Prologue

Author’s Note: I have chosen to use an archaic form of Scottish naming in this story, with a greater use of patronyms and matronyms than is currently the custom. Patronyms of course identified the father. Matronyms identified the mother and sometimes indicated bastardy where the father’s name was either unknown or could not be acknowledged. Nowadays of course, most Scots people, wherever they have settled, use heritable surnames which do not change from one generation to the next.

‘Nic’ is the abbreviation for the Gaelic words meaning ‘daughter of’ just as the more familiar ‘Mc’ or ‘Mac’ means ‘son of’.

I have also chosen to use the modern Anglicized spellings of many of the Scottish Gaelic names I am using because no non-Gaelic speaker can read them nor get anywhere close to pronouncing them correctly without suffering an injury.

Names and words that are not familiar will be listed in a glossary at the beginning of the chapter that it first appears in, with a pronunciation guide and definition. Feel free to ignore it. You may pronounce these words any way that you like.

Glossary:

Moire (Moi-ra, Mary)

Ísland (Ees-land, Iceland)

We now return you to our regularly scheduled prologue.

Just hours after Elizabeth I died childless, her cousin James IV of Scotland was named King James I of England. He and his wife, Anne of Denmark were crowned King and Queen of England on the 25th of July 1603.

In 1622, after years of effort, James succeeded in uniting the kingdoms of Scotland and England into a single kingdom with a single Parliament. After much debate and rancor, the name ‘Greater Scotland’ was adopted, with the capital of the united kingdom remaining in London.

In 1625, James I died and was succeeded by his youngest son Robert. His older sons, Henry and Charles, had died before him, Henry in 1612 of illness and Charles in 1619, killed in a drunken brawl.

Robert lived only a few weeks after his coronation. He was succeeded by his son James II.

In 1629, with plague once again ravaging England and especially severe in London and the southern counties, James II moved the court to Edinburgh. Following a devastating fire which destroyed the palace and nearly all of the city city of London, both the central city inside the old Roman walls, wind driven sparks even allowed the fire to jump the river. Parliament and the rest of the government followed in 1631. Edinburgh was formally named the capital one year later.