James succeeded to the hereditary office of his father and transmitted it on his death to his son Walter, who brought the Scottish crown into the family by marrying Margery, the eldest daughter of Robert Bruce and heiress of his brother David, who died without issue. Their son was Robert II, King of Scotland, the line of succession from him to Charles I being through Robert III, James I, James II, James III, James IV, James V, Mary and James VI, who was James I of England and father of Charles I.

The second branch of Alexander's descendants through his son John are known in history as the Earls and Dukes of Lennox, and was joined with the royal line when Lord Darnley married Mary, Queen of Scots, whose only child was the first of the ill-fated Stuarts to ascend the throne of England.

Andrew, the third son, lived at Dundavale. His grandson was appointed one of the attendants of James I. when he was sent to France to evade the intrigues of his uncle, the Duke of Albany. The vessel in which they sailed was driven on the English coast and Henry IV. detained the prince and his suite as prisoners. Growing restless under restraint this member of the Steward family, whose name was John, consented to fix his residence in England if released. He married advantageously and was knighted.

The Origins of the Stewarts and Stewards

Walter Fitzalan (c.1110-1177), third son of Alan son of Flaald, was a favoured supporter of Henry I, who was descended from the hereditary stewards of Dol in Brittany. Walter's elder brother William was lord of Oswestry and Clun in Shropshire, and ancestor of the Fitzalans who were later earls of Arundel. Walter entered the service of David I, king of Scots, about 1136, and towards the end of David's reign became the king's dapifer, or steward, an office which was to be held heritably.

Walter died in 1177, his heir, from his marriage to Eschina, evidently of a family native to southern Scotland, being Alan (c.1150-1204), who served William the Lion (r. 1165–1214) as dapifer until his death in 1204 and whose daughter Avelina married Duncan, sometime earl of Carrick.

Walter son of Alan (c.1198-1241), was the third hereditary steward and adopted the more dignified title senescallus on reaching his majority c.1219. He was a considerable benefactor of Paisley Abbey and held office as justiciar of Scotia (that is, Scotland north of Forth) between 1232 and 1241. A close alliance between the families of Stewart and Bruce, lords of Annandale, may be traced from Walter's time and continued until the early fourteenth century. Both his sons played a prominent part in the national life of mid-thirteenth-century Scotland. His younger son Walter, was the first to adopt the name Stewart.

Walter's elder son, Alexander of Dundonald (c.1220-1282), the fourth steward, held the stewardship from 1241 until about the time of his death. He seems to have commanded the armed force which, at Largs, in October 1263, successfully defended Scotland against attempted invasion by Hákon IV, king of Norway. Alexander's oldest surviving son was baptized James, hitherto an uncommon personal name in Scotland.

James Stewart (c.1260-1309), the fifth steward, was in the forefront of Scottish politics throughout his tenure of the stewardship. His younger brother, Sir John Stewart of Jedburgh, married the heir to the barony of Bunkle in Berwickshire and was ancestor of the Stewarts of Bunkle.

James Stewart's younger son was Sir Walter Stewart (c.1296-1327), who commanded one of the four Scottish brigades at Bannockburn in 1314, after which battle he was knighted. A year later Walter was given the eldest child of Robert I (Robert the Bruce), Marjorie Bruce (c.1296-1316), in marriage. In December 1318 Walter was present in parliament when the succession to the throne was entailed upon his son Robert (born probably on 2 March 1316), failing male heirs of Robert I's body. When Robert I's son, David II, having reigned for over half a century and been married twice, died childless in 1371, Robert Stewart duly succeeded, as King Robert II.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ref 2) has this to say about Robert:

Robert Steward became a Benedictine monk at Ely, and took his birthplace as his surname in religion. He studied at Cambridge. It has been suggested that he was the pensioner of Gonville Hall who took his BA in 1517 and his MA in 1520. Surviving documentation, however, consistently refers to him simply as clerk without further title. He was elected prior of Ely in 1522, and in the 1520s served in predictable roles in convocation and as a clerical tax collector for the crown. The only evidence of his views on the crisis of the 1530s is his affirmation of the validity of Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon in the convocation of 1533. Thereafter he must have accepted the change of religion (as he did all the subsequent changes from then until his death), since Thomas Goodrich, who succeeded the conservative Nicholas West as bishop of Ely in 1534, thought sufficiently highly of him to recommend him to the crown as a possible suffragan bishop of Colchester in 1536. However, the other nominee, William More, was promoted, probably because he was steward to Lord Chancellor Audley. Ely Priory was surrendered to the crown on 18 November 1539, and was refounded as a cathedral with dean and chapter on 10 September 1541. Wells became the first dean, converting his monastic pension of £120 into stipend, and resuming his family surname. Evidence for his management of the priory estate is fragmentary, but he does not seem to have been as ruthless in dispensing long leases and dispersing property as some former monastic heads of house. However, as dean he ensured that his family prospered: there were leases of Lakenheath Manor to Simeon and of the rectory of Ely to Nicholas and his son William. William's relationship by marriage with Bishop Goodrich also helped to secure advantageous episcopal leases. But most of the profit of the Stewards seems to have derived from office holding: they were auditors, coroners, and stewards to both chapter and bishop.

Robert Steward died in Ely on 22 September 1557 and was buried in Ely Cathedral. He had taken a number of the priory's manuscripts into his safe keeping at the dissolution and retained them under the provisions of the Henrician charter. These Ely manuscripts now survive in the British Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Lambeth Palace Library, and include several copies of the Liber Eliensis, the chronicle of the priory and see. The dean's close personal interest in these records is suggested by his rebinding of the texts, as well as by his own work on the continuation of the chronicle. His judgements on the sixteenth-century bishops whom he had known are sympathetic, but not uncritical. Steward's own best memorial is the comment of Henry Wharton who prints his chronicle and genealogy: without his labours the unique Historia might have been lost.

"......Robert [Cromwell], the brother who had come into the world little more than a year after the first-born, began his married life on about £300 a year, which meant that he was comfortably off by the standards of the day, but by no means wealthy. He had gone through Queens' and Lincoln's Inn with his elder brother, then returned home and begun casting around for a marriage that would bring him more property and enable him to boost his income.

The woman he had found came from a family whose connections with the Cromwells extended back over several decades. When Sir Richard [Williams/Cromwell, knighted in 1537, married to Frances Murfyn of London] had reported in 1537 to Mr. Secretary [Thomas, later Earl of Essex] Cromwell that the Prior of Ely was 'forward' [progressive, or nationalistic in disputes with Papal authority in such matters as divorce] in outlook he had been referring to Robert Styward (or Steward) alias Wells, a pliant religious who supported the King's spoliation of the Church and was rewarded by being appointed Dean of Ely after the secularization of the monastic foundation.

Steward, who obligingly amended his religious opinions on the accession of Queen Mary, ensured that his family did well out of the Dissolution: they had a grant of former monastic lands and Robert's elder brother became hereditary steward of the cathedral's remaining properties. By the end of the sixteenth century these lucrative responsibilities had devolved upon Sir Thomas Steward who, trading upon the similarity of his name to that of the prospective heir to the throne traced a connection with the royal house of Scotland.

It was Elizabeth, niece of this Thomas Steward, whom Robert [Williams/Cromwell] married about 1591. She was already the widow of a certain John Lynne of Bassingbourn, near Cambridge, and brought to her second marriage a jointure of some sixty pounds a year......"

From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ref 2):

Steward was probably admitted to Gray's Inn on 29 January 1593, and on 13 April 1597 he married Grace (b. c.1579), daughter of Edward St Barbe of Ashington, Somerset, at St Olave, Hart Street, London, ‘in the la: walsinghames house’. Their son Robert was born c.1599. According to Fuller, Steward lived at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as a fellow-commoner following his knighthood, but the coat of arms displayed in his chamber, recorded as extant in 1730, had been lost without trace by 1886.

Steward's political career was controversial. Elected MP for Shaftesbury, Dorset, in 1614, he was the subject (with his second cousin Sir Thomas) of a quarrelsome petition in November 1619. With Edward Peyton he was returned for Cambridgeshire in January 1624, but the election was declared void upon petition, Steward having persuaded the under sheriff to ignore the vociferous support for their rival, John Cuts, who then replaced Steward as MP........

footnote..

Probably Edward's brother, as he was also a nephew of the first Dean. Simon Steward was great-uncle of Oliver Cromwell (Cambs. and Hunts. Arch. Soc. Trans. v, 369-84). The Stuards, or Stewards, were descendants of a Scots family of Stewards of Dundevale. Dr. Steward was last prior and first dean of Ely. The family continued to live in the neighbourhood until mid-18th century (Bentham, Ely, 2nd ed., 190).

.... Lord Scrope passed Coveney in 1562 to his kinsman Ralph Scrope of the Vine (Hants), who the following year sold it to Symeon Steward, his son Robert, and their heirs. Robert (d. 1571) made a very complicated entail of his manors on about a dozen of his relatives, of whom his brothers Mark, Thomas, and Nicholas were still alive at the death (1598) of their elder brother Edward, who had had the remainder next after Joan, Symeon's relict. Each of the manors, including Coveney, seems to have been divided between the three brothers. Mark passed his third to Thomas Jermy and his wife Joan, Edward Steward's daughter and heir, after a lawsuit regarding the entail and devolution of the manor. It appears, however, that Coveney manor was afterwards reunited under Sir Simon, Mark's son, who was dealing with it in 1604. Thomas Steward, Sir Simon's grandson and the last of the line, passed it to Thomas Allen in 1649.

Whereas this honourable House, by an Order of the Fifth of September, 1643, protected Wm. Steward Gentleman, from all Suits and Arrests; in regard that the greatest Part of his Estate (being Money) then was, and now is, in the Parliament's Hands; under Colour whereof, the Tenants of the said Mr. Steward refuse to pay him the Rents of his Lands due unto him, supposing his Estate to be in the Parliament's disposing: And for that the said Mr. Steward is now Tenant to the Parliament, as he was before to the Dean and Chapter of Ely: And being to pay great Rents for the same, which he cannot, unless the Rents be paid by the Tenants: It is therefore this Day Ordered, by the Commons assembled in Parliament (the said Mr. Steward being destitute of Means to recover his Right, or maintain himself,) That all the said Tenants forthwith, upon Demand, give present Satisfaction unto the said Mr. Steward, or whom he shall appoint, for his said Rents in Arrear, due, or to be from henceforth due.