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. . . pretenders, to anything big enough,
have always been, for me,
an attractive class.

— Henry James, A Passionate Pilgrim.

ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

— Shakespeare.

Roehenstart
A Late Stuart Pretender

Being
An Account of the Life of
Charles Edward August Maximilien Stuart
Baron Korff Count Roehenstart

By George Sherburn

The Book and the Author
[from the book's jacket]

Count Roehenstart was an obscure descendant of one of history's most romanticized characters. He was the illegitimate son of the daughter of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and, although his birth was scandalous (his father was the Archbishop of Cambrai), he led the life of an intelligent, highly cultivated gentleman.

Mr. Sherburn has based this book on Roehenstart's own private papers, and, without "fictionalizing" the material in any way, he has interpreted the curious position in which any such pretender had to exist. Roehenstart's search for a place in society took him to Russia, the United States, the West Indies, England, Scotland, France, Italy, and the Levant. His papers reveal him as shy and somewhat self-pitying. Some of the clouds of mystery which surround his career were of his own creation in his attempts to achieve respectability by misrepresenting his background.

This volume provides a final glimpse into the history of the Stuarts which will be new even to most ardent Jacobites. It will be particularly interesting to students of the complicated state of succession to the British throne which led to Victoria's reign.

George Sherburn is professor emeritus of English at Harvard. He was for many years a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and became a member of its Council. He has been elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He holds the degrees of Ph.D. and L.H.D. from the University of Chicago; D.Lit., University of London; and L.H.D., Wesleyan and Yale universities. Among his many publications are A Literary History of England (with others) (1948) and The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (5 vols.; 1956). Pope and His Contemporaries, a distinguished Festschrift in his honor, was published at Oxford (1951).

[p. vii] Contents

(Preface)

v

I.

Parentage

1

II.

Early Years

15

III.

Russia: 1807‑11

22

IV.

America: 1812‑14

30

V.

The Tin Box

39

VI.

The Memorial (1816)

51

VII.

Reactions

65

VIII.

Early Aftermath

75

IX.

Travels

87

X.

Last Journeyings

109

XI.

A Note on Finances

118

XII.

The Anatomy of Pretending

124
Appendices

I.

"The Case of X against Y"

131

II.

Summaries of Letters to Mrs. Stuart

134

III.

The Battle of Saalfeld (1806)

137

Illustrations
(Table not in the printed edition: added for this Web transcription)

"Charles III" (Bonnie Prince Charlie) to His Estranged Mistress the Comtesse d'Albestroff

Facing page
6

Charles Edward Stuart (Baron Roehenstart), Aged 11 (?), Writes to His Uncle Henry ("Duke of York") Cardinal Stuart to Send New Year's Greetings

17

❦

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition transcribed here appears to be the first and only one. It bears a copyright notice © 1960 by The University of Chicago, but the copyright was not renewed in 1987 or 1988 as required by the law in effect at the time: the book has therefore been in the public domain since Jan. 1, 1989.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. I run a first proofreading pass immediately after entering each section; then a second proofreading, detailed and meant to be final: in the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe them to be completely errorfree; any red backgrounds would mean that the section had not received that second final proofreading. The header bar at the top of each page will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition was not very well proofread; in addition to Roehenstart's own idiosyncratic spellings in both English and French, which I left unchanged of course, there are a number of typographical and transcription errors of various kinds. When I could fix the errors, I did, marking the correction each time with a bullet like this;º or when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles. Very occasionally, also, I use this blue circle to make some brief comment. Sometimes a transcription error called for commentary, which will be found in a footnote.

Finally, a number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have the printed edition in front of you.

For citation purposes, the pagination is indicated by local links in the sourcecode and made apparent in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ). Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

[image ALT: A photograph, taken from the sea, of a small round island with slopes rising symmetrically at a constant angle of about 30 degrees to a central cone. The view of this peak is interrupted just below the summit by a ring of cloud, producing the effect of an object floating above the island. It is a view of the island of Roehenstart, and serves on this website as the icon for the book 'Roehenstart' by Douglas Gane.]

Regrettably, there seems to be no portrait of Roehenstart, or at least Prof. Sherburn does not reproduce or mention any; nor could I find one elsewhere online. The icon I use to indicate this subsite is my colorized version of Roehenstart's signature from the facsimile facing p17.

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Site updated: 13 Dec 20