Nonetheless, the exiled James Stuart has sympathisers, the Jacobites, throughout Britain.
A short, vicious war in Ireland put paid to any chance of a Catholic Stuart restoration. Less than 15 years ago, the hated Catholic James II was forced into exile in the Glorious Revolution and a Protestant monarchy restored. The new nation has been through a century of unparalleled turbulence: an unwelcome joining of Scotland and England religious strife civil wars an executed king military dictatorship a populist monarch restored and the overthrow of a second king. Great Britain is not a natural creation, but the marriage of separate kingdoms and peoples.
