The Jacobite Peerage

Description

Between 1688–when James II and VII was declared to have abdicated his throne–and 1784, James II and VII and his successors in exile (Bonnie Prince Charlie, etc.) retained the plenary authority to bestow nobiliary and chilvalric honors. In fact, the Stuarts conferred over two hundred hereditary titles and made hundreds of court appointments during this ninety-six-year period. The names and particulars of those receiving such titles are extraordinarily difficult to locate, since they do not appear in any of the standard books on the Peerage and Baronetage. For this reason, Genealogical Publishing Company is pleased to announce their reissue of Marquis de Ruvigny & Raineval’s acclaimed The Jacobite Peerage, the only book ever to document these unofficial conferrals. This remarkable work, treating titles that are neither claimed nor used, and which died with the dynasty by which they were conferred, contains a previously untapped wealth of genealogical and historical material.

The first part of the volume contains an alphabetical list of all titles known to have been bestowed between December 11, 1688 and November 4, 1784, the date of the last title conferred by Charles III. A biographical and genealogical account is given for each peer and baronet, together with the names of their children, except in the cases of those peers who appear under some other title in the current peerage. The names of all the titles held by each peer are given, together with the date of the creation and an indication of whether the peerages are English, Scottish, or Irish.

The second part of the work, dealing with court appointments and chivalric honors, contains lists of the knights created by the Stuarts; persons to whom certificates of nobless were granted; household, diplomatic, and consular appointments; Catholic archbishops, bishops, and vicars-apostolic nominated by James II and VII and by James III and VIII; and those who received naval and military commissions. The bulk of the material was extracted from the unpublished Stuart Papers in the Windsor Castle library, to which Ruvigny was granted access for his research. Thousands of family and personal names appear throughout, making this work an invaluable source of information on Jacobite family lines.