Claimants to Royalty

CLAIMANTS TO ROYALTY.
JOHN H. INGRAM.
Le public qui veut être dupé à tout prix, en était fort satisfait. —BOREL.
LONDON: DAVID BOGUE, 3, ST. MARTIN'S PLACE, TRAFALGAR SQUARE, W.C. 1882.
Hazell, Watson, and Viney, Printers, London and Aylesbury
CONTENTS.

The History of Popular Delusions might well have contained another chapter, and that one not calculated to have been the least interesting, devoted to a record of aspirants to the names and titles of deceased persons. The list of claimants to the thrones of defunct monarchs is a lengthy one, the chronicles of nearly every civilized country affording more or less numerous instances of the appearance of these pretenders to royalty. Human credulity has afforded a tempting bait for such impostors: le public , as Petrus Borel says, qui veut être dupé à tous prix, en était fort satisfait , for the discontented and ambitious have always been numerous enough and willing enough to accept, either as a leader or as a tool, any one sufficiently daring to assert his identity with that of the dead prince.
The subject of this volume should, indeed, possess sufficient attraction in itself, without needing the adventitious aid of any recent causes célèbres to give it additional interest. The mystery which envelopes the histories of such men as the supposititious Voldemar of Brandenburg, Perkin Warbeck, the soi-disant Sebastian of Portugal, and other renowned claimants to royalty, invests their romantic adventures with a glamour surpassing that of acknowledged fiction. Whether impostors, or the persons they alleged themselves to be, the record of their lives and fate forms one of the most fascinating chapters of historic biography. In many instances the materials procurable are too scanty to admit of lengthy memoirs, whilst even in cases where that is not so, only the most remarkable features of a claimant's story have been selected, in order to render this work as inclusive as possible. In instances of suspicious evidence (and, it must be premised, many of the incidents herein recorded are based upon dubious testimony), only a bare recapitulation of an authority's account is given, all expression of personal opinion being suppressed, and the reader left to form his own theory as to the truth or falsity of the aspirant's claim.