第66章

On the other hand is the monstrous will. Unworldly as de la Cloche may have been, he can hardly have fancied that Wales was the appanage of a bastard of the Crown; and he certainly knew that 'the province of Monmouth' already gave a title to his younger brother, the duke, born in 1649. Yet the testator claims Wales or Monmouth for his unborn child. Again, de la Cloche may not have known who his mother was. But not only can no Mary, or Mary Henrietta, of the Lennox family be found, except the impossible Lady Mary who was younger than de la Cloche; but we observe no trace of the presence of any d'Aubigny, or even of any Stewart, male or female, at the court of the Prince of Wales in Jersey, in 1646.*

*See Hoskins, Charles II. in the Channel islands (Bentley, London, 1854).

The names of the suite are given by Dr. Hoskins from the journal (MS.) of Chevalier, a Jersey man, and from the Osborne papers. No Stewart or Stuart occurs, but, in a crowd of some 3,000 refugees, there MAY have been a young lady of the name. Lady Fanshaw, who was in Jersey, is silent. The will is absurd throughout, but whether it is all of the dying pretender's composition, whether it may not be a thing concocted by an agent of the Corona family, is another question.

It is a mere conjecture, suggested by more than one inquirer, as by Mr. Steuart, that the words 'Signora D. Maria Stuardo della famiglia delli Baroni di S. Marzo,' refer to the Lennox family, which would naturally be spoken of as Lennox, or as d'Aubigny. About the marquisate of Juvigny (which cannot mean the dukedom of d'Aubigny) we have said enough. In short, the whole will is absurd, and it is all but inconceivable that the real de la Cloche could have been so ignorant as to compose it.

So the matter stands; one of two hypotheses must be correct--the Naples man was de la Cloche or he was not--yet either hypothesis is almost impossible.*

*I was at first inclined to suppose that the de la Cloche papers in the Gesu--the letters of Charles II. and the note of the Queen of Sweden--were forgeries, part of an impostor's apparatus, seized at Naples and sent to Oliva for inspection. But the letters-- handwriting and royal seal apart--show too much knowledge of Charles's secret policy to have been feigned. We are not told that the certificates of de la Cloche's birth were taken from James Stuart in prison, and, even if he possessed them, as Armanni says he did, he may have stolen them, and they may have been restored by the Viceroy of Naples, as we said, to the Jesuits. As to whether Charles II. paid his promised subscription to the Jesuit building fund, Father Boero says: 'We possess a royal letter, proving that it was abundant' (Boero, Istoria etc., p. 56, note 1), but he does not print the letter; and Mr. Brady speaks now of extant documents proving the donation, and now of 'a traditional belief that Charles was a benefactor of the Jesuit College.'

It may be added that, on December 27, 1668, Charles wrote to his sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans: 'I assure you that nobody does, nor shall, know anything of it here' (of his intended conversion and secret dealings with France) 'but my selfe, and that one person more, till it be fitte to be publique. . .' 'That one person more' is not elsewhere referred to in Charles's known letters to his sister, unless he be 'he that came last, and delivered me your letter of the 9th December; he has given me a full account of what he was charged with, and I am very well pleased with what he tells me' (Whitehall, December 14, 1668).

This mysterious person, the one sharer of the King's secret, may be de la Cloche, if he could have left England by November 18, visited Rome, and returned to Paris by December 9. If so, de la Cloche may have fulfilled his mission. Did he return to Italy, and appear in Naples in January or February 1669? (See Madame, by Julia Cartwright, pp. 274, 275, London, 1894.)