Rome: August 31, 1669.
That certaine fellow or what hee was, who pretended to bee his Ma’ties
naturall sonn at Naples is dead and haueing made his will they write mee
from thence wee shall with the next Poast know the truth of his quality.
September 7, 1669.
That certaine Person at Naples who in his Lyfe tyme would needes bee
his Ma’ties naturall Sonne is dead in the same confidence and Princely
humour, for haueing Left his Lady Teresa Corona, an ordinary person, 7
months gone with Child, hee made his Testament, and hath Left his most
Xtian Ma’tie (whom he called Cousin) executor of it.
Hee had been absent from Naples some tyme pretending to haue made a
journey into France to visit his Mother, Dona Maria Stuarta of His
Ma’tie Royall Family, which neernes and greatnes of Blood was the cause,
Saies hee, that his Ma’tie would never acknowledge him for his Sonn,
his mother Dona Maria Stuarta was, it seemes, dead before hee came into
France. In his will hee desires the present King of England Carlo 2nd to
allow His Prince Hans in Kelder eighty thousand Ducketts, which is his
Mother’s Estate, he Leaues Likewise to his Child and Mother Teresa 291
thousand Ducketts which hee calls Legacies. Hee was buried in the Church
of St. Fran’co Di Paolo out of the Porta Capuana (for hee dyed of this
Religion). He left 400 pounds for a Lapide to have his name and quality
engrauen vpon it for hee called himself Don Jacopo Stuarto, and this is
the end of that Princely Cheate or whatever hee was.
The newsletter of September 7 merely mentions the death and the will.
On this occasion Kent had private intelligence from a correspondent in
Naples. Copies of the will, in English and in Italian, were forwarded to
England, where both copies remain.
‘This will,’ Lord Acton remarked, ‘is fatal to the case for the Prince.’
If not fatal, it is a great obstacle to the cause of the Naples man. He
claims as his mother, Donna Maria Stewart, ‘of the family of the Barons
of San Marzo.’ If Marzo means ‘March,’ the Earl of March was a title
in the Lennox family. The only Mary Stewart in that family known to
Douglas’s ‘Peerage’ was younger than James de la Cloche, and died, the
wife of the Earl of Arran, in 1667, at the age of eighteen. She may have
had some outlying cousin Mary, but nothing is known of such a possible
mother of de la Cloche. Again, the testator begs Charles II. to give his
unborn child ‘the ordinary principality either of Wales or Monmouth, or
other province customary to be given to the natural sons of the Crown;’
to the value of 100,000 scudi!
Could de la Cloche be so ignorant as to suppose that a royal bastard
might be created Prince of Wales? He certainly knew, from Charles’s
letter, that his younger brother was already Duke of Monmouth. His
legacies are of princely munificence, but--he is to be buried at the
expense of his father-in-law.
By way of security for his legacies, the testator ‘assigns and gives his
lands, called the Marquisate of Juvignis, worth 300,000 scudi.’
Mr. Brady writes: ‘Juvignis is probably a mistake for Aubigny, the
dukedom which belonged to the Dukes of Richmond and Lennox by the older
creation.’ But a dukedom is not a marquisate, nor could de la Cloche
hold Aubigny, of which the last holder was Ludovick Stewart, who died, a
cardinal, in November 1665. The lands then reverted to the French
Crown. Moreover, there are two places called Juvigny, or Juvignis, in
north-eastern France (Orne and Manche). Conceivably one or other of
these belonged to the house of Rohan, and James Stuart’s posthumous son,
one of whose names is ‘Roano,’ claimed a title from Juvigny or Juvignis,
among other absurd pretensions. ‘Henri de Rohan’ was only the travelling
name of de la Cloche in 1668, though it is conceivable that he was
brought up by the de Rohan family, friendly to Charles II.
The whole will is incompatible with all that de la Cloche must have
known. Being in Italian it cannot have been intelligible to him, and may
conceivably be the work of an ignorant Neapolitan attorney, while de la
Cloche, as a dying man, may have signed without understanding much of
what he signed. The folly of the Corona family may thus (it is a mere
suggestion) be responsible for this absurd testament. Armanni, however,
represents the man as sane, and very devout, till his death.
A posthumous child, a son, was born and lived a scrambling life, now
‘recognised’ abroad, now in prison and poverty, till we lose him about
1750.*
*A. F. Steuart, Engl. Hist. Review, July 1903, ‘The Neapolitan
Stuarts.’ Maziere Brady, ut supra.
Among his sham titles are Dux Roani and ‘de Roano,’ clearly referring,
as Mr. Steuart notices, to de la Cloche’s travelling name of Henri de
Rohan. The Neapolitan pretender, therefore, knew the secret of that
incognito, and so of de la Cloche’s mission to England in 1668. That,
possessing this secret, he was set free, is a most unaccountable
circumstance. Charles had written to Oliva that his life hung on
absolute secrecy, yet the owner of the secret is left at liberty.
Our first sources leave us in these perplexities. They are not
disentangled by the ‘Lettere’ of Vincenzo Armanni (1674). I have been
unable, as has been said, to see this book. In the summary by Mr. Brady
we read that (1668-1669) Prince James Stuart, with a French Knight of
the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, came to Naples for his health.
This must have been in December 1668 or January 1669; by March 1669 the
pretender had been ‘for some months’ in Naples. The Frenchman went by
way of Malta to England, recommending Prince James to a confessor at
Naples, who was a parish priest. This priest was Armanni’s informant.
He advised the Prince to lodge with Corona, and here James proposed
to Teresa. She at first held aloof, and the priest discountenanced
the affair. The Prince ceased to be devout, but later chose another
confessor. Both priests knew, in confession, the secret of his birth:
the Prince says so in his will, and leaves them great legacies. So far
Armanni’s version is corroborated.
Mr. Brady goes on, citing Armanni: ‘At last he chose another spiritual
director, to whom he revealed not only his passion for Teresa Corona,
but also the secret of his birth, showing to him the letters written
by the Queen of Sweden and the Father General of the Jesuits.’ Was the
latter document Oliva’s note from Leghorn of October 14, 1668? That did
not contain a word about de la Cloche’s birth: he is merely styled ‘the
French gentleman.’ Again, the letter of the Queen of Sweden is now in
the Jesuit archives; how could it be in the possession of the pretender
at Naples? Was it taken from him in prison, and returned to Oliva?
The new confessor approved of the wedding which was certainly celebrated
on February 19, 1669. Old Corona now began to show his money: his new
son-in-law was suspected of being a false coiner, and was arrested by
the Viceroy. ‘The certificates and papers attesting the parentage of
James Stuart were then produced....’ How could this be--they were in the
hands of the Jesuits at Rome. Had de la Cloche brought them to Naples,
the Corona family would have clung to them, but they are in the Gesu
at Rome to this day. The rest is much as we know it, save, what is
important, that the Prince, from prison, ‘wrote to the General of the
Jesuits, beseeching him to interpose his good offices with the Viceroy,
and to obtain permission for him to go to England via Leghorn’ (as in
1688) ‘and Marseilles.’
Armanni knew nothing, or says nothing, of de la Cloche’s having been in
the Jesuit novitiate. His informant, the priest, must have known that,
but under seal of confession, so he would not tell Armanni. He did tell
him that James Stuart wrote to the Jesuit general, asking his help in
procuring leave to go to England. The General knew de la Cloche’s hand,
and would not be taken in by the impostor’s. This point is in favour
of the identity of James Stuart with de la Cloche. The Viceroy had,
however, already written to London, and waited for a reply. ‘Immediately
on arrival of the answer from London, the Prince was set at liberty and
left Naples. It may be supposed he went to England. After a few months
he returned to Naples with an assignment of 50,000 scudi,’ and died of
fever.
Nothing is said by Armanni of the imprisonment among the low scum of the
Vicaria: nothing of the intended whipping, nothing of the visit by James
Stuart to France. The 50,000 scudi have a mythical ring. Why should
James, if he had 50,000 scudi, be buried at the expense of his
father-in-law, who also has to pay 50 ducats to the notary for drawing
the will of this ‘prince or cheate’? Probably the parish priest and
ex-confessor of the prince was misinformed on some points. The Corona
family would make out the best case they could for their royal kinsman.
Was the man of Naples ‘prince or cheate’? Was he de la Cloche, or, as
Lord Acton suggests, a servant who had robbed de la Cloche of money and
papers?
Every hypothesis (we shall recapitulate them) which we can try as a key
fails to fit the lock. Say that de la Cloche had confided his secret to
a friend among the Jesuit novices; say that this young man either robbed
de la Cloche, or, having money and jewels of his own, fled from the
S. Andrea training college, and, when arrested, assumed the name and
pretended to the rank of de la Cloche. This is not inconceivable, but it
is odd that he had no language but French, and that, possessing secrets
of capital importance, he was released from prison, and allowed to
depart where he would, and return to Naples when he chose.
Say that a French servant of de la Cloche robbed and perhaps even
murdered him. In that case he certainly would not have been released
from prison. The man at Naples was regarded as a gentleman, but that is
not so important in an age when the low scoundrel, Bedloe, could pass in
Spain and elsewhere for an English peer.
But again, if the Naples man is a swindler, as already remarked, he
behaves unlike one. A swindler would have tried to entrap a woman of
property into a marriage--he might have seduced, but would not have
married, the penniless Teresa Corona, giving what money he had to her
father. When arrested, the man had not in money more than 160 pounds.
His maintenance, while in prison, was paid for by the Viceroy. No
detaining charges, from other victims, appear to have been lodged
against him. His will ordains that the document shall be destroyed by
his confessor, if the secret of his birth therein contained is divulged
before his death. The secret perhaps was only known--before his
arrest--to his confessors; it came out when he was arrested by the
Viceroy as a coiner of false money. Like de la Cloche, he was pious,
though not much turns on that. If Armanni’s information is correct, if,
when taken, the man wrote to the General of the Jesuits--who knew de la
Cloche’s handwriting--we can scarcely escape the inference that he was
de la Cloche.
On the other hand is the monstrous will. Unworldly as de la Cloche may
have been, he can hardly have fancied that Wales was the appanage of
a bastard of the Crown; and he certainly knew that ‘the province of
Monmouth’ already gave a title to his younger brother, the duke, born
in 1649. Yet the testator claims Wales or Monmouth for his unborn child.
Again, de la Cloche may not have known who his mother was. But not only
can no Mary, or Mary Henrietta, of the Lennox family be found, except
the impossible Lady Mary who was younger than de la Cloche; but we
observe no trace of the presence of any d’Aubigny, or even of any
Stewart, male or female, at the court of the Prince of Wales in Jersey,
in 1646.*
*See Hoskins, Charles II. in the Channel islands (Bentley, London,
1854).
The names of the suite are given by Dr. Hoskins from the journal (MS.)
of Chevalier, a Jersey man, and from the Osborne papers. No Stewart or
Stuart occurs, but, in a crowd of some 3,000 refugees, there MAY have
been a young lady of the name. Lady Fanshaw, who was in Jersey, is
silent. The will is absurd throughout, but whether it is all of the
dying pretender’s composition, whether it may not be a thing concocted
by an agent of the Corona family, is another question.
It is a mere conjecture, suggested by more than one inquirer, as by Mr.
Steuart, that the words ‘Signora D. Maria Stuardo della famiglia delli
Baroni di S. Marzo,’ refer to the Lennox family, which would naturally
be spoken of as Lennox, or as d’Aubigny. About the marquisate of Juvigny
(which cannot mean the dukedom of d’Aubigny) we have said enough. In
short, the whole will is absurd, and it is all but inconceivable that
the real de la Cloche could have been so ignorant as to compose it.
So the matter stands; one of two hypotheses must be correct--the Naples
man was de la Cloche or he was not--yet either hypothesis is almost
impossible.*
*I was at first inclined to suppose that the de la Cloche papers in
the Gesu--the letters of Charles II. and the note of the Queen of
Sweden--were forgeries, part of an impostor’s apparatus, seized at
Naples and sent to Oliva for inspection. But the letters--handwriting
and royal seal apart--show too much knowledge of Charles’s secret policy
to have been feigned. We are not told that the certificates of de la
Cloche’s birth were taken from James Stuart in prison, and, even if he
possessed them, as Armanni says he did, he may have stolen them, and
they may have been restored by the Viceroy of Naples, as we said, to the
Jesuits. As to whether Charles II. paid his promised subscription to
the Jesuit building fund, Father Boero says: ‘We possess a royal letter,
proving that it was abundant’ (Boero, Istoria etc., p. 56, note 1),
but he does not print the letter; and Mr. Brady speaks now of extant
documents proving the donation, and now of ‘a traditional belief that
Charles was a benefactor of the Jesuit College.’
It may be added that, on December 27, 1668, Charles wrote to his sister,
Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans: ‘I assure you that nobody does, nor
shall, know anything of it here’ (of his intended conversion and secret
dealings with France) ‘but my selfe, and that one person more, till
it be fitte to be publique...’ ‘That one person more’ is not elsewhere
referred to in Charles’s known letters to his sister, unless he be ‘he
that came last, and delivered me your letter of the 9th December; he has
given me a full account of what he was charged with, and I am very well
pleased with what he tells me’ (Whitehall, December 14, 1668).
This mysterious person, the one sharer of the King’s secret, may be de
la Cloche, if he could have left England by November 18, visited Rome,
and returned to Paris by December 9. If so, de la Cloche may have
fulfilled his mission. Did he return to Italy, and appear in Naples in
January or February 1669? (See Madame, by Julia Cartwright, pp. 274,
275, London, 1894.)