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Lieutenant Thomas Allen and the great tartan forgery
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PMarione
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Post Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2010 11:10 pm    Post subject: Lieutenant Thomas Allen and the great tartan forgery Reply with quote

Admiral John Carter Allen had two sons.
His younger son was Admiral John Allen (1774-1853).
The elder son was Lieutenant Thomas Allen, RN (1173-1852).
He was made a Lt in 1791 and resigned the RN in 1798.
In 1792 he married Catherine Matilda, 2nd daughter of the Rev Owen Manning, Vicar of Godalming, and by her had two sons: John Hay Allen and Charles Manning Allen.
After his resignation he lived abroad in France and Italy probably to avoid debtors. He changed his surname to the Scottish spelling, ALLAN and added the middle name, HAY, alluding to the fact that his father who had claimed to be the rightful Hay, Earl of Errol, Lord High Constable of Scotland, even if the last Earl of Errol died unmarried (a secret marriage was alleged).
His two sons appeared in Scotland in the 1820's, claiming to have fought at Waterloo (on the French side, a disappointing fact for sons of a RN officer). They were soon regular guests at the homes of some Highland chiefs and came under the patronage of the Earl of Moray.
When he died in 1800, Admiral John Carter Allen left £2,300 in his will to be divided between his two sons, Thomas and John. John received £2,200 but Thomas, the elder only received £100.
The sons of Thomas began to claim publicly to be the legitimate grandsons of King Charles III. They used the names "John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart" and "Charles Edward Stuart". The elder brother used the title "Comte d'Albanie" until his death, when the younger brother adopted it. The brothers claimed that in 1773 Princess Louisa of Stolberg Guedern, wife of Bonnie Prince Charlie, gave birth to a son. Out of fear that the baby would be assassinated by agents of the Elector of Hanover, the child was handed over for safe-keeping to the captain of an English frigate. In the first account by the brothers, this English captain is called O'Haleran, but later he is called Admiral Hay and Admiral Allen. So their father Thomas Allen (or Thomas Hay Allen, or Thomas Gatehouse Allen) was not in fact the son of Admiral John Carter Allen, but was adopted and instead was the legitimate son of King Charles III.
People believe what they want to believe, and at that time in the Highlands nobody wanted anything more than two genuine grandsons of the late Pretender.
The two then came up with an amazing discovery - a late fifteenth-century manuscript called Vestiarium Scoticum (The Scottish Wardrobe) which detailed all the various identifying ancient tartans of all the clans, both Highland and Lowland.
It was such a rare manuscript that only three copies existed in all the world, and they had all three copies. It was. The original copy came from the Scots College in Douay, but nobody ever saw it. Their father, they said, had it in London and was indignant that they had even mentioned its existence, much less proposed to show it to anybody. The best evidence suggests that it never existed except in their imaginations.
The copy they showed around they called a "corrupt copy" of 1721. This described seventy-six tartans (over fifty of which had been invented for the occasion).
Sir Walter Scott, the novelist, was sceptical, pointing out that there was absolutely no evidence that Lowland clans had ever worn tartan or plaid, and that even the title of the book was bad Latin.
Others didn't question the authenticity of the document, and the Allens soon set up house at the beautiful hunting lodge of Eilean Aigas, on an island in the Beauly river, Inverness, which their new patron, Lord Lovat, had granted them. Here they really did hold court, finally fully declaring their Stuart ancestry and converting to Roman Catholicism.
In 1842 they published a version of Vestiarium Scoticum.
In 1847 the brothers wrote a book Tales of the Century in which they provided certain details about their supposed ancestry. This book would mark the beginning of their downfall. It attracted an anonymous attack in the Quarterly Review (written by Professor George Skene), which, having quickly dismissed the Tales, went on to demolish the scholarship of the Vestiarium, page by page. The author pointed out that the Vestiarium was a fantasy, a book that everyone would like to have existed but which was clearly a forgery.
With their reputation demolished, the Allen brothers’ little court broke up and the family moved to the continent where they hoped their pretensions to royalty might be better received. Twenty years later, and now very poor, they returned to London.
Perhaps they had the last laugh after all, as the myth that they started – of the ancient clan tartans – is stronger than ever. Today people from all over the world travel to Scotland to discover which ‘ancient’ tartan their Scottish ancestors once wore.

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(taken from various sources)
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PMarione
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Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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Post Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 3:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

According to LDS, Admiral John Carter Allen was born on 19 January 1724 and baptized on 31 January at St Dunstan in the West, London, a son of Carter Allen by his wife, Emma née Hay.

His first wife was (in some peerages) said to be Juliana, daughter of Richard Hampden, and granddaughter of the famous John Hampden (1594 - 1643) but this imply a serious age gap.

The Gentlemen Magazine of November 1800 (p 1021) gives another clue :
"He married to his first wife, a lady with a large fortune, which principally descends to Mr Hatch".

Any idea ?

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