The sickly Stuarts - Frederic Lawrence Holmes

In a sense, the House of Stuart ended three times: with the execution of Charles I in 1649, in 1688 when the Glorious Revolution deposed James II and in 1694 when Queen Mary died childless. From the time that James VI, King of Scotland, came to the throne in 1603 until the death of the last Stuart monarch, Anne, in 1714, a Stuart sat on the throne of England for only 93 of those 111 years, while others ruled England for 18 years during this period. The sickly Stuarts were simply unable to sustain their rule in England and in this work, Frederick Holmes, a distinguished professor of medicine, looks at the medical history of the Stuart dynasty, concluding that the aggregate medical problems and medical misadventures of the Stuarts brought the family down, so that parliament rose to fill the vacuum created. In other words, if it had not been for the physical frailty of James I, James II and Charles I, the course of British history might well have been very different.