Stuart, James (1764–1840), newspaper editor and historian, was born in Armagh city, son of Benjamin Stuart of Co. Antrim. He was educated at Armagh Royal School under Dr Arthur Grueber and in 1784 took sixth place on entrance to TCD. He graduated BA in 1789 and the following year entered the Middle Temple, but never practised as a lawyer. Contemporary rumours linked him with the United Irishmen in the 1798 uprising, but there is no solid evidence for this. In 1811 he published Poems on various subjects, which eulogised his friends and Armagh places but were of no particular merit. The following year he became the first editor of Alexander Wilkinson's Newry Telegraph and from 1815–19 also edited Wilkinson's Newry Magazine, a literary and political magazine issued every two months. Stuart had a warm interest in local history and in his editorial capacity encouraged John Donaldson to undertake a study of the barony of Upper Fews, Co. Armagh, which was published in a number of editions in the Newry Magazine and reprinted as a slim volume by Dundalgan Press in 1923. Stuart himself undertook a far more ambitious and larger study, Historical memoirs of the city of Armagh for a period of 1373 years, which was printed under his own supervision on the premises of the Newry Telegraph and formed an octavo volume of 750 pages. It was then the most learned and exhaustive account of the city to have been written, and benefited from a vivid, lucid style and an eye for interesting detail. It was reissued after revision and rewriting by the Rev. Ambrose Coleman in 1900.
Stuart went to live in Belfast in 1821 and became editor of the tory organ, the News Letter. His theological letters, which first appeared in this journal, were published in a separate volume entitled Protestant Layman in 1825. He went into partnership in 1827 with Fortescue Gregg and established the Guardian and Constitutional Advocate, a conservative, protestant paper ‘for the restoration of the constitution in its purity, as established in the year 1688’. Its avowed purpose was to counteract the Northern Whig, which had been founded in 1824. The two papers exchanged healthy insults until the Guardian ceased publication in 1835, but Stuart resigned some time after 1829 due to ill health. He fell on hard times and died in poverty and neglect at the home of a charitable friend in Arthur St., Belfast, on 28 September 1840 and was buried in the Belfast cemetery, Antrim Road. He was childless but was survived for thirteen years by his wife, the former Mary Ogle. A memorial tablet was erected to him in Christ Church, Belfast, in 1854 with an obituary inscription by the Rev. John Hull of Cheltenham, after donations from, among others, the lord primate, Viscount Dungannon, and the earl of Roden (qv).