A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689-1718 (review)

When James II fled England in 1688, he found a comfortable refuge in France with his cousin, Louis XIV. Louis awarded James a generous annual subsidy of 300,000 livres (about £50,000) and installed him in the Château-Vieux de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, close to Versailles. The chateau of Saint-Germain was no ordinary country house — it was in fact Louis's birthplace and for many years his principal residence. At Saint-Germain, James was able to reconstitute his court. Although much reduced from its Whitehall days, it was still significant and merits the substantial study presented here. This Stuart court-in-exile flourished until 1712, when James's son, styled James III in this book, was forced to withdraw from Saint-Germain (on his way to Lorraine, Avignon, and finally Italy). A reduced court continued at Saint-Germain until the death of James II's queen, Mary of Modena, in 1718, and even then a Jacobite community hung on at the chateau well into the eighteenth century.

A Court in Exile describes this court in rich detail. The volume is not a single-author monograph, but slightly more than two-thirds of the text is provided by Edward Corp, who over the last dozen years has made the subject of the court at Saint-Germain his own. His list of related previous publications fills three pages (xiv-vi). Corp provides the volume's framework, a series of eight chapters describing the physical setting of the court and its servants and tracing its evolution from 1689 to 1718 and beyond. Interspersed are chapters on the relationship between the Stuarts and the court of France, portraits of the Stuarts and their courtiers, the court as a center of Italian music, and the education of James III. Other chapters are contributed by Edward Gregg (a long opening essay on "France, Rome and the Exiled Stuarts," about which more below), Howard Erskine-Hill (on poetry at the court), and Geoffrey Scott (on the court as a center of Catholicism and part of the chapter on the education of James III). Although I was most impressed by Geoffrey Scott's sensitive discussion of James II's religious life, all the essays are both readable and learned. Corp in particular has mined deeply in a remarkable array of sources both British and French. The volume's achievement is all the more noteworthy given that the court's main archives were destroyed during the French Revolution.

I am reluctant to find fault with a book whose scholarship I genuinely admire, but this admiration is qualified in several ways. First of all, the stated aims of the book seem too modest to merit such a large volume. Corp announces that the book is a "major revision" of accepted knowledge about the exiled court, but then the main revision he offers is only that "the court was large and well financed, not only able to maintain its courtiers but also to be an important centre of cultural patronage" (4). Much is made of this point, but a volume of nearly 400 pages is not needed to make it. The extraordinary wealth of detail contained in the book might have been expected to support a more ambitious argument. Second, for all the rich detail about the physical arrangements of the court and about its residents, in the end the picture seems curiously lifeless. Except for occasional descriptions of court ceremony, we learn little about how the court's inhabitants actually operated in it. In particular, there is little discussion about court politics of the kind that makes David Starkey's work on the court of Henry VIII or Neil Cuddy's work on the court of James I, for example, so interesting and illuminating. Possibly this is a case of blaming a book for not being what the reviewer thinks it should have been, but...