VICTORIA.
[Illustration: Drop-G]eorge Selwyn excused 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 new Lord
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.
[Sidenote: _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 cried
_peccavi!_ 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.
[Sidenote: _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.
[Sidenote: _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
queen _created_ this 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.
[Sidenote: _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
the _Scottish_ Peerages 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.
[Sidenote: _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,’ 2,200_l._; to the younger, ‘Thomas Allen, third
Lieutenant in His Majesty’s navy,’ 100_l._ The reader is respectfully
requested to keep this lieutenant, Thomas Allen, alone in view. He may
turn out to be a very unexpected personage.
[Sidenote: _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 100_l._ 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 legitimate son of
the young Chevalier, and that all faithful Scots and Jacobites _had
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
words _you 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.
[Sidenote: _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.’
[Sidenote: _THE ROMANCE OF THE STORY._]
As Sketches of the _Romance_ of History, the writers _might_ have
meant that they were not dealing with _reality_. 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 board an _English 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.
[Sidenote: ‘_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 of
history:――
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 the _Red 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 as the Comte d’Albanie; and both, no doubt,
sincerely believing in the rigmarole story of Lieut. Thomas Allen,
_alias_ Red Eagle, _alias_ legitimate son of Charles Edward, the young
Chevalier!
[Sidenote: ‘_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 of _supers_,
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――or
_yet_, 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 his _sons_. He does not call Thomas his
_foster_ son. Prince Charles Edward spoke of no child in _his_ will 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 James II. had carried off from England, came into the cardinal’s
possession; and these, at the beginning of the present century, he
generously surrendered to George III. The cardinal was well assured
that no legitimate heir of his brother had ever existed.
[Sidenote: _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.
[Sidenote: _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 her father and uncle. The
second volume, consisting of ‘Notes,’ is dedicated to a Charles Edward
Stuart, by _his_ father 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.
[Sidenote: _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!’ The figure the nobles from Scotland made
at the Court of London in 1848, is thus smartly sketched:――
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 George
I., who bore it as a vassal of the Empire; and it may be little
flattering to the _amour-propre_ of 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.
[Sidenote: _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, _that_ is the point to be decided here.’
[Sidenote: _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 character was 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 George III. 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.’ _That_ has 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.
[Sidenote: _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 a claim 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.
[Sidenote: _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 stout fight 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, 1_s._ 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.’
[Sidenote: _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 by
his 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.
[Sidenote: _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. ◆[Sidenote: _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 down Donald Alison for violently assaulting the Comte’s
landlady in a Pimlico lodging house!
[Sidenote: _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 pretensions were
has gone out of memory; but they must, rightly or wrongly, have had
_some_, 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!
[Sidenote: _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 thus enumerated:――
‘1st. John Sobieski Stuart, Count d’Albanie,
2nd. Count Charles Edward d’Albanie.
3rd. Countess Catherine Matilda d’Albanie.’
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.
[Sidenote: _THE STUART-D’ALBANIES._]
‘The elder son, John Sobieski, Count d’Albanie, married the eldest
surviving daughter of Edward Kendall, of Osterey (_vide_ Burke’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.
[Sidenote: _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 Lancastro _et d’Albanie_, from his
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 Napoleon III., 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.’)
[Sidenote: _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 as few, 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’s _Noodle_, 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 called _treason_, 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.’
[Sidenote: _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 be _valid_.’ 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 a
_trait_ of the very latest Jacobitism on record.[3]
[Sidenote: _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 at all 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 Charles II.,
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.
_Spottiswoode & Co., Printers, New-street Square and Parliament Street._
Transcriber’s Note:
This book was written in a period when many words had not become
standardized in their spelling. Words may have multiple spelling
variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. Jargon and obsolete
spellings have been left unchanged unless indicated below.
Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like
this_. Initial drop capital letters at the beginning of chapters
are indicated [Illustration: Drop-X]. Footnotes were renumbered
sequentially and were moved to the end of the chapter in which the
corresponding anchor occurs. Page headers were converted to sidenotes.
Where the text continued for more than a full page, in-line sidenotes
were used, annotated within ◆ mark-up.
Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were
added. Duplicate words at line endings were removed. Archibald
Cameron’s brother, Donald, is misidentified in the text as Duncan, line
7824 et seq.
The following items were changed:
line 1939: punnished to punished
line 2836: Scotand to Scotland
line 5022: Jabobite to Jacobite
line 8652: orignal to original
line 9453: Lous to Louis
line 9933: It to In