12 s. i. MAE. 4, i9i6.] NOTES AND QUERIES.
191
Andrew Lang, in ' Pickle the Spy,' mentions
that he had access to the papers of the late
Count d'Albanie, and he leaves them with the
comment : " The time has not come to tell
the whole strange tale of ' John Stolberg
Sobieski Stuart ' and Charles Edward Stuart/
if, indeed, that tale can ever be told." In
his 'Prince Charles Edward' (1903) he is
more definite. He calls their story a
" legend," and suggests that they were
" the victims of megalomania." He re-
cognizes a strange kind of sincerity, but
thinks the phenomena resemble those of
hysterical illusion. Even then he is unable
to account for two brothers being similarly
affected. In another passage he attributes
their pretensions to " an over-indulged habit
of romantic day-dreaming which acquired
the force of actual hallucination." They
spent many years in Austria, where Charles
Edward Stuart's son, Charles Edward Louis
Philip Casimir Stuart (born 1824, died 1882),
rose to be a colonel of Austrian cavalry.
If they were really the sons of a lieutenant,
and the grandsons of an admiral, in the
British navy, it is hard to understand why
they expatriated themselves for nearly
twenty years in Austria ; but this is only
another of the mysteries of this case. Mr.
W. Townend, in * Descendants of the
Stuarts ' (second edition), takes the view
that they were the descendants of Prince
Charles Edward's mistress, the Lanarkshire
lady Clementina Walkinshaw. But after
she fled from the Prince, owing to his ill-
treatment, she made in 1767 an affidavit that
no marriage had ever taken place, and the
Sobieski-Stuarts claimed to be legitimate
heirs of the Stuarts. A slashing attack on
the Sobieski-Stuarts, apropos of their book
- Tales of the Century' (1847), appeared
in The Quarterly Review (vol. Ixxi. p. 57) from the pen of Prof. Skene. Mr. Archibald Forbes published an article on the brothers, under the title of ' Real or Bogus Stuarts,' in The New Review, 1893, vol. i. p. 72, in which he gave some interesting details of their later life as habitues of the British Museum Reading-Room in the sixties and seventies.
If one may hazard a guess, the claims of the brothers and the documents they possessed owed something to that busy adventurer Dr. Robert Watson, who hanged himself in London in 1838. He had been private secretary to Lord George Gordon, and afterwards, as a member of the London Corresponding Society, was forced to fly the country. He was appointed by Napoleon Principal of the revived Scots College in
Paris. In 1813 in Rome he secured pos-
session of three cartloads of papers which had
been left neglected since the death of their
owner, Henry, Cardinal of York, brother of
the " Young Pretender." Watson's dealings
with this material are described in The
Quarterly Review, vol. Ixxix. p. 167, and in
the introduction to vol. i. of the Stuart
Papers (Hist. MSS. ) ; and it is clear that
he had handed over some of the papers to
various persons as specimens before the
Prince Regent obtained possession of the
bulk. Mr. F. H. Groome, in the ' D.N.B.'
article on the Sobieski-Stuarts, says that they
are known to have had dealings with
Watson ; and it is safe to assume that he is
the " Dr. Beaton " who appears as the
authority for the romantic narrative which
they put forward in their ' Tales of the Cen-
tury.' Mr. Groome also wrote on their case,
under the title of ' Monarchs in Partibus,' in
The Bookman, September, 1892; and there is
an article by Mr. Henry Jenner (which I
have not seen) in The Genealogical Magazine,
May, 1897. The earliest reference to their
claims appeared in The Catholic Magazine
in 1843. Other references will be found in
Chambers' s Journal, May, 1844 ; Dr. Doran's
' London in Jacobite Times,' vol. ii. p. 390 ;
Vernon Lee's * Countess of Albany ' ; and
' Under Fourteen Flags,' vol. ii. p. 146. 'The
Legitimist Kalendar ' gives the descendants
of Charles Edward Stuart, the younger of
the brothers. R. S. PENGELLY.
12 Poynder's Road, Clapham Park, 8.W.
1 am grateful for the numerous references to your pages, 1877 passim. None of them touches the sale of the Count d'Albanie's effects, of which I quoted The Times adver- tisement. Can any one tell me how the Stuart relics at this sale were regarded- genuine or speculative ?
HAEOLD S. ROGERS.
DAVID Ross (12 S. i. 127). I believe that
the marriage of David Ross and Fanny
Murray took place between June, 1756, and
March, 1759, but I do not know the exact
date. The most circumstantial account will
be found in ' Records of my Life,' by John
Taylor, i. 362-6. Perhaps the Journals of
the House of Lords, April 10, 1771 (when
his appeal for the reversion of the decision
of the Lords of Session with regard to his
father's will was decided), may disclose his
father's name. Or it may be found in the
Records of the Court of Session in Scotland,
Dec. 23, 1769, and Jan. 27, 1770.
HORACE BLEACKLEY.
