The Valet's Tragedy, and Other StudiesLang, Andrew
History
The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies
Lang, Andrew
History; World history
The newsletter of September 7 merely mentions the death and the will.
On this occasion Kent had private intelligence from a correspondent in
Naples. Copies of the will, in English and in Italian, were forwarded to
England, where both copies remain.
‘This will,’ Lord Acton remarked, ‘is fatal to the case for the Prince.’
If not fatal, it is a great obstacle to the cause of the Naples man. He
claims as his mother, Donna Maria Stewart, ‘of the family of the Barons
of San Marzo.’ If Marzo means ‘March,’ the Earl of March was a title
in the Lennox family. The only Mary Stewart in that family known to
Douglas’s ‘Peerage’ was younger than James de la Cloche, and died, the
wife of the Earl of Arran, in 1667, at the age of eighteen. She may have
had some outlying cousin Mary, but nothing is known of such a possible
mother of de la Cloche. Again, the testator begs Charles II. to give his
unborn child ‘the ordinary principality either of Wales or Monmouth, or
other province customary to be given to the natural sons of the Crown;’
to the value of 100,000 scudi!
Could de la Cloche be so ignorant as to suppose that a royal bastard
might be created Prince of Wales? He certainly knew, from Charles’s
letter, that his younger brother was already Duke of Monmouth. His
legacies are of princely munificence, but--he is to be buried at the
expense of his father-in-law.
By way of security for his legacies, the testator ‘assigns and gives his
lands, called the Marquisate of Juvignis, worth 300,000 scudi.’
Mr. Brady writes: ‘Juvignis is probably a mistake for Aubigny, the
dukedom which belonged to the Dukes of Richmond and Lennox by the older
creation.’ But a dukedom is not a marquisate, nor could de la Cloche
hold Aubigny, of which the last holder was Ludovick Stewart, who died, a
cardinal, in November 1665. The lands then reverted to the French
Crown. Moreover, there are two places called Juvigny, or Juvignis, in
north-eastern France (Orne and Manche). Conceivably one or other of
these belonged to the house of Rohan, and James Stuart’s posthumous son,
one of whose names is ‘Roano,’ claimed a title from Juvigny or Juvignis,
among other absurd pretensions. ‘Henri de Rohan’ was only the travelling
name of de la Cloche in 1668, though it is conceivable that he was
brought up by the de Rohan family, friendly to Charles II.
The whole will is incompatible with all that de la Cloche must have
known. Being in Italian it cannot have been intelligible to him, and may
conceivably be the work of an ignorant Neapolitan attorney, while de la
Cloche, as a dying man, may have signed without understanding much of
what he signed. The folly of the Corona family may thus (it is a mere
suggestion) be responsible for this absurd testament. Armanni, however,
represents the man as sane, and very devout, till his death.
A posthumous child, a son, was born and lived a scrambling life, now
‘recognised’ abroad, now in prison and poverty, till we lose him about
1750.*
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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