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