Sobieski Stuarts

rdf:langString Sobieski Stuarts

rdf:langString In the 1820s, two English brothers, John Carter Allen (1795–1872) and Charles Manning Allen (1802–1880) adopted the names John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart, moved to Scotland, became Roman Catholics, and about 1839 began to claim that their father, Thomas Allen (1767–1852), a former Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, had been born in Italy the only legitimate child of Prince Charles Edward Stuart and his wife Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. They claimed that Thomas had, for fear of kidnapping or assassination, been brought secretly to England on a ship captained by their grandfather, Admiral John Carter Allen (1725–1800), and adopted by him. Thomas was thus, they claimed, 'de jure monarch of England in place of the then reigning sovereign Queen Victoria'. 'They succeeded in fabricating around them an aura of bogus royalty which attracted the allegiance of a few romantic Jacobites in Victorian times'. Herbert Vaughan called their story 'an impudent fabrication' and 'an unblushing fraud' but it was as Sir Charles Petrie wrote 'proof of the hold which the House of Stuart has never ceased to exercise upon popular imagination in the British Isles, so that ... if a man were to declare himself the heir to the Yorkist or Tudor dynasty, he would attract but little attention, yet if he claim to be a Stuart he will find hundreds ready to believe him'. The brothers' two publications, Vestiarium Scoticum (Edinburgh, 1842) and Costume of the Clans (Edinburgh, 1843), described by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper as 'shot through with pure fantasy and bare faced forgery', have been sources widely used by the tartan industry in Scotland.