The King Over The Water:

A Complete History of the Jacobites By Desmond Seward £25 BIRLINN

Seward is very good at providing previously unknown details in this ambitious, breathless account of one of Scottish history’s favourite subjects – the Jacobites.

An early example in the book is this assessment by James II and VII of his successor William of Orange, which takes the art of understatement to new heights, “I repent that I gave my daughter to him for he sought to slay me.”

Another memorable one – “At James’s coronation the crown slipped down over the king’s face. Bad start.”

Seward embraces every Jacobite endeavour wherever it impinged upon the western world. He eschews broad brushstrokes in favour of attention to sometimes microscopic detail, which creates a book almost overcrowded with incident. The tale of the escape of Clementina Sobieska, the Old Pretender James’s wife, takes that principle and runs with it.

“Her father had been a candidate for the Polish throne as the son of King John III Sobieski – who saved Vienna from the Turks…” You feel the need to gasp for breath. And I am willing to bet that was a factoid about Bonnie Prince Charlie’s grandfather you did not know until now.

Remarkably, the narrative, runs from 1688 until 1914, just about intact. If you thought that the Jacobite story was limited to the risings of 1715, 1719 and 1745, this is the book that will change your mind.

If, on the other hand, you know every book in the 16-page bibliography well, you may feel you don’t need this one. But did it occur to you that “…during the 19th century when a politically independent Scotland was unthinkable, the Jacobite novels of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson played a vital role in keeping alive the country’s sense of nationhood…”?

Well, maybe you do need The King Over The Water. The subtitle is not kidding when it says “a complete history”.

An ambitious, breathless tale of Jacobites” the