Next to the son of James II., still an infant under his father’s control, Mary, princess of Orange, elder daughter of James II., had the strongest claim to the crown; but the claims of the prince of Orange also, even apart from his marriage, were not very remote, since he was the son of Mary, eldest daughter of Charles I. The marriage had strengthened the claims of both, and they were proclaimed joint sovereigns of England on the 12th of February 1689, Scotland following the example of England on the 11th of April. They left no issue, and the Act of Settlement passed in 1701, excluding Roman Catholics from the throne, secured the succession to Anne, second daughter of James II., and on her death without issue to the Protestant house of Hanover, descended from the princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I., wife of Frederick V., count palatine of the Rhine. On the death of Anne in 1714, George, elector of Hanover, eldest son of Sophia (youngest child of the princess Elizabeth), and Ernest, elector of Brunswick-Luneburg, or Hanover, consequently became sovereign of Great Britain and Ireland, and, notwithstanding somewhat formidable attempts in behalf of the elder Stuart line in 1715 and 1745, the Hanoverian succession has remained uninterrupted and has ultimately won universal assent. The female issue of James II. ended with the death of his daughter, Queen Anne. James, called James III. by the Jacobites and the Old Pretender by the Hanoverians, had two sons—Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, who died without legitimate issue in 1780, and Henry Stuart, titular duke of York, commonly called Cardinal York, on whose death in 1807 the male line of James II. came to an end. Henry was also the last descendant in the lineal male line of any of the crowned heads of the race, so far as either England or Scotland was concerned. In the female line, however, there are among the descendants of James I. representatives of the royal Stuarts who are senior to the house of Hanover, for Philip, duke of Orleans (brother of Louis XIV.), married, as his first wife, Henrietta daughter of Charles I., and, as his second, Charlotte, granddaughter and heiress of the princess Elizabeth (daughter of James I.). By the former, through their daughter, the queen of Sardinia, he was ancestor, among others, of the princess Maria Theresa of Bavaria, who in 1910 was “heir of line” of the house of Stuart, her eldest son, Prince Rupert, being heir to the throne of Bavaria; and from his second marriage descends the house of Orleans. In addition to those descended from these two marriages there are also the descendants of Edward, a brother of the electress Sophia. The male representation of the family, being extinct in the royal lines, is claimed by the earls of Galloway and also by the Stewarts of Castlemilk but the claims of both are more than doubtful.
See Sir George Mackenzie, Defence of the Royal Line of Scotland (1685), and Antiquity of the Royal Line of Scotland (1686) ; Crawfurd, Genealogical History of the Royal and Illustrious Family of the Stuarts (1710); Duncan Stewart, Genealogical Account of the Surname of Stewart (1739); Andrew Stuart, Genealogical History of the Stuarts (1798); Stodart, House of Stuart (privately printed, 1855); An Abstract of the Evidence to Prove that Sir William Stewart of Jedworth, the Paternal Ancestor of the Present Earl of Galloway, was the Second Son of Sir Alexander Stewart of Darnley (1801) ; Riddell, Stewartiana (1843); W. Townend, Descendants of the Stuarts (1858); R. W. Eyton, History of Shropshire (1858), vol. vii.; Bailey, The Succession to the English Crown (1879); Skelton, The Royal House of Stuart (1890) ; J. H. Round, Studies in Peerage and Family History (1901); and S. Cowan, The Royal House of Stuart (1908). The best chart pedigree of the house is that which was prepared for the Stuart Exhibition by W. A. Lindsay.
STEWART, ALEXANDER TURNEY (1803–1876), American merchant, was born, of Scotch descent, at Lisburn, near Belfast, Ireland, on the 12th of October 1803. He studied for the ministry for about two years at Trinity College, Dublin, emigrated to New York in 1823, and in 1825 opened a small dry goods store In 1848 he built at the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway a store which became the wholesale department upon the completion in 1862 of the large store on Broadway between Ninth and Tenth Streets. The business grew to enormous proportions for those days, with foreign branches in Manchester, Belfast, Glasgow, Berlin, Paris and Lyons. Stewart was chairman of the commission sent by the United States to the Paris Exposition of 1867. In 1869 he was appointed secretary of the treasury by President U. S. Grant, but the Senate refused to confirm the appointment because of an old law excluding from the office any one interested in the importation of merchandise. Grant asked Congress to repeal the law, and Stewart offered to transfer his business to trustees and to give its proceeds while he held office to charitable institutions, but the nomination was never confirmed. Stewart sent to Ireland a shipload of provisions during the famine of 1846; he manufactured and sold to the government, at less than the prevailing rates, great quantities of cotton cloth for the use of the army during the Civil War; he took an active part in the prosecution of the “Tweed Ring” in New York; he sent a shipload of flour to the French sufferers from the Franco-German War, and he gave $50,000 to the sufferers from the Chicago fire of 1871. In 1869 he bought some 7000 acres on the Hempstead Plain, Long Island, New York, and established Garden City for working men. The cathedral of the Incarnation (Protestant Episcopal) dedicated in 1885, was erected in Garden City by Stewart’s widow as a memorial to him. He died in New York on the 10th of April 1876,[1] leaving the bulk of his great fortune to his widow, Mrs Cornelia (Clinch) Stewart (1802–1886)[2]. His large art collection was sold by auction in New York in 1887.
See William O. Stoddard, “Alexander Turney Stewart,” in Men of Business (New York, 1893) ; “A Merchant Prince,” in Chambers’s Journal (1876), vol. liii. ; Edward Crapsey, “A Monument of Trade,” in The Galaxy (1882), vol. ix.; “Stewart’s,” in The Nation (1882), vol. xxxiv.; “The Story of a Millionaire’s Grave,” in Chambers’s Journal (1888), vol. lxv.; and George W. Walling, Recollections of a New York Chief of Police (New York, 1887).
STEWART, BALFOUR (1828–1887), Scottish physicist, was born in Edinburgh on the 1st of November 1828, and was educated at the university of that city. The son of a tea merchant, he was for some time engaged in business in Leith and in Australia, but, returning to his studies of physics at Edinburgh, he became assistant to J. D. Forbes in 1856. Forbes was especially interested in questions of heat, meteorology, and terrestrial magnetism, and it was to these that Stewart also mainly devoted himself. Radiant heat first claimed his attention, and by 1858 he had completed his first investigations into the subject. These yielded a remarkable extension of Pierre Prévost’s “Law of Exchanges,” and enabled him to establish the fact that radiation is not a surface phenomenon, but takes place throughout the interior of the radiating body, and that the radiative and absorptive powers of a substance must be equal, not only for the radiation as a whole, but also for every constituent of it. In recognition of this work he received in 1868 the Rumford medal of the Royal Society, into which he had been elected six years before, Of other papers in which he dealt with this and kindred branches of physics may be mentioned “Observations with a Rigid Spectroscope,” “Heating of a Disc by Rapid Motion in Vacuo,” “Thermal Equilibrium in an Enclosure Containing Matter in Visible Motion,” and “Internal Radiation in Uniaxal Crystals.” In 1859 he was appointed director of Kew Observatory, and there naturally became interested in problems of meteorology and terrestrial magnetism. In 1870, the year in which he was very seriously injured in a railway accident, he was elected professor of physics at Owens
- ↑ On the 6th of November 1878 his body was stolen from St Mark’s churchyard in New York, but recovered in 1881 upon the payment of $20,000, and buried in the crypt of the cathedral in Garden City.
- ↑ Upon her death she left a small part of her estate to her other relatives and her servants, about $4,631,000 to Charles J. Clinch, a kinsman, and about $9,262,000 to Judge Henry Hilton (1824–1899), a business associate of Stewart, who had received a legacy of $1,000,000 from Stewart, and who managed Mrs Stewart’s business affairs after her husband’s death. Clinch and Hilton were executors, and it was understood that Hilton should complete the cathedral at Garden City and endow schools there. A nephew of Mrs Stewart in 1887 sued to break the will on the ground that Hilton had unduly influenced her; the case was compromised out of court in 1890 and Mrs Stewart’s relatives received more of her estate than they would have got under the terms of the testament.
