assassinated by an unknown hand in a mill, where he had taken refuge
during the battle of Sauchie. James IV, wounded by two arrows and a blow
from a halberd, fell amidst his nobles on the battlefield of Flodden.
James V died of grief at the loss of his two sons, and of remorse for the
execution of Hamilton. James VI, destined to unite on his head the two
crowns of Scotland and England, son of a father who had been
assassinated, led a melancholy and timorous existence, between the
scaffold of his mother, Mary Stuart, and that of his son, Charles I.
Charles II spent a portion of his life in exile. James II died in it.
The Chevalier Saint-George, after having been proclaimed King of Scotland
as James VIII, and of England and Ireland as James III, was forced to
flee, without having been able to give his arms even the lustre of a
defeat. His son, Charles Edward, after the skirmish at Derby and the
battle of Culloden, hunted from mountain to mountain, pursued from rock
to rock, swimming from shore to shore, picked up half naked by a French
vessel, betook himself to Florence to die there, without the European
courts having ever consented to recognise him as a sovereign. Finally,
his brother, Henry Benedict, the last heir of the Stuarts, having lived
on a pension of three thousand pounds sterling, granted him by George
III, died completely forgotten, bequeathing to the House of Hanover all
the crown jewels which James II had carried off when he passed over to
the Continent in 1688--a tardy but complete recognition of the legitimacy
of the family which had succeeded his.

In the midst of this unlucky race, Mary Stuart was the favourite of
misfortune. As Brantome has said of her, "Whoever desires to write about
this illustrious queen of Scotland has, in her, two very, large subjects,
the one her life, the other her death," Brantome had known her on one of
the most mournful occasions of her life--at the moment when she was
quitting France for Scotland.