Heaven, and the Genius of Great Britaine’ (Mercurius Britanicus no. 100 (29 Sept.-6 Oct. 1645), 890 (E.304.2)). Lord Bernard and his brothers had merely been ‘Martyrs to this Truth’ – that is, to the futility of resisting Parliament’s victory. For the parliamentarians, their deaths only had meaning in revealing the ultimate pointlessness of their sacrifice. This interpretation would prevail, at least in public discourse, until the restoration of monarchy in 1660. Indeed, in their determination to exclude the brothers from any share in the nation’s ‘Genius’,  the parliamentarians may have erased all visible trace of their burial in Oxford’s cathedral; certainly not even the smallest inscription survives to mark their graves.

The Stuart brothers’ memory was revived after 1660 during the reign of their royal cousin Charles II, although, again, it was twisted for polemical purposes. The royalist hagiographer David Lloyd, in his 1668 publication Memoires of the Lives…[etc.], invented glorious deaths for them that likely bore little relation to fact. Lord George, claimed Lloyd, had received twelve wounds at Edgehill and had fought on until the blood had all but run from his veins. Lord John, at Cheriton, had not been ‘daunted with the fall of two horses under him, nor with six wounds given and the death of near five hundred men round about him’. Lord Bernard, we are told, had commanded the royalists’ rearguard at Rowton Heath ‘to the amazement of all that saw him’ – in fact he had been killed in a confused melee that had preceded the main battle. Regardless – in Lloyd’s telling the three brothers had ‘died Martyrs to this great Cause’ (Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings & Deaths…[etc.], pp. 321-30).

The fate of the Stuart brothers, as lords of the blood royal, was emblematic for both royalists and parliamentarians in the struggle to define and defend ‘this Truth’ or ‘this great Cause’. Their high birth and the political circumstances in which they were memorialised thus dictated what moral should be drawn from their deaths. If truth is invariably a casualty of war then Lloyd’s fanciful reconstruction of their last moments is further evidence that the conflicts of the 1640s were still being fought in the 1660s, albeit with pens rather than swords. Lloyd’s own service in this protracted war of words did credit neither to the brothers nor to himself. The Restoration antiquarian Anthony Wood thought the Memoires contained ‘almost as many errors as lines’, lending its author ‘not only the character of a most impudent plagiary [plagiariser], but a false writer and meer scribbler’ (Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis ed. P. Bliss (1820), iv. 349). Evidently the Stuart brothers continued to pay the cost of royalist martyrdom long after the true facts about their deaths had been forgotten.

Thomas Fallais and David Scott

The research for this blog was undertaken as part of a UNIQ+ internship at the University of Oxford in conjunction with the History of Parliament Trust. For further information, see UNIQ+ (UNIQ plus) | Graduate Access | University of Oxford

Further reading

Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion : a New Selection ed. P. Seaward (OUP, 2009)

C. Gray, ‘Wild civility: men at war in royalist elegy’, in J. Feather and C.E. Thomas (eds.), Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (Palgrave, 2013), pp. 169-89

E. Peters, Commemoration and Oblivion in Royalist Print Culture, 1658-1667 (Palgrave, 2017)