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ISBN-13:

9780752470931

Publisher: The History Press
Publication date: 09/16/2011
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 224
File size: 739 KB
Age Range: 18Years

Oliver Thomson is the author of Easily Led: a History of Propaganda, From the Bloody Heart: the Stewarts and the Douglases, The Great Feud: the Campbells and the MacDonalds, and The Romanovs: Europe’s Most Obsessive Dynasty.

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The Rises & Falls of the Royal Stewarts

By Oliver Thomson

The History Press

Copyright © 2011 Oliver Thomson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7093-1

CHAPTER 1

Flaald, Steward of Dol

The slow painful rise of the family later known as Stewart began in the Breton town of Dol, more than three and a half centuries before they won their first crown. This small town lies in the north east corner of Brittany, some five miles from the sea, and in those times was much more important than it is now, for it had a cathedral with its own archbishop. It stood on the crossroads between two very different regions of France: one was Brittany which had acquired its name because of the number of British refugees who had settled there during the Saxon and Viking invasions of their homeland. They included two Cornish holy men, St Samson who founded Dol and St Malo who settled on the nearby coast. The other region was Normandy, which had acquired its name because of the large numbers of Northmen or Vikings who had displaced the original population. Brittany too had been conquered by the Northmen but in smaller numbers, so the existing population, more Celtic than French, had survived. The cultural differences between the Viking settlers of Brittany and those of Normandy were almost as great as those between them and the rest of France. This meant that Dol, in its position close to the frontier was a dangerous place, where a young fighting man might make his mark.

Thus in about the year 1020 Junkeneus the Archbishop of Dol (d.1032) appointed a man called Flaald to be his steward. Traditionally the post had been that of a senior butler as the Latin title dapifer or 'feast-bearer' implies, but by this time such duties were largely ceremonial. What it really meant was that the archbishop needed a skilled bodyguard to protect him against his enemies. His brother was the lord of nearby Combourg, and Flaald, the ancestor of the Stewarts, was probably attached to that household too.

We do not know much detail about Flaald except that he must have been a competent fighter with access to the new fashion of chain mail, used to fighting on horseback with sword and axe, and able to justify his upkeep as an armed retainer. We can also, with near certainty, say that he was a third or fourth generation Viking settler whose forebears had come to Brittany about a hundred years earlier. They may have come directly from Scandinavia, or possibly, as later legends suggested, previously been settled in Scotland. Such a story was told about that other Breton-Viking family, later called Bruce, which was also destined to play a major role in Scottish history. When William Shakespeare in his Macbeth included a little piece of propaganda for the first Stuart king of Britain, he borrowed his version of the story from the chronicler Holinshed who in turn took it from a poem written by John Barbour around 1370 and paid for by Stewarts. It portrayed the dynasty as descended from a Scots general, known as Banquo, whose son Fleance supposedly went into exile in France; it is far-fetched, but conceivably there might be a grain of truth in it. At least Flaald and Fleance begin with the same two letters and there was later a Flancus referred to as owning property near Sporle in Norfolk, a place where Walter, the first of the Scottish stewards many years later, had an estate.

In 1027, a few years after Flaald's appointment, a tanner's daughter in Falaise, some ninety miles from Dol, gave birth to the illegitimate son of Robert the Magnificent, Duke of Normandy. The child was William, who against all the odds was to make himself the Duke of Normandy and set in motion a train of events which not only brought the knights of Brittany into the Norman ambit, but involved many of them in his invasion of England.

Meanwhile, in about 1031 Duke Robert, whose mother Judith came from the ruling Breton family, began a war with his first cousin, Count Alan of Brittany. Count Alan was trying to take over control of Mont St Michel. In retaliation Robert attacked Dol and burned it to the ground. Alan counter-attacked at Avranches but was defeated and the career of Flaald the Dapifer must have reached a very low ebb. Many Breton knights had begun to look elsewhere to find their fortunes in areas such as Italy and Sicily where their military skills were appreciated, but Flaald stayed in Dol as it was rebuilt and came under increasingly Norman influence.

The precise role of Flaald in this fighting is unknown but the fact that from then on he was a Norman rather than just a Breton perhaps benefited his career. It was the Duchy of Normandy that was perfecting new skills in armour, castle-building and man management backed by brutally enforced oaths of loyalty and the literate infrastructure of the Catholic Church. The Bretons on the other hand, despite their infusion of Scandinavian blood or perhaps because of it, and their lesser skill in imitating Frankish culture, were seen as primitive. They were an odd mixture of Viking and Celtic races, some Welsh, Cornish and even Scottish asylum seekers over the years had intermixed much less with the French and continued in greater isolation than their Norman cousins round Rouen, who rapidly copied almost everything from their French neighbours.

For the long term career of Flaald and his family, the destruction of their home in Dol was a small price to pay for the possibilities of service in the aggressive new duchy of Normandy.

CHAPTER 2

Alan, Steward of Dol and Earl Harold

The fact that Flaald's son and successor as Dapifer of Dol was called Alan (fl 1040–80) reflects the fact that he was born when Alan, Count of Brittany was still his undisputed overlord. But the troubles of Dol were destined to return. Within thirty years of the town being rebuilt after its destruction by Duke Robert it was besieged once again. The new bishop, Juhellus (d.1078) was referred to in papal propaganda as lascivious and corrupt, a reasonable excuse for attacking him. The turmoil of the Dapifer family was to continue.

Significantly, the late Duke Robert had chosen Alan, Count of Brittany as one of the guardians for his young son, William the Bastard, so for a while there was no need for conflict in the frontier area round Dol. Remarkably Count Alan and his colleagues supported the child duke through his minority, perhaps preferring a youngster whom for the time being they could control, to an adult who might interfere with their freedoms.

A few years later the stigma of bastardy would have negated young William's claim to inherit and provided a good excuse for rebellion, but in the 1030s this was still not the case, even though he had several cousins who had a better technical claim to be Duke of Normandy. William, however, survived to come of age and around 1044 began to make his own decisions. He also began to show that he was an extremely competent soldier and leader of men. His skills were honed by a series of rebellions, the most significant in 1047, when King Henri of France came to his aid. As William's strength increased, the French began to perceive him as a threat and launched an invasion of Normandy which he repelled without too much difficulty. Then in 1053 he conquered Maine and married Matilda of Flanders, thus greatly adding to his prestige.

Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the saintly Edward the Confessor, King of England was never going to produce an heir, so the Duke of Normandy, as Edward's cousin, saw himself as a credible successor to his throne. William was not, however, in a position to canvas any local support, until by a strange coincidence one of England's most powerful earls fell into his clutches. Harold son of Godwin had just succeeded as Earl of East Anglia and though he had no royal blood in his veins was sufficiently respected as a soldier and leader to be another possible candidate for the throne. In 1063 – as is graphically illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry – after a good dinner at Bosham, Harold sailed for France on a mission to negotiate the release of his brother who had been captured by the Normans. Unluckily for him his ship was blown off course and went aground on the shores of Ponthieu, part of Normandy, near the mouth of the Somme. He was arrested by the local count and taken to Duke William who treated him to a mixture of lavish hospitality and emotional blackmail. After entertainment at the palace in Rouen he was given a valuable suit of armour. Then with elaborate ceremony, to which the English were not yet accustomed, Earl Harold was dubbed a knight by William, thus cunningly emphasising the position of moral superiority which the Duke was trying to establish over him.

Soon afterwards, William decided to conduct a new campaign against the Bretons, who as usual were endeavouring to claim independence from Normandy. The Norman army headed towards the frontier town of Dol which was held by the rebellious Conan, Count of Rennes, aided we must assume by the Steward of Dol, Alan son of Flaald. On the way some Norman knights were trapped in a marshy quicksand by the River Couesnon and Harold took a major part in the rescue. Then they began the siege of Dol which Duke William referred to as 'une orgueilleuse bicoque' – an upstart shanty town – and the defenders can be seen on the Bayeux tapestry pouring water on the leather shields nailed to the castle walls to stop it catching fire. In the end, the Breton Lord of Dol, Rhiwallon chose to surrender rather than see his town destroyed, so Alan, who had married a lady called Tittensor, called the youngest of his three sons Rhiwallon and once more came within the orbit of the Normans.

Earl Harold meanwhile rashly swore an oath to Duke William that he would support him in his claim to be the next king of England. It is hard to believe that he did so with the intention of breaking it as soon as he went home, but Edward the Confessor died eighteen months later and the temptation to seize the English throne proved too much for him.

In faraway Scotland, the usurper Macbeth had been defeated in battle and killed in 1057. He was succeeded after a short gap by Malcolm III Canmore (1031–93), father of the man who was later to persuade the family from Dol to come to Scotland. When William of Normandy, angered by Harold's failure to keep his promise, began to cast covetous eyes across the Channel and when Malcolm of Scotland picked the English princess Margaret as his second wife we see the start of the extraordinary chain of events that was to take the family of Dapiferi from Dol to the throne of Great Britain.

CHAPTER 3

Alan II, the Crusader

As Alan II succeeded his father Alan I as Steward of Dol (Alanus Dapifer Dolensis-Senescalus Dolensis) the destiny of the Normans was about to take an entirely new course. So far as we know he was not in the first wave of troops which Duke William led across the English Channel and with which he won control of England at the Battle of Hastings. Perhaps he was too young and his father, if he was still alive in 1066, was too old. But there were certainly two Breton counts who played a significant part: Alan IV, Count of Brittany was a favourite of Duke William who now styled himself King William I of England, and rewarded him with lands in North Yorkshire, around Richmond, from which he took the title of his new English earldom. The other was Ralph the Gael known as the Staller who was made Earl of East Anglia but was not satisfied, rebelled and ended up as an exile back in Dol.

King William was far from pleased and decided to teach the Bretons another lesson. The chroniclers referred to them as 'Breton filth' and 'polygamous barbarians addicted to wars, feuds and brigandage' (William de Poitiers). But for once King William did not prove invincible. The new count of Brittany, Hoel, came to Ralph's rescue and summoned additional help from the impetuous King Philip of France (1052–1108). This combination was sufficient to drive off William the Conqueror and save the city of Dol. It also perhaps began to see a rise in the fortunes of the Dapifer family, for a few years later Alan was wealthy enough to be a major benefactor of the abbey of St Florent-de-Saumur which soon had a daughter house at Mezuoit near Dol where his brother Rhiwallon became a monk.

At about this time King William began to fall out seriously with his own three sons, particularly his favourite, the eldest, Robert of Curthose (1054–1134) who at the age of twenty-three already wanted a dukedom for himself. He also wanted the punishment of his two younger brothers William and Henry who, amongst other provocations, had held noisy dice parties in the room above the one where he was conducting a council of war and even urinated on it from above. His father refused to discipline the boys so Robert petulantly appealed to King Philip of France for help, an act of treachery which was to become almost commonplace for the eldest sons of Norman kings and be-devilled their years in power.

King William by this time in his fifties and becoming obese, besieged his son Robert in Gerberoy, east of Rouen, but suffered a humiliating defeat. Robert had to be bribed with vast treasure by his mother before he backed down and accepted the offer of the Norman dukedom to be conferred as soon as his father died.

Quite what was Alan the Dapifer's role in these civil wars we do not know, but after William I's death in 1087 it is clear that the family's primary allegiance was to his youngest son Henry, who in the division of spoils became Count of Cotentin, the great peninsula of Brittany. Robert was given the promised Dukedom of Normandy and the middle brother, William Rufus, the crown of England as William II. Soon afterwards the three brothers began to fall out again. William attacked his younger brother Count Henry in 1090 and Duke Robert came to Henry's aid. A year later when Henry was besieged by William in Mont St Michel just a few miles from Dol it was Duke Robert who sent food and drink across to the starving garrison. On that occasion Henry had to surrender and went into a brief period of exile in Paris but ten years later he was to make a spectacular comeback.

In this constant squabbling between the three brothers, Alan the Dapifer transferred his allegiance to Duke Robert, for he joined him in the contingent which left to take part in the First Crusade in 1096. Robert himself was to come back from it covered in glory and ready to pick further fights with his two younger brothers. William Rufus was, so far as he knew, still the King of England and the fractious young Henry still Count of Cotentin. Alan the Dapifer, so far as we know a bachelor and a fervent Christian did not come back from the Holy Land, for he had won himself a guaranteed place in heaven by dying soon after the siege of Antioch in 1098 along with his master Roland the Archbishop of Dol. What Duke Robert did not realise was that during his long absence the situation had altered radically.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Rises & Falls of the Royal Stewarts by Oliver Thomson. Copyright © 2011 Oliver Thomson. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Preface,
Introduction,
Part One THE BRETON APPRENTICESHIP,
1. Flaald, Steward of Dol (c.1020–1040),
2. Alan, Steward of Dol (c.1040–80) and Earl Harold,
3. Alan II, the Crusader (c.1080–98),
Part Two THE ENGLISH INTERLUDE,
1. Flaald the Fighter (c.1098–1105),
2. Alan Fitzflaald Sheriff of Shropshire (1105–14),
3. William Fitzalan (1114–60) and the Wars of Matilda,
Part Three HIGH STEWARDS OF SCOTLAND,
1. Walter Fitzalan, Lord of Renfrew (c.1137–77) and the Battle of Knock Hill,
2. Alan the Steward (c.1177–1204) and the Crusades,
3. Walter the Judge (1204–1234),
4. Alexander of Dundonald (c.1234–83) and the Battle of Largs,
5. James (1283–1309) and the Wars of Independence,
6. Walter (1309–28) and the Royal Wedding,
Part Four KINGS AND ONE QUEEN OF SCOTLAND,
1. Robert II (1371–90) or King Blearie,
2. Robert III (1390–1406) or Faraneyeir, Albany and the Wolf of Badenoch,
3. Duke Murdoch and King James I (1406-37),
4. James II (1437–60) of the Fiery Face,
5. James III (1460–88) and the Hanging Bridge,
6. James IV (1488–1513) of the Iron Belt,
7. James V (1513–42) and Self-Destruction,
8. Mary Queen of Scots (1542–66), King Henry and Her Other Two Husbands,
9. James VI of Scotland (1506–1603),
Part Five RULERS OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND,
1. James I of Great Britain (1603–25),
2. Charles I (1625–49) and the Civil War,
3. Charles II (1660–85) and the Second Chance,
4. James II (1685–88), Dismal Jimmy,
5. William, Mary and the Orange Afterglow (1688–1702),
6. Anne (1702–14) and Mrs Freeman,
Part Six THE PRETENDERS AND THE DIASPORA,
1. James the Old Pretender,
2. Charles the Young Pretender and Culloden,
3. John Stuart and the American Wars,
4. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Beauty Stuart and the Rest,
Gazetteer of Main Surviving Stewart Monuments,
Bibliography,

Rises and Falls of the Royal Stewarts

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