Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

With the Sobieski Stuart brothers, E H Langlois and Sara Losh we approach the far end
of the spectrum, where artefact, identity and meaning are inextricably interfused. The interiors
they created, in a house, a museum and a church respectively, require more detailed discussion.
Scott also reappears for, at the end of his life, he seems to have come to a less detached view of
his home and its possible meanings.
The Sobieski Stuarts and the death of Jonathan Oldbuck
The two brothers who came to be known as the Sobieski Stuarts began life as John Carter
Allen and Charles Manning Allen [fig: 39]. They were the sons of Thomas Gatehouse Allen an
English naval officer who, they claimed, was the legitimate son of Charles Edward Stuart, the
Young Pretender. Accounts of their lives, not surprisingly, vary substantially. The most recent,
an article by Steven Robb, published in 2003, purports to add more detail, although without any
indication of its sources. 31 The principal critical discussions of them are by Hugh Trevor-Roper.
His essay ‘The Highland Tradition of Scotland’ in The Invention of Tradition, offers an analysis
of their remarkable career, during which they created not only the concept of tartan as Scottish
national dress, but also designed many of the tartans in use today, while claiming historical
sources for them in their most famous, or notorious publication, the Vestiarium Scoticum, of
1842. Another version of Trevor-Roper’s essay was published posthumously in 2008 as ‘The
Tartan’, and covers essentially the same ground. 32
31 Robb, ‘The Sobieski Stuart Brothers’.
32 Trevor-Roper, The Invention of Scotland, pp. 216-236.
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