Sobieski Stuarts

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’.[1]

‘They succeeded in fabricating around them an aura of bogus royalty which attracted the allegiance of a few romantic Jacobites in Victorian times’.[2] Herbert Vaughan called their story ‘an impudent fabrication’ and ‘an unblushing fraud’[3] 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’.[4]

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’,[5] have been sources widely used by the tartan industry in Scotland.

References
  1. Sir Charles Petrie, The Jacobite Movement: the last phase: 1716-1807 (London, 1950) 189.
  2. James Lees-Milne, The last Stuarts (1984) page 230.
  3. Herbert M. Vaughan, The last of the royal Stuarts: Henry Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (1906) page 280
  4. Sir Charles Petrie, The Jacobite movement: the last phase: 1716-1807 (London, 1950) 187.
  5. ‘Invention of tradition; the Highland tradition of Scotland’ in Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The invention of tradition (University of Cambridge, 1983)
  6. John Charnock, Biographia Navalis, vol. 6 (1798) 288.
  7. Anthony Camp, New light on the Sobieski Stuarts, in Genealogists' Magazine, vol. 31, no. 8 (December 2014) 298-306.
  8. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts: their claim to be descended from Prince Charlie (1909) 102.
  9. Letter of William Scott in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1800, vol. i, page 1021.
  10. The Complete Peerage, vol. v (1926) pages 99-100
  11. Notes and Queries, vol. 197 (1952) 456
  12. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 20-21, 102-3.
  13. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 102.
  14. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 89, 102.
  15. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 89-90.
  16. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 25.
  17. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 25.
  18. The Times, 9 May 1836, quoting the Glasgow Chronicle (John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 37-38).
  19. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 93.
  20. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 93.
  21. Burke’s Landed Gentry (1858) page 643.
  22. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 100.
  23. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 27.
  24. Principal Probate Registry, 10 June 1872.
  25. Sir Charles Petrie, The Jacobite Movement: the last phase: 1716-1807 (London, 1950) 191.
  26. Sir Charles Petrie, The Jacobite Movement: the last phase: 1716-1807 (London, 1950) 191-2].
  27. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 59.
  28. Quarterly Review, vol. 81, June-September 1847, page 64.
  29. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 24.
  30. Complete Baronetage (vol. 4, 1904) page 362, note a.
  31. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 60.
  32. Hugh Douglas, Bonnie Prince Charlie in love (1995) 218.
  33. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 101; Dictionary of National Biography.
  34. John Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts (1909) 27.

Sources
  • Hugh Beveridge, The Sobieski Stuarts: their claim to be descended from Prince Charlie (Inverness, 1909). The book had previously been published as a series of articles in The Inverness Courier, commencing in 1907. He concluded (page v) that ‘nothing has been found of a sufficiently definite nature to support those claims. At the same time there is not sufficient evidence to damn them’.
  • C.L. Berry, ‘An annotated pedigree of the Allen family and the so-called Sobieski-Stuarts’, in Notes and Queries, vol. 197 (1952) 418-29, 455-57, 470-71, 511-13.*
  • Sir Charles Petrie, The Jacobite movement: the last phase: 1716-1807 (London, 1950).
  • James Lees-Milne, The last Stuarts: British royalty in exile (New York, 1984).
  • Anthony Camp, 'New Light on the Sobieski Stuarts', in Genealogists' Magazine, vol. 31, no. 8 (December 2014) 298-396, with additions at anthonyjcamp.com.

Sources
  • Camp, Anthony. "New Light on the Sobieski Stuarts", in Genealogists Magazine, vol. 31, no. 8 (December 2014) 298-306.
  • Fraser, Marie, John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart & Charles Edward Stuart.
  • Reynolds, K. D. "Stuart, John Sobieski Stolberg". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  • Robb, Steven. "The Sobieski Stuart Brothers", Royal Stuart Review 2003.
  • Trevor-Roper, Hugh (1983), "The Highland Tradition of Scotland", in Hobsbawm; Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition.
  • Catalogue, UK: Copac.
  • Catalogue, National Library of Scotland.
  • Catalogue, British Library.
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