What a wretched lot the Stuarts were, the later ones especially, the males at least. James II fled England without a fight in 1688, and the battlefield of the Boyne in 1690 earning him the unaffectionate nickname Séamus an Chaca, ‘James the Shit’. During the Jacobite rising of 1715 on the death of Anne and the accession of George I, his son Prince James Edward, coming late to the fight from France, fled Scone palace, telling his hapless supporters to ‘shift for themselves’ after the defeat at Sheriffmuir.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £21.00. Tel: 08430 600033. Allan Mallinson is the author of The Making of the British Army: From the English Civil War to the War on Terror.
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