A Treasury of Deception

by Michael Farquhar

  The allure of royalty must have been pretty potent for those close enough to witness firsthand the pampered luxury and fawning deference accorded monarchs and their families. Such was the case with Sarah Wilson, a young maid in the service of Britain’s Queen Charlotte, consort of George III. The aura of majesty was apparently so intoxicating to the ambitious girl raised in rural England that she wanted a piece of it for herself. Her quest would eventually lead her to the American colonies, where she reinvented herself as a member of the royal family who in fact never existed. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  At first all Sarah wanted was something that belonged to the queen. So one night she crept into Charlotte’s closet and took a ring, along with a miniature portrait of the queen and one of her finest gowns. Greedy for more, Sarah slipped in again the following night but was caught. Stealing from the queen was a capital offense, and Sarah was duly sentenced to death. Fortunately, she was saved from the gallows through the intercession of Caroline Vernon, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte who had brought Sarah into the royal service. The death sentence was commuted to exile in the colonies.

  The redeemed maid arrived in the New World in the fall of 1771, and was sold as an indentured servant to William Devall of Bush Creek, Maryland. Life as a slave in all but name did not suit Sarah, though, and after several months she escaped to Virginia. There she commenced her imposture. Somehow she had managed to keep possession of the items she had stolen from Charlotte, and she used them to create her new identity: Princess Susanna Carolina Matilda, the queen’s younger sister.

  Sarah told people she had been banished after quarreling with her sister the queen. No one seemed to notice, or care, that the supposedly German-born princess could not speak a word of the language. And the fact that Charlotte had only one, older sister was apparently a nonissue as well. The onetime maid was feted in the American south by people eager to rub shoulders with royalty. The governors of Virginia and North Carolina warmly received her, and in both colonies, wrote historian Francis Xavier Martin in 1829, “she made astonishing impressions in many places, affecting the manners of royalty so inimitably that many had the honor of kissing her hand.”

  The presumed princess kept people interested with promises of rank or property when she eventually reconciled with her sister and returned home. “To some she promised governments,” wrote Martin, “to others regiments or promotions of different kinds in the treasury, army, and navy. In short, she acted so adroitly as to levy heavy contributions upon some persons of the highest rank.”

  Yet while Sarah made her royal progress through the south, her master William Devall had not been idle. He advertised her as missing property and sent his lawyer to track her down. She was eventually captured in 1773, but escaped again two years later. By now the colonies were in revolt against Britain, and in the turmoil Sarah was able to avoid detection. She eventually married a young officer named William Talbot and settled with him in New York, where they raised a large family. In the midst of this simple domesticity, however, Sarah never forgot her stint as a princess. On the wall of her home she kept a portrait of her “sister,” the queen.

  4

  A School of Dauphins

  “Your eyes is looking at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette. . . . Yes, Gentle-the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.... Yes, Gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France.”

  —MARK TWAIN, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Had Twain’s fictional “Looy” actually existed, he would have been just one of a herd claiming to be the lost king of France. There were more than a hundred. Some of the fake dauphins caused quite a stir; others—like a half Native American in the Great Lakes region—never got very far with their frauds. All, however, traded on a tragedy and, in doing so, tormented the real dauphin’s sister to her grave.

  After the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 1793, their two orphaned children were kept separated from one another in the fortress prison known as the Temple, where the deposed royal family had been imprisoned. Louis-Charles, the eight-year-old dauphin, was consigned to a hideous fate. His enchanted childhood at Versailles had ended abruptly when a murderous mob stormed the palace. He watched in terror as his mother and father were threatened and humiliated before they were finally dragged to the guillotine. Now the little boy was all alone and at the mercy of revolutionary fanatics. The “son of a tyrant,” as they called him, was subjected to a brutal reeducation program designed, in the words of one, to make “the little whelp . . . lose the recollection of his royalty.” Then, when physical, emotional, and sexual abuse had all but broken the boy, he was abandoned entirely—left to rot in his own filth in a dark cell.

  “He lay in bed,” wrote his older sister Marie-Thérèse, “which had not been made for more than six months, and he now had no strength to make it. Fleas and bugs covered him, his linen and person were full of them. His shirt and stockings had not been changed for more than a year. His excrements remained in the room; no one had removed them in all that time. His window, the bars of which were secured by a padlock, was never opened. It was impossible to stay in his chamber on account of the foul odor. . . . He might have taken rather more care of his person. . . . But the unhappy child was half dead from fear, so much had they terrorized him. He spent the day in doing nothing. They gave him no light; this condition did as much to harm him morally as it did physically. It is not surprising that he lapsed into a fearful marasmus.”

  When a doctor was finally allowed to attend the boy, now ten, he found him consumed by diseases, covered with tumors and sores, his joints grotesquely swollen and discolored. Louis-Charles was “a victim of the most abject misery and of the greatest abandonment,” the doctor reported, “a being who has been brutalized by the cruelest treatments and who it is impossible for me to bring back to life. . . . What a crime!” On June 8, 1795, he died. An autopsy was performed, during which the boy’s heart was secretly removed—a postmortem tradition for French kings that on this occasion seemed hollow, but would in time have enormous significance. The rest of the body was buried in an unmarked grave without ceremony or mourners. The child who would have been Louis XVII was no more, but his legend was launched.

  Many believed the boy-king had not died, but had escaped the Temple and that a substitute child had been buried in his place. “Some contend that this death means nothing,” reported Le Courrier Universel; “that the young child is in fact full of life and that it is a very long time since he was at the Temple.” Sure enough, the first of a long parade of imposters soon made his appearance. A tailor’s son who claimed to be Louis XVII had a noble bearing that convinced many people that he was indeed the young king. Royalists showered him with gifts and paid homage, while tales of his escape from the Temple and subsequent adventures excited imaginations across France. Nevertheless, Marie-Thérèse, by then living in exile in Vienna, believed the story of the young man who claimed to be her brother was “an idle fancy,” as she wrote her uncle in 1798, which “according to everything I know thereon, is in no way probable.” The imposter was eventually arrested by Napoleon’s secret police and imprisoned. In his place, however, sprouted many more false claimants, and some of these Marie-Thérèse could not so easily dismiss from her mind.

  One of the most successful, and most agonizing to Marie-Thérèse, was a Prussian clockmaker named Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, who made his claim official in 1834. Ironically, it was during the trial of another imposter. Naundorff’s representative interrupted the proceedings to read a letter from his client, the real claimant: “Gentlemen of the jury and all you Frenchmen in whose hearts reign sentiments of honor and justice, learn that the son of your unfortunate king, Louis XVI, is still living. . . . Yes, Frenchmen, Louis XVII still lives and is relying upon the lively interest which the nation has never ceased t
o feel for the innocent son of the most unhappy of her kings . . .”

  Like many of his fellow imposters, Naundorff told a compelling story of rescue from the Temple prison, and of harrowing adventures that followed. What set him apart, however, were the number of intimates of the deposed royal family who believed him and rallied to his cause. “Madame,” the dauphin’s childhood nurse, now an old woman, wrote Marie-Thérèse, “I am impelled by my conscience to take the liberty of writing respectfully to you to assure you of the existence of your illustrious brother. I have seen him and recognized him with my own eyes. . . . His long suffering, his resignation and submission to the will of Providence, as also his kindness, are beyond belief.” Other former courtiers of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were equally enthusiastic in their endorsements. Startled, Marie-Thérèse sent her trusted friend, Vicomte de La Rochefoucauld, a former French minister, to meet Naundorff.

  “I found myself in the presence of a man who undoubtedly bears a certain resemblance—taking his age into account—to the more careful portraits of Louis XVII,” the vicomte reported, “and who possesses the general features of the Bourbon family.” More important, he continued, “There was nothing in his behavior, in his tone, his manner of speech which suggested impudence or fraud, let alone roguery and still less blackmail. . . . He is so calm, so convincing, that one is almost convinced oneself.”

  Marie-Thérèse had been harassed by a relentless horde of “brothers” for years, and was naturally wary of Naundorff. Still, the possibility that he might be telling the truth compelled her to at least receive letters from him through his agent. “I am ready to give my sister alone, by word of mouth, indisputable proofs which will remove all your remaining doubts,” Naundorff wrote. In the end, though, Marie-Thérèse could not bring herself to meet the imposter, which made him furious. “It is sufficiently painful to me to find Frenchmen propagating by command lies and calumnies against me,” he wrote, “but how bitter must be my feelings when I see my own sister at the head of my oppressors! My own sister, not content with protecting my enemies, assists them to crush my just cause. . . . I find myself utterly at a loss, Madame.”

  The imposter continued to stalk his “sister,” and even filed suit against her. His efforts eventually got him arrested, after which a shady past that included allegations of forgery and insurance fraud was exposed. He was deported to England. “Thank God, I will not hear of the Prussian again,” wrote Marie-Thérèse. “But I know it is not entirely over. . . . His threats do not frighten me a great deal. He is a cunning imposter who is being manipulated by political adventurers.” Indeed, Naundorff would continue to haunt her.

  He died in Holland in 1845, maintaining his royal pretensions to the end. Inexplicably, Dutch officials recorded on his death certificate that he was “Louis XVII, who has been known as Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, born at the Chateau of Versailles, in France, March 27, 1785 . . . the son of his late Majesty, Louis XVI, king of France, and her Imperial and Royal Highness, Marie-Antoinette . . .” And on his tombstone was engraved, “Here lies Louis XVII . . . King of France and Navarre.” Naundorff’s wife and children were determined to validate the epitaph. They pursued a claim in the French courts to have the death certificate of the real dauphin invalidated and the fake one recognized. In addition, as the (self-proclaimed) widow of Louis XVII and the rightful “princes” and “princesses,” they demanded “rights and privileges” to which they claimed entitlement. Marie-Thérèse was summoned to appear before the court, but she refused. The case was eventually dismissed, and a month later Marie-Thérèse was dead at age seventy-two. Her epitaph was infinitely more appropriate than Naundorff’s: “Oh, all those that pass by, come and see whether any sorrow is like unto my sorrow!”

  Marie-Thérèse was at last free of the mysteries and torment that surrounded her brother’s life and death, but for historians there was no such relief. For nearly two more centuries, scholars and amateurs alike tried to find the elusive proof that the little boy who died so miserably at the Temple was indeed the dauphin. It finally came in 2000, thanks to the now dry and hardened heart taken from the boy during his autopsy in 1795, and the miracle of DNA.

  The shriveled organ, passed from hand to hand over the years, had survived wars and revolutions before it finally came to rest among the remains of other French royalty in the abbey of Saint-Denis. A sliver of the relic was analyzed and compared to hair samples taken from the dauphin’s maternal aunts, which had survived in a rosary that belonged to their mother. “This is the end of two hundred years of uncertainty,” declared Philippe Delorme, a historian who worked with the scientists on the case. “It puts to an end a mystery that has absorbed so many of us. The DNA analysis shows the child’s heart is from a member of the Habsburg family [Marie-Antoinette’s royal line]. The historical research shows that this heart came from the orphan of the Temple. Since, apart from Marie-Thérèse who survived, the only other relative of Marie-Antoinette in the Temple in 1795 was Louis-Charles, now we have an answer. It was Louis XVII, the little king of France without a crown, who died in the Temple prison. It is definitive.”

  5

  The Last Tsarevna?

  There was one royal imposter who reigned above all others in the world’s imagination. From the time she was pulled sputtering out of a Berlin canal after an apparent suicide attempt in 1920 until just recently, a Polish peasant named Franziska Schanzkowska had a legion of believers convinced she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the only surviving child of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II. The resemblance was indeed startling, as was her apparent intimate knowledge of the imperial court. And Franziska was certainly ornery enough to pass as royal. She barked orders and threw fits like any true spoiled princess. But what really captured the imagination of historians and Hollywood alike was the romantic notion that the tsar’s youngest daughter, against all odds, had miraculously escaped her family’s bloody fate.

  At first Franziska was maddeningly evasive after being rescued from the canal and brought to a Berlin asylum. She refused to identify herself, or, for that matter, to say anything at all. Instead, she cowered under her bedcovers in apparent terror. They called her “Fräulein Unbekannt,” or “Miss Unknown.” Gradually, however, Franziska started to offer little hints to the hospital staff about who she might be. She muttered Russian in her sleep, but refused to speak it while awake, as if the language was somehow cursed. She also subtly encouraged comparisons between her appearance and photos of the real Anastasia, but pretended to be horrified if anyone made a connection. Her fear, she suggested, was that the Bolsheviks would come and kill her if they ever discovered who she was. Then, after nearly two years biding her time in the asylum, Franziska finally “admitted” that she was indeed the Grand Duchess Anastasia.

  Some thought she was just another pathetic creature who thought she was royal. After all, Romanov claimants appeared all over the place after the massacre of the tsar and his family in 1918. Others, however, were thoroughly convinced she was the genuine princess. Her story, as it emerged in fragments, was fantastic. She said a Russian soldier named Alexander Tschaikovsky had somehow rescued her after the rest of her family was slaughtered in the basement of the prison home in the Siberian town of Ekaterinburg. How he managed this she claimed not to know, only what Tschaikovsky told her: “It was a dreadful mix up, then he saw that I was still alive [after the family had been lined up against a wall and shot]. He did not want to bury a live body and he escaped with me under the greatest dangers. It was very dangerous.”

  Grievously wounded in the assault, she was hidden in a farm cart and driven out of Russia with Tschaikovsky and his family. “Do you know what a Russian farm wagon is?” Franziska asked her rapt audience. “No, you do not know. You only know when you lie in one with a smashed head and body. . . . How long was it? My God! A long time. Many weeks. Tschaikovsky was really crazy to rescue me.” Speaking of crazy, the tale continued. They ended up in Bucharest, Romania, Franziska said, where they were shelte
red by a gardener and survived by selling off pieces of jewelry “Anastasia” had sewn in her clothing while in captivity. During this time she had a son with Tschaikovsky, whom she then married. Soon after he was killed, perhaps, she hinted, by the Bolsheviks. With her husband dead, she said, there was nothing to keep her in Bucharest. It was time to go to Berlin and find her surviving royal kinsmen there. Having left her son with Tschaikovsky’s family, she set off with his brother. “It was always in my mind to go to my mother’s relatives,” she said. “It seemed so natural to me that they would recognize me; I did not think of any difficulties.” But difficulties there were, she claimed, from the arduous trek to Berlin to her abandonment by her brother-in-law to the desperate realization that her royal relatives might not recognize her. It was in this confused and distressed state that she jumped into the canal from which she was rescued.

  Farfetched as the story was, the faithful swallowed it. Nor were they deterred by the sharp denials of Franziska’s claims by various royal relatives and intimates who agreed to meet the increasingly prominent imposter. “I saw immediately that she could not be one of my nieces,” declared Princess Irene of Prussia, sister of Anastasia’s mother, Empress Alexandra. “Even though I had not seen them for nine years, the fundamental facial characteristics could not have altered to that degree, in particular the position of the eyes, the ears, etc.”

  That should have settled it, but for every apparent exposure of the fraud, there was some tantalizing bit of evidence that kept it alive. The most compelling of these was the declaration of a few people who had known Anastasia in Russia that the frail, sickly woman now before them was the Grand Duchess herself—or very well could be. Anastasia’s paternal aunt Olga, Tsar Nicholas’s sister, was so open to the possibility that Franziska was her niece that she sent her sweet notes and little gifts. “I am sending you all my love,” Olga wrote in one missive, “am thinking of you all the time. It is so sad to go away knowing that you are ill and suffering and lonely. Don’t be afraid. You are not alone now and we shall not abandon you.” That Olga eventually repudiated the imposter was of little consequence to her supporters. The tsar’s sister, they concluded, had simply bowed to family pressure.