CLAIMANTS TO ROYALTY.
Since the famous Tichborne trial brought ‘The Claimant’ so prominently before the reading public, the general use of a term which accurately described his position without seeming to prejudge his case has given it universal currency as a convenient designation in similar cases of disputed or doubtful identity. For instance, the newspapers have recently announced a ‘Napoleonic Claimant,’ who makes his appearance in the most unromantic manner, by presenting himself before a magistrate at a police station in Paris, and asking for money to pay his passage to England. He claimed to be the Prince Imperial, the legitimate son of the Emperor Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugenie. The announcement of his death in Zululand was a mistake: he was not killed, but captured by the Zulus. After some time, he effected his escape, and having traversed Africa from south to north, he crossed the Mediterranean and landed at Marseilles. His poverty and his dignity prevented him from presenting himself before his mother, and so he stayed and worked in Marseilles incognito for several years. But he met the Empress once: it was at Vienna, at the tomb of Maximilian. So violent was his emotion, that he swooned away. The Empress herself raised him and tended him; but when he became conscious, she had gone. He wished now to go to her, but he was penniless. Would the magistrate grant him the sum necessary; and his mother, the Empress, would repay the loan? When asked to show his papers, he produced a book in which was entered the name of Pollak, a journeyman clockmaker of Vienna. It had been lent to him to enable him to maintain his incognito.
When he found that his story was not to be credited, he accused the magistrate of yielding to pressure put upon him by the Princes Victor and Louis, whose interest it was to supplant the rightful heir. He spoke in the language of a well-educated man; and when examined with a view to determine his mental condition, he betrayed no symptom of derangement.
The methods of all Claimants have a certain similarity, though some have been more audacious and successful than others. This is perhaps the most audacious of modern instances. But there are many examples of Claimants more or less notorious in the history of past times, whose pretensions are quite as difficult to reconcile with recorded facts. In most of these historical instances the Claimants have advanced pretensions to the name and station of a deceased member of some reigning family, and much obscurity has thus been thrown around historical events, whose incidental details have been confused and complicated by the conflicting statements of contemporary or nearly contemporary records.
Perhaps the least known, but not the least curious and tragical story of a Claimant is that of the woman who, in the first year of the fourteenth century, attempted to personate the Maid of Norway, heiress to the crown of Scotland, and presumptive heiress also to that of Norway.—It had been given out that the Maid of Norway had died on her voyage to Scotland; but that, it was now alleged, was a mistake; she did not die; but she was ‘sold’ or betrayed by those who had charge of her, and carried away to an obscure hiding-place on the continent. She had at last found means to escape, and coming from Lübeck to Bergen—the very same port from which she had sailed for Scotland ten years before—she there presented herself to the people of Norway as the Princess Margaret. Although her father, King Eirik, was now dead, and her uncle Hakon possessed the throne, her right of succession to the crowns of Norway and of Scotland had been secured by the marriage contract of Norburgh, by which her father had espoused her mother Margaret, the daughter of Alexander III., king of Scotland. The Claimant appeared old for her years, and was white-haired; but sorrow brings gray hairs more surely than age. She was a married woman; and her husband came with her to Norway, and subsequently shared her tragic fate. King Hakon himself was present at her trial in Bergen, of which, unfortunately, no record exists. But we learn from the Iceland Annals that she was burned to death as an impostor at Nordness, and her husband beheaded. When she was being taken through the Kongsgaard Port to the place of execution, she said; ‘I remember well when I, as a child, was taken through this self-same gate to be carried into Scotland; there was then in the High Church of the Apostles an Iceland priest, Haflidi by name, who was chaplain to my father, King Eirik; and when the clergy ceased singing, Sir Haflidi began the hymn Veni Creator, and that hymn was sung out to the end, just as I was taken on board the ship.’
Haflidi Steinsson, the priest here mentioned, had long since gone back to Iceland, where he died parish priest of Breidabolstad; and in chronicling his death, the annalist adds that ‘he was King Eirik’s chaplain at the time that his daughter Margaret was taken to Scotland, as she herself afterwards bore witness when she was being carried to execution at Nordness.’ Indeed, so prevalent was the belief in the personal identity of the Claimant with the daughter of King Eirik who died on the voyage to Orkney in 1290, that the place of her execution became a resort of pilgrims; and many of the priesthood having countenanced the popular belief in her martyrdom, a chapel was built on the spot where she suffered; and though uncanonised, and reprobated by the dignitaries of the church, her memory was held in reverence till the Reformation as St Maritte (Margaret), the Martyr of Nordness. In 1320, the number of pilgrimages to this irregular shrine had become so numerous that Bishop Audfinn of Bergen issued an official interdict against them, an interference which was resented by his canons, some of whom were bold enough to protest against its promulgation.
Nothing is known of the Claimant’s previous history, except that the contemporary annalist states that she came to Bergen in a ship from Lübeck. Absolom Pedersen asserts that she came from Scotland, but gives no authority for the statement, and there is sufficient evidence in the records to render this highly improbable. But it is a very remarkable circumstance that Wyntoun, the popular historian of his time, gave currency in Scotland to the statement—which we must assume to have been then the popular belief—that the Maid of Norway was put to death in her own country by martyrdom. After giving circumstantial details of the sending of the Scottish embassy to Norway, consisting of Sir David of the Wemyss and Michael Scot of Balwearie, he adds, that when they arrived—
Dead then was that Maiden fair,
That of law suld have been heir,
And appearëd til have been
By the law of Norway Queen;
But that Maiden sweet for-thi [therefore]
Was put to death by martyry.
In accordance with the usage of the period, the expression of the chronicler describing the manner of her death would be universally understood to mean burning at the stake; and the evident anachronism, as well as the inherent improbability of the narrative, is accounted for by the fact that it quite accurately describes the death of the Claimant, but assigns it to the time of the death of the Princess. The reason given by Wyntoun for the ‘martyrdom’ is, that the Norwegians—though their law allowed—could not brook the idea of a woman succeeding to the crown; and this also may be accounted for by the fact that the woman who suffered was a pretender to the crown.
No incident in Scottish history is more pathetic than that of the untimely death of the young Princess on her voyage to Orkney; and no single event in the whole course of that history has exercised a more important influence on the destinies of the nation. In these circumstances, we cannot cease to wonder how it came to pass that there is no authentic record of its details in the contemporary or nearly contemporary chronicles of Scottish or Norwegian history. The only contemporary document in Scottish record which notices her death is the letter of the Bishop of St Andrews to Edward I., dated at Leuchars the 7th of October 1290, in which the bishop states that there was a rumour of her death; but that he had heard subsequently that she ‘had recovered of her sickness, but was still weak.’ It was plain, however, that the bishop did not believe the rumour of her recovery, for he concludes his letter by praying King Edward to approach the Borders with his army to prevent bloodshed, seeing that Sir Robert Bruce had come to Perth and Mar and Athole were collecting their forces. On the Norwegian side, there is a total absence of authentic contemporary record of the time and manner of the death of the Princess; and there would have been absolutely nothing known of the details of her decease, if it had not been for the appearance ten years later of the Claimant, whom Munch, the historian of Norway, following Bishop Audfinn, has no hesitation in designating ‘The False Margaret.’
In his official interdict of 1320, forbidding the people ‘any longer to invoke that woman with great vows and worship as if she had been one of God’s martyrs,’ the bishop states that he has deemed it his duty to declare the truth as to her case; ‘She said, indeed, that she was the child and lawful heir of King Eirik; but when she came from Lübeck to Bergen she was gray-haired and white in the head, and was proved to be twenty years older than the time of King Eirik’s marriage with Margaret of Scotland. He was then only thirteen winters old, and consequently, could not have been the father of a person of her years. And then he had no other child than one daughter by Queen Margaret. This only child of King Eirik and Queen Margaret was on her journey to Scotland, when she died in Orkney between the hands of Bishop Narve of Bergen, and in the presence of the best men of the land, who had attended her from Norway; and the bishop and Herr Thore Hakonson and others brought back her corpse to Bergen, where her father had the coffin opened and narrowly examined the body, and himself acknowledged that it was his daughter’s corpse, and buried her beside the queen her mother, in the stone wall on the north side of the choir of the cathedral church of Bergen.’
Although we owe these details of the Princess’s death and burial, meagre as they are, to the bishop’s anxiety to confute the pretensions of the Claimant, there can be no room for doubt as to their strict truth. And yet it was possible, ten years after the event, for a Claimant so to influence the popular belief, that, although burned to death as a traitorous impostor, she was regarded by many of the priesthood as a martyr; and by the common people was not only worshipped as a saint in the church erected to her memory on the spot where she suffered, but celebrated in songs which long continued to be handed down among them. Even to this day, the precise date of the death of the Princess Margaret remains unknown; and until quite recently, it was generally believed that she had been buried in Kirkwall Cathedral, as is indeed stated by the Danish archæologist Worsaae in his account of that edifice given in his work on The Danes and Northmen in England. No History of Scotland, until the issue of the last edition of Dr John Hill Burton’s, has noticed the curious episode of the False Margaret, a knowledge of which is necessary in order to account for the fact that, in Wyntoun’s time, it was the popular belief in Scotland that the Maid of Norway had suffered martyrdom at the hands of her own countrymen.
It is curious that in connection with the history of Scotland, and before the close of the fourteenth century, we find the story of another Claimant not less audacious in his pretensions, but much more fortunate in his patrons, by whom he was maintained till his death as a state pensioner, and buried in one of the churches of Stirling under the royal name and regal title to which he had laid claim. There was this strange element in his case that he was the second personator of the same dead king. Readers of English history are familiar with the incidents of the revolution which placed Henry of Lancaster on the throne, and consigned ‘the good King Richard’ to a perpetual prison in Pontefract Castle. But the subsequent events in the life of the imprisoned monarch, and the date and manner of his death, are shrouded in an impenetrable obscurity. One of the ablest of our Scottish historians, Patrick Fraser Tytler, has even declared, after an elaborate investigation of the whole available evidence, that this second Claimant, whose story we are about to notice, was Richard II. in reality.
It is well known that shortly after the king’s imprisonment, there was a conspiracy to replace him on the throne. The conspirators attempted to attract the people to their cause by spreading abroad the rumour of his escape from Pontefract; and, as is stated by a contemporary chronicler, ‘to make this the more credible, they brought into the field with them a chaplain called Father Maudelain, who so exactly resembled good King Richard in face and person, in form and speech, that every one who saw him declared that he was their former king.’ The conspiracy failed; and those most deeply concerned in it, among whom was the first personator, Father Maudelain, were beheaded.
Shortly afterwards, it was given out that King Richard had died in Pontefract Castle, on or about the 14th of February 1399. Rumour, indeed, spoke freely of the suspicion, that if he were dead, he had surely been murdered by his enemies, and with the connivance of the reigning king. It was not till nearly a month after the alleged date of his death that, in order to silence the popular rumours, King Henry caused the body to be brought publicly to London ‘with the face exposed,’ and laid in state for two days in the church of St Paul, ‘that the people might believe for certain that he was dead.’ ‘But,’ says the old chronicler formerly quoted, ‘I certainly do not believe that it was the king, but I think it was Maudelain, his chaplain,’ who had been beheaded little more than a month previously.
There were many who shared this unbelief; and in 1402, the rumours that King Richard was yet alive became so persistent and circumstantial, that King Henry dealt with them by putting to death a number of persons, principally priests and friars, for spreading such treasonable reports. The cause of the revival of these rumours at this time is revealed in a document issued by King Henry, requiring the sheriffs to arrest all persons guilty of spreading the report that King Richard was alive, which had arisen from a person calling himself King Richard having appeared in Scotland in company with one William Serle, who had been groom of the robes to Richard, and had possessed himself of his signet.
As the scene thus shifts to Scotland, we naturally turn to the Scottish chronicles and records for the further elucidation of the mystery. Wyntoun and Bower—each writing of events which happened within his own lifetime—narrate the story of this second Claimant in much the same manner. He came from the out-isles of Scotland, having been discovered in the kitchen of Donald, Lord of the Isles, by persons who had seen King Richard, and recognised his likeness. He was sent in charge of Lord Montgomery to Robert III. of Scotland, by whom he was well received, and assigned a pension of one hundred merks yearly. After King Robert’s death, the pension was continued by the Regent Albany. The Scottish Chamberlain, in charging his accounts with these annual payments, has entered them as paid to ‘King Richard of England.’ Finally, we learn from an old Scottish chronicle that when he died at Stirling in 1419, his body was buried on the north side of the high-altar of the Church of the Preaching Friars, and a long Latin epitaph graven over his tomb informed the reader that ‘Here lies buried King Richard of England.’ Yet it has been established as clearly as any such question can now be established by evidence, that this second personator of King Richard was an adventurer named Thomas Ward, or Thomas of Trumpington, who, with his confederate William Serle, is exempted by name from the general amnesty granted to political offenders by Henry IV. in 1403.