Newspaper Article

The man who would be King

Allan, Vicky

2002

Overview

[Peter Pininski] did not stop there. He retrieved de Thorigny's death certificate. There was something odd going on. De Thorigny was born in the exact same year as one of [Charlotte Stuart]'s children. Not only that but she shared the name mentioned in the [Fitzroy Maclean] book, [Marie-Victoire]. The conclusion seemed unbelievable, not worth contemplating, and yet Pininski was drawn. He started research in earnest, building up a picture of the network of international connections that existed in Europe at the time. If de Thorigny was Marie, daughter of Charlotte Stuart, how had she ended up in Poland married to a wealthy Polish-Armenian landowner? He knew, certainly, that historically there had long been a dense mesh of connections between the Stuarts and the Poles. Bonnie Prince Charlie's mother, for instance, was Clementina Sobieska, a daughter of the Polish royal family, granddaughter of the famous John III Sobieski, who had defeated the Turks at Vienna. He knew the Stuarts were connected with the Radziwill family. He also knew about the Ferguson-Teppers, the internationally connected bankers based in Warsaw. All this was making sense but one thing was still troubling Pininski - the name de Thorigny. Where did that come from? Eventually he tracked down the Chteau de Thorigny in the Duchy of Montbazon, France, the dukedom of the head of the de [Rohan] family. \"The owners had only just got the history of the Chteau de Thorigny, which they had ordered from an extremely good young historian from Tours. We open it and, lo and behold, on the first page we find that [Ferdinand]'s eldest brother Jules Hercule, the Duc de Montbazon, has adopted as his own a girl called Marie and given her the title la Demoiselle de Thorigny. He had had her legitimised as his natural daughter. So we now have an explanation but a confusing one. Because we're now being asked to believe that Jules Hercule is the father.\" What is remarkable in Pininski's story is the way everyday coincidences accumulate. For instance, Pininski points out that all the Stuart descendants named Charles or Charlotte seemed destined to have difficult and tragic lives. [Charles Edward Stuart] was bankrupted, died childless and felt himself the \"object of universal hostility\". His sister Charlotte died young with her only child during birth. Marie- Victoire's grandson, Charles, was forced to commit suicide at 24 after a duel. And, many generations down the line, Pininski's great- aunt Charlotte was sent by the NKVD [the KGB's forerunner] to work in the wastelands of Soviet Kazakhstan.

• Publisher: NLA Media
• Subject: Edwards, Charles / Marie-Victoire / Pininski, Peter / Stuart, Charlotte