Not so quietly was effected the next business entailed on Parliament, by the Jacobite rebellion,—or, rather, the business was assumed by Her Majesty herself, if any business can be assumed by an irresponsible sovereign whose ministers have to answer for everything done in that sovereign’s name. The title of Earl of Cromartie (with its inferior titles once worn by the head of the house of Mackenzie) was, and still is, under attainder. But there was a great heiress, Miss Annie Hay Mackenzie, who, in 1849, married the Duke of Sutherland. In 1861, the queen created this lady Countess of Cromartie, Viscountess Tarbat of Tarbat, Baroness Castlehaven, and Baroness Macleod of Castle Leod, in her own right, with limitation of succession to her second son Francis and his heirs;—the elder succeeding to the Dukedom.
The latest restoration was by legal process. Among the minor unfortunates whose Jacobitism was punished by forfeiture, was a Lord Balfour of Burleigh. In 1869, Mr. Bruce, of Kennett, Clackmannan, gained his suit to Parliament, and recovered that resonant title; and it is said that the modern Balfour of Burleigh has in his veins the blood of Bruce;—which, after all, is not so honest or so legitimately royal as that of Baliol.
TITLES UNDER ATTAINDER.
With regard to Jacobite peerages, ‘Experience has shown that in the absence of a Resolution and Judgment of the House of Lords, it is a dangerous thing to say, without qualification, who represents a Peerage. The Duchess of Sutherland is Countess of Cromartie, as the Earl of Errol is Baron Kilmarnock, not in the Peerage of Scotland, but that of the United Kingdom, in virtue of a recent creation. Each of the Scottish Peerages held by the three Jacobite Noblemen is still open to any Nobleman who can establish a right thereto, and obtain a reversal of the Attainder.’ (‘Notes and Queries,’ Jan. 11, 1873, p. 45.) As to the heir to the title of Balmerino, we find that Captain John Elphinstone, R.N. (Admiral Elphinstone of the Russian Navy,—the hero of Tchesme), left a son, William, also a captain in the Czar’s navy, whose son, Alexander Francis, Captain R.N., and a noble of Livonia (born 1799), claimed to be heir to the title of Balmerino, were the attainder removed. All his sons were in the British naval or military service, in which they and other members of the baronial house greatly distinguished themselves.
FITZ-PRETENDERS.
While some of the above titles were being relieved from the obloquy which had been brought upon them by the Jacobitism of former wearers, and no one was dreaming, except in some out-of-the-way corner of the Scottish highlands, that the Jacobites had still, and had never ceased to have, a king of their own, a strange, wild, story was developing itself, which had a remarkably ridiculous, not to say impudent, object for its motive. To make it understandable, the reader is asked to go a few years back, in order to comprehend a mystery, in which the ‘Quarterly Review’ of June, 1847, in an article sometimes attributed to the Rt. Hon. John Wilson Croker, but more correctly to Mr. Lockhart, smashed all that was mysterious.
In the year 1800 (October 2nd), Admiral John Carter Allen (or Allan), Admiral of the White, died at his house in Devonshire Place, London. Such is the record in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ In the succeeding number, a correspondent describes him as an old Westminster scholar, a brave sailor, a Whig well looked upon by the Rockingham party, and of such good blood as to induce Lord Hillsborough to believe that he was the legal male heir to the earldom of Errol.
The admiral was twice married and had two sons. By his will, dated February, 1800, he bequeathed to the elder, ‘Captain John Allen, of His Majesty’s navy,’ 2,200l.; to the younger, ‘Thomas Allen, third Lieutenant in His Majesty’s navy,’ 100l. The reader is respectfully requested to keep this lieutenant, Thomas Allen, alone in view. He may turn out to be a very unexpected personage.
ADMIRAL ALLEN’S SON AND GRANDSONS.
Lieutenant Thomas, in 1792, married, at Godalming, Katherine Manning, the second daughter of the vicar. This would seem to have been a suitable marriage; but it has been suggested that it may have appeared unsuitable in the eyes of the admiral, and that, for this reason, he bequeathed his younger son only 100l. But whatever the reason for such disproportion may have been, the lieutenant’s marriage produced two sons, John Hay Allen and Charles Stuart Allen. The younger gentleman married, in November, 1822, in London, Anne, daughter of the late John Beresford, Esq., M.P. In the record of this marriage, the bridegroom is styled ‘youngest son of Thomas Hay Allen.’ In the same year, the lieutenant’s elder son published a volume of poems (Hookham), which, however, excited no attention, though it contained dark allusions to some romantic history. The father, Thomas, the lieutenant, seems to have been much on and about the Western isles of Scotland, as well as on the mainland. There existed there a fond superstition that Charles Edward would appear in some representative of his race, very near akin to himself. The lieutenant must have been an impressionable man. He died about the year 1831, and he must have revealed previously a secret to his sons, who, in such case, kept it long under consideration, till, probably out of filial respect for his veracity, they manifested their belief in the revelation, and, in 1847, declared themselves to be, the elder, John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart; the younger, Charles Edward Stuart. Their father, Lieutenant Thomas Allen, son of the old Admiral of the White, must have imparted to them the not uninteresting circumstance, that he was the legitimate son of the young Chevalier, and that all faithful Scots and Jacobites had yet a king. Long after the lieutenant’s death, a book was published in London (1847), by Dolman, the Roman Catholic publisher, of Bond Street, of which the two brothers were joint authors, in which the words you have yet a king, implied that John Sobieski S. Stuart was the individual who had sole right to wear the crown of his ancestors. But this momentous book was preceded by others.