When did the royal court become irrelevant in British history? There is no easy answer to that question, because the court was important in cultural and social as well as political ways, and it did not cease to be relevant in all its aspects at once. Robert Bucholz has argued persuasively that court culture declined under Queen Anne, never to revive again. The court was no longer the center of politics by Anne's reign either, although it was still possible (albeit controversial) for a monarch to choose a courtier as chief minister. The court's social cachet, of course, lingered long after the eighteenth century, but we should not confuse political power with the ability to confer social distinction (or snob appeal). There was a real difference between the influence of the first duke of Buckingham and that of Norman Hartnell.

The English court had an unhappy history in the second half of the seventeenth century, which may have precipitated its decline. A court requires money and power to keep it going, and the exiled Charles II lacked both. His court had a chaotic and impoverished existence. Meanwhile, Lord Protector Cromwell gathered around him a sort of alternative court that remains to be studied in depth. The restored court of Charles II seemed glittering at the outset, but it soon came under heavy fire from all sides for its lack of morals. The emergence of organized political parties after 1679 was a severe blow to the influence of the court, which thrived on playing factions off against one another. Yet the court made a comeback under James II, because it became a testing ground for his policy of Catholic inclusion. Then the second Stuart exile began at the end of 1688, and the Restoration court came to an abrupt end. For almost three decades thereafter, James II and his family lived at the palace of St.-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, in what many historians have pictured as a state of boredom, genteel poverty, and forlorn hopes, surrounded by half-starved Irish and Scottish retainers.

In the 1990s, Edward Corp, an Englishman who lives and teaches in France, blew to pieces that old caricature of life at St.-Germain, through a series of articles and a beautifully illustrated exhibition catalog detailing the structure of the court at St.-Germain. The results of his exhaustive research, in both English and French archives, are brought together and restated in this handsome volume. The court at St.-Germain was far better organized and more extensive than anything Charles II had managed to put together while in exile. Numerous courtiers followed James II to France, including some high-ranking officers, the vast majority of them English Catholics. Although the king's household at St.-Germain was only one-sixth its previous size, it continued to uphold its hierarchies and its customs. The exiled Stuarts were not poor, although their financial difficulties increased during the War of the Spanish Succession, and again after 1715 when pension payments from the French government were less regular. Most surprising of all, the court at St.-Germain was culturally vibrant. The Stuarts and the French royal family marked their frequent visits to one another with entertainments and festivities. St.-Germain was enlived by balls, concerts, plays, and operas. The court of the young James III became a center for the spread of Italian musical styles. Courtier-poets, like Anthony Hamilton and John, Lord Caryll, penned elegant verses at St.-Germain, as Howard Erkine-Hill discusses. The novelist Jane Barker (who deserves a chapter to herself) also frequented the Stuart palace. This was not by any means a moribund court staffed by pathetic playactors.

Corp and his collaborators also cast new light on the exiled monarchs themselves. James II emerges, in an excellent chapter by Geoffrey Scott, as a model of contemporary Catholic piety, rather than a morbid fanatic. James III seems to have been more of a risk taker, like his uncle Charles II. Expelled from St.-Germain under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, he kept only a small court around him at Bar-le-Duc, Avignon, and Urbino. Following the failure of the 1715 rebellion, James III's small circle of retainers was increasingly dominated by Tory politicians, who forced out his old English Catholic servants and replaced them with Scots. Meanwhile, his mother continued to reside at St.-Germain until 1718, and Jacobite families occupied parts of the palace until the French Revolution and beyond.

Evidently, the exiled Stuart court retained some power after 1688. This came partly from the support of Louis XIV, partly from the deposed monarch's political following in Great Britain. On the first point, this volume contains contradictory views. Edward Corp stresses Louis's personal and religious sympathy for his Stuart cousins, while Edward Gregg represents the French as interested in the Stuarts only insofar as they supplied useful pawns in the wars against England. Both arguments seem strained at times, especially in considering whether or not the Treaty of Utrecht marked an abandonment of the Stuarts by France. Regarding Jacobite support from Britain, this volume has little to say, except to point out that money from British Jacobites was periodically sent over to St.-Germain.

The lack of comparison with the courts of William and Mary, Anne and George I is unfortunate. So are the small errors in the final chapter, which mostly concern the vexed topic of Freemasonry (e.g., despite what is implied here, the French lodges had no Catholic religious qualifications; the Papal Bull of 1738 prevented Catholics from entering any Masonic society, not just pro-Hanoverian ones; and Andrew Ramsay did not introduce all the thirty-three degrees of the Scottish Rite). Military aficionados may be surprised to read that Lord Louis Drummond, rather than his second cousin Lord John, commanded the Royal Scots at Culloden. These flaws are, however, insignificant. Anyone who is interested in the exiled Stuarts at St.-Germain will find this to be the definitive volume. Thorough, detailed, and judicious, it rescues from obscurity one of the most interesting small courts of early modern Europe.