From the serial husbands of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the eccentric Cardinal with a taste for pretty young men, award-winning writer John Macleod unfolds the complex, calamitous and always entertaining history of a royal family so awful the Scots let England share them too. Never has royal house been so unfortunate. Yet, through the farce and tumult of their years in power, there emerged a new and vigorous religion; a United Kingdom; radical new thoughts and institutions; and the foundations of a modern democracy.

The Stuart story is one of intrigue and battle, soap opera and theology, porphyria and homosexuality. From the glories of Robert the Bruce to a Queen so fat she had to be buried in a square coffin, John Macleod unfolds their darkly funny history with detail, anecdote and wit.