The Sobieski Stuarts

Title page of the Vestiarium Scoticum (1822) of John Sobieski Stuart

A few years ago I published in one of these essays a deliciously ironic photograph of a police surveillance camera mounted high on the wall of a building next to a sign identifying the place as the Plaza de George Orwell in Barcelona.  I won’t need to tell this literate audience why it is ironic.  The year 1984 has come and gone, and the surveillance state, armed with ever more powerful snooping tools, continues to burgeon.  Photography, finger prints, blood types, voice prints, facial recognition software, accurate DNA analysis—more than a century of incremental technological developments have made it harder and harder for those who might seek to conceal their identities from those intent upon discovering them.  Lots of problems attend these developments, but just at the moment I am looking through the other end of the telescope at a number of interesting instances before the development of powerful forensic techniques, when certain means of identifying people might be entirely lacking.

How did the eighteenth-century “Interpol” work?  I first became interested in this some years ago when I was writing about Cagliostro, an internationally famous guru, swindler, gynecologist, and master of the Masonic arts who travelled all over Europe openly and in disguise, usually pursued by the secret police agents of at least four governments and usually escaping their clutches. 

One or two examples of interestingly disputed or false identities may already be familiar to you.  You may have seen the film of The Return of Martin Guerre, based on actual events in a rural village in sixteenth-century France, or be familiar with one of several versions of the alleged survival of Anastasia, daughter of the last Romanov czar.  The mysterious stranger is a stock character in earlier history and literature, with prominent examples ranging from the Man in the Iron Mask to Kaspar Hauser. The number of dubious claimants to valuable property, thrones, titles or simply the south forty are legion.  Many instances involve deluded and gullible people of wealth who refuse to believe long lost relatives are really dead.  One such instance, that of the so-called “Tichborn Claimant”, was the subject of a sensational legal case in Victorian England.  In it a boorish Australian butcher weighing in at about 240 pounds nearly convinced a rich and grieving aristocratic English mother that he was her long-lost (and strikingly svelte) son.  Some surreptitiously gathered Facebook data could have avoided the drama.

The case I shall raise today, simply because it has so many happy byways, is that of the so-called “Sobieski Stuarts”, two brothers who pretended to be Pretenders, so to speak.  Toward the end of the tumultuous seventeenth century in England the line of Stuart monarchs came to an abrupt end when the Protestant William of Orange, married to the Protestant daughter of the Catholic King James II, was placed upon the English throne in the so-called Glorious Revolution.  James went into exile on the Continent.  Many believers in royal “Divine Right,” and especially the conservative Catholic nobility of northern England, Scotland, and Ireland—called “Jacobites” after the Latin form of the name “James”—continued to support the cause of the deposed monarch.  The Jacobites caused some reasonably serious political and military problems for about fifty years and supplied inexhaustible romantic fodder for novelists for the two hundred and fifty years after that.  Read Walter Scott; read Stevenson’s Kidnapped.

Bonnie Prince Charlie on a good day

James II’s son and grandson (the “Old Pretender” and the “Young Pretender” respectively) lived more or less futile lives supported by the King of France, eager to injure the English enemy in any way possible, and by successive Popes, eager to believe that the “real” royals of England were Catholics.  Particularly feckless was the Young Pretender (Charles Edward Stuart, 1720-1788), the famous “Bonnie Prince Charlie”.   Never was more affection and esteem invested less deservingly in a pathetic sot than the Jacobites invested in him.

Albany and Alfieri

The British pretenders in their Continental exile naturally had to marry other Catholic royals, and this was not always easy.  The Old Pretender lucked out with the Polish princess, Clementina Sobieska, the granddaughter of the Polish hero-king John Sobieski III, a woman of parts, who became the mother not merely to the awful Young Pretender but to his brother who became a cardinal in the Roman Church and for a time made the unlikely claim of being the Cardinal-King of England!  I shall return to the Polish Sobieskis in just a minute, after a brief but sensational digression designed to introduce you to a new author.  Though it seems to defy demographics, there are in my experience in life and in history way more superb women married to scumbags than admirable men married to scumbag women.  The Young Pretender’s wife, Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. beautiful, brilliant, witty, and adventurous, was grossly mismatched to a boring boozer with an IQ even lower than the British royal average.  Her unsatisfied libido eventually got the better of her, and she entered a red-hot affair with the famous Italian writer Count Vittorio Alfieri, a volcanic genius and the Italian version of Lord Byron.  For reasons of delicacy Princess Louise was known as the Countess of Albany—which is the title of a terrific and seriously under-appreciated book by the terrific and seriously under-appreciated writer Vernon Lee (alias of Violet Paget, 1856-1937), a butch lesbian buddy of Henry James, who was himself also known among literary wits as the “Old Pretender.”  Henry James, get it?

Violet Paget, alias Vernon Lee, by John Singer Sargent

Now, back to mysterious strangers.  Around 1820 two guys, mid- to late twenties and declaring themselves to be brothers, showed up in Scotland.  It is reasonably clear now, though it was not then, that they were the sons of a British naval officer, that they had been born in Wales in the 1790s, and that their actual surname was Allen, Allan, Hay, or Hay-Allen.  Their extraordinary claim was they had only recently learned that they were actually the last Stuarts of the Sobieski line; they later “discovered” that they had been in born in Versailles.

At first it was not quite clear what the exact grift of the “Sobieski Stuarts” was.  They made no serious claim to the throne, if only from prudential reasons, as it was unlikely that the Coldstream Guards were going to join them in a putsch against George IV, William IV, or Queen Victoria, the monarchs whose hospitality they dubiously sought.  Their actual aim seems to have been scholarly fraud as a prelude to social eminence, and in this they were strangely successful.  Scottish clan costumes did exist, but the mysterious Sobieskis revolutionized the concept.  They more or less invented the Scottish tartan racket, still a major money-making industry in Scotland.  They published an amazing coffee-table book entitled Vestiarium Scoticum (The Scotch Wardrobe, I suppose), a large collection of pseudo-scholarly pseudo-information about the decorative patterns used for clan identification in woolen goods.  This proved to be a huge success with the British middle classes, almost all of whom had or could invent some Highland family connection, however remote, and discovered that, without knowing it, they themselves were tartan-eligible.  I really shouldn’t complain, as the Flemings were supplied with a bonny bright blue and green swatch to go along with our slightly less hokey coat of arms.  (See my essay “Flemingiana").  I might even show you my tartan keychain bought for me by a beloved granddaughter in a French  airport.

As scholarly frauds go the Sobieski Stuarts were unusual chiefly in the fact that their main goal seems not to have been tenure but social cachet.  They never could have gotten by with it had they simply been a couple of impoverished graduate students of textile science.  But the gap in the surveillance tapes allowed romantics half to believe that they might actually be the tragic pretenders to the British throne.