Stewart (Stuart), Sir Robert

by Robert Armstrong

Stewart (Stuart), Sir Robert (d. 1662), army officer, was appointed governor of the fort of Culmore, Co. Londonderry, at the mouth of the Foyle, in April 1638. He had petitioned for the post the previous year and had been recommended by the duke of Lennox as one ‘who hath served a long time abroad in the wars’ in both Danish and Swedish service, and was now recruiting in Ireland (and in Scotland) for the Swedish army (Knowler, ii, 79). He is sometimes identified with Sir Robert Stewart, fifth son of Robert Stewart (1533–93), 1st earl of Orkney, and his wife Jean Kennedy (d. 1598), countess of Orkney, and a kinsman of James VI and I, who held court office and was involved in diplomatic ventures in, and recruitment drives for, the Baltic area in the early seventeenth century, but this seems improbable. He is also sometimes described as a brother of Sir William Stewart (qv) (d. 1647) of Co. Donegal, but this is very unlikely. The governor of Culmore secured the command of a company of infantry in 1638 and had won the trust of the lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth (qv), during the covenanting troubles in Scotland. Knighted, perhaps by 1639, he apparently accumulated property in Dungannon barony, Co. Tyrone, and was elected to the Irish parliament in 1640 for Londonderry city. He may have married either a Katherine Barclay, or an Alice Legge.

At the outbreak of the 1641 rising Stewart was commissioned by the king to raise a regiment of foot and a troop of horse, which combined with other new-levied protestant forces in the north-west as what came to be termed the ‘Laggan army’. Contemporaries accorded him a leading role in the decisive defeats of Sir Phelim O'Neill (qv) at Glenmaquin near Raphoe in June 1642 and of Owen Roe O'Neill (qv) at Clones in June 1643, and in the campaigns of 1642–3 which secured much of western Ulster for the protestant forces. In April 1643 the king named him to the post of governor of Derry city, though the order does not appear to have taken effect. He accepted the September 1643 cessation between royal and confederate catholic forces, but was soon reported as wavering. By early 1644 he was one of several senior protestant officers in Ulster who determined to stand by the royalist lord lieutenant, Ormond (qv), in opposition to the proffered Solemn League and Covenant which would align protestant Ulster with the king's enemies in England and Scotland, with renewal of the war in Ireland, and with the promotion of presbyterianism. The covenant was greeted with genuine enthusiasm by many in protestant Ulster, Stewart's own regiment accepted the bond, and eventually he ‘declared his resolution to take the covenant, only he put it off’ (Adair, 115). He managed to retain his command and cooperated with the Scottish general in Ulster, Robert Monro (qv), and with the parliamentarian lord president of Connacht, Sir Charles Coote (qv), in his expeditions into the western province. In July 1647 the English parliament added the Laggan to Coote's command with Stewart holding ‘chief command’ (CSPI, 1647–60, 758) of the Laggan forces under Coote.

By the spring of 1648 Stewart was known to be a supporter of the engagement between Charles I and conservative elements within the Scottish regime, in opposition to the English parliament, and organised the dispatch of a cavalry detachment, under his son, to join the engagers’ invasion of England. Orders from Westminster led to his arrest by Coote at the end of 1648 and his dispatch to London, whence he escaped to the Netherlands and the court of the exiled Charles II. He was sent back to Ulster with a commission to Hugh, 3rd Viscount Montgomery (qv), to command forces in the province loyal to the new monarch, himself regaining a subordinate command, and by May 1649 was part of the force besieging his old commander Coote in Londonderry. The siege collapsed, and Stewart blamed the failure not only on the intervention of Owen Roe O'Neill but on divisions among the besiegers, and particularly the ‘divisive preachings’ (Carte MS 25, f. 221) of the presbyterian ministers, uneasy at participation in the broad royalist coalition he had helped constitute. He appears to have continued to serve in the royalist forces, being present at the August 1649 council of war, which voted ‘that Drogheda be maintained’ against Cromwell's army.

Stewart was ‘excepted from pardon for life or estate’ in the act for the settling of Ireland issued by the victorious English republic in August 1652 (Gilbert, Contemporary history, iii, 342). With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he petitioned successfully for the governorship of the city and county of Londonderry (granted February 1661), and for command of a foot company in the reconstituted army. He hoped for further reward for his years of loyal service but instead suffered the indignity of arrest and imprisonment for debt on foot of obligations undertaken to provision forces in Ulster in the early 1640s. He depicted his condition as that of one ‘now starving’ having ‘ruined himself’ in the king's service (CSPI, 1660–62, 296–7), and his petitions to the king were supported by the Dublin administration. Orders were made for payment of the debt from taxation, and that means be found to reward him by grant of confiscated land. It is unclear whether either initiative was completed by the time of his death, in September 1662. Stewart had proved a staunch defender of the British and protestant interest in Ireland, but ill at ease when this aligned him with opponents of royal authority or proponents of religious reform. One of the more able commanders to serve in 1640s Ireland, Stewart, the military professional, had struggled to find a sure political foothold in turbulent times.