It is widely believed that Robert Burns was Scotland's first Poet Laureate. However, Charles II named Iain Lom poet laureate during his reign, and a later MacDonald poet, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair ("Alexander, son of the teacher Alexander") was later appointed poet laureate by Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the de jure Prince Regent, during the 1745 Jacobite Rising, but as the Stuart line was unseated in 1689, and the subsequent Jacobite Risings failed to permanently restore the Stuarts, their status became a moot point. Their stature has further been diminished by the fact that they composed exclusively in Gaelic, which even at that time was a language in decline.