Such is the adventure of Dr. Beaton, and thus he is said to have related it, in the year 1831, eighty-five years after the battle of Culloden, where he had himself seen Charles Edward; whence it is presumable that the doctor was considerably over a hundred when he made the disclosure. This story of Doctor Beaton was published, not in a historical work, but in a volume entitled Tales of the Century; or Sketches of the Romance of History between the years 1746 and 1846, published at Edinburgh in 1847. But although this book might pass as a work of imagination, and could, therefore, scarcely be impugned as a historical document, there is every reason for supposing that, while not officially claiming to reveal the existence of an heir of the Stuarts, it was deliberately intended to convey information to that effect; and as such, an anonymous writer (either Lockhart or Dennistoun) made short work of it in the Quarterly Review for June 1847, from which I have derived the greater part of my knowledge of this curious "romance of history."
Nay, the Tales of the Century were undoubtedly intended to insinuate a further remarkable fact: not merely that there still existed heirs of Stuarts in the direct male line, but that these heirs of the Stuarts were no others but the joint authors of the book. The two brothers styling themselves on the title-page John Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart, but whose legal names were respectively John Hay Allan and Charles Stuart Allan, had been known for some years in the Highlands as persons enveloped in a degree of romantic mystery, and claiming to be something much more illustrious than what they were officially supposed to be, the grandsons of an admiral in the service of George III. According to the information collected by Baron von Reumont, the joint authors of the Tales of the Century had made themselves conspicuous by their affectation of the Stuart tartan, to which, as Hay Allans, they could have no right; by a certain Stuart make-up (by the help of a Charles I. wig which was once found and mistaken for a bird's-nest by an irreverent Highlander) on the part of the elder, and by a habit of bowing to his brother whenever the King's health was drunk on the part of the younger. Moreover the family circumstances of these gentlemen's father coincided exactly with those of the hero of this book, of the supposed son of Charles Edward Stuart and Louise of Stolberg. Their father, Thomas Hay Allan, once a lieutenant in the navy, was known before the law as the younger son of a certain Admiral Carter Allan, who laid claims to the earldom of Errol; and the Jolair Dhearg (for such was the Keltic appellation of the hero of the Tales of the Century) was the reputed son of a certain Admiral O'Haloran, who laid claim to the Earldom of Strathgowrie, to which curious parallel the writer in the Quarterly adds the additional point that Errol, being in the district of Gowrie, the Earldom of Strathgowrie claimed by the imaginary Admiral O'Haloran was evidently another name for the Earldom of Errol claimed by the real Admiral Carter Allan, two names, by the way, O'Haloran and Carter Allan, of which the first seems intended to reproduce in some measure the sound of the other. The father of Messrs. John Hay and Charles Stuart Allan, was married in 1792, and the hero of the Tales of the Century was married somewhere about 1791, both to ladies more suited to the sons of an admiral than to the sons of the Pretender. Taking all these circumstances into consideration it becomes obvious that when the two brothers Hay Allan assumed respectively the names of John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, they distinctly, though unofficially, identified themselves with the sons of the Jolair Dhearg of their book, with the sons of that mysterious infant at whose birth Dr. Beaton had been present, who had been conveyed by night on board the Albina and educated as the son of Admiral O'Haloran; in other words, with the sons of the child, unknown to history, of the Count and Countess of Albany.
Now, not only are we assured by Sir Horace Mann, whose spies surrounded the Pretender and his wife, and included even their physicians, that there never was the smallest or briefest expectation of an heir to the Stuarts; but, added to this positive evidence, we have an enormous bulk of even more convincing negative evidence by which it is completely corroborated. This negative evidence consists of a heap of improbabilities and impossibilities, of which even a few will serve to convince the reader. The Pretender married, and was pensioned for marrying, merely that the French Court might have another possible Pretender to use as a weapon against England; is it likely, therefore, that such an heir would be hid away so as to lose his identity, and be completely and utterly forgotten? The Pretender, separated from his wife in consequence of circumstances which will be related further on, called to him, as sole companion of his old age, his illegitimate daughter by Miss Walkenshaw, after neglecting and apparently forgetting both her and her mother for twenty years; is it likely he would have done this had he possessed a legitimate son? Cardinal York assumed the title of Henry IX. immediately on the decease of his brother; is it likely that he, always indifferent to royal honours, always faithful to his brother, and now almost dying, would have done so had he known that his brother had left a son? The Countess of Albany, who never relinquished her Stuart position, and who was extremely devoted to children, left her fortune to the painter Fabre; is it likely she would have done so had she been aware that she possessed a child of her own? But there is yet further evidence—I scarcely know whether I should say positive or negative, but in point of fact perhaps both at once, since it is evidence that the word of one, at least, of the joint authors of the Tales of the Century cannot outweigh the silence of all other authorities. Five years before the brothers Allan, or Stuart, whichever they should be called, mysteriously informed the world of the adventures of the Jolair Dhearg, the elder of the two, once John Hay Allan, now John Sobieski Stuart, had brought out a magnificent volume, price five guineas, entitled Vestiarium Scoticum, and purporting to be a treatise on family tartans written somewhere in the 16th century, and now edited for the first time. The history of this work, as stated in the preface, was well-nigh as complicated and as romantic as the history of the Jolair Dhearg. The only reliable copy of three known by Mr. Sobieski Stuart, of which one was said to exist in the library of the Monastery of St. Augustine at Cadiz, and another had been obtained from an Edinburgh sword-player and porter named John Ross, was in the possession of the learned editors, and had been given by the fathers of the Scots College at Douay to Prince Edward Stuart, from whom it had, in some unspecified but doubtless extremely romantic manner (probably sewn in the swaddling clothes in which the Jolair Dhearg was consigned to Admiral O'Haloran) descended to Mr. John Sobieski Stuart. This venerable heraldic document appears, if one may judge by the review in the Quarterly, to have been well-deserving of publication, owing to the extremely new and unexpected information which it contained upon Scottish archæology. Among such information may be mentioned that it derived several clans from other clans with which they were well known to have no possible connection; that it extended the use of tartans to border-families who had never heard of such a thing; that it contained many words and expressions hitherto entirely unknown in the particular dialect in which it was written; and, moreover, that it multiplied complicated and recondite patterns of tartans in a manner so remarkable that Sir Walter Scott, to whom part of Mr. Sobieski Stuart's transcript of the ancient MS. was submitted, was led to suspect "that information as to its origin might be obtained even in a less romantic site than the cabin of a Cowgate porter (or the Scots College at Douay), even behind the counter of one of the great clan-tartan warehouses which used to illuminate the principal thoroughfare of Edinburgh."
This important and well-nigh unique document was apparently never submitted in its original MS. to anyone; the copy from the Scots College at Douay, and the copy from the old sword-player of Cowgate, remained equally unknown to everyone save their fortunate possessor. But transcripts of some portions of the work were submitted, at the request of the Antiquarian Society, to Sir Walter Scott, and as he dismissed the deputation which had met to hear his opinion upon the Vestiarium Scoticum, the author of Waverley was pleased to remark by way of summing up: "Well, I think the March of the next rising" (alluding to the part of the Highlanders in the '45) "must be not 'Hey tuttie tattie,' but 'The Devil among the Tailors.'"
However, perhaps the Vestiarium Scoticum may have come out of the Scots College at Douay, and perhaps also the son of Charles Edward Stuart and of Louise of Stolberg may have been born in the room hung with red brocade, and have been handed over to a British Admiral one moonlight night, in the presence of the venerable Dr. Beaton, whom Providence permitted to attain the unusual age of a hundred years or more, in order that, with unimpaired faculties and unclouded memory, he might transmit to posterity this strange romance of history.
CHAPTER V.
FLORENCE.
It is quite impossible to tell the precise moment at which began what Horace Mann, most light-hearted and chirpy of diplomatists, called the Countess of Albany's martyrdom. As we have seen, Charles Edward had momentarily given up all excessive drinking at the time of his marriage. Bonstetten thought him a good-natured garrulous bore, and his wife a merry, childish young woman, who laughed at her husband's oft-told stories. This was the very decent exterior of the Pretender's domestic life in the first year of his marriage. But who can tell what there may have been before beneath the surface? Who can say when Louise d'Albany, hitherto apparently so childish, became suddenly a woman with the first terrible suspicion of the nature of the bondage into which she had been sold? Such things are unromantic, unpoetical, coarse, common-place; yet if the fears and the despair of a guiltless and charming girl have any interest for us, the first whiff of brandy-tainted breath which met the young wife in her husband's embraces, the first qualms and reekings after dinner which came before her eyes, the first bestial and unquiet drunkard's sleep which kept her awake in disgust and terror, these things, vile though they be, are as tragic as any more ideal horrors. At the beginning, most probably, Charles Edward drank only in the evening, and slept off his drunkenness over-night; nor does Bonstetten appear to have guessed that there was any skeleton in the palace at the Santissimi Apostoli. But the spies of the English minister soon reported that Charles Edward was returning to his old ways; that the "nasty bottle," as Cardinal York called it, had got the better of the young wife; and when, two years after their marriage, the Count and Countess of Albany had left Rome and settled in Florence, Charles Edward seems very soon to have acquired in the latter place the dreadful notoriety which he had long enjoyed in the former.
Circumstances also had conduced to replunge the Pretender into the habits to which the renewed hope of political support, the novelty of married life, and perhaps whatever of good may still have been conjured up in his nature by the presence of a beautiful young wife, had momentarily broken through. The French Government, after its sudden pre-occupation about the future of the Stuarts, seemed to have completely forgotten the existence of Charles Edward, except as regarded the payment of the pension granted on his marriage. The child that had been prepaid by that wedding pension, who was to rally the Jacobites round a man whose claims must otherwise devolve legitimately in a few years to the Hanoverian usurpers, the heir was not born, and, as month went by after month, its final coming became less and less likely. Nor was this all. Charles Edward seems to have expected that the sudden interest taken by the Court of Versailles in his affairs, and his new position as a married man and the possible father of a line of Stuarts, would bring the obdurate sovereigns of Italy, and especially the Pope, to grant him those royal honours enjoyed by his father, but hitherto obstinately denied to the moody drunkard whose presence in the paternal palace had been occasionally revealed only by the rumour of some more than ordinarily gross debauch, or the noise of some more than ordinarily violent scene of blackguardly altercation.