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also has to pay 50 ducats to the notary for drawing the will of this 'prince or cheate'? Probably the parish priest and ex-confessor of the prince was misinformed on some points. The Corona family would make out the best case they could for their royal kinsman.

Was the man of Naples 'prince or cheate'? Was he de la Cloche, or, as Lord Acton suggests, a servant who had robbed de la Cloche of money and papers?

Every hypothesis (we shall recapitulate them) which we can try as a key fails to fit the lock. Say that de la Cloche had confided his secret to a friend among the Jesuit novices; say that this young man either robbed de la Cloche, or, having money and jewels of his own, fled from the S. Andrea training college, and, when arrested, assumed the name and pretended to the rank of de la Cloche. This is not inconceivable, but it is odd that he had no language but French, and that, possessing secrets of capital importance, he was released from prison, and allowed to depart where he would, and return to Naples when he chose.

Say that a French servant of de la Cloche robbed and perhaps even murdered him. In that case he certainly would not have been released from prison. The man at Naples was regarded as a gentleman, but that is not so important in an age when the low scoundrel, Bedloe, could pass in Spain and elsewhere for an English peer.

But again, if the Naples man is a swindler, as already remarked, he behaves unlike one. A swindler would have tried to entrap a woman of property into a marriage he might have seduced, but would not have married, the penniless Teresa Corona, giving what money he had to her father. When arrested, the man had not in money more than 1607. His maintenance, while in prison, was paid for by the Viceroy. No detaining charges, from other victims, appear to have been lodged against him. His will ordains that the document shall be destroyed by his confessor, if the secret of his birth therein contained is divulged before his death. The secret perhaps was only knownbefore his arrest-to his confessors; it came out when he was arrested by the Viceroy as a coiner of false money. Like de la Cloche, he was pious, though not much turns on that. If Armanni's information is correct, if, when taken, the man wrote to the General of the Jesuits-who knew de la Cloche's handwriting-we can scarcely escape the inference that he was de la Cloche.

On the other hand is the monstrous will. Unworldly as de la Cloche may have been, he can hardly have fancied that Wales was the appanage of a bastard of the Crown; and he certainly knew that the province of Monmouth' already gave a title to his younger brother, the duke, born in 1649. Yet the testator claims Wales or Monmouth for his unborn child. Again, de la Cloche

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may not have known who his mother was. But not only can no Mary, or Mary Henrietta, of the Lennox family be found, except the impossible Lady Mary who was younger than de la Cloche ; but we observe no trace of the presence of any d'Aubigny, or even of any Stewart, male or female, at the court of the Prince of Wales in Jersey, in 1646.1

The names of the suite are given by Dr. Hoskins from the journal (MS.) of Chevalier, a Jersey man, and from the Osborne papers. No Stewart or Stuart occurs, but, in a crowd of some 3,000 refugees, there may have been a young lady of the name. Lady Fanshaw, who was in Jersey, is silent. The will is absurd throughout, but whether it is all of the dying pretender's composition, whether it may not be a thing concocted by an agent of the Corona family, is another question.

It is a mere conjecture, suggested by more than one inquirer, as by Mr. Steuart, that the words 'Signora D. Maria Stuardo della famiglia delli Baroni di S. Marzo,' refer to the Lennox family, which would naturally be spoken of as Lennox, or as d'Aubigny. About the marquisate of Juvigny (which cannot mean the dukedom of d'Aubigny) we have said enough. In short, the whole will is absurd, and it is all but inconceivable that the real

1 See Hoskins, Charles II. in the Channel Islands (Bentley, London, 1854).

de la Cloche could have been so ignorant as to compose it.

So the matter stands; one of two hypotheses must be correct-the Naples man was de la Cloche or he was not-yet either hypothesis is almost impossible.1

1 I was at first inclined to suppose that the de la Cloche papers in the Gesù-the letters of Charles II. and the note of the Queen of Sweden-were forgeries, part of an impostor's apparatus, seized at Naples and sent to Oliva for inspection. But the letters-handwriting and royal seal apart-show too much knowledge of Charles's secret policy to have been feigned. We are not told that the certificates of de la Cloche's birth were taken from James Stuart in prison, and, even if he possessed them, as Armanni says he did, he may have stolen them, and they may have been restored by the Viceroy of Naples, as we said, to the Jesuits. As to whether Charles II. paid his promised subscription to the Jesuit building fund, Father Boero says: 'We possess a royal letter, proving that it was abundant' (Boero, Istoria &c., p. 56, note 1), but he does not print the letter; and Mr. Brady speaks now of extant documents proving the donation, and now of 'a traditional belief that Charles was a benefactor of the Jesuit College.'

It may be added that, on December 27, 1668, Charles wrote to his sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans: 'I assure you that nobody does, nor shall, know anything of it here' (of his intended conversion and secret dealings with France) but my selfe, and that one person more, till it be fitte to be publique. . . . 'That one person more' is not elsewhere referred to in Charles's known letters to his sister, unless he be 'he that came last, and delivered me your letter of the 9th December; he has given me a full account of what he was charged with, and I am very well pleased with what he tells me' (Whitehall, December 14, 1668).

This mysterious person, the one sharer of the King's secret, may be de la Cloche, if he could have left England by November 18, visited Rome, and returned to Paris by December 9. If so, de la Cloche may have fulfilled his mission. Did he return to Italy, and appear in Naples in January or February 1669? (See Madame, by Julia Cartwright, pp. 274, 275, London, 1894.)

S

IX

THE TRUTH ABOUT FISHER'S

GHOST'

EVERYBODY has heard about Fisher's Ghost.' It is one of the stock yarns' of the world, and reappears now and again in magazines, books like The Night Side of Nature,' newspapers, and general conversation. As usually told, the story runs thus: One Fisher, an Australian settler of unknown date, dwelling not far from Sydney, disappeared. His overseer, like himself an ex-convict, gave out that Fisher had returned to England, leaving him as plenipotentiary. One evening a neighbour (one Farley), returning from market, saw Fisher sitting on the fence of his paddock, walked up to speak to him, and marked him leave the fence and retreat into the field, where he was lost to sight. The neighbour reported Fisher's return, and, as Fisher could nowhere be found, made a deposition before magistrates. A native tracker was taken to the fence where the pseudoFisher sat, discovered white man's blood' on it, detected white man's fat' on the scum of a pool

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