Sobieski Stuarts
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.
The first child, William (died 1878), who used the surname MacGarrow, claimed to have been born in Glamorganshire in Wales but his baptism and the exact whereabouts of Thomas and Ann at this time have not been determined.
He ostensibly registered the death of his wife Catherine Matilda at Portland Place North, on 14 February 1841, again calling himself Thomas MacGaradh, but describing her as 'Matilda Manning, widow'.
Some believed that he was buried at Old St Pancras, Middlesex (as stated in the introduction to the 1892 edition of his sons' The Costume of the Clans, xvii, and repeated in the Dictionary of National Biography) and Beveridge added 'but the stone said to have been placed over his grave cannot now be found'.
[15] No detail of the educations of Thomas's two sons has been found though they claimed that the secret of their royal descent had been revealed to them about 1811, that they had fought for Napoleon at Dresden (in August 1813), Leipzig (October 1813) and Waterloo (June 1815) and had learned Gaelic in London.
However, the couple moved to Scotland after marriage and their first child, Anna Marie Stuart, born 27 July 1823, was baptised at Edinburgh and there recorded in the surname Hay on 20 October 1823.
[23] In his letter to Chambers just prior to the marriage John asked for a loan of £100 until his wife's dividends were paid but when his father-in-law eventually died in March 1872 the total estate was sworn at 'under £1,500' and later as 'under £2,000'.
In Scotland the brothers 'conducted themselves as members of a reigning dynasty who wished to preserve their incognito'[25] and their claims 'were accorded a level of credence' (as the Dictionary of National Biography said at the end of the century) by 'men of rank and intelligence, such as the tenth Earl of Moray (1771–1848), the fourteenth Lord Lovat (1802–1875), the late Marquis of Bute (1793–1848), Thomas Dick-Lauder (1784–1848), and Robert Chambers (1802–1871)'.
On behalf of the Society of Scottish Antiquaries he was shown a transcript of part of the brothers' manuscript but from its language alone 'indignantly declared his conviction that the MS itself must be an absolute fabrication'.
[31] However, calling himself John Sobieski Stuart, the elder brother then produced the lavish Vestiarium Scoticum (Edinburgh, 1842), costing ten guineas, which purported to be a reproduction, with colour illustrations, of a better version of the 1721 manuscript, this one being dated to 1571.
Considerable interest in clans and tartans continued, and the following year, under the name John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart, John and his brother Charles published The Costume of the Clans: with observations upon the literature, arts, manufactures and commerce of the Highland and Western Isles during the middle ages; and the influence of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries upon their present condition (Edinburgh, 1845) which, as noted above, received intense criticism.
In the second tale, some years later, the grown child arrived in the Western Highlands of Scotland where, although called O'Haloran and thought to be the son of the former captain, he is known as The Red Eagle and addressed as a prince.
He concluded about the Vestiarium that 'this pretended MS of the sixteenth century is an absolute fabrication, and of no authority whatever' and about the Tales that Prince Charles Edward Stuart 'could have had no possible reason for concealing the birth of an heir'; any idea that he had 'left a legitimate male progeny' was 'the silliest of dreams'.
In 1848 John attempted A reply to the Quarterly Review upon the Vestiarium Scoticum (Edinburgh, 1848) and the two brothers then produced Lays of the deer forest: with sketches of olden and modern deer-hunting (2 vols.
Edinburgh, 1848), but three of their benefactors, the Earl of Moray, the Marquis of Bute and Thomas Dick-Lauder, died that year and the brothers were now so discredited that Charles took his wife to Prague where their son was in the Austrian army[35] and John followed soon after.
In London they then occupied themselves with research, being well-known figures in the British Museum, wearing Highland dress or military tunics and using pens embellished with gold coronets.
John's brother Charles then assumed the title of Count of Albany and was active in Catholic circles in London but died from the same address (by then called 52 Alderney Street) on a trip to France on the Steamer Rainbow near Bordeaux, 24 December 1880, and was buried at Eskadale.
Study of correspondence in the Chiddingstone archives has enabled Craig Buchanan to identify Charles Edward Stuart, his daughter Maria, and sister-in-law Georgina as the authors of travel-related articles published in the magazine Once a Week in 1860.
Buchanan also suggests that John Sobieski Stuart was the author of six articles published under the series title "Tales of the Gael" in William Motherwell's short-lived daily literary magazine The Day between February and April 1832.
