An austere carved wood Stuart royal arms above the tower arch at the west end of St Andrew's church, Quidenham. Ref - (
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Which of the Stuart monarchs it refers to is a little uncertain, but it is possibly Charles II.
"The House of Stuart, originally Stewart, was a European royal house that originated in Scotland. The dynasty's patrilineal Breton ancestors had held the office of High Steward of Scotland since the 12th century, after arriving by way of Norman England. The royal Stewart line was founded by Robert II, and they were Kings and Queens of Scots from the late 14th century until the union with England in 1707. Mary, Queen of Scots, was brought up in France, where she adopted the French spelling of the name, Stuart. Her son, James VI of Scotland, inherited the thrones of England and Ireland upon the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. Except for the period of the Commonwealth, 1649–1660, the Stuarts were monarchs of the British Isles and its growing empire, until the death of Queen Anne in 1714.
In total, nine Stewart/Stuart monarchs ruled Scotland alone from 1371 until 1603. James VI of Scotland then inherited the realms of Elizabeth I of England, becoming James I of England and Ireland in the Union of the Crowns. Following the Glorious Revolution in 1688, two Stuart queens ruled the isles: Mary II and Anne. Both were the Protestant daughters of James VII and II by his first wife. Their father had converted to Catholicism and his new wife gave birth to a son in 1688, who would be brought up a Roman Catholic and would precede his half-sisters; so James was deposed by Parliament in 1689, in favour of his daughters. But neither had any children who survived to adulthood, so under the terms of the Act of Settlement 1701 and the Act of Security 1704, the crown passed to the House of Hanover on the death of Queen Anne in 1714.
During the reign of the Stuarts, Scotland developed from a relatively poor and feudal country into a prosperous, modern and centralised state. They ruled during the transitive period in European history between the Middle Ages, via the Renaissance, to the midpoint of the Early modern period. Monarchs such as James IV were known for sponsoring exponents of the Northern Renaissance such as the poet Robert Henryson, among others. After the Stuarts reigned over all of Great Britain, the arts and sciences continued to develop; William Shakespeare wrote many of his best known plays during the Jacobean era, while institutions such as the Royal Society and the Royal Mail were established during the reign of Charles II."
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Charles II -
"Charles II (29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685) was king of England, Scotland and Ireland. He was king of Scotland from 1649 until his deposition in 1651, and king of England, Scotland and Ireland from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 until his death.
Charles II's father, Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War. Although the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II king on 5 February 1649, England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth, and the country was a de facto republic, led by Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, and Charles fled to mainland Europe. Cromwell became virtual dictator of England, Scotland and Ireland, and Charles spent the next nine years in exile in France, the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. A political crisis that followed the death of Cromwell in 1658 resulted in the restoration of the monarchy, and Charles was invited to return to Britain. On 29 May 1660, his 30th birthday, he was received in London to public acclaim. After 1660, all legal documents were dated as if he had succeeded his father as king in 1649.
Charles's English parliament enacted laws known as the Clarendon Code, designed to shore up the position of the re-established Church of England. Charles acquiesced to the Clarendon Code even though he favoured a policy of religious tolerance. The major foreign policy issue of his early reign was the Second Anglo-Dutch War. In 1670, he entered into the Treaty of Dover, an alliance with his first cousin King Louis XIV of France. Louis agreed to aid him in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and pay him a pension, and Charles secretly promised to convert to Catholicism at an unspecified future date. Charles attempted to introduce religious freedom for Catholics and Protestant dissenters with his 1672 Royal Declaration of Indulgence, but the English Parliament forced him to withdraw it. In 1679, Titus Oates's revelations of a supposed "Popish Plot" sparked the Exclusion Crisis when it was revealed that Charles's brother and heir (James, Duke of York) was a Catholic. The crisis saw the birth of the pro-exclusion Whig and anti-exclusion Tory parties. Charles sided with the Tories, and, following the discovery of the Rye House Plot to murder Charles and James in 1683, some Whig leaders were executed or forced into exile. Charles dissolved the English Parliament in 1681, and ruled alone until his death on 6 February 1685. He was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed.
Charles was one of the most popular and beloved kings of England, known as the Merry Monarch, in reference to both the liveliness and hedonism of his court and the general relief at the return to normality after over a decade of rule by Cromwell and the Puritans. Charles's wife, Catherine of Braganza, bore no live children, but Charles acknowledged at least twelve illegitimate children by various mistresses. He was succeeded by his brother James."
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