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

novels a real manuscript is described as the source of the story but is understood by the reader to
be itself part of the fiction. Tales of the Century uses the same framing technique of the Preface
but to suggest that what is presented as fiction should really be understood as history. ‘It is
credible, because it is improbable’, is the concluding sentence. 42 At the centre of this hall of
mirrors there is an empty space in which, out of the reverberating reflections, the reader is meant
to deduce two real historical figures.
Before considering in more detail the relationship of Tales of the Century to
antiquarianism and to Scott’s writing, the Sobieski Stuarts’ own living arrangements in their
heyday deserve some attention. From 1839 until 1847 they were under the patronage of Lord
Lovat who allowed them to choose a site on his land on which he would build for them a home.
Lovat was not alone by the late 1830s in taking them seriously as the heirs to the Stuart line, as
Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus recalled, ‘half the clans in the Highlands believed in them; for
several years they actually reigned in the north country’. 43 The house that Lord Lovat built for
them was, naturally, Gothic, its situation on Eilan Aigas, an islet in the Beauly River suitably
picturesque. The brothers’ self-portrait shows them at home surrounded by the usual profusion of
oak, antlers, arms and miscellaneous curiosities. These may well include the genuine relics of
Charles Edward Stuart which the brothers acquired, possibly from the Scottish revolutionary and
adventurer Robert Watson (?1746-1838). 44 If there is a little less confusion or profusion of
objects than in Cooke’s painting or William Allan’s portrait of Scott, if there is no gloom and no
hint of the occult, that is perhaps because the brothers felt their claims to be shadowy enough as
it was and wanted to present themselves without any suggestion of further obscurity.
Their effect on visitors who saw them either in their home or at mass, to which they
sailed from their island in a boat flying the Stuart standard, tended to reflect the level of faith or
doubt in the beholder. The setting was, however, important to everyone. In 1842 A W N Pugin,
refuting Trevor-Roper’s boast that ‘no Englishman seems to have taken them seriously’, found
42
Sobieski Stuarts, Tales of the Century, p. xii.
43
Grant, Memoirs of a Highland Lady, p.388.
44
Suggestion made by Robb in ‘The Sobieski Stuart Brothers’. A sale catalogue of ‘interesting relics of Prince
Charles Edward Stuart’, sold after the death of Charles in 1881, survives in the National Library of Scotland,
Adv.ms.50.3.10 ff. 135-138.
179