taken the keenest interest, and to which he had made
numerous gifts in the past, amongst them being the
original proclamation drawn up by his brother, and
read aloud from the High Cross at Edinburgh in

I745. 1

1 Owing to political disturbances in Mexico, which prevented for a time
the sale of the late Cardinal Duke's estates in that country, this secret codicil
remained sealed until it was opened by order of Leo XI I in 1831, when
the testator's last wishes with regard to the final disposal of his property were
complied with. The Schedola, or Note, containing in brief the Cardinal
Duke's wishes, is included amongst the Stuart Manuscripts (vol. vi. f 173) :
" . . . . Intenzione di S.A.R. Ema il CD. di York communicata mi, si
a di lasciare alia Congregazione di Propaganda Fide il di Lui patrimonii),
onde possa in bene della Religione mantenere nel Collegio quei Giovani
Scozzesi, chepotra. Angelo Cesarini, Vescovo di Milevi, Erede Fiduciario."



DEAN OF THE SACRED COLLEGE 271

The political portion of the Cardinal Duke's will is of
some historical importance, for it reiterates his unshaken
belief in his legitimate sovereignty, and indicates, though
it does not name, the personage on whom these inalienable
royal claims devolved : —

" Lastly, We wish here to renew and to express (as is
already explicitly inscribed in Our protest enrolled in
the deeds of the notary Cataldi on January 22nd, 1784,
and published on January 30th, 1788, on the occasion of
the death of Our Serene Brother) that, so far as concerns
the transmission of Our rights of Succession to the
Throne and Crown of England in favour of that prince
to whom it descends by virtue of {de jure) blood -relation-
ship, We transmit these rights to Him with the most
express and solemn forms. . . .

" Enrico R. Cardinale.

"Given from Our Residence of Frascati, July 15th,
1802." »

This statement can of course only apply to the head
of the Royal Family of Sardinia — at that time the ex-
King Charles Emmanuel IV — who through his ancestress,
Henrietta Stuart, Duchess of Orleans, the daughter of
Charles 1, had now become the senior legal representative
of the three great British Houses of Stuart, Tudor and
Plantagenet. The Sardinian King is not actually
mentioned by name, it is true, and doubtless this bequest
of sovereign claims was purposely put in obscure and
guarded form so as not to give offence to the reigning

1 Stuart Papers. Artaud, His tot re de Pius VI I.



272 HENRY STUART CARDINAL YORK

House of Guelph, which had treated the late Cardinal
Duke with so much sympathy and generosity.

Owing to Cesarini's untimely death, no arrangement
had been made for the disposal of what was in reality
the late Cardinal Duke's most valuable possession — the
voluminous archives of his House, the total weight of
which was said to exceed seven tons. These valuable
documents, which contained almost the whole of the
Stuart correspondence, public and private, ever since
the expulsion of King James II, had been deposited by
a former steward in various store-rooms at the Frascati
villa, and here they lay neglected, and almost forgotten,
for several years ; though according to one account the
French Consul in Rome, Monsieur Stamaty, had managed
to abstract a large mass of important papers dealing with
Scotch and Irish affairs. But whether this story be true
or not, it is certain that in 1816, nine years after their
owner's death, a certain unscrupulous person, usually
known as the Chevalier Robert Watson, discovered the
existence of these archives, and prevailed on their nominal
custodian to part with them for the trifling sum of 170
piastres (about £23 sterling). 1

This Robert Watson, as a most remarkable specimen
of a British adventurer, deserves a short notice here.
Born at Elgin of humble parentage in the year of
Culloden, young Watson at an early age migrated to
America, where he fought on the Colonial side in the
War of Independence, and became, if his own statement
can be credited, " intimate with George Washington, who
gave him the rank of Colonel." Returning to Europe,
he settled in London, and in course of time became

1 Atti.



, -•



CARDINAL KkCOLE CONSALV1



DEAN OF THE SACRED COLLEGE 273

secretary to Lord George Gordon, in which capacity he
figures as " Gashford " in Dickens' novel of Barnaby
Rudge} Later he withdrew to France, where the great
Napoleon nominated him Principal of the revived Scots
College in Paris, but in 1806 he proceeded to Italy, filled
with a plan for cultivating cotton and indigo in the newly-
drained Pontine Marches. This wild scheme naturally
ended in utter failure, and the self-styled Chevalier, at
that time " a little lame man about sixty years of age,"
found himself reduced to teaching the English language
in Rome for a livelihood. It was whilst thus engaged
that Watson contrived to gain possession of the Stuart
manuscripts, and had it not been for his own imprudence,
the unscrupulous Scotchman would undoubtedly have
made a considerable fortune by the sale of his prize in
England. But the garrulous old man could not refrain
from boasting openly of his great bargain, and the tale
soon passed from mouth to mouth till it finally reached
the ears of the Papal officials, who at once impounded the
whole mass of the documents " with the exception of one
small packet." Watson indignantly appealed to the
Papal Secretary of State against his deprivation of that
which he declared had been purchased in good faith, and
in consequence Cardinal Consalvi on January 26th, 18 17,
wrote a long account of the matter to Lord Castlereagh : —

"MILORD,— The English Consul [at Civita Vecchia],
Signor Denis, will have informed your Excellency in
full detail as to the papers belonging to the heirs of
the late Cardinal Duke of York, acquired by Signor
Watson, but I feel I ought to repeat the matter here.

1 The Dhkcnsiaii, February 1906 : " Gashford and his Prototype."
18



274 HENRY STUART CARDINAL YORK

The only object of this letter is to inform your
Excellency that the said Watson, in company with a
Signor Schmidt, came to me to claim the free enjoy-
ment of the purchase which he had made, and that I
thereupon drew his attention to the law in force at
Rome nullifying the sale of papers of this description
without previous permission of the State. Understanding
from me that it was impossible for him to keep the
papers, Signor Watson then begged me not to make
the matter public, but to suspend the operation of the
decree given out by the Administration against the sale.
He further asked me to send a letter to your Excellency
by means of this Signor Schmidt, wherein I might inform
you that Signor Watson had acquired these papers in good
faith for 170 piastres from a person who declared himself
authorised to sell them. He also begged me to tell your
Excellency that his was the merit of having unearthed,
so to speak, these papers, and of having preserved them
by this transaction from total destruction, either by their
dispersal (which would certainly have occurred, had they
been left much longer in the granary where they were
found) or by their probable sale to some tradesman for
waste paper. I replied that I was quite willing to write
the required letter, but that I could not give any positive
answer as to the fate of the papers . . J' 1

The only result of this appeal to Cardinal Consalvi
was that the original sum of 170 piastres was repaid to
the luckless Watson, who at first indignantly refused to
accept the money, and began to talk wildly of laying
the whole affair of his treatment before the British
1 Artaud, Vie du Fape Pius vn.



DEAN OF THE SACRED COLLEGE 275

House of Commons. And although in after years the
Chevalier Watson was in the habit of bragging that he
obtained no less a sum than three thousand guineas
for Stuart documents that he had sold to the Prince
Regent, it is fairly safe to characterise this statement
as a downright untruth, though what the small packet
of papers he was permitted to keep actually contained
it is impossible to say. The death of this entertaining
but shameless old man proved as violent and eccentric
as the rest of the acts of his long career, for at the
age of ninety - two he committed suicide in London
lodgings by self- strangulation, "twisting his neckcloth
with a poker as with a torniquet." 1

As to the ultimate fate of the Stuart Papers, it
appears that they were examined by Roman lawyers
in the interests of the Sardinian Royal Family, who
expressed no desire to retain them. Cardinal Consalvi,
accordingly, with the permission of the Pope and of
the King of Sardinia, dispatched the bulk, if not the
whole of them, to the Prince Regent, by whom they
were placed in the royal library at Windsor Castle.

• •••••••

Although the Cardinal Duke was without any reason-
able shadow of doubt the last legitimate Prince of his
House, yet such was the glamour shed in the past over
the Royal Stuarts, that it is perhaps not surprising to
find that in course of time there arose aspirants to the
claims of the extinct British Pretenders. Romance and
mystery are ever potent forces, and in this case the
deep-rooted desire amongst many persons to imagine
the royal line of Scotland as still existing doubtless
1 Dictionary of National Biography.



276 HENRY STUART CARDINAL YORK

inspired a readiness to listen to any suggested theory
of Stuart descendants. The murdered Edward V and
his little brother reappeared in Perkin Warbeck and
Lambert Simnel ; the evil fate of the poor child-king
Louis XVII did not deter a host of impostors from
coming forward in his name ; nor did the genuine " last
prince of Darnley's House" prove to be the last to
lay claim to that distinction.

The complete story of the so-called Sobieski-Stuarts
and their pretensions to royal birth is almost as intricate
as it is improbable, so that it is no easy matter to
compress its main features into a small space. — Through-
out the middle part of the last century a good many
persons were interested by, and a few (who included,
however, various members of the great Scottish Houses)
believed in the claims to royal descent put forward by
two brothers, born John Hay Allen and Charles Stuart
Allen, but styling themselves in magnificent form as
John Stolberg Sobieski - Stuart, and Charles Edward
Sobieski-Stuart. These young men, who were highly
educated, of refined manners and of remarkable, not to
say eccentric appearance, were the sons of a certain
Lieutenant Thomas Allen, who left the Royal Navy in
1798, having married six years previously Catherine
Matilda Manning, a daughter of the Reverend Owen
Manning, vicar of Guildford and a well-known antiquary.
Thomas Allen's father was Admiral John Carter Allen,
a distinguished naval officer, and a claimant at one time
to the earldom of Erroll, who died in London in October
1800. But according to the wild theory on which the
two Sobieski-Stuarts based their claims to kingship, their
supposed grandparent, the Admiral, was in reality the



DEAN OF THE SACRED COLLEGE 277

guardian, and not the father of the Thomas Allen who
passed for his son, and is even expressly mentioned as
such in his will. Thomas Allen, who in after days was
alluded to by his sons as the Red Eagle (Iolair Dhearg),
was in fact no less a personage than the sole legitimate
son and heir of Prince Charles Stuart, of whom his wife,
Louise of Stolberg, had been delivered in the most
private manner at a lonely villa situated somewhere in
the Apennine country between Parma and Lucca in or
about the year 1773. At her lying-in the Princess had
been attended by a Scottish doctor of the name of
Beaton, a devoted Jacobite, said to have been present
at Culloden, who then chanced to be travelling in Italy
in order to pay his respects to his legitimate sovereign.
Shortly afterwards the child was secretly conveyed, for
fear of its assassination by Hanoverian agents, to the
Tuscan coast, where, by arrangements made beforehand,
it was entrusted to the care of Admiral Allen, who was
then cruising in the Mediterranean. The Admiral
brought up the royal infant as his own child, and ever
kept its exalted parentage a close secret, whilst it was
not till more than a quarter of a century after his death
that the true circumstances of their father's birth were
told to the two brothers by Dr. Beaton himself, who, if
he had really fought at Culloden, must by that date
have passed his hundredth year. A clumsier concoction
of improbabilities and absurdities it would be well-nigh
impossible to match, yet the two young men appear to
have swallowed greedily this tale of their royal descent,
for henceforth they began to pose as grandsons of the
Young Chevalier, their father conveniently " abdicating "
in their favour, and leading an obscure life until his



278 HENRY STUART CARDINAL YORK

death in a Pentonville lodging-house in the year 1852.
Meanwhile the two brothers, who from severe Presby-
terians had now become ardent Roman Catholics,
published various books, including some volumes of
tolerable poetry and an elaborate work dealing with
the Clans of Scotland and their tartans. But the most
celebrated joint production of the Sobieski- Stuarts at
the time being was undoubtedly their Tales of the
Century, amongst which was set forth, under feigned
names but with a wealth of detail, the whole story of
the authors' royal parentage. The appearance of this
work was shortly followed by a vigorous exposure of
the absurdity of this legend (which was no difficult task)
by Professor George Skene in the Quarterly Review of
June 1847, 1 t° whose attack the brothers replied in a
pamphlet that ascribed the reviewer's hostile attitude to
his own personal attachment to yet another Royal Stuart
pretender, namely a certain " General Edward Stuart,
Baron Rohenstart," who had claimed to be the legitimate
son of Charlotte, Duchess of Albany ! Both brothers
married, but only Charles, the younger (whose wife was
Anna Beresford, widow of Mr. Charles Gardiner and
niece to the first Marquis of Waterford), left issue. 2
John, the elder, died in 1872, whilst Charles, who

1 " The Heirs of the Stuarts." — " It gives us no pleasure," writes the
Reviewer, "to bring down such a Chateau en Espagne about the ears of
those to whose personal gratification it must be supposed to have ministered ;
but the nature of the claim, and the fact that some credulous rural dignitaries
have been lending it countenance, seemed to impose the duty of demolition
on some of our craft. The attempt to persuade the world that Charles
Edward left a legitimate male progeny is the silliest of dreams. . . ."

2 See Burke's Peerage 1873, under title of "Waterford," wherein the
name of Anna Beresford's husband is given as "Charles Stuart, Count
d'Albanie " {sic).



DEAN OF THE SACRED COLLEGE 279

assumed the title of " Count of Albany " after his
brother's death, died at Bordeaux in 1880; and both
these strange beings were buried beneath a Celtic
cross at Eskadale, near which place Lord Lovat had
many years before built them a Gothic shooting-lodge.
Charles' four children are now all dead, and one only,
the second daughter, Louisa Sobieska, Madame von
Piatt, has left issue, so that her son, Lieutenant Alfred
Edward Charles von Piatt, a lieutenant in the Austrian
service, is the present inheritor of the pretensions of the
so-called Sobieski-Stuarts.

This short account contains, of course, but the barest
outline of a long, ill-constructed myth, the chief mystery
of which lies in the fact that any educated person could
ever have affected to credit it — In the first place we
know that Charles Stuart married Louise of Stolberg
with the sole purpose of begetting an heir to carry on
the exiled dynasty, and we also know how keen was
his disappointment at the union proving childless ; there-
fore he was far more likely to produce a supposititious
infant (a possible contingency that Sir Horace Mann
was ever dreading) than to conceal a real one. Again,
the Chevalier in the most emphatic terms denied more
than once that his wife had ever borne him a child ; nor
does it seem probable that, with a Jacobite Prince of
Wales living, he would have legitimised a natural
daughter in order to create a successor to the Stuart
claims. It is evident that the Cardinal Duke was
ignorant of the existence of any such legitimate heir,
otherwise he would never have assumed the titular king-
ship, and have struck medals as Henry IX. Nor can
we believe that Louise of Stolberg could ever have left



28o HENRY STUART CARDINAL YORK

all the property she died possessed of to the companion
of her old age, the French painter, Francois Xavier Fabre,
had she been the mother of a surviving son. But perhaps
the most damning piece of evidence (if any further proof
were needed) against the Sobieski-Stuart theory, is the
single fact that it was not until after the death of the
Countess of Albany herself — the one person who could
have given the lie direct to the whole impudent fabrica-
tion — that these ridiculous claims were " revealed " to the
public. Certain students of Jacobite historical literature
profess to recognise, not without reason, in the " Doctor
Beaton " of the story the personality of the Chevalier
Robert Watson, yet it is difficult to understand what
advantage this old charlatan could have expected to
obtain from an unblushing fraud of this nature, and the
true reason for starting the Sobieski-Stuart legend must
therefore ever remain a mystery. It has often been
stated that the two brothers themselves genuinely believed
in the details of their own story, and consequently in
the reality of their own royal descent ; and this is far
from being impossible, for the human capacity to credit
what is agreeable to personal vanity is naturally unlimited.
But this is no fit place to discuss the question as to
whether the self-styled Sobieski-Stuarts were conscious
or unconscious impostors ; it is merely sufficient to state
here that without doubt on July 13th, 1807, all but a
century ago, there "disappeared from Earth the last
sublime glory of the House of Stuart." x

1 For a full description of the Sobieski-Stuarts and their claims, see
Vernon Lee, Life of the Countess of Albany, chapter iv. ; Henry Jenner,
The Sobieski-Stuarts (the Genealogical Magazine, No. i) ; Dictionary of
National Biography; and "The Heirs of the Stuarts," Quarterly Review,
June 1847.



CHAPTER XII

THE CARDINAL DUKE AS AN HISTORICAL
FIGURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THERE is no doubt whatever that the Cardinal
Duke of York, albeit the grandson of a reigning
British monarch, was in reality a foreigner by birth, by
training, by religious sympathy and by an uninterrupted
residence abroad ; for out of a long life exceeding eighty-
two years, only twenty months were passed by him out-
side the borders of Italy. Nor can he be described
merely as Italian ; he was essentially a Roman, who
rarely crossed the frontiers of the Papal States and was
bound by every tie of ecclesiastical duty and of natural
affection to the capital of the Popes or its immediate
neighbourhood. Nevertheless, though a Roman Bishop
and Cardinal, Henry Stuart himself belongs to English
history, and his career has had a marked bearing upon the
course of political events in the United Kingdom. From
his boyhood his name as that of the younger son of
the Old Pretender had been familiar to British ears, and
not a few English travellers, as we have already shown,
were inclined to perceive latent abilities and martial tastes
in the attractive little Jacobite Duke of York, who was
in these early years toasted with enthusiasm at Legitimist
banquets, and was spoken of with mingled fear and spite

281



282 HENRY STUART CARDINAL YORK

at the Whig assemblies. After the seizure of the young
Radclyffe, son of Lord Derwentwater, off the Kentish
coast in the winter of 1745, an opinion prevailed that
the captured youth was none other than " the Youngest
Pretender," and in consequence the terrified London mob
attempted to tear the unfortunate prisoner to pieces, as
he was being conveyed by guards to the Tower : — such
were the feelings of hatred with which the future Cardinal
was regarded in his youth by the people whom in his old
age he affected to claim for his rightful subjects.

On the immediate effect of Henry's acceptance of the
Scarlet Hat and of his subsequent admission to the
priesthood and the Italian episcopate we have already
dwelt at considerable length, and shall therefore only
repeat here that, although nobody (except, perhaps, Prince
Charles Stuart) realised at the moment the incalculable
injury that had been inflicted on the Jacobite Party by
such a step, the ensuing results came to be fully appre-
ciated by historians in later times. Yet Britain owes
Henry Stuart a deep debt of gratitude for this service,
however unconscious or unintentional on his part, that
thus dealt the deathblow to a cause now irreparably lost,
the further pursuit of which was bound to bring ruin and
misery upon its remaining supporters; — as Sir Horace
Mann truthfully remarks in one of his letters to Horace
Walpole, "the Cardinal Stuart by putting on the Cowle
has done more to extinguish his party than would have
been effected by putting to death many thousands of
deluded followers." For Henry's close connection with
the Papacy constituted an insurmountable obstacle to this
cult of Legitimism in a country that was mainly Anglican
and Protestant in its religious beliefs, and utilitarian in



AS AN HISTORICAL FIGURE 283

its sentiments. And to prove the truth of the above
assertion we have only to recall the circumstance that
a year or so after Prince Charles' marriage in 1772, a
report, intended to rekindle, if possible, the dying embers
of Jacobite fervour, was industriously spread abroad
throughout Britain that the Countess of Albany was with
child and the Cardinal was dead: two wilfully misleading
statements that Sir Horace Mann deemed worthy of an
official disclaimer to his Government.

Whilst the death of Charles Stuart was allowed to
pass almost unnoticed by the general public in London,
the Cardinal Duke's formal assumption of his late brother's
royal title was made the subject of pleasantry rather than
of genuine annoyance amongst the comparatively few
persons at home to whom this incident became known.
For, long before Charles' demise, Henry's possible succes-
sion as a Pretender to the Crown had ceased to be taken
into serious consideration ; the Young Pretender's only
surviving brother and heir was known to be a Roman
ecclesiastic, but as to his mode of life, his political views
or ambitions, the bulk of Englishmen were either ignorant
or totally indifferent. Such was the general feeling in the
British Islands as to the existence of the new official
Pretender, whom a London rabble had once savagely
assaulted by proxy in the far-off days of the Jacobite
scare. But misfortune was destined to drive Henry
Stuart into close impact with the northern nation from
which he had so long dissociated himself, and it was
reserved for Sir John Hippisley to discover, as it were, the
gracious personality of the Cardinal Duke of York, and to
drag this interesting link with past history to the light of
day, so that for the few remaining years of his life the



284 HENRY STUART CARDINAL YORK

Roman prelate, who still obstinately aspired to be re-
cognised at the Papal Court as the true legitimate
Sovereign of Britain, actually became the object of British
compassion and of British bounty. All persons from the
King downwards readily expressed sympathy and praise
for the venerable Prince, whose father had been attainted
and whose brother had all but snatched the crown of
England from George II half a century before. Nor in
the various dealings between the Government at home
and the exiled Cardinal at Venice was the slightest hint
ever advanced that the recipient of the royal pension was
any other than the grandson and last surviving repre-
sentative of King James II; whilst the Duke of Sussex
invariably treated the Cardinal Pretender with every mark
of royal distinction. As regards English history, therefore,
Henry Stuart, though an Italian priest who never set foot
on British soil, may justly be regarded as a political
personage who played a part — indirect, perhaps even
negative, but by no means insignificant — in the annals of
the great kingdom that he claimed to rule by a royal
birthright which was no longer disputed. So much for