Sir William Fraser (1816-1898) was one of the most prolific genealogists and archival scholars in Victorian Scotland.  In a subsequent post I hope to discuss his methods, his writings, and the value of his work for modern genealogists, but I realised that before I could attempt that it would be necessary to compile a bibliography of his publications.  This is the result and is, I believe, complete, although Fraser’s habit of publishing privately and in very small print runs (rarely over a hundred) makes it entirely possible that I’ve missed one or two items.  Where digitised copies are known, I’ve included links, and where they are not I’ve indicated the shelfmarks of the copies in the National Library of Scotland.

Additions or corrections to this bibliography would be welcomed.

 
Chronological Bibliography

 

The Stirlings of Keir and Their Family Papers.  Edinburgh: Privately Printed, 1858.

Memorials of the Montgomeries, Earls of Eglinton, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1859.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Memoirs of the Maxwells of Pollok, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1863.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Inventories of the Muniments of the Families of Maxwell, Herries and Nithsdale in the Charter-Room at Terregles.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1865.  NLS ABS.8.84.9

The Pollok-Maxwell Baronetcy: Statement of the Right of William Stirling of Keir, and now of Pollok, to the Baronetcy held by his Maternal Uncle the late Sir John Maxwell of Pollok.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1866.

History of the Carnegies, Earls of Southesk, and of Their Kindred, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1867.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Memorial of the Right of Walter Coningsby Erskine, Earl of Kellie . . . to the Titles, Honours and Dignities of Earl of Mar and Lord Garioch in the Peerage of Scotland.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1867.  NLS Newb.4441

The Red Book of Grandtully, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1868.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Chiefs of Colquhoun and Their Country, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1869.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Memorial as to the Ruthven Peerage.  n.p.: n.p., 1870.  NLS 6.1152(34)

Registrum Monasterii S. Marie de Cambuskenneth, A.D. 1147-1535.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1872.

The Book of Carlaverock: Memoirs of the Maxwells, Earls of Nithsdale, Lords Maxwell & Herries, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1873.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Cartulary of Colquhoun of Colquhoun and Luss.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1873.  “Limited ed. of 20 copies”.  NLS ABS.4.86.6

The Lennox, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1874.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Cartulary of Pollok-Maxwell.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1875.

The Earls of Cromartie: Their Kindred, Country, and Correspondence, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1876.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Scotts of Buccleuch, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1878.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Red Book of Menteith, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1880.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Chiefs of Grant, 3 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1883.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3

The Douglas Book, 4 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1885.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3  Vol. 4

Memorials of the Family of Wemyss of Wemyss, 3 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1888.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3

Memorials of the Earls of Haddington, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1889.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Melvilles, Earls of Melville, and the Leslies, Earls of Leven, 3 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1890.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3

The Sutherland Book, 3 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1892.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2  Vol. 3

The Annandale Family Book of the Johnstones, Earls and Marquises of Annandale, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1894.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

The Elphinstone Family Book of the Lords Elphinstone, Balmerino, and Coupar, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1897.  Vol. 1  Vol. 2

Facsimiles of Scottish Charters and Letters, 2 vols.  Edinburgh: n.p., 1903.  NLS X.234.a.  

Papers from the Collection of Sir William Fraser, ed. J. R. N. MacPhail.  Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1924.


Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams

Few works of reference are more ubiquitous than the genealogical dictionaries published under the collective name of “Burke’s”.  They occupy honourable positions in the open-shelf reference collections of dozens of major research libraries, they are cited with remarkable frequency in many other reference works (not least the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), and in the pre-digital era they were perhaps the single most widely available resource outside of Britain for the study of British genealogy.  Despite that, the history underlying the Burkean publishing empire has been largely – although not entirely – neglected.  In this post I’ll briefly outline some of that history and the accompanying criticisms of the genealogical scholarship practised by Burke and his successors, ending by suggesting what we, as responsible modern genealogists, can take away from these problematic works.

The saga began in 1826 when John Burke (1786-1848), an Anglo-Irish poet and journalist, published A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom.

Burke’s ostensible reason for publication was what he described as “the absolute want of any book of reference, appertaining to those elevated ranks, the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom, in which the slightest confidence, as an authority [sic], could be reposed”.[1]  Given the existence of similar works by Debrett, Collins, Douglas, and others, which, although open to criticism by modern standards, represented good genealogical practice at the time, his claim is questionable at best, but the reading public of Regency and Victorian England seems not to have minded; the work was a success and had reached four editions by 1833.  These were rapidly followed by an Extinct, Dormant, and Abeyant Peerage (1831), A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland (1833-1835, later rebranded as Burke’s Landed Gentry), an Extinct and Dormant Baronetage (1838), and a General Armory (1842), as well as more ephemeral publications such as The Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Females, Including Beauties of the Courts of George IV and William IV (1833).

By the 1840s the Burke brand had been largely taken over by Burke’s son, (John) Bernard Burke (1814-1892).  Trained as a barrister, the younger Burke was appointed Ulster King of Arms in 1853 – presumably due to the rising prestige of his family’s publications – and oversaw the Peerage become an annual publication in 1847, the Landed Gentry appear in five editions from 1849 to 1892, and the issue of updated versions of most of his father’s other works.  He also catered to the Victorian taste for romantic aristocracy with a variety of more anecdotal volumes – Vicissitudes of Families, Anecdotes of the Aristocracy, etc. – and made an early gesture towards what would become a lucrative field later in the century with his 1858 Royal Descents and Pedigrees of Founders’ Kin.[2]  At the end of his life he expanded his range of publications even further, cashing in on the hey-day of empire with a two-volume Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Colonial Gentry (1891).

It was precisely its successful homogeneity and seemingly relentless publication of genealogical data that led to increasing criticism of the Burke brand in the later nineteenth century.  The first blow came from Edinburgh in the form of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Popular Genealogists or the Art of Pedigree-Making (1865).  Its author, the Scottish economic historian, peerage lawyer, and eventual Lyon King of Arms, George Burnett (1822-1890), poured withering scorn on the “easy credulity”, “poorly executed fabrication[s]”, and “clumsy and ignorant attempt[s]” of the Burkes’ scholarship.[3]  Most tellingly, he railed against the false legitimacy given to bad genealogy by Burke’s own office as Ulster King of Arms:

Statements which would never otherwise have obtained a moment’s credit, have been allowed to go forth with the imprimatur of the chief herald of Ireland, on the strength of which they are relied on by a large section of the public . . . [y]ear by year new fictions, belonging not to respectable legend, but to vulgar imposture, are obtaining general acceptance on their authority; it is therefore high time that the public should be disabused of their faith in these books.[4]

To some extent this was simply the irritation of erudition when faced with popular scholarship, but Burnett had nonetheless hit on a fundamental and unsettling truth, one which the first John Burke had in part anticipated: the Burke publications did fill a gap in the literature, even if only by virtue of their ubiquity, and as far as the public was concerned bad genealogy was better than no genealogy at all.  Even as early as 1865 the entire shape of British genealogical studies was being fundamentally altered by the Burke family and their “dictionaries”.

Burnett had sounded a note of caution, but the scholars who followed began to comprehensively expose a range of errors across the Burke series, a tradition which reached its culmination in the work of the historian John Horace Round (1854-1928).  A Balliol man and pupil of William Stubbs, Round had devoted himself to the study of medieval English government and genealogy with singular focus and dedication.[5]  In 1893 he published a joint review of Burke’s Peerage (in this case the 1893 edition) and the first edition of George E. Cokayne’s now famous Complete Peerage (1887-1892).[6]  After thoroughly grilling his colleague Cokayne (and finding him to be mostly a good thing), Round turned to Burke in deceptively mild tones:

Of ‘Burke’s Peerage’ we desire to speak with all fairness.  It has long been the fashion to pour contempt on what a well-known genealogist has styled ‘that gorgeous repertory of genealogical mythology,’ and it cannot be denied that it was fully justified by the absurd fables which the Burke family . . . have recklessly repeated in their productions.  But, in justice, it is right to add that these fables were, at the worst, repeated rather than invented, and that slowly but steadily, under the pressure of ridicule and competition, they are being weeded out.[7]

Round, despite his famous irascibility, wrote in the patronising tone of a conqueror reorganising the government of a defeated province.  Although correcting, often sharply, numerous individual errors in the 1893 volume of the Peerage, his overall conviction seems to have been that with sufficient tongue-lashing the Burke brand could be forced to improve and that “what may be fairly described as our standard work upon the Peerage” could yet be saved for scholarly genealogy.[8]

Round’s review may, of course, be contrasted with his more trenchant exposés of Burkean errors in numerous articles and volumes of essays, but it nonetheless represented a turning point.  After the beginning of the twentieth century the Burke Empire, flourishing as ever, found itself subject to comparatively less scrutiny than it had in the Victorian era.  Under the guidance of Sir Henry Farnham Burke (1859-1930) and Ashworth Peter Burke (1864-1919), grandsons of the founder, it continued to prosper and 1939 even saw a belated but substantial recognition of its American audience with the publication of an American supplement to that year’s Landed Gentry.[9]

The problem was that Round, ultimately, had been too kind.  The most egregious frauds and forgeries had gradually been winnowed from the various Burke publications over the course of the nineteenth century, but as standards of genealogical scholarship became ever more exacting, Burke’s works remained dinosaurs in their very form, essentially incapable of transmitting scholarship of a high standard.

Proof of this can be seen by examining the typical early twentieth-century Burkean style, as exemplified in the example above.  Now far wordier than the relatively terse prose of the first generation of publications, the format nonetheless forbids the systematic citation of sources, let alone the careful discussion and evaluation of conflicting evidence.  We are told for example that “Conchobhar nag Cearbhach O’Kelly of Gallagh . . . appears to have been one of the sub-chiefs of Hy-Many, and was living 1585”.  Burke’s “Hy-Many” is Uí Maine, one of the Irish kingdoms located within Connacht, but we remain ignorant of the reasoning behind the publication’s claim: why does Conchobhar “appear” to have been a sub-chief?  On what inference is this based?  Is it related to the document which, we may assume, underlies the claim that he was living in 1585?  The very format which had become essential to the publication of the annual Peerages and periodic other works makes it impossible to answer these questions and thus impossible to produce or replicate good scholarly practice.

These flaws have led many scholars to jettison Burke entirely, branding – not entirely unfairly – the whole endeavour as second-rate, bad genealogy which has done far more harm than good.  While I sympathise with that position, I cannot agree.  As error-ridden and frustrating as the Burke publications are, they nonetheless represent an unparalleled collection of genealogical data and one of the principal reasons why the outlines of British genealogy are comparatively so much better known than those of other European countries.  We may deride the Burkes as clumsy amateurs, we may resent the slapdash nature of what should be a meticulous and thoughtful form of scholarship, but ultimately we would be throwing the baby out with the bath water if we failed to turn to their publications as a first port of call in establishing the genealogy of a British middle- or upper-class family.  Particularly in the case of individuals who lived after 1750, Burke publications can offer an often game-changing snapshot of their family connections which, if not always correct, still offers dozens of points of potential departure for the scholarly genealogist.

After a chequered history during the latter part of the twentieth century, the seemingly unstoppable Peerage has been published again in 2003, complemented by a Landed Gentry of Scotland (2001), and an increasing number of other new and reissued volumes.[10]  It is the older generations of Burke products, however, that remain paramount in influence across the globe, the almost innumerable volumes of Peerages, Landed Gentries, General Armories, and others which were issued between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries.  It is to be regretted that this pillar of genealogical publishing is not, and never can be, what we might want: a truly reliable dictionary of British genealogy.  But the enduring power of the Burke brand and its remarkable legacy is such that, much as we may find to criticise within its covers, it remains one of the largest and most valuable collections of genealogical data ever assembled.


[1] John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom (London, 1826), sig. Ar.
[2] For more on “royal descents” as a phenomenon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century genealogy see my previous blog post on the subject.
[3] George Burnett, Popular Genealogists or the Art of Pedigree-Making (Edinburgh, 1865), 49-50, 89.
[4] Burnett, Popular Genealogists, 89-90.
[5] See the biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.n.
[6] John Horace Round, Review of A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage and Complete Peerage . . . extant, extinct, or dormant, Quarterly Review  177 (October 1893): 386-415.
[7] Round, 397.
[8] Round, 415.
[9] Subsequently republished by the Genealogical Publishing Company as Burke’s American Families with British Ancestry (Baltimore, 1996).
[10] http://www.burkespeerage.com/bookcase.php


Copyright © 2014 Kelsey Jackson Williams

In 1883, a thirty-seven year old newspaperman had a new idea.  Charles Henry Browning was an agent for the New York Herald in Philadelphia and lived with his uncle J. K. Walker, a wholesale druggist, at 1632 Spruce Street.[1]  His youth had been marked by trauma: in 1850, at the age of four, he had lost his father, Robert Lewright Browning, a lieutenant in the American navy, when he was drowned in Trinidad Bay off the coast of California.  The tragedy was re-enacted with eerie precision a decade later when Charles’s brother, also named Robert Lewright, was on the U.S. sloop Levant when it was lost in the Pacific Ocean in 1860.[2]  What the young Browning made of these twin deaths is unknown, but what is known is that twenty years later he struck out into a field far more rarified than journalism: he became a genealogist.

Browning was not just any genealogist.  He specialised in tracing royal descents for the Gilded Age magnates of the American East Coast and in 1883 he published the first fruits of his research, a volume simply entitled Americans of Royal Descent. 

Browning himself was oddly absent from this and subsequent books, tersely warning in a prefatory ‘advertisement’ that:

The compiler of this collection of genealogies of American Families traced to Kings, wishes it distinctly understood that he holds himself responsible for only the accuracy of their transcriptions, as they have been reproduced from recognized authorities; from privately printed family histories, and information supplied in manuscript by the families themselves,

and appearing in a genealogy of his mother’s family simply as “Charles Henry Browning, of Philadelphia, Pa.”  His initial one hundred and twenty copy print-run must have been successful, for a second edition appeared in 1891, this time entitled Americans of Royal Descent: A Collection of Genealogies of American Families Whose Lineage is Traced to the Legitimate Issue of Kings (no bastards here).  In 1898 these were supplemented with The Magna Charta Barons and their American Descendants, whose faux-blackletter title-page still embodies the social and cultural pretensions of fin-de-siècle American society:

Browning is not much remembered now, or, if he is, it’s only to be reviled as the author of the famously inaccurate Welsh Settlement of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1912).  His archives lie, hopefully not mouldering but certainly unread, in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.  But he started something that’s still with us today: the intense, unique, and sometimes baffling fascination that American genealogists have for “royal descents”.[3]

After Browning came a host of publications on the same topic.  Frederick Lewis Weis’s Ancestral Roots and Magna Charta Sureties were, in many ways, updated versions of Browning’s two works and went through many editions between the first publication of Ancestral Roots in 1950 and its – so far – final incarnation (edited, after Weis’s death, by Walter Lee Sheppard) in 2004.  Since then Gary Boyd Roberts has produced two editions of a compendium of these descents, The Royal Descents of 500 (later 600) Immigrants to the American Colonies or the United States (1993-2004) and is working on a third, while Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2004) and Magna Carta Ancestry (2005) continue both the tradition and the topical division begun by Browning in 1883 into the twenty-first century.  The major genealogical journals regularly publish articles on newly discovered descents from royalty for early American immigrants and regular readers of soc.genealogy.medieval will be familiar with the controversy and, at times, acrimony, which can surround discussions of the validity or lack thereof of these pedigrees.

To observe the phenomenon is one thing, to understand it another, and I don’t pretend to do so.  When it began in Browning’s Main Line Philly it seems to have been about aggrandisement, about a class of nouveau riche proving that they had the pedigrees to go with their money and were the match for any old world aristocrats they happened to come across (whether the old world aristocrats cared is another story).  Now, though, in its popularity across social strata in America it seems to be about something else and I wonder if it’s continuation into the modern era might have something to do with another American fixation which Europeans are especially apt to comment on: the determination with which we hang onto immigrant ethnic identities long after we’ve been stirred into the deracinating melting pot of American culture.  I wonder if royal descents, like claims to being Irish, German, or Italian when our parents and grandparents were born in Chicago or New York or Philadelphia, are part of an American attempt to reach back to the European past and make a connection with their increasingly shadowy origins.

What do you think?  I’d love to see comments from Americans who have proven royal descents for themselves.  What motivated you to undertake the – let’s face it – remarkably time-consuming research to study this sort of pedigree?  What about it interests or fascinates you?


[1] 1880 U.S. Census, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, E.D. 127, page 180C, enumerated 5 June by Edward J. Aledo, 118-165, 1632 Spruce Street.
[2] Browning Family Papers, Finding Aid, Library of Congress; Charles H. Browning, Americans of Royal Descent (Philadelphia, 1883), 17.
[3] A parallel publication appeared in England in the same year: the first fascicle of the genealogical entrepreneur Joseph Foster’s The Royal Lineage of Our Noble and Gentle Families (London, 1883).  Neither refers to the other and whether there was, indeed, some reciprocal influence or they simply represent the Zeitgeist of their Age remains unexplained.  We Moderns, however, may at least be entertained to see the royal descent (from Edward III) of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper on page 90 of Foster’s work.


Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams

In 1910 Helen Stewart Williams, wife of Horace Lee Washington, the newly-appointed American consul at Liverpool, gave birth to a son.  He was named Sydney Horace Lee Washington after his father and his maternal grandfather, the wealthy Chicagoan George Sydney Williams.  From the beginning he was surrounded by privilege.  His father, who became American consul-general in London in 1924 was the scion of a prominent military and bureaucratic family and a distant cousin of George Washington.  His mother was a wealthy socialite who divided her time between Washington, D.C., her husband’s various diplomatic postings, and a summer house on the Maine coast.  Lee, as he seems to have been known, was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he imbibed both a taste for genealogy and an overly romanticised vision of rural England.

This young Anglo-American was to become one of the most puzzling figures in twentieth-century genealogical history.  His distinguished career included a series of pioneering studies of medieval and early modern families, particularly in the north of England, and the friendship of numerous famous genealogists, including the historian of Northamptonshire, Henry Isham Longden, and the American scholars Donald Lines Jacobus and George Andrews Moriarty.  And yet, sometime between 1946 and 1950, something snapped.  An outstanding career was compromised beyond recovery by a series of articles and books in which Washington claimed that he was a descendant many times over of the Stuart kings of Great Britain and the natural grandson of Napoleon III.  For the rest of his life he published as prolifically as before, but increasingly in small, private press pamphlets as the learned journals which had previously published his scholarship stepped back from these fantastical claims.[1]

Washington has always fascinated me and last summer I began to read my way through his impressively large oeuvre.  Other projects interrupted and I never finished, so my plans for a serious article exploring his scholarship remain on the back burner, but I want to write a little about what I did discover and how that might help us understand this baffling man. 

Early Achievements

Washington began to study genealogy at Harrow, under the patronage of Isham Longden, whose fatherly regard he fondly remembered in an obituary written for the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1943.[2]  His published juvenilia, however, only consists of three novels which I have yet to read, though their titles – In Darkest Africa (1923), The Temple of Mystery (1924), and The Story of Old Egypt (1924) – may give some indication of their quality.  When he first began publishing on genealogical subjects in 1937 his interests lay chiefly in his own ancestors: the wealthy planters of the Virginia Tidewater and their English forebears.  He identified the English origin of William Claiborne, Secretary of the Virginia Colony, 1648-1660, and made a series of important discoveries concerning the Washington family in England, culminating in his seminal article on Amphyllis (Twigden) Washington, great-great-grandmother of the president. 

In the 1940s he was a leading exponent of the new, “scientific” approach brought to genealogy by Horace Round, his friends Jacobus and Moriarty, and others, lamenting in a 1943 article that:

[I]n England itself, despite Freeman’s bitter tirades and Round’s scathing criticism, many of the same genealogical errors and absurdities are still being annually repeated thirty or forty years after they had originally been exposed.[3] 

On the surface the young Lee Washington seemed like a perfect leader for the mid-century genealogical establishment: precise and thoughtful in his methodology, aware of the larger historical stakes inherent in his research, and committed to sweeping away the cobwebs of sloppiness and fantasy that obscured so much Victorian genealogical writing.  But a closer examination of his articles from these years reveals quirks which, in retrospect, seem to foretell things to come.  Washington had a literary turn which sometimes manifested itself in purple prose dangerously close to historical fiction (echoing his juvenile novels?), such as when he wrote, in an essay on the marriage of Lawrence Washington and Amphyllis Twigden:

and we may imagine how Lawrence, the cultivated Oxford Don, would have been instantly attracted by the bright eyes of this Northamptonshire lady, whom he must have well remembered as a young girl at his mother’s house at Wicken or amid the stately pleasaunces of Althorp Park.[4]

Perhaps saddest and most telling, however, was a throw-away comment in his greatest triumph, the article first identifying Amphyllis (Twigden) Washington:

Such a statement [that Amphyllis’s father and grandfather were yeomen], taken as it stands, might well suggest that Amphyllis Washington’s own relatives on her father’s side were both uninteresting and obscure . . .[5]

First Fantasies

Washington had been living in Cambridge when he began publishing, but as the second world war progressed he returned to America, living first in Washington, D.C. (1941-1942), perhaps with his family, and then in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It was from this latter address that he penned an article which was published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register for July 1950 and entitled “The Royal Stuarts in America”.[6]  The dense, manic tone, replete with a plethora of vast footnotes, involved in-line citations, constant irrelevant references to literary works, and far too many exclamation marks reads like a parody of his earlier scholarship.  The subject is the presence of three alleged descendants of Charles II in America: Captain Henry Crofts alias FitzRoy (died 1702 in Boston), J. F. D. Smyth (1747-1814), and Benedict Calvert (1724-1788).[7]  Smyth, Washington claimed, was the great-grandfather of Washington’s own grandmother, Kate (Lee) Washington.

He became obsessed with his supposed connection to the Stuarts, publishing multiple articles, additions, and corrections in the NEHGR during the following two years, now under the orotund moniker of “Charles Edward George Sydney Horace Laurence Cosimo Lee Washington, M.A., F.S.A., F.I.A.G.”  By 1952 he was in the act of discarding his earlier Crofts-Smyth-Stuart pedigree, which he no longer believed was ancestral to his paternal grandmother, but rather to his mother.  His father’s family was not entirely left out in the cold, however, for in July 1952 he published a claim that his great-great-grandmother, Margaret Stephens (1784-1869), was a descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie![8]

Such mad assertions seem to have passed without too much comment in the rarified circles of the NEHGR, but in February 1953 Washington sought out a more mainstream audience, publishing a farrago of impenetrable genealogical fantasy in the British historical and literary journal Notes and Queries.[9]  But he had overreached himself.  The Jacobite historian George Sherburn challenged his claims – particularly to have had access to private documents, collectively described as the “Roehenstart papers”, supposedly in Sherburn’s possession – and wrote in no uncertain terms that “Mr. Washington’s statements seem gravely misleading – practically unbelievable without some cogent evidence”.[10]  By 1957 the Jacobite antiquary Leo Berry had also written to the journal, pounding the final nail into Washington’s coffin:

I am satisfied that the “Roehenstart papers” mentioned by Mr. Washington have no existence at all.  Mr. Tulloh-Hatchett kindly showed me in confidence the story which Mr. Washington now has.  It does not even mention Roehenstart and cannot properly be used again to bolster up the romantic but most misleading fictions of Mr. Lee Washington.[11]

Evidently the editors thought so too, noting “this correspondence must now cease” underneath Berry’s contribution.  It marked the end of Washington’s reputation.

Napoleon’s Grandson

In 1960 Washington – who now had settled into the name “George S. H. L. Washington”, evidently a compromise between his birth name and his immensely long reinvention of the early 1950s – had returned to England and privately published a pamphlet in Cambridge entitled Prince Charlie and the Bonapartes.[12]  Now all the stops were pulled out and the convoluted pedigrees of bastard Stuarts rehearsed in his articles of the previous ten years paled in comparison to the baroque fantasy described there.  His father, he wrote, was the natural son of Napoleon III and his mistress Marguerite Bellanger.[13]  Napoleon III was the same as Plantagenet-Harrison, the Victorian genealogist and fantasist, for whom Washington had always had a predilection, but the real (or, in his view, the fake) Plantagenet-Harrison was, in fact, Napoleon’s amanuensis, the Rev. William Jackson.[14]  Historical figures donned and discarded identities in a merry-go-round of speculation and invention.  Unremarkably, given the previous incident surrounding the “Roehenstart papers”, Washington provided unimpeachable authorities for his Bonapartist origins:

Finally, to revert again to the late Princess Ytúrbide (née Marie Bonaparte of Paris): after her death in England on 11th May, 1940 I became her ultimate heir, and not only did I thereby acquire many precious family papers, portraits, etc., but also I grew vividly aware for the first time of our true family background – quite a shock for one who throughout his earlier career at Harrow, Princeton, and Cambridge had always clung to the good old American names of Washington and Lee![15]

Needless to say, no one other than Washington seems ever to have seen these “precious family papers”.

Although he continued to privately publish various pamphlets on both the Washingtons and the Stuarts, Washington faded into comparative obscurity after his first, prolific decade of myth-making.  What I feel I haven’t fully grasped, though is why.  Why did such a brilliant scholar suddenly devote himself to concocting fantasies?  Perhaps the answer lies in his comment about Amphyllis Twigden’s supposed yeoman ancestors who were “both uninteresting and obscure” and in a telling quotation from John Maynard Keynes in one of his late articles.[16]  Keynes, reflecting on an early twentieth-century eugenicist’s claim that the Villiers family possessed disproportionate “hereditary ability” wrote:

What are we to conclude?  Is it that all Englishmen would be found cousins within four generations if we could trace all our trees?  Or is it true that certain small ‘connections’ have produced eminent characters out of all proportion to their size?  It will be a very cautious and sceptical reader who does not leave this book [the eugenicist, Gunn’s, publication] with a bias for the latter conclusion.[17]

These may be Keynes’s words, but the spirit, I think, is Washington’s.  Disappointed with his own lack of relationship to his obsessions, the Stuarts and the Bonapartes, he not only invented one, but combined the two historic families into a single “small connection”, as far from the “uninteresting and obscure” ancestors of Amphyllis Twigden as he could get.



[1] The late William Addams Reitwiesner offered a characteristically trenchant, but in this case slightly inaccurate, summary of Washington’s career in the notes to his “Children and Descendants of George I, King of Great Britain”.  In fact, Washington’s fantasies did not recur “every few years”, but only began to be published in 1950.
[2] S. H. Lee. Washington, “Rev. Henry Isham Longden, M.A., F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S., F.S.G.”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 97 (April 1943): 99-102.
[3] S. H. Lee. Washington, “The Origin of the Families of Greystoke and Dunbar”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 97 (July 1943): 239-240.
[4] S. H. Lee. Washington, “The Marriage of the Rev. Lawrence Washington and Amphyllis Twigden”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 97 (April 1943): 197.
[5] S. H. Lee. Washington, “Amphyllis Washington, 1602-1655, Her Ancestry and Family Connections”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 94 (July 1940): 252.
[6] S. H. Lee. Washington, “The Royal Stuarts in America”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 104 (July 1950): 173-176.
[7] John Ferdinand Smyth, later Smyth Stuart (1745-1814), though not an ancestor of Washington, was a perfectly real Stuart pretender of the early nineteenth century who invented a descent for himself from the Duke of Monmouth and wrote an astonishingly bad epic poem justifying his pretensions (see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.n.).
[8] S. H. Lee. Washington, “The Royal Stuarts in America”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 106 (July 1952): 235-237.  In the same article he claimed to be related to both Horace Round and the Victorian fantasist Plantagenet-Harrison.  It is remarkable that here and elsewhere the scholars whose work he discussed and used in his earlier writing appear transformed into actors in his genealogical dramas.
[9] S. H. Lee. Washington, “The Count of Roehenstart”, Notes and Queries 198 (February 1953): 71-75.
[10] George Sherburn, “The Count of Roehenstart”, Notes and Queries 198 (April 1953): 174.
[11] C. L. Berry, “Charles Edward, Count Roehenstart”, Notes and Queries 202 (June 1957): 257.
[12] George S. H. L. Washington, Prince Charlie and the Bonapartes (Cambridge, 1960).
[13] Bellanger was Napoleon’s mistress, true enough, but their only child was one Charles Leboeuf (1864-1941).
[14] Washington, Prince Charlie and the Bonapartes, xi-xii.  The actual “Plantagenet-Harrison”, born George Henry Harrison in Yorkshire, had created a mythical past for himself not unlike that forged by Washington (see this, the only easily available biographical summary).
[15] Washington, Prince Charlies and the Bonapartes, xi.
[16] George Washington, “Family Knowledge in Genealogy”, Notes and Queries 12 (1965): 43-47.
[17] John Maynard Keynes, “The Great Villiers Connection”, in Essays in Biography (1951), 71, quoted in Washington, “Family Knowledge in Genealogy”, 47. 


Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams