Matthew Stewart

Robert II was the first Stewart king of Scots, reigning from 1371 until his death in 1390. He was the son of Walter Stewart, 6th High Steward of Scotland, and Marjorie Bruce, daughter of King Robert the Bruce, and it was through his mother that the crown eventually reached the Stewart line. Born at Paisley in 1316 and orphaned as an infant, he acted as Guardian of Scotland during the long absences and captivity of his uncle David II, and succeeded him in 1371 at the age of fifty-five. His reign saw renewed border warfare with England and a growing reliance on his sons to govern in his name. By his first wife, Elizabeth Mure of Rowallan, he was the father of Robert III, and every later Stewart and Stuart monarch descends from him.

James I was king of Scots from 1406 until 1437, though he spent the first eighteen years of his reign as a prisoner in England. Born at Dunfermline in 1394, the youngest son of Robert III and Annabella Drummond, he was captured at sea in 1406 while being sent to France and held at the English court, where he received an excellent education and is generally credited with the long courtly poem The Kingis Quair. Ransomed in 1424, he returned with his English wife Joan Beaufort and ruled with fierce energy, curbing the great magnates, reforming parliament and taxation, and destroying the rival Albany Stewarts. His reign ended when he was killed at Perth in February 1437, and his six-year-old son succeeded as James II.

James II was king of Scots from 1437 to 1460. Born at Holyrood in 1430 to James I and Joan Beaufort, he was six when he came to the throne, and his minority was dominated by the rivalries of the Livingston, Crichton and Douglas families. Taking power in his own right in the later 1440s, he broke the overmighty Black Douglases in a series of campaigns that ended with their forfeiture in 1455, and greatly strengthened the crown's lands and finances. He was an enthusiast for the new siege artillery of the age, and it was at the siege of the English-held Roxburgh Castle in August 1460 that he was killed when one of his own guns burst. His son succeeded as James III.

James III was king of Scots from 1460 to 1488. The son of James II and Mary of Guelders, he was about eight at his accession and grew into a cultivated but unpopular ruler, more interested in the arts, music and architecture than in the hunting and campaigning his nobility expected. His marriage to Margaret of Denmark in 1469 brought Orkney and Shetland into the Scottish crown in place of her unpaid dowry, a lasting gain. His attempts at friendship with England, his reliance on low-born favourites and his quarrels with his own brothers repeatedly set the magnates against him, and he was overthrown and killed in 1488 after the Battle of Sauchieburn, fought in the name of his eldest son, who became James IV.

James IV was king of Scots from 1488 to 1513 and is usually reckoned the most successful of the Stewart kings. The son of James III and Margaret of Denmark, he came to the throne at fifteen after the rebellion that ended his father's reign, and spent his life atoning for it. He was a genuine Renaissance prince: a linguist, a patron of the poets William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, a founder of the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and of Scotland's first printing press, and the builder of the great warship the Michael. His marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503, the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, eventually carried his descendants to the English throne. He was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513.

James V was king of Scots from 1513 to 1542. Born at Linlithgow Palace in 1512 to James IV and Margaret Tudor, he was seventeen months old when his father was killed at Flodden, and his long minority was fought over by his mother, the Earl of Angus and the Duke of Albany. Ruling in his own right from 1528, he built up the crown's revenues, taxed the church heavily and rebuilt Falkland, Stirling and Linlithgow in the new Renaissance manner. He kept Scotland's French alliance and Catholic allegiance against the pressure of his uncle Henry VIII, marrying first Madeleine of Valois and then Mary of Guise. He died at Falkland Palace in December 1542, days after the birth of his daughter Mary, Queen of Scots.

Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, was the eldest son of James VI and I and Anne of Denmark and heir to the three kingdoms until his death at eighteen. Born at Stirling Castle in 1594 and raised there apart from his mother, he was invested as Prince of Wales in 1610 and quickly became the focus of enormous public expectation: athletic, militantly Protestant, keen on ships and naval power, and a serious collector of art and books whose collection later formed part of his brother's. He built his household at St James's Palace into a rival court to his father's. His death in November 1612 was met with extraordinary national mourning, and the succession passed to his younger brother, Charles I.

Charles I was king of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1625 until 1649. Born at Dunfermline in 1600, the second son of James VI and I and Anne of Denmark, he became heir when his elder brother Henry Frederick died in 1612. He married the French princess Henrietta Maria in 1625 and assembled one of the greatest art collections in Europe, employing Van Dyck and Rubens. His insistence on the divine right of kings, his eleven years of personal rule without parliament, and his attempt to impose a new prayer book on Scotland led to the Bishops' Wars and then the Civil Wars. Defeated by parliament's armies, he was tried for treason and executed outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall in January 1649.

Charles II was king of England, Scotland and Ireland, reigning in Scotland from 1649 and in all three kingdoms from the Restoration of 1660 until his death in 1685. The eldest surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, he was born at St James's Palace in 1630, fought in the Civil Wars as a teenager and, after defeat at Worcester in 1651, spent nine years in exile on the Continent. Invited back in 1660, he presided over a reign that saw the Great Plague, the Fire of London, the founding of the Royal Society and the Royal Observatory, and three wars with the Dutch. Known as the Merry Monarch, he had no legitimate children by his queen, Catherine of Braganza, so his brother James succeeded him.

Sophia of Hanover was the granddaughter of James VI and I through whom the British crown passed to the House of Hanover. The twelfth child of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V, Elector Palatine, she was born in exile at The Hague in 1630 and grew up in a household famous for its learning; she corresponded for years with the philosopher Leibniz and was a notable intellectual figure in her own right. In 1658 she married Ernest Augustus, who became the first Elector of Hanover. The English Act of Settlement of 1701 named her and her Protestant descendants heirs to the throne after Queen Anne. She died in June 1714, weeks before Anne, and her son became King George I.

William III was Prince of Orange from birth, Dutch stadtholder from 1672, and king of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1689 until 1702. Born at The Hague in 1650 to William II of Orange and Mary, Princess Royal, he was a grandson of Charles I and so a Stuart on his mother's side. He made his name resisting Louis XIV's invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1672, and in 1677 married his first cousin Mary, elder daughter of James II. Invited by English politicians in 1688, he landed at Torbay, and when James fled he and Mary were offered the crown jointly on terms set out in the Bill of Rights. He won the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and ruled alone after Mary's death in 1694.