TERROR OF THE TURK 369replied indifferently: 'They don't want to listen to me when I'm alive, so why
should they obey my wishes when I'm dead?' A final heart attack put an end to
the old champion on 17 April 1696.
Although Sobieski's dynastic schemes misfired, his descendants did not escape
the royal touch completely. His son, Jakub Sobieski, was not elected; but his
grandchild, Clementina Sobieska (1702-35), Jakub's daughter, helped found an
extraordinary line of British pretenders, the Sobieski-Stuarts. The acquaintance
of the two ex-royal families, Polish and Scottish, began in Rome where
Marysienka and her children had retired, and later at the Chateau of Blois,
where they lived as pensioners of Louis XIV. In 1718, Clementina was betrothed
to James Edward Stuart, the Chevalier de St. George, the 'Old Pretender', James
III. On passing through Innsbruck later that year on the way to her wedding in
Italy, she was kidnapped by imperial agents acting on behalf of the Emperor's
Hanoverian allies, but was released by an Irish rescue party under one Charles
Wogan, who contrived to substitute a female accomplice for the imprisoned
princess. In May 1719, in Bologna, she married her Stuart, and on 31 December
1720 gave birth in Rome to Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir, the 'Young
Pretender', 'Bonny Prince Charlie', and from 1766, Charles III. Her second son,
Henry Benedict Maria Clement, titular Duke of York and from 1788 Henry IX,
joined the Church and died in 1807 with the title of Cardinal-Bishop of Frascati.
Thereafter, the line of Stuart pretenders descended into bastardy and charla-
tanry. One branch was headed by General Charles Edward Stuart, Baron
Rohenstart, soi-disant grandson of Bonnie Prince Charlie's Scottish mistress,
Clementina Walkinshaw. His death in a coach accident at Dunkeld in 1854 left
the field clear for his rivals, the Sobieski—Stolberg-Stuarts. The members of this
branch traced their descent from Bonnie Prince Charlie's deserted second wife,
Louisa von Stolberg, Countess of Albany, who was supposed to have handed
her infant son to a Captain Alien (alias O'Halleran) RN, to avoid a squad of
Hanoverian assassins. According to the Dictionary ofNational Biography, their
story is 'demonstrably false'; but it was freely accepted in many courts of
Europe. It provided a living for two enterprising brothers, John Sobieski-
Stolberg-Stuart (1795-1872) and Charles Edward (1799-1880), who successively
assumed the title of 'Comte d'Albanie' on the undisprovable grounds that their
father, Lt. Thomas Alien RN was the son of the rescued Stuart heir. Their uncle,
and their grandfather, John Carter Alien (d. 1800), were both Admirals of the
Royal Navy, whilst they themselves chose to live first in Napoleonic France,
then in Prague and Vienna, and at various times on an island in Eskadale. In
their Scottish period, John Sobieski-Stolberg-Stuart became a prolific poet, very
conscious of his supposed Polish ancestry. In a modest reference to his own role
in the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, he composed the immortal line: 'Stuart
swam the wave where Poniatowski sank.' In their Austrian period, Charles