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

Figure 39 The Sobieski Stuart brothers, self-portrait
There will be more to say about the brothers in the next chapter where they figure as
Roman Catholic converts and Jacobites. In this context it is the use they made of historic
artefacts and their associations that is most interesting, for without doubt this was an essential
factor in their success. Both literally in the home that they made for themselves from 1839 on the
estate of Lord Lovat in Inverness-shire, and literarily in their writings, they created a setting in
which their claims appeared plausible. In both cases, in their house and in their pseudoautobiographical
fiction Tales of the Century published in 1847, the role of objects and their
associations, their authenticity or otherwise is a constant theme, a shadow narrative to the
brothers’ own story.
Trevor-Roper’s first essay, like the book of which it forms a part, was essentially, as
discussed in the opening chapter, a debunking exercise. He was not unsympathetic to these
‘engaging charlatans’ who ‘went the whole hog’ but his predominant interest was in establishing
what the brothers were not. 33 In 1980 Stewart and Thompson’s unambiguously titled Scotland’s
Forged Tartans, established what the Vestiarium Scoticum was not. This having been so
thoroughly accomplished my intention is to consider what the brothers were and to suggest that
the ODNB’s one-word account of their occupation, ‘impostors’, is so inadequate as to be
33 Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition’, p.232.
176