James II’s arrangement of Clancharlie’s succession

James II’s arrangement of Clancharlie’s succession converted uncertain reports about a dead exile into a royal settlement: Lord David Dirry-Moir would inherit Lord Linnæus, Lord Clancharlie’s titles and rights, provided he married the infant Duchess Josiana. The settlement appeared to close the succession by declaring there was no legitimate heir. Later, an authenticated message recovered from the sea disclosed that Lord Linnæus had left a son, Gwynplaine, and that the king’s order had helped remove him from the line of inheritance. The episode makes succession both a matter of royal power and a contest over what the law can recognize as fact.

Rumour and Royal Settlement

After Lord Linnæus’s death, reports circulated that he had married Ann Bradshaw, the daughter of a regicide, in his final years of exile in Switzerland. She, too, was said to have died, giving birth to a boy. The accounts made the child Lord Linnæus’s legitimate heir, but they were presented as conjecture, distant from England and impossible for the people repeating them to verify. The narrative leaves the reports uncertain at this stage: the possibility of an heir exists, but it has not become an established legal claim.

James II ended the public uncertainty with a declaration that Lord David Dirry-Moir was the sole heir in default of legitimate issue. The absence of any other issue and descent was treated as established, and patents setting out the grant were registered in the House of Lords. The royal declaration did more than name a successor. It set an official account of the family’s descent against rumours that could otherwise unsettle the inheritance, and gave that account the force of a registered settlement.

The Conditional Inheritance

The patent placed Lord David in the titles, rights, and prerogatives of the late Lord Linnæus on a condition: when Duchess Josiana reached a marriageable age, Lord David was to marry her. At the time of the arrangement she was only a few months old, already created a duchess by the king. The settlement thus tied the succession to a future marriage and joined the transfer of the Clancharlie inheritance to the king’s choice of a bride for its designated heir.

Josiana’s position was itself part of the arrangement. The king granted her the Clancharlie peerage provisionally: she was a peeress until there should be a peer, who would be her husband. The inheritance comprised the baronies of Clancharlie and Hunkerville; the family also held the title of Marquis of Corleone in Sicily by royal licence. Its lands and associated rights included burghs, bailiwicks, fiefs, rents, freeholds, and domains. Those holdings were provisionally assigned to Josiana, while the king declared that Lord David, once married to her, would become Baron Clancharlie. The arrangement therefore made the marriage condition the hinge between Josiana’s temporary possession and Lord David’s intended succession.

Josiana also possessed a separate personal fortune, much of it derived from gifts made to the Duke of York by Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orleans. That distinction matters to the settlement: the Clancharlie estates and titles formed one part of her provisional position, while her own wealth was additional to them. The arrangement gathered inheritance, rank, property, and a prescribed marriage into a single royal disposition.

The Evidence the Settlement Excluded

The declaration that there was no legitimate issue proved false. The later judicial account identifies Gwynplaine as the only legitimate son of Lord Linnæus and Ann Bradshaw, and the inheritor of his father’s estates and titles. It also states that, when Gwynplaine was two, he was sold on the king’s order for ten pounds, after Lord Linnæus’s death. The child’s removal was not merely an accidental gap in the family record: the account says it was intended to put the heir out of the way. In that light, the succession granted to Lord David depended on a supposed absence that royal action had helped produce and preserve.

The evidence reaches England by a route the original settlement could not control. A ship’s crew wrote its declaration on the back of the royal order that had served as the receipt for the child’s purchase. The document identified the Matutina, a Biscay vessel sailing from the Gulf de Pasages, and explained that the order was on its reverse. On that reverse were the words Jussu regis and the signature Jeffreys. The declaration and the king’s order had travelled together, so that the document used to authorize the child’s removal also preserved evidence of his identity and the authority behind that removal.

The papers were found inside Hardquanonne’s gourd flask, a container that had been sealed and carried to shore by the sea. Barkilphedro, an officer of the Admiralty’s Jetsam Office, explained that the flask had been opened in the presence of two sworn jurors, William Brathwait and Thomas Jervois, who attested its contents with him. He reported the matter to the queen, after which the required legal formalities were undertaken. The testimony and official handling turned a private, lost record into evidence that could challenge the registered succession.

Recognition and Reversal

At the confrontation, the sheriff showed the prisoner the flask bearing Hardquanonne’s name and described the declaration and confession of his accomplices. Hardquanonne had recognized the bottle but had initially refused to answer. When Gwynplaine was brought before him on the fourth day, he broke his silence and recognized his victim. The scene joins material evidence to personal recognition: the bottle, the writing, the signature, and Hardquanonne’s response together expose the identity that the earlier patent had excluded.

The consequence for Gwynplaine is a sudden reversal of status. Barkilphedro explains that the legal process has established him as a peer with an annual income of forty thousand pounds, a legislator and judge, and the intended husband of a duchess who is a king’s daughter. Gwynplaine faints under the force of this transformation. The revelation does not simply replace Lord David with a different heir; it exposes how the original arrangement treated the absence of a legitimate child as fact while the child himself had been concealed. In the plot, the sea-message restores the suppressed inheritance and turns the king’s succession plan into evidence against the power that made it.