“Wait.” I was vaguely remembering things from a long-ago history class. “Is this the Glorious Revolution?”
Alistair Scott answered, drily, “For some, aye, it might have been glorious. But not for James. A committee of nobles sent word into Holland, to William of Orange, inviting him to come and rule them as king, with his wife Mary as queen. William came, there was fighting, and James—no doubt mindful of what had become of his father—made certain his wife and their wee son were safely sent out of the country, to France, where his cousin the king would protect them. And then he did what he had done as a lad; what his brother had done when the times were against them: he followed his family to exile.”
My cousin thought James should have stayed to fight. “Think of how different things might have been if he had stayed.”
“Aye, he might have ended up a little shorter, like his father.”
“No, really,” said Jacqui. “It wasn’t the best thing to do. If he’d stayed, then his enemies couldn’t have claimed he’d abandoned his kingdom, and William and Mary could never have ruled in his place, and—”
I said, “You don’t know that. It might have changed nothing.”
Jacqui wasn’t swayed. “A king should never run away.”
I didn’t continue to argue, because I saw Jacqui was doing that thing with her mouth again, being defensive. But Alistair Scott either hadn’t yet learned when my cousin was digging her heels in, or else it didn’t bother him.
“The problem is,” he said, “we want our kings to act like kings, and not like men. King James the Seventh was a man. He had a wife and newborn baby to protect, and he was being asked to fight his own grown daughters, who had taken sides against him. He had seen, firsthand and vividly, the damage that a civil war could do, not only to himself and those he cared for, but to the whole country and its common people. Better he should spare them that and bide a while in France, until the storm had all blown over. It had worked before. I’ve no doubt James expected the same thing would happen this time.”
“But it didn’t,” I remarked.
“It didn’t, no.” I wasn’t good at judging tones of voice. I only knew that his had changed. He threw the soft red cylinder a little farther this time, and the dog raced gamely after it. “But he wasn’t on his own in France. The people who stayed loyal to him—Jacobites, they called themselves, from Jacobus, the Latin word for James—they fought with him and bled with him and when he fled, they followed him. The bulk of them, at first, were Irish Catholics, but the Scots were there as well, and even English. It came down,” he said, “to what a man believed. What made a king? The will of God, or Acts of Parliament? For Jacobites, the answer was a simple one. A king was born a king, and nothing men could write on paper could undo that. So when James the Seventh died, his son, to them, became the rightful king: King James the Eighth of Scotland, and the Third of England also. And with each new attempt they made to set him on his throne again, their ranks in exile swelled, as men were outlawed for their loyalty to James and came across to join his shadow court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.”
He used the proper French pronunciation, San Zher-MAN en Lay, but I really only registered that briefly.
My imagination had been fully captured by the image of a shadow court—a castle with its king and all his courtiers who were real, yet without substance, moving always as a mirror to their counterparts across the sea.
“That’s near Chatou,” he said, “the place where you’ll be going. Where the diary of Mary Dundas is.”
“So then,” I said, getting my dates straight, “it would have been James the Eighth ruling the Jacobites when she was writing that diary? The baby whose birth was the cause of the war?”
“Aye.”
I looked to the long winter shadows that stretched past our feet from the trees at our backs, and I tried to imagine a girl at that long-ago shadow court. “You still haven’t told me,” I said, “why the diary’s so valuable.” And for a writer who claimed that he wrote about ordinary people, his lecture so far had been mostly about kings and queens. When I pointed this out to him, Alistair Scott turned to look at me, smiling as though I had somehow amused him.
“It has, aye,” he said. “And you’ve answered your own question there, in a fashion.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well now, history is not just the tale of the victors,” he said. “It’s the tale of the privileged. The men in the mud of the battlefield didn’t leave much of a story behind, and the stories they did tell were mostly ignored or forgotten. The papers and documents that have survived are the ones that were deemed worth preserving, not always the ones that would be of most interest to someone like me. But this diary of Mary Dundas is a treasure because she was no one important. Her father was one of the wig makers at Saint-Germain, and her mother was French—we know that much, at least, from the baptism registers. And it appears that, at some point, young Mary was sent to her mother’s relations, because when her diary begins—and it starts in plain writing, not cipher—she’s on her way back with her brother, to Saint-Germain, coming to live with the Jacobites there. So not only will she be recording the day-to-day life of the common folk at Saint-Germain, she’ll be doing it with the keen eye of an outsider. That’s why her journal’s so valuable to me.”