Decorated bannerCHAPTERXVII.VICTORIA.
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george Selwynexcused himself for going to see Simon Fraser Lord Lovat lose his head at the block, by going to see it sewn on again. That last head sacrificed wore a title which was the first restored by Her Majesty after her accession. Old Lovat’s son, whom his father forced into rebellion, and whom that exemplary parent would have hanged, if he could have saved his own life by it, became a distinguished General in the British service. General Fraser and his half-brother Archibald died, without surviving heirs. Old Lovat was the thirteenth lord, leaving a title under attainder. As early as 1825, Sir Thomas Fraser of Lovat and Strichen claimed the ancient barony as a son of the sixth lord, who died in 1557. Their Lordships at Westminster had made no progress towards making the claimant a Baron, when Her Majesty ascended the throne. The Queen settled the claim at once by creating Sir Thomas Fraser, Baron Lovat in the United Kingdom. The newLord Lovat, however, still coveted the older and therefore grander dignity. He persisted in asserting his right to possess the Scottish title, in spite of the attainder which smote the lord who was beheaded on Tower Hill. After twenty years’ consideration, the Peers at Westminster were advised that the assertion was a correct one; and, in 1857, they acceded to his demand. That was exactly three hundred years after the death of the sixth lord, through whom the claimant asserted his right to the title.
OLD JACOBITE TITLES.
In a way something similar was another restoration of a Jacobite title effected in London. Of all the lords who were tried for their lives (1716 and 1746 included), there was not one who bore himself so gallantly as the son of the illustrious House of Seton, the Earl of Wintoun. All the Jacobite peers who pleaded guilty, petitioned for mercy, and returned to a treasonable outspokenness, when they failed to obtain forgiveness for an avowed crime. Even brave Balmerino criedpeccavi!and got nothing by it. But noble Wintoun pleaded that he was not guilty in fighting on what he considered the just side; when he was condemned to death he refused to beg for his life; and he showed his contempt for the Act of Grace, by anticipating it in an act of his own,—escaping from the Tower to the continent. He was the fifth earl, and his attainder barred the way to any heir of his own. But, in 1840, the fifteenth Earl of Eglinton proved his descent from a preceding earl, of whom he was forthwith served heir male general, and a new dignity was added to the roll of Lord Eglinton’s titles.
MORE RESTORATIONS.
In the following year, the Committee of Privileges went to the work of restoration of Jacobite forfeitures with unusual alacrity. On their advice, an Act of Parliament was passed which declared that Mr. William Constable Maxwell, of Nithsdale and Everingham, and all the other descendants of William Maxwell, Earl of Nithsdale and Lord Herries, were restored in blood. There the Act left them. As far as they were of the blood of Winifred Herbert, noble daughter of the House of Pembroke, the ill-requited wife of the puling peer whom she rescued from death, their blood was free from all taint, in spite of any Act. Mr. Maxwell could not claim the earldom, but the way was open for him to the barony once held by the unworthy earl, and in 1850, he was the acknowledged Lord Herries.
Three years later, Her Majesty despatched a ‘special command and recommendation’ to Parliament, which was speedily obeyed. It was to the effect that the Parliament should restore George Drummond to the forfeited Jacobite titles of Earl of Perth and Viscount Melfort the dignities of Lord Drummond of Stobhall, Lord Drummond of Montifex, and Lord Drummond of Bickerton, Castlemaine, and Galstoun, and to the exercise of the hereditary offices of Thane of Lennox and Steward of Strathearn. The peer who in 1824 advised Lord Liverpool to be sure he had got hold of the right Mr. Drummond, when recommending one for restoration to the peerage, had some reason for the course taken by him. However, in this case, where there are so many Drummonds, Parliament could hardly have been mistaken.That body having fulfilled the Queen’s ‘command and recommendation,’ Her Majesty gave her assent; and then, as if the better to identify the Drummond who was restored to so many titles, record was gravely made that ‘born in 1807, he was baptised at St. Marylebone Church,’ Hogarth’s church, of course.
In 1855 the act of attainder which had struck the Earl of Southesk (Lord Carnegie) for the share he took in the little affair (which intended a good deal) in 1718, was quietly reversed, at Westminster, where it had been originally passed.
THE CROMARTIE TITLE.
Not so quietly was effected the next business entailed on Parliament, by the Jacobite rebellion,—or, rather, the business was assumed by Her Majesty herself, if any business can be assumed by an irresponsible sovereign whose ministers have to answer for everything done in that sovereign’s name. The title of Earl of Cromartie (with its inferior titles once worn by the head of the house of Mackenzie) was, and still is, under attainder. But there was a great heiress, Miss Annie Hay Mackenzie, who, in 1849, married the Duke of Sutherland. In 1861, the queencreatedthis lady Countess of Cromartie, Viscountess Tarbat of Tarbat, Baroness Castlehaven, and Baroness Macleod of Castle Leod, in her own right, with limitation of succession to her second son Francis and his heirs;—the elder succeeding to the Dukedom.
The latest restoration was by legal process. Among the minor unfortunates whose Jacobitism was punished by forfeiture, was a Lord Balfour of Burleigh. In 1869,Mr. Bruce, of Kennett, Clackmannan, gained his suit to Parliament, and recovered that resonant title; and it is said that the modern Balfour of Burleigh has in his veins the blood of Bruce;—which, after all, is not so honest or so legitimately royal as that of Baliol.
TITLES UNDER ATTAINDER.
With regard to Jacobite peerages, ‘Experience has shown that in the absence of a Resolution and Judgment of the House of Lords, it is a dangerous thing to say, without qualification, who represents a Peerage. The Duchess of Sutherland is Countess of Cromartie, as the Earl of Errol is Baron Kilmarnock, not in the Peerage of Scotland, but that of the United Kingdom, in virtue of a recent creation. Each of theScottishPeerages held by the three Jacobite Noblemen is still open to any Nobleman who can establish a right thereto, and obtain a reversal of the Attainder.’ (‘Notes and Queries,’Jan.11, 1873, p. 45.) As to the heir to the title of Balmerino, we find that Captain John Elphinstone, R.N. (Admiral Elphinstone of the Russian Navy,—the hero of Tchesme), left a son, William, also a captain in the Czar’s navy, whose son, Alexander Francis, Captain R.N., and a noble of Livonia (born 1799), claimed to be heir to the title of Balmerino, were the attainder removed. All his sons were in the British naval or military service, in which they and other members of the baronial house greatly distinguished themselves.
FITZ-PRETENDERS.
While some of the above titles were being relieved from the obloquy which had been brought upon them by the Jacobitism of former wearers, and no one was dreaming,except in some out-of-the-way corner of the Scottish highlands, that the Jacobites had still, and had never ceased to have, a king of their own, a strange, wild, story was developing itself, which had a remarkably ridiculous, not to say impudent, object for its motive. To make it understandable, the reader is asked to go a few years back, in order to comprehend a mystery, in which the ‘Quarterly Review’ of June, 1847, in an article sometimes attributed to the Rt. Hon. John Wilson Croker, but more correctly to Mr. Lockhart, smashed all that was mysterious.
In the year 1800 (October 2nd), Admiral John Carter Allen (or Allan), Admiral of the White, died at his house in Devonshire Place, London. Such is the record in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ In the succeeding number, a correspondent describes him as an old Westminster scholar, a brave sailor, a Whig well looked upon by the Rockingham party, and of such good blood as to induce Lord Hillsborough to believe that he was the legal male heir to the earldom of Errol.
The admiral was twice married and had two sons. By his will, dated February, 1800, he bequeathed to the elder, ‘Captain John Allen, of His Majesty’s navy,’ 2,200l.; to the younger, ‘Thomas Allen, third Lieutenant in His Majesty’s navy,’ 100l.The reader is respectfully requested to keep this lieutenant, Thomas Allen, alone in view. He may turn out to be a very unexpected personage.
ADMIRAL ALLEN’S SON AND GRANDSONS.
Lieutenant Thomas, in 1792, married, at Godalming, Katherine Manning, the second daughter of the vicar.This would seem to have been a suitable marriage; but it has been suggested that it may have appeared unsuitable in the eyes of the admiral, and that, for this reason, he bequeathed his younger son only 100l.But whatever the reason for such disproportion may have been, the lieutenant’s marriage produced two sons, John Hay Allen and Charles Stuart Allen. The younger gentleman married, in November, 1822, in London, Anne, daughter of the late John Beresford, Esq., M.P. In the record of this marriage, the bridegroom is styled ‘youngest son of Thomas Hay Allen.’ In the same year, the lieutenant’s elder son published a volume of poems (Hookham), which, however, excited no attention, though it contained dark allusions to some romantic history. The father, Thomas, the lieutenant, seems to have been much on and about the Western isles of Scotland, as well as on the mainland. There existed there a fond superstition that Charles Edward would appear in some representative of his race, very near akin to himself. The lieutenant must have been an impressionable man. He died about the year 1831, and he must have revealed previously a secret to his sons, who, in such case, kept it long under consideration, till, probably out of filial respect for his veracity, they manifested their belief in the revelation, and, in 1847, declared themselves to be, the elder, John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart; the younger, Charles Edward Stuart. Their father, Lieutenant Thomas Allen, son of the old Admiral of the White, must have imparted to them the not uninteresting circumstance, that he was the legitimateson of the young Chevalier, and that all faithful Scots and Jacobiteshad yet a king. Long after the lieutenant’s death, a book was published in London (1847), by Dolman, the Roman Catholic publisher, of Bond Street, of which the two brothers were joint authors, in which the wordsyou have yet a king, implied that John Sobieski S. Stuart was the individual who had sole right to wear the crown of his ancestors. But this momentous book was preceded by others.
WORKING THROUGH LITERATURE.
Mr. John Hay Allen, as before stated, first appeared in literature in 1822. His volume of poems bore those names. Twenty years later, in 1842, the same gentleman edited, under the assumed name of John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, the ‘Vestiarium Scoticum,’ the transcript from a MS. alleged to have been formerly in the Scots College at Douay; with a learned introduction and illustrative notes. This folio, at the time, made no particular sensation. It was followed, in 1845, by a work, in which the elder brother was assisted by the younger, namely, ‘Costume and History of the Clans,’ with three dozen lithographs, in imperial folio; the cheapest edition was priced at six guineas. Some were much dearer. Two years later, a work very different in intention, was published by the Roman Catholic publisher Dolman, of Bond Street, who had Blackwood of Edinburgh and London as his colleague. The title of this book was ‘Tales of the Last Century, or Sketches of the Romance of History between the years 1746 and 1846,’ by John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart.There is a dedication ‘To Marie Stuart, by her father and uncle.’
THE ROMANCE OF THE STORY.
As Sketches of theRomanceof History, the writersmighthave meant that they were not dealing withreality. But such seemingly was not their meaning. They made a serious step towards asserting that the elder brother was rightful heir to the throne of the Stuarts; and that if Jacobites and Ultramontanists should ever be in search of such an heir, after upsetting the present ‘happy establishment,’ he was to be found at his lodgings, prepared to wear the crown, with Jacobite instincts and Ultramontane ferocity. Of course, this was not said in words. It is rather implied in the three sketches which make up the romance of ‘Tales of the Last Century.’
The Tales illustrate the claims of the Chevalier John Sobieski Stuart, after this fashion.—The ‘young Pretender’ married in 1772, Louise, Princess of Stolberg Gœdern, and grand-daughter of the Jacobite Earl of Aylesbury, who after his liberation from the Tower, in 1688, for his political principles, settled in Brussels, and there married (his second wife) a lady of the ancient family of Argentain. The daughter and only child of this marriage wedded with the Prince of Horne. Louisa of Stolberg, the youngest child of the last named union, married Charles Edward in 1772, when she was not yet twenty, and he was fifty-two. According to the ‘Tales of the Last Century,’ Louisa became the mother of a son, in 1773. The alleged event was kept a profound secret, and the child was as secretly carried on boardanEnglish man of war! commanded by Commodore O’Halleran, who, if he had his rights, was not only foster-father to the mysterious infant, but also Earl of Strathgowrie! Admiral Allen, it will be remembered, was thought to be heir to the earldom of Errol.
‘RED EAGLE.’
It may here be observed, by way of recovering breath, that if there ever had been a son of this luckless couple, the fact would have been proudly trumpeted to the world. The event the most eagerly desired by the Jacobites was the birth of an heir to the Stuarts. Had such an heir been born, to conceal the fact from the adherents of the House of Stuart would have been an act of stark madness. Such insanity would have simply authorised the House of Hanover to repudiate the claimant, if he ever should assume that character.—To return to the romance ofhistory:—
The infant prince received by the commodore was brought up by him as his own son. The young adventurer was trained to the sea, and he cruised among the western isles of Scotland. He appears in the romance as theRed Eagle; by those who know him he is treated with ‘Your Highness’ and ‘My Lord;’ and, like Lieut. Thomas Allen himself, he contracts a marriage with a lady, which is reckoned as a misalliance by those who are acquainted with his real history. He drops mysterious hints that the Stuart line is not so near extinction as it was generally thought to be. The better to carry the race on, the Red Eagle left, in 1831, two sons, the Chevaliers John and Charles Stuart, the former being also known asthe Comte d’Albanie; and both, no doubt, sincerely believing in the rigmarole story of Lieut. Thomas Allen,aliasRed Eagle,aliaslegitimate son of Charles Edward, the young Chevalier!
‘TALES OF THE LAST CENTURY.’
The ‘Tales of the Last Century’ do not say this in as many words. The book leaves a good deal to the imagination. The hero fades out of the romance something like Hiawatha, sailing into the mist after the setting sun. There is abundance of melodramatic business and properties throughout. There is mysterious scenery, appropriate music, serious and comic actors, complex machinery, ships of war sailing over impossible waters and looking as spectral as Vanderdecken’s ghastly vessel,—with booming of guns, harmonised voices of choristers, cheers ofsupers, and numerous other attractions in a dramatic way. There is nothing ‘dangerous’ in the book, though one gentleman does venture on the following Jacobite outburst:—‘Oh! if I had lived when you did—oryet, if he who is gone should rise again from the marble of St. Peter’s,—I am a Highlander and my father’s son,—I would have no king but Tearlach Righ nan Gael,’—no other king but Charlie.
In another page, one of the actors puts a sensible query, and adds a silly remark on the present condition of the Stuart cause:—‘Wonderful!—but why such mystery?—why?—for what should the birth of an heir to the House of Stuart be thus concealed? It had—it yet has friends (in Europe), and its interests must ever be identified with those of France, Spain,and Rome.’ Of this sort of thing, though there be little, there is more than enough; but the reader, as he proceeds, has an opportunity of conceiving a high opinion of Red Eagle’s common sense, and of fully agreeing with him at least in one observation which is put in the following form: ‘Woman!’ said the Tolair, ‘this is no time for bombast and juggling!’ The old Admiral Carter Allen never indulged in either. In his will the gallant sailor calls John and Thomas Allen hissons. He does not call Thomas hisfosterson. Prince Charles Edward spoke of no child inhiswill but his illegitimate daughter, the Duchess of Albany. The Cardinal of York took the nominal title of king at his brother’s death; and received the duchess into his house. At her death, in 1789, the Crown jewels, which JamesII.had carried off from England, came into the cardinal’s possession; and these, at the beginning of the present century, he generously surrendered to GeorgeIII.The cardinal was well assured that no legitimate heir of his brother had ever existed.
THE LEVER OF POETRY.
The assurance that there was one, however, continued to be made, and that the sons of Tolair were as poetical as they were princely was next asserted.
POETICAL POLITICS.
In 1848, Mr. Dolman, of London (conjointly with Blackwood), published a poetical manifestation by the Count, John Sobieski Stuart, and his brother, Charles Edward. It had an innocent look, but a mysterious purpose. Its title is, ‘Lays of the Deer Forest.’ The Lays are dedicated to Louisa Sobieska Stuart, by herfather and uncle. The second volume, consisting of ‘Notes,’ is dedicated to a Charles Edward Stuart, byhisfather and uncle. There is something of a poetical fire in the Lays; and much interesting matter on deer-stalking and other sporting subjects in the Notes. The spirit is thoroughly anti-English; very ‘Papistical’ in the odour of its heavily-charged atmosphere, but betraying the combined silliness and ferocity which distinguished the Stuarts themselves, in a hero-worship for the most cruel enemies of England. For instance, in the poem called ‘Blot of Chivalry,’ Charles Edward Stuart, the author, deifies Napoleon, and, if there be any meaning at all to be attached to the words, execrates England. In the ‘Appeal of the Faithful,’ there is a mysterious declaration that the writer, or the faithful few, will not bow the head to Somebody, and there are as mysterious references to things which might have been, only that they happened to be otherwise.
THE BLACK COCKADE.
There is a little more outspokenness in ‘The Exile’s Farewell,’ which heartily curses the often-cursed but singularly successful Saxon, and still more heartily vituperates the sensible Scots who stuck to the Brunswick family and the happy establishment. The writer sarcastically describes Scotland, for the exasperation of those judicious Scots, in the words:—‘The abject realm, a Saxon province made! and the Stuart heaps fire on the heads of Scottish Whigs by accusing them of common-place venality, and charging them with selling ‘Their mother’s glory for base Saxon gold!’ Thefigure the nobles from Scotland made at the Court of London in 1848, is thus smartlysketched:—
While in the Saxon capital enthralled,Eclipsed in lustre, though in senses palled,The planet nobles, alien to their own,Circle, dim satellites, the distant throne:Saxons themselves in heart, use, tongue disguised,Their own despising, by the world despised,While those for whom they yield their country’s pride,Their name, their nation, and their speech deride.
While in the Saxon capital enthralled,Eclipsed in lustre, though in senses palled,The planet nobles, alien to their own,Circle, dim satellites, the distant throne:Saxons themselves in heart, use, tongue disguised,Their own despising, by the world despised,While those for whom they yield their country’s pride,Their name, their nation, and their speech deride.
While in the Saxon capital enthralled,
Eclipsed in lustre, though in senses palled,
The planet nobles, alien to their own,
Circle, dim satellites, the distant throne:
Saxons themselves in heart, use, tongue disguised,
Their own despising, by the world despised,
While those for whom they yield their country’s pride,
Their name, their nation, and their speech deride.
The above figures of speech are admissible in poetry, but in truth and plain prose they are ‘palabras.’ The two authors are as crushingly severe on the English cockade as on the anti-Jacobite Scottish nobles. The cockade is shown to be altogether an imposture. The words in which the demonstration is made have, however, left her Majesty’s throne unshaken. ‘At this moment, most persons imagine that black is’ (the colour of) ‘the English cockade, ignorant that it was that of the Elector of Hanover, and only introduced into England with GeorgeI., who bore it as a vassal of the Empire; and it may be little flattering to theamour-propreof the British people to know that the cockade which they wear as national is the badge of a petty fief, the palatinate of a foreign empire.’ On this matter it is certain that the national withers are unwrung. The black cockade won glory at Dettingen, lost no honour at Fontenoy, and was worn by gallant men whom ‘John Sobieski Stuart’ could not overcome when his sword was (if report be true)unsheathed against English, Irish, and Scots, on the field of Waterloo.
THE ALLENS IN EDINBURGH.
Let us now turn to a minor Jacobite episode.—A correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries,’ M. H. R. (August 1st, 1857, p. 95), refers to an account the writer had from an informant, who was accustomed to meet John and Charles Allen in Edinburgh society. ‘I find however that their claims to legitimate descent from the Royal Stuarts were treated in such society quite as a joke, though the claimants were fêted and lionised, as might be expected in such a case, in fashionable circles. They usually appeared in full Highland costume, in Royal Tartan. The likeness to the Stuart family, I am told, was striking, and may have been without improving their claim a whit.’ The writer then alludes to the number of young ladies who, at Her Majesty’s accession, were thought to bear a great resemblance to the Queen. But accidental resemblance is worthless as proof of consanguinity. ‘If,’ the writer continues, ‘the two claimaints have no better foundation to rest upon, their cause is but weak, for it is obvious there may be likeness without legitimate descent; and I fancy, if the real history is gone into,thatis the point to be decided here.’
THE SUCCESSION TO THE CROWN.
The writer goes on to traduce the character of the wife of Charles Edward. It must, indeed, be allowed that from the year 1778, when she was twenty-six years of age, and she first became acquainted with Alfieri, the lover with whom she lived from 1780, with some intervals, till his death in 1803, her characterwas under a shade, and yet, in 1791, the Countess of Albany was received at Court, in London, by so very scrupulous a sovereign lady as Queen Charlotte. So scrupulous was the queen, that her reception of the widow of Charles Edward seemed to disperse the breath of suspicion that rested on her. Another circumstance in her favour is the fact of GeorgeIII.having settled a pension upon her. The Countess of Albany died at Montpellier plain Madame Fabre, in 1824, leaving all she possessed to her husband, the historical painter. It will be seen from the last-named date, that Queen Victoria and the wife of Charles Edward were for a few years contemporaries.
But the countess is out of the question in this matter of John and Charles Allen. The correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries’ has something more to the point when he says:—‘The question is not of any importance as a matter of state. The succession to the English crown is secured by parliament, and is not affected by a descent from the young Pretender; but as an historical fact, it is desirable that the truth of the story, apparently set afloat by the father of these two gentlemen, should be settled at once and for ever.’Thathas been effectually settled in the 81st volume of the ‘Quarterly,’ so far as the development from Allen to Allan, and this to Stuart, is made out, without leaving a link unsevered in the chain of testimony.
A DERWENTWATER AT DILSTON.
In the year 1868, the Ministry and the Lords of the Admiralty, and the Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital estates, were amused rather than alarmed by aclaim made to the forfeited earldom of Derwentwater, and also to the confiscated estates. A sort of action was added to the latter claim, by taking possession of a portion of them, in the North. The claimant is an accomplished lady who has been long known by sympathising northern friends as Amelia Matilda, Countess of Derwentwater. She backed the assumption of such title by installing herself in one of the ruined chambers of the castle in ruins—Dilston. Her servants roofed the apartment with canvas, covered the bare earthen floor with carpeting, made the best apologies they could for doors and windows, hung some ‘family portraits’ on the damp walls, spread a table with relics, documents, &c., relating to the Derwentwater persons and property: they hoisted the Derwentwater flag on the old tower, and then opened the place to visitors who sympathised with the countess in the way in which she supported her dignity and its attendant rheumatism.
DESCENT OF THE CLAIMANT.
The Lords of the Admiralty and the Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital speedily bestirred themselves. They sent their representatives from London with due authority to eject the lady, if they could not persuade her to leave. The countess received them with mingled courtesy and outspoken defiance. Her manners seem to have resembled her costume, which consisted of a foreign military upper coat, with a sword by her side, and a white satin bonnet on her head. She appeared to be between fifty and sixty years of age, but owned only to forty. The countess made a stoutfight for it, and when she was compulsorily put out of the castle, she pitched a camp and dwelt in a tent on the adjacent highway. Her effects and family relics, portraits, plate, &c., were announced for sale, under a sheriff’s seizure. The announcement attracted many buyers from London, their motive being less Jacobitism than curiosity-dealing. The liberality of personal friends satisfied the sheriff’s claims, by their bidding, and the ‘relics’ were removed to Newcastle for public exhibition; admission, 1s.The countess now attired in her Stuart tartan, with a shoulder-scarf of silk of the same pattern, and with a black plume in her bonnet, attended, as the local advertisements said, ‘between two and four, to explain several of the curiosities.’
OBSTACLES IN PEDIGREES.
The question remains as to identity. The Lords of the Admiralty in London, when those relics of the Jacobite time came up to trouble them, naturally asked, but in more profuse and much more legal language, ‘Who are you?’ The reply was not satisfactory. There has already been recorded in these pages, under the dates 1731 and 1732, the coming of John Radcliffe to Poland Street, London, to consult Cheselden, and the death and funeral of the great surgeon’s patient—sole son of the beheaded earl. The present countess, if understood rightly, denies that the above John, ‘Earl of Derwentwater,’ died childless, as he undoubtedly did, in 1732. She states that he married in 1740 a certain Elizabeth Amelia Maria, Countess of Waldsteinwaters (which is a sort of translation of Derwentwater); that he lived till 1798, when he must have been within hail of centenarianism, and that he was succeeded byhis two sons in order of age, the first, Earl John, the second, Earl John James. The last-named coronetted shadow is described as dying in 1833, leaving his only child, the present Amelia Matilda, Countess of Derwentwater, who took possession of Dilston Castle, &c., under the delusion that she had hereditary right to both land and dignity. She accounts for John, the son of the beheaded earl, by saying that he lived till 1798 in the utmost secrecy, under fear of being murdered by the British Government! As he really died in 1732, unmarried, and that the Government knew very well that he was carried from London to be buried in his mother’s grave in Brussels, one may be allowed to suspect that there is some mistake in the pedigree to which the Countess Amelia pins her faith.
With regard to the descendants of the Earl of Derwentwater, in a line not yet considered, Mr. H. T. Riley (in ‘Notes and Queries,’ October 25th, 1856, p. 336), says: ‘I remember being pointed out, some time since, a person who bears the family name and is generally reputed to be a descendant, through an illegitimate son, of the unfortunate Earl of Derwentwater. I have little doubt there are several other persons similarly connected with him, to be found in the neighbourhood of North or South Shields.’ A lady correspondent, ‘Hermentrude,’ says (‘Notes and Queries,’ November 16th, 1861), ‘I have been applied to, through a friend, to communicate some genealogical particulars for their (living descendants of the Radcliffes) benefit, which, I am sorry to say, I was not able to ascertain.I do not know through what branch they descend, but I was told they still entertain hopes of a reversion of the attainder and restoration of the title.’
After this romance, the chief actor in another made his quiet exit from the stage.
JOHN SOBIESKI STUART.
In 1872, the most eminent personage of this latest Jacobite time, disappeared from the scene. The tall, gaunt, slightly bent figure of the gentleman, who once believed himself to be plain John Allen, till his father imparted to him a story that he, the sire, was the legitimate son of Charles Edward, and that plain John Allen was John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, was missed from the Reading Room of the British Museum. There he used to enter, cloaked and spurred like an old warrior, with a sort of haughty resignation. Yet there was an air about him which seemed as a command to all spectators to look at him well, and to acknowledge that the character he had inherited from his father the lieutenant, who fancied he was the rightful King of England, was patent in him, as clearly as if he had been born in the purple. Some few people, of those whose idiosyncracy it is to lend ready faith to the romantic impossible, believed in the genuineness of the character, and held the pretensions it interpreted to be as well-founded as those of either of ‘the Pretenders.’ This Chevalier Stuart, or Comte d’Albanie, mixed a flavour of the scholar with that of the warrior. He and his brother sat together apart from unprincely folk in the Reading Room. Books, papers, documents, and all the paraphernalia of study and research were scattered about them.THE ELDER SON OF ‘RED EAGLE.’Quietly unobtrusive,yet with a ‘keep your distance’ manner about them, they were to be seen poring over volumes and manuscripts as if in search of proofs of their vicinity to the throne, and found gratification in the non-discovery of anything to the contrary. Looking at the elder gentleman who was often alone, the spectator could not help wondering at the assiduous pertinacity of the Chevalier’s labour. Nothing seemed to weary him, not even the wearisome making of extracts, the result of which has not been revealed. Perhaps it was the vainly attempted refutation of the plain, logical, consequential, irrefutable statements made in Volume 81 of the ‘Quarterly,’ by Mr. Lockhart, who, courteously cruel, smashed to atoms the fanciful idea which had entered Lieutenant Allen’s brains, and from which idea was evolved the perplexing conclusion that he, the ex-lieutenant, was Tolair Deargh, the Red Eagle, and by divine grace, obstructed by human obstinacy, king of three realms! The elder son of the Red Eagle was as familiar a figure in the streets of London as he was in the Museum; and wayfarers who had no thought as to his individuality, must have felt that the cloaked and spurred personage was certainly a gentleman who wore his three score years and ten with a worthiness exacting respect. The same may be said of his sorrowing surviving brother, ‘Le Comte d’Albanie’ (Charles Edward), as his card proclaims him. In this ‘Chevalier,’ whose figure is well known to most Londoners, the chivalrous spirit survives. The last record of him in this character is in the year 1875, when he knocked downDonald Alison for violently assaulting the Comte’s landlady in a Pimlico lodging house!
STUART ALLIANCES.
A year previously, the Lady Alice Mary Emily Hay, daughter of the 17th Earl of Errol, and therefore of the blood of Kilmarnock, did Colonel the Count Edward Stuart d’Albanie the honour to become his wife. The Colonel is the son of ‘The Count d’Albanie.’
This marriage is thus chronicled in Lodge’s Peerage (1877, p. 238), ‘Lady Alice Mary Emily (Hay)b.6th July, 1835,m.1st May, 1874, Colonel the Count Charles Edward d’Albanie, only son of Charles Edward Stuart, Count d’Albanie, and Anne Beresford, daughter of the Hon. John de la Poer Beresford, brother of the 1st Marquis of Waterford.’ Anne Beresford—widow Gardiner,—is variously described as marrying, in 1822, ‘C. E. Stuart, Esq.,’ and ‘Charles Stuart Allen, younger son of Thomas Hay Allen.’
The Colonel Count d’Albanie who married Lady Alice Hay is said to have been in the service of Don Carlos, than which nothing could so little recommend him to a humane, right-thinking, liberal, peace-loving, blood-odour-hating world. There is, however, manifestly, some difficulty in identifying the descendants of Lieutenant Thomas Allen, or Red Eagle, who mistook himself for a never-existing son of the once ‘young Chevalier.’ Perhaps the countship of Albany is not the exclusive possession of Lieutenant Allen’s descendants. It is at least certain that, a couple of years ago, there was some talk in London of a Count and Countess ‘d’Albanie,’ in Hungary, but what their pretensionswere has gone out of memory; but they must, rightly or wrongly, have hadsome, if the tale be true that they quitted a small estate there, somewhat offended, because the bishop of the diocese had refused to allow them to sit in the sanctuary of some church, on purple velvet chairs!
FULLER PARTICULARS.
In all this affair Lieutenant Thomas Allen may deserve rather to be pitied than blamed. That he was under a delusion seems undeniable. The immediate victims of it, his sons, do not forfeit respect for crediting a father’s assertions. They or their descendants must not expect the world to have the same confidence in them.
A clear and comprehensive view of this family matter may be acquired by perusing the following statement, which appeared in ‘Notes and Queries,’ July 28th, 1877, and which is from one who speaks with knowledge and authority.
‘When James Stuart, Count d’Albanie, died, he left two sons and one daughter.’
To understand this starting point aright, the reader should remember that the above-named James Stuart was originally known as Lieutenant Thomas Allen, second son of Admiral Allen. The two sons and one daughter are thusenumerated:—
The first of the three was the author of poems published in 1822, as written by John Hay Allen.Both those gentlemen subsequently became authors of works, under the name of Stuart.
THE STUART-D’ALBANIES.
‘The elder son, John Sobieski, Count d’Albanie, married the eldest surviving daughter of Edward Kendall, of Osterey (videBurke’s ‘Landed Gentry,’ under Kendall of Osterey), and died, leaving no children.
‘The second son, Charles Edward Stuart, now Count d’Albanie, married Anna Beresford, daughter of the Hon. and Right Hon. John Beresford, second son of Marcus Beresford, Earl of Tyrone, and brother of the first Marquis of Waterford, and by her had four children.
‘1st. Count Charles Edward d’Albanie, major in the Austrian Cavalry, in which he served from 1840 to 1870, when he left the service and came to England, and in 1874 married Lady Alice Mary Hay, sister of the present and eighteenth Earl of Errol.
‘2nd. Countess Marie, who died at Beaumanoir on the Loire, on the 22nd of August, 1873, and was buried in the cemetery of St. Cyr sur Loire.
‘3rd. Countess Sobieska Stolberg, married Edouard Platt de Platt, in the Austrian Imperial Body Guard, and has one son, Alfred Edouard Charles.
‘4th. The Countess Clementina, a nun.
JACOBITE LORD CAMPBELL.
‘The Countess Catherine Matilda, daughter of James Count d’Albanie’ (that is, of the gentleman first known as Admiral Allen’s son), ‘married Count Ferdinand de Lancastro, by whom she had one son, Count Charles Ferdinand Montesino de Lancastroet d’Albanie, fromhis mother. He also served in the Austrian army, in the Kaiser Kürassier Regiment, or Imperial Cuirassiers, of which the emperor is colonel. He volunteered, by permission of the emperor, Franz Joseph, into the Lancers of the Austrian Army Corps which accompanied the Arch-Duke Maximilian to Mexico, and during the three years’ campaign he received four decorations for valour in the many actions at which he was present, two of which were given to him by the Emperor Maximilian, one being the Gold Cross and Eagle of the Order of Ste. Marie de Guadalupe, and two by the Emperor NapoleonIII., and also four clasps. After the campaign terminated, he returned to Austria with his regiment, and got leave to visit his uncle, the present Count d’Albanie, then in London, where he died on the 28th September, 1873, from inflammation of the lungs, at the age of twenty-nine years and five days.’ (Signed ‘R. I. P.’)
LORD CAMPBELL, ON OLD JUDGMENTS.
Some adherents to the cause of the Stuarts have survived to the present reign, and one at least may be found who was keeper of the sovereign’s conscience, and sat on the woolsack. It is certainly somewhat remarkable to find that one of Her Majesty’s chancellors was not only a Jacobite at heart, like Johnson in part of the Georgian Era, but openly expressed, that is, printed and published, his opinions. In Lord Campbell’s life of Lord Cowper, the lord chancellor who presided at the trial of the rebel lords in 1716, the biographer alludes to the new Riot Act brought in by Cowper, in which it was stated that if as many, or asfew, as a dozen persons assembled together in the streets, and did not disperse within an hour after a magistrate’s order to that effect, the whole dozen would incur the penalty of death, and might be lawfully strangled at Tyburn. ‘This,’ says Lord Campbell, ‘was perhaps a harsher law than ever was proposed in the time of the Stuarts,’ but he adds that it was not abused in practice, yet, nevertheless, ‘it brought great obloquy upon the new dynasty.’ Lord Cowper in charging and in sentencing the rebel lords in 1716, and Lord Hardwicke, in addressing and passing judgment upon the rebel lords in 1746, could scarcely find terms harsh enough to express the wickedness, barbarity, and hellish character of the rebellion and of the lords who were the leaders in it. As to their own disgust at such unmatched infamy, like Fielding’sNoodle, they could scarcely find words to grace their tale with sufficiently decent horror. Lord Chancellor Campbell, in the reign of Victoria, flames up into quite old-fashioned hearty Jacobitism, and ‘bites his thumb’ at his two predecessors of the reigns of the first two Georges. In especial reference to the ultra severe strictures of the Chancellor Hardwicke in 1746, the Jacobite chancellor in the reign of Victoria says, in Hardwicke’s ‘Life,’ ‘He forgot that although their attempt, not having prospered, was calledtreason, and the law required that they should be sentenced to death, they were not guilty of any moral offence, and that if they had succeeded in placing Charles Edward on the throne of his grandfather,they would have been celebrated for their loyalty in all succeeding ages.’
TIME’S CHANGES.
And now, in the year 1877, we are gravely told that the claims of the brother, who supposes himself to be a legitimate heir of the Stuarts (a supposition as idle as the claim of the convict Orton to be a baronet is infamous), have been fully investigated by a ‘delegation of Roman Catholic clergy, nobility, and nobles of Scotland,’ who, it is added, with amusing significance, pronounced those claims to bevalid.’ We hear nothing, however, of the names of the investigators, nor of the evidence on which their judgment was founded. Awaiting the publication of both, the investigation (if it ever took place) may be called atraitof the very latest Jacobitism on record.[3]
AT CHELSEA AND BALMORAL.
After being a serious fact, Jacobitism became (with the above exception) a sentiment which gradually died out, or which was applied in quite an opposite sense to that in which it originated. When the French revolution showed a taste for pulling down everything that was right on end, the old London Jacobite toast, ‘May times mend, and down with the bloody Brunswickers!’ ceased to be heard. Later, too, the wearing of gilded oak-apples, on the 29th of May, ceased to be a Jacobite emblem of love for the Stuart race of kings. It was taken as a sign that the wearer was glad that a king atall was left to reign in England. It is only as yesterday that in Preston unruly lads were called ‘a parcel of young Jacobites,’—so strong and enduring was the memory of the Jacobite presence there.Now, yearly at Chelsea, the veteran soldiers are drawn up in presence of the statue of CharlesII., on the anniversary of his restoration. They perform an act of homage by uncovering in that bronze presence (with its permanent sardonic grin), and they add to it the incense of three cheers in honour of that civil and religious king, and his ever-welcome restoration. How different from the time of the first George, when soldiers in the Guards were lashed to death, or near to it, in the Park, for mounting an oak leaf on the 29th of May, or giving a cheer over their cups for a prince of the line of Stuart. The significance of words and things has undergone a happy change. Donald Cameron, of Lochiel, is groom-in-waiting to the Queen; and, on Her Majesty’s last birthday, at Balmoral, the singers saluted her awaking with welcome Jacobite songs, and ended their vocalisation with ‘Wha’ll be King but Charlie?’
[3]As this page is going through the press, we have the Comte d’Albanie’s authority for stating that the above story (alluded to in ‘Notes and Queries,’Oct.6, p. 274) is ‘a pure invention,’ or ‘a mystification.’
THE END.
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