The “Sobieski Stuarts”
It came about like this. In the
late 1820s the Sobieski Stuart brothers, then living
in Moray, were visiting Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, and
produced for his inspection a copy of a document of
tartan patterns. This was entitled Liber
Vestiarium Scotia (the Book of Scottish Dress)
and bore the date 1721 on the first page. The brothers
said it came from someone called John Ross of
Cromarty, and was a second-rate copy of an earlier
manuscript. John Sobieski Stuart later (1842)
published the now-notorious “Vestiarium Scoticum:
from the Manuscript formerly in the Library of the
Scots College at Douay. With an Introduction and
Notes”, printed in a limited edition by the
highly-reputable publisher, bookseller and radical,
William Tait of Edinburgh
In the Preface, the author
claimed that it was based on an original manuscript
(usually called the Douay MS) of date 1571 or earlier,
and said to have been in the hands of John Leslie,
Bishop of Ross (1527–1596). The Douay MS itself,
claimed Sobieski Stuart, was the "oldest and most
perfect" copy of the Vestiarium, the original
being even older. From Bishop Leslie, it had then
turned up in the library of the Scots College, the
famous seminary founded in 1594 and settled at Douai
in 1612, for the training of Scottish exiles for the
Roman Catholic priesthood. When Bonnie Prince Charlie
visited the Scots College in the early 1750s he took
possession of the MS, and from there it had found its
way to the brothers – they claimed.
We’ll get back to John Sobieski
Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart later, but for the
moment, let’s concentrate on the book. When Dick saw
the copy of the “15th century” manuscript
the brothers showed him (which was not claimed to be
the Douai copy, you’ll notice), he wrote to his friend
Sir Walter Scott on June 1, 1829, recommended the book
in the highest terms and stated that several clan
chiefs, such as McLeod and Cluny MacPherson had
derived their "true and authentic" tartans from it. In
his letter to Scott, Lauder described the manuscript,
said that he had obtained colour drawings of the
60-odd tartans in it and sent some of these to Scott
himself. The book had appendices on arisaids
(the traditional Western Islands women's buckled
plaid), on hose and on trews. Lauder was keen that the
brothers should have the book published and even
started pulling together support, costings and silk
swatches of the tartan patterns depicted. Lauder was
completely taken in.
Not so Sir Walter Scott. Apart
from his reputation as a novelist, the inventor of
Scottish Tourism (thank you, Sir Walter!) and the most
famous man in Europe at the time, Scott was a good
antiquarian. Replying to Lauder on June 5, 1829, Scott
articulated his scepticism of both the manuscript and
the brothers themselves, and asked that a copy be sent
to him, so that he and other experts could examine it.
It was in this letter that he stated his doubts that
Lowlanders had ever worn tartans, pointed out that
there was no supporting evidence (including any
mention in the writings of Bishop Leslie) and took the
view that the title Vestiarium Scotia was, as
he said, "false Latin" (it should have been
Vestiarium Scoticum – Scotia is
nominative, meaning “Scotland” rather that genitive
“of Scotland”, which would be Scotiae, or the
adjective Scoticum, “Scottish”).
Sir Thomas wrote back on July
20, 1829, describing the (alleged) 1571 original from
which the 1721 copy he saw was derived – even though
he hadn’t seen that “original” but said it was in the
possession of the brothers' father in London. He also
discussed the brothers' personalities and credibility,
and allowed that their "quixotism” (by which he
probably meant romantic impracticality) “must render
these very unfortunate individuals for the
introduction of a piece of antiquarian matter to the
world…". In other words, no-one would believe them.
Yet Lauder did, declare again his belief in the MS’s
authenticity, and taking issue with the "false Latin"
and the supposed use of tartans in the Lowlands of
Scotland.
The last letter in this
epistolary tussle was from Scott to Lauder, dated 19
November 1829. Scott stuck by his rejection of the
authenticity of the Vestiarium and dismissed
the whole idea of Clan tartans as a “fashion of modern
date " – which Sir Walter himself had helped to foster
by organising George IV's 1822 visit to Edinburgh.
Nonetheless, published the
Vestiarium Scoticum was in 1842 (Scott had been
dead 10 years, but was presumably spinning in his
grave) complete with a list of "Highland clans" and
"Lowland Houses and Border Clans", with some rather
fanciful spellings which the brothers doubtless felt
were suitably and authentically ancient (see below)
such as “Fryjjelis in ye Ayrd” for Fraser..
Fewer than 100 copies of
Vestiarium Scoticum were published (“printed”
would be a better term for such a low-level activity)
but the brothers produced another book in 1847,
The Tales of the Century, which was a
lightly-fictionalised claim by them to be direct
descendants of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young
Pretender. This provoked a response, in terms of a
critique of the Vestiarium Scoticum, in the
June 1847 issue of The Quarterly Review. We
now know this anonymous piece to have been penned by
Prof. George Skene of Glasgow University and Rev. Dr.
Mackay, editor of the Highland Society's Gaelic
Dictionary. In reply to the dismantling of its
authenticity by Skene and Mackay, John Sobieski Stuart
replied in the an 1848 Quarterly Review and
offered the 1721 Cromarty MS for inspection. This
appears never to have happened and Skene’s demand for
the original manuscript (the one said to have belonged
to Bishop Leslie) to be brought out. To this day,
no-one except the brothers (they claim) has ever seen
the Leslie-Douai copy.
The affair went further. The
Glasgow Herald published a number of articles in 1895
by Andrew Ross, entitled "The Vestiarium Scoticum,
is it a forgery?". Ross did get his hands on the 1721
Cromarty MS, gave a detailed description of it and
even had it chemically analysed by Stevenson Macadam,
Lecturer (and later Professor) in Chemistry at the
University of Edinburgh and a Public Analyst. Macadam
reported that the document had been treated chemically
to give it an appearance of age and concluded that it
"cannot be depended upon as an ancient document".
No second edition of the
Vestiarium Scoticum was ever published, although
Dunbar's History of Highland Dress (1962) has
many excerpts from the first edition and there are
copies available for view in various libraries,
including the Burns House Museum in Mauchline, Ayshire,
and the Scottish Tartans Museum in Franklin, NC, USA
has produced scans of the title page and images of the
75 tartans (http://resources.scottishtartans.org/vestiarium_gallery.html).
D. C. Stewart and J. C. Thompson did a proper,
forensic demolition job on the Vestiarium Scoticum
and the historical claims of the brothers in
Scotland's Forged Tartans (1980), concluding that
it was a fabrication, the universally-held view of
tartan scholars today, except a few isolated flat-earthers.
The vast majority of the
'ancient' clan tartans in the Vestiarium came
only from the fertile imagination of John and his
brother Charles (the illustrator) although they were
jumped on by Clan Chiefs and, predictably, the tartan
weaving industry. Scott himself had suspected the hand
of the weavers in the origin of the Cromarty MS,
suggesting it started out life “behind the counter of
one of the great clan-tartan warehouses which used to
illuminate the principal thoroughfares of Edinburgh”,
which sentiment could be replaced today by “the
counters of the many tartan-tat shops which line the
High Street and Princes Street”.
So, who were the
Sobiesky Stuart Brothers?
As is now well-known, they were
Welsh, and their surname was Allen. John (Sobieski
Stuart) Carter Allen and Charles (Edward Stuart)
Manning Allen were born in Wales in the late 1700s,
although their father, Naval Officer Thomas Hay Allen,
claimed Hay ancestry, related to the Earl of Erroll.
The brothers may have learned a lot at their father’s
knee, as he seems to have been in debt, often lived
abroad, used an assumed name and made up his ancestry.
He died in Clerkenwell in 1852.
It wasn’t until 1811 (the
brothers say) that they discovered they were descended
from the Stuart kings, and in the 1871 census entry
gave their birthplace as Versailles. When they moved
to Scotland some time in or before 1822, they first
changed their surname to the Scottish spelling, Allan,
then to Hay Allan, and finally to Hay. John published
a Genealogical table of the Hays in 1840 In
1822 John published The Bridal of Caölchairn and
other poems under the name John Hay Allan, and
had the sheer effrontery to produce another edition
the same year under the name Walter Scott.
In the 1830s (having failed to
persuade Scott that their Cromarty MS was genuine)
they moved to Eilean Aigas on the River Beauly in
Inverness-shire, where Lord Lovat, completely taken in
by the brothers, gave them a hunting lodge which they
tricked out as a royal court with thrones, fake
heraldry, pennants, seals and all the rest. It was
during their stay at Eilean Aigas that they started
using the surname Stuart and became practising
Catholics. Highland chiefs and nobles became their
patrons, including Sir Francis Stuart, 10th Earl of
Moray.
They followed the publication of
the Vestiarium Scoticum with The Costume
of the Clans. With observations upon the literature,
arts, manufactures and commerce of the Highlands and
Western Isles during the Middle Ages; and the
influence of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries upon their present condition (1844),
equally a farrago of fake scholarship and sheer
fantasy.
The attack by Skene and Mackay
in the Quarterly Review did dent their
reputation and they disappeared from Scotland, but
were later to be seen in the British Library in
London, wearing Highland dress and writing with pens
bearing gold coronets. They did return to Scotland,
but only to be buried in Eskadale, about 15 miles WSW
of Inverness.
Almost everything about them is
a richly-embroidered fantasy. Their supposed
connection to the Stuarts was by a claim that their
grandfather, Admiral John Carter Allen, had only
fostered their father Thomas, whose "true" father was
Bonnie Prince Charlie. And how did this come to pass?
Clementina Sobieski (Maria Klementyna Sobieska) was
the granddaughter of John III (Sobieski), King of
Poland, and married the "Old Pretender", Prince James
Francis Edward Stuart. The Allen brothers claimed him
as their "true" grandfather. James and Clementina had...
(i) Charles Edward Louis Philip
Casimir Stuart (1720–1788), the "Young Pretender",
Bonnie Prince Charlie, who married Louise of
Stolberg-Gedern in 1772 (he was 51, she 19);
(ii) Henry Benedict Maria Clement
Thomas Francis Xavier Stuart (1725–1807), Cardinal
Duke of York, who never married.
Charles and Louise had no
children, but Charles already had, by an affair with
his cousin Marie Louise de La Tour d'Auvergne (also a
great-grandchild of John III) and with his mistress
Clementina Walkinshaw, who came from Glasgow,
Scotland.
The child of Charles and
Marie Louise was Charles Godefroi Sophie Jules Marie
de Rohan (Marie Louise was married to Jules Hercule
Mériadec de Rohan, Duke of Montbazon, Prince of
Guéméné) who died aged less than 6 months old in
1748 and was buried in the Rohan-Guemene crypt in
Paris.
Charles and Clementina Maria
Sophia Walkinshaw (1720–1802) had a daughter,
Charlotte, on 29 October 1753. Charles refused to
recognise her, but towards the end of his life they
were reconciled and Charlotte was (possibly)
legitimated in 1783
Charlotte became the carer for
her increasingly drunken and dissolute father from
1784 until his death in1788. She died a year later and
left her mother a principal sum and an annuity, but
Charles’s brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (now
considered King Henry IX by his Jacobite supporters)
refused to hand it over for two years until Clementina
signed a "quittance" renouncing any further claim on
behalf of herself and her descendants. This
effectively ruled out Charlotte’s children while
mistress of Ferdinand Maximilien Mériadec de Rohan,
Archbishop of Bordeaux and Cambrai as heirs to Prince
Charles. They were: Marie Victoire, Charlotte, and
(tellingly) Charles Edward Augustus Maximilian Stuart,
Baron Korff, Count Roehenstart (ca. May 1784
– 28 October 1854). Notice the combination of Rohan
and Stuart in Roehenstart. He pursued the Jacobite
claim in a half-hearted way, but often visited
Scotland (he died and was buried at Dunkeld in 1854 on
his way from a visit to the Duke of Atholl at Blair
Castle). He married twice, but there were no children.
John Allan sometimes called
himself John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, a reference to
Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. He used the title
Count d'Albanie, as did Charles on John's death in
1872 and when Charles died on a steamer on a trip to
France in 1880, his son did likewise and is buried as
Count d'Albanie.
If there is a claim to the
Jacobite succession, it has fluttered down through
Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia (a descendant of
Charles I in the female line) and two more generations
of the House of Savoy, via the House of Austria-Este
to the current Duke of Bavaria, whose great-nephew was
born in London in 1995, Prince Joseph Wenzel
Maximilian Maria von und zu Liechtenstein, Count of
Rietberg. When he succeeds his father, Alois (b.
1968), as Hereditary Prince of Liechtenstein, he will
become a Head of State.
So who needs independence for
Scotland? We can just wait until 2050 or so and be
taken over by Leichtenstein!
Sources
Dunbar, John Telfer.
History of highland dress: A definitive study of the
history of Scottish costume and tartan, both civil and
military, including weapons, Edinburgh,
1962.
Fraser, Marie. John
Sobieski Stolberg Stuart & Charles Edward Stuart
Reynolds, K.D. Stuart,
John Sobieski Stolberg in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography
Robb, Steven. The
Sobieski Stuart Brothers, Royal Stuart Review
2003.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh.
The Highland Tradition of Scotland in The
Invention of Tradition ed. Hobsbawm and Ranger
(1983)
AUTHOR: Dr Bruce Durie
- Contact:
gen@brucedurie.co.uk
Certainly,
the idea of weaving a patterned cloth is ancient – the
earliest Scottish example is from the 13th
Century. Originally, the patterns was probably typical
of a region, using the vegetable dyes common in the
area. But the linking of a pattern to a surname is a
fairly modern one. There are contemporary paintings of
individual Highlanders (including some Chiefs, and
fighters at Culloden) wearing two or three different
tartans.