The Heir of Douglas

by Lillian de la Torre

  The British party urge the good nurse to come with them from Dammartin to Rheims, but she will not. Finally they find a sturdy reaper-woman, who carries her baby in a basket on her back as she cuts the grain. She agrees to come. They arrange to take the husband too, but the baby must stay at Dammartin. Early in August the party of six sets out for Rheims, Milord, Milady, her woman, her child, his nurse, and his nurse’s husband.…

  Having pieced together this story, Messieurs Stuart and Buhot made a little country expedition to Dammartin, and talked with the landlady and the country people who had known the Steuarts there. They had nothing new to offer. Thereupon Andrew Stuart went off to Rheims.

  Many people at Rheims remembered the Steuart party. They had lodged, before they left for Paris, with a Mademoiselle Hibert, and Mademoiselle was sour. She thought Milady did not look more than four or five months pregnant when she left, even though her delicate look gave her all the air of a woman with child.

  “There was in the behaviour of these people,” remarked Miss Hibert with relish, “something concealed and mysterious which I could not comprehend. The lady was very amiable; but the gentleman seemed to me stupid and wicked!”

  There were others at Rheims, landladies and tradespersons and people of quality who had known the Steuart party; but in general they took another view. Jocular Colonel John and gracious Lady Jane had been popular, and their friends continued loyally unwilling to think ill of them.

  Andrew Stuart went back to Paris and scanned all the evidence he had collected. It showed that the accoucheur and the landlady of the birth-house were chimeras, that on the day of the alleged birth, July 10, Lady Jane was at the Hôtel d’Anjou in good health, and that not everybody at Rheims believed in her pregnancy as it had been represented. He reached conviction. The supposed father and mother of the Douglas claimant, with their assistant Mrs. Hewit, had been guilty of a crime of the deepest dye.

  It was a plot by Lady Jane, he perceived, to give the house of Douglas a spurious heir, and so get control of the Douglas possessions. She planned it in Scotland, spurred on perhaps by the failure of her hopes in the Stuart rising. To help her she chose Colonel John Steuart, the resourceful old campaigner, and as the best locale for the crime she chose the crowded city of Paris. She gave the Colonel her hand, recruited Mrs. Hewit and the maids, and set forth from Scotland on her shady errand.

  The two countries were at war. She had to wait to get to Paris. In the spring of 1748, peace and Paris were in sight. She hastily began to feign pregnancy. As soon as the roads were opened, she prepared to set forth. She left the serving-wenches at Rheims; they were to be dupes. Unattended, she set forth for Paris in the public stage-coach with her two accomplices.

  What they did at Paris Andrew Stuart was in process of finding out. They had certainly produced one boy-baby at the Hôtel d’Anjou. They had returned to Rheims talking about twins. After an interval at Rheims, they had completed the plot and gone back to England with an ill-assorted pair of boys. The Duke, Andrew Stuart was now convinced, had been only too right in calling them Pretenders.

  It was now the business of the Hamilton agent to trace the origins of the two little Pretenders. Meanwhile he wrote home to Scotland, imparting his conclusions and enjoining the deepest secrecy.

  Before the letter had time to reach Scotland, somebody had blabbed. Two days after it went off, a visitor was ushered into Andrew Stuart’s luxurious apartment at the Hôtel de Tours. It was the third Lady Steuart’s firebrand brother. He tackled the Hamilton agent without ceremony. He wanted to know what Andrew Stuart meant by such proceedings?

  “My sole object in being here,” said Stuart stiffly, “is to discover the truth.”

  “I am possessed of certain knowledge,” replied Murray, “which will make the affair as clear as the sun at noonday. My Lady Jane’s pregnancy was known to all the world at Rheims—”

  “I have all the proofs in the world,” said Andrew Stuart, thinking of the Service evidence and the loyal friends at Rheims, “of her pregnancy, but none of her delivery.”

  “What say you then to the accoucheur? For he is to my certain knowledge alive and in Paris.”

  “If you’ll show me the accoucheur,” replied Stuart promptly, “I will instantly at your sight write the strongest letter that can be devised to any person that you shall name, admitting that Archie Douglas is Lady Jane’s son.”

  “Nay, Sir,” cried firebrand Murray, exploding, “as you have been here three or four months without acquainting me of your errand, I hold myself bound to keep everything concealed from you, and will endeavour to counteract and undermine you all in my power!”

  “It could have served no purpose,” remarked Andrew Stuart with his cool half-smile, “to make you too early a confidence; indeed it would have been rather an awkward sort of proceeding on my part to tell you, before having certain knowledge, that I was come to inquire whether your brother-in-law has been guilty of an egregious villainy!”

  “I have interest at home,” cried Murray, unappeased, “and I have interest in France, and I’ll see to it that the great ones lend you no countenance!”

  “You may do as you please,” said Stuart icily, “and I shall for my part observe the conduct that is most proper.”

  Murray withdrew in a rage.

  “I know,” wrote Andrew Stuart to a friend in England, “that I render a multitude of Mr. Douglas’s friends implacable enemies during life and it is more than probable that in the course of this affair I shall be involved in various disputes, but be the consequence what it will, my resolutions are taken. My own honour and credit are now at stake, and these will prompt me to be more active in asserting the interests of truth in this matter than the benefit which the Duke of Hamilton may receive by the event!”

  I have all the proofs in the world of her pregnancy, but none of her delivery.

  (ANDREW STUART)

  Chapter VII

  Archie Douglas at Westminster, Duchess Peggy and Sir John Steuart at Edinburgh, were comfortably spending Douglas money when the bad news hit them. On December 7, 1762, the Hamilton lawyers went before the Court of Session, the highest court in Scotland, and demanded every farthing of the money, and every foot of the land. They represented that Archie Douglas was not a Douglas at all, and that therefore the proceedings in which he had been served heir should be reduced, retreated, cassed, annulled, decerned, and declared null and void.

  Striking fast, they followed up by haling surprised Sir John into court. The law was that a witness was entitled to fifteen days of warning, which did not suit the Hamilton faction at all. So Archibald Stuart coolly appeared one morning and swore that his old friend Sir John was preparing to flee from justice; a post-chaise was hired and a man of the law was ready to attend his flight. He demanded that the old man be examined without waiting. The Lords assented, and sent a macer to fetch him.

  The macer found the old man groaning in his bed, with the gout in his stomach and inflammation in his viscera. Nevertheless, the old soldier rose upon the summons and promptly went to court. He was too stiff to sit in the sedan chair, but they made shift to fit him in. They put a trunk on the seat and propped him against it, they tilted back the cover, and in this grotesque posture they bore him up the cobbled High Street like a wax-work in a show, with two men in the shafts and a third walking behind to hold back the tilted cover from falling on his sconce.

  In court they propped him up, with a chair, the trunk, and a table; sometimes they had to hold him upright by the arms. In spite of this natural rack, Sir John Steuart spoke right up. He answered every question fast, and confusedly, and backwards and forwards. They kept at him for three days.

  They drew from him a picture of his days in Paris, strolling in the Tuileries or the Luxembourg, drinking and playing at chess in coffee-houses, giving a breakfast or a bottle of wine to an Irish exile poorer than he, while Lady Jane and Mrs. Hewit sat in their lodging waiting for my Lady’s hour.

  Where had they lodge
d?

  The first night or two they lodged at the house of one Godefroi, rue Saint-Martin. Then, on account of its inconveniency (by which Sir John must have meant the ear-splitting noise) they sought other lodgings. Godefroi’s servants recommended the house of one Madame Le Brun. The old man could not remember the address, but if you went up from the Pont Neuf to the Luxembourg by the rue de la Comédie, it was on the right-hand side. In that house the children were born. It was not a long labour; the twins were there before the anxious father had dined. Madame Le Brun witnessed the birth; he himself did not. He described the lady in vague terms: neither tall nor short, rather meagre than fat, and probably rather dark than fair, on the grounds that few French women are fair.

  After ten or twelve days with this uninteresting landlady, they were so over-pestered with bugs that they moved to Madame Michelle’s, whence the sultry weather drove them to country quarters at Dammartin.

  He told them about his sons’ nurses, and about Pier La Marr the man-midwife.

  “In the 1721, I passed the winter at Liege, and by the means of an old acquaintance, Colonel Fontaine, became acquainted with Pier La Marr, a Walloon, as I believe, who then told me, to the best of my remembrance, that he had been surgeon to a Walloon regiment, though the chief branch of his business was acting as a man-midwife. Walking in the Tuileries, I accidentally met with Pier La Marr; and my finances being in bad order, it occurred to me, that this was a good opportunity of being served cheaper than by seeing a first-rate man-midwife at Paris, as Pier La Marr told me, that having been called up upon an affaire épineuse, he believed he would continue some time at Paris; and upon my mentioning to him my affair, he answered that he would be glad to do me any service in his power. He declined to acquaint me where he lodged, I suppose because of his ticklish affair; but he told me, that at certain times he would be found at the Tuileries, or at the Luxembourg. Suppose my Lady fell in labour at night? Then I must have called another.”

  All this he narrated with great confidence and vivacity. From day to day he was not always consistent. He said he made a preliminary sortie to Paris in June, a statement of which no bit of confirmation was ever forthcoming. On December 14 he said that once, from Godefroi’s or Le Brun’s, he had carried Lady Jane out for an airing in a coach, being informed that the jolting of a coach was good for a lady in her situation, and that night they returned to Paris after taking the air. On December 15 he said Lady Jane, after her delivery, never went out. When they tried again, he said she went out in a hackney-coach. On December 14, he said that a widow-lady witnessed the birth. On December 15, he voluntarily took it back; the widow-lady was at Michelle’s. There is no possibility that he knew anything about the discoveries of Andrew Stuart. These trumpery confusions seem to be purely fortuitous.

  To clinch the matter, the Hamilton advocates got the Pier La Marr letters produced. Sir John looked at them, and scratched his head, and said that some of them, or all of them, were copies made by a friend of his, a clerk at the War Office; but which was which he could not decide and stick to. The Hamilton lawyers seized the occasion to scrutinize these important papers narrowly, and noted some very odd things about them. Sir John had not heard the last of the La Marr letters.

  Finally they unpropped the old man and let him go. He scanned and signed every page of the written interrogatories. The document still lies in the Register House at Edinburgh, and every signature of his is as firm and vigorous as that of the Lord President signing for the court.

  While the Hamilton faction was harrying Sir John, the indomitable Duchess Peggy set her defensive forces in motion. To lead the first sortie her choice fell upon young Alexander Murray, whose youthful modesty and ripe judgement had so impressed the Duchess in the matter of the Duke’s papers. Alexander Murray was now twenty-six years old, clever at his books and eloquent at the bar, and in the matter of judgement he was to out-general Andrew Stuart himself. The very day they haled Sir John to the bar, he set out post from Edinburgh.

  The day after Christmas, at eight o’clock in the evening, he rolled into Paris and went to work. On the last day of the year he paused to take stock of the position. He took pen in hand and opened a small note-book. He had been using it to take notes in court; but he reversed it and inscribed it fairly at the top: “Journall Paris 30 Decr 1762.” That journal still survives in the National Library of Scotland.

  On December 27, recorded the diarist, he “wrote to & waited of Mr. Murray.” Firebrand Murray was busy on his brother-in-law’s behalf. He seems to have impressed his young namesake with his conspiratorial air, for the young lawyer now transliterated from plain English into the relative obscurity of Greek characters: “After long conversation found he knew nothing about the matter.” Then he perceived the absurdity of encoding such insignificant news, and went back into plain English: “Saw Mr. Hay.”

  John Hay was a Jacobite exile who had once been the Pretender’s secretary. With another exiled Scot, Sir John’s kinsman Carnegie of Boysack, he was busy in the Douglas interest. Their inquiries after Pier La Marr had been fruitless. At Godefroi’s in the rue Saint-Martin, however, they had heard something to their disadvantage. The Steuart party were not in his books by that name; but he showed them an account which he said was theirs. He showed it to Andrew Stuart too. The name was blank.

  The account, before the case was over, was torn to hairs and the hairs were split. It appeared to be an account, regularly entered in the books, for three people, name and sex not specified. These people arrived on July 4. On the 8th they paid the reckoning and departed. On the morning of the 9th they came back, and stayed till the 13th. They paid so much a day for food and ordinary wine, and a considerable extra charge to drink the best Burgundy. They ate butter every day, and broke a pane of glass. What must have struck the Britishers as odd, they were never charged for tea.

  It was odd that they had left on the 8th and come back so quickly. M. Godefroi explained it: “They had hired a lodging in the faubourg Saint-Germain, and being infected with bugs it required to be cleansed. The lodgings not being ready, they remained here some few days longer.”

  M. Godefroi was sure of his man, because he had come back for three days in August. His name was in the book: “Du Jeudi 8 Août 1748—Mr. Stewart est entré.” This time he had chosen to sample with his Burgundy the white wine and the champagne. Alexander Murray knew all about that August visit: Colonel John had run up to Paris to visit Sholto.

  Andrew Stuart had not known what to make of information that placed the Steuarts at Godefroi’s and at Michelle’s simultaneously. Bugs could not be the answer; there were no bugs at Michelle’s. Then he began to see it: a double residence meant double obfuscation. With this theory he obfuscated himself.

  The Douglas faction thought very little of Godefroi. He struck them as shifty. “He told them,” noted young Murray, “Mr. Steuart was known by him upon his return, but that he did not observe any of the ladies who had come with him upon the 4th of July with child, and had but a very slight look of them. What he said however was attended with many suspicious circumstances. He owned the entry was in his wife’s hand-writing, and yet when Mr. Carnegie asked him if his wife had seen any of the ladies he pretended she was either in the country or lying in at the time. He said the police had been with him, but did not know the officer personally, and in general affected a forgetfulness as to the circumstances at the distance of 14 years.”

  Sifted again on December 30, Godefroi stuck to his story; he was as certain as of his existence that the party had stayed there till July 13. He said his wife’s visit to the country had been on August 8. Young Murray studied the register, and pointed out an article of that date in her handwriting. He wanted to question the lady herself, but the landlord refused to produce her, on the grounds that she was confined to her room. Even when called to appear before a French court, Madame Godefroi kept to her bed, but eventually she corroborated her husband’s story.

  On New Year’s day the Duchess of Dougla
s arrived in person to spur on the counter-investigation. It is said that she was the last person of consequence to travel guarded by a squad of halberdiers. For her journey to Paris she omitted the halberdiers; but she arrived with a numerous retinue. She was attended by her sister and her waiting-women. Lady Steuart came along, bringing her husband’s description of the Le Brun house. She did not bring her husband. He had countermanded the post-chaise and excused the man of law and resolved to stay snug in Scotland. His health seemed to require it. For an interpreter, the Duchess was therefore forced to fall back upon Miss Primrose, mantua-maker of London, who had lived at Aix as a girl, and had known Lady Jane there.

  The arrival of the Duchess turned young Murray out of his comfortable lodgings to make way for her and her entourage. She settled in and sallied forth to battle. She began with a sharp brush with one of the would-be Douglas heirs. Andrew Stuart had felt the need of the presence of one of them. The little Duke was too young. Lord Selkirk would not come. It fell to Sir Hew Dalrymple, M.P., to risk Bute’s displeasure (which fell upon him) and the loss of his Parliamentary seat (which eventuated) in order to assist in the investigations. The Duchess tackled him brusquely and got no satisfaction. He said they were obliged to raise the cry of spuriousness, because Archie was in possession; and they could prove he was spurious.

  Furthermore, they were in process of doing so. Within less than two weeks, the Duchess learned to her horror that the Hamilton faction had actually gone before a French court and accused Sir John Steuart and Mrs. Hewit, behind their backs, of a capital crime.

  Andrew Stuart had no sooner amassed his evidence of the non-existence of the birth than he began to wonder how to clinch it legally. He could take affidavits, and chance their validity. He could get a commission from the Scotch court and validate the affidavits he took. He consulted French lawyers, Messieurs D’Anjou and Doutremont, and they advised a third course. “Supposition of children,” they explained, was in France a capital crime, and Sir John Steuart and Mrs. Hewit were certainly guilty of it. They should be prosecuted in the country where the crime was committed.