Stuarts

INTRODUCTORY 3
is made at any exhaustive inquiry into the complex circumstances which
shaped the careers of the leading personages of this great drama ; that is
a subject in which many eminent writers have found a field for the exercise
of their highest powers, and it is a topic which will always attract the
moralist, the historian, and the partisan.
In a letter Sir Walter Scott wrote in 1828 upon the appearance of
Lodge's portraits of " Illustrious Personages of Great Britain," he says : " I will
enlarge no more upon the topic, because I am certain that it requires not the
voice of an obscure individual to point out to the British public the merits
of a collection which at once satisfies the imagination and the under-
standing, showing us by the pencil how the most distinguished of our ancestors
looked, moved, and dressed, and informs us by the pen how they thought,
acted, lived and died."
Substitute "subject" for the word "collection," and limit the application
to the Stuart period, and you have the best justification I can offer for sub-
mitting this work to the public.
The reader will observe that the book is styled "outlines of the personal
history of the family," and accordingly I leave to others the description of the
march of political events, of the welling up of those social and religious
forces which swept more than one monarch from his throne, which brought
a beautiful and gifted Queen to the scaffold, and drove the descendants of
a long line of kings into exile and obscurity. I leave to the assailants of
the Stuarts, and to their champions, of whom there are not a few, the
discussion of such questions as to whether exigencies of statecraft justified
Elizabeth in her conduct to Mary, and as to whether Cecil's crooked ways
may be forgiven in view of his duty, as he conceived it, to his country and
to the great Queen he served. Others may determine whether Oliver
Cromwell was a sincere God-fearing man, or a hypocrite ; an impostor or
a hero. But in addition to these beaten paths of history, there are byways,
surely not without their charm, along which some of us are well content to
wander. Without once descending into the dusty arena of political or
theological controversy, we can find abundance to interest us, and discover
illustrations of the careers of the Stuarts, derivable from various sources of
never-failing interest and beauty. There are, for example, numberless fine
miniature portraits in this country, many of them precious in themselves as
historical illustrations (for the life-stories of the originals are inseparably
bound up with those of the Stuarts), and admirable also as works of art,