Stewart History

The 16th-century Scottish historian, Boece, gave the Stewart kings a mythical ancestor of the ancient house of Kenneth Mac Alpin called Banquo, whom Shakespeare was careful to include in Mac Beth for the satisfaction of the first Stewart king to occupy the English throne, James VI. Today those who attach a sentimental importance to a Celtic origin for the Stewarts have the equal satisfaction of knowing that they came from just beyond the borders of Normandy, and descended from a Breton named Flaald. Their town of Dol, with its beautiful Norman Cathedral, still commemorates the illustrious and ill-fated dynasty to which it gave birth. The ancestors of the Stewarts acquired estates in England after the Conquest and moved to Scotland with David I. Here they received the hereditary court appointment of High Steward, and Walter the 6th High Steward married the daughter of King Robert Bruce.
When his only son David II died childless, his grandson Robert Stewart succeeded Robert II. This king left at least twenty-one children, of whom his grandson James I wiped out the most senior representatives as soon as he had the opportunity. The curious result was that for a long period of Scottish history there was no near heir to the Stewart king while there was an ever-increasing number of collateral descendants of royal Stewart blood. It was not until the English had been given a dominant interest by the Union of Crowns that the Stewart succession was first interrupted, then destroyed.
Almost every Stewart sovereign remains to this day a subject of lively controversy. What ought to be beyond dispute is their failure to integrate Gaelic half of their kingdom with the Lowland half from where they ruled it. For the most part they treated its people badly. Only when the Stewarts had been rejected by their English-speaking subjects did they fall back on the Gaels for support and thus complete the ruin of both.