"The Kings over the Water" (or the Old and Young Pretenders): the last of the Stuarts in Rome.
One of my favourite things in St Peter’s Basilica is the funerary monument to the last of the Stuarts, not least because a piece of bonny Scotland in bella Roma has a wonderfully improbable air. It is to be found on the outside of the first pier to the left as one enters the church and is the work of Antonio Canova, Venetian neo-Classicist (and the first director of the Vatican Museums).
In 1719, James Francis Edward Stuart arrived in Rome in exile. The son of James II of England and Ireland and VII of Scotland, he was the claimant to the thrones of Britain and Ireland. For British and Irish Catholics he was “the King over the Water”. Many moons ago, towards the end of the last millennium, when I was at a nominally non-denominational but culturally profoundly Anglican school in London, he was called the Old Pretender. On Canova’s monument in Rome he is, however, described as King James III, one imagines rather to the chagrin of Jacobite Scots, for whom he would instead have been James VIII. The King who never was.
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