Obviously, the figure of Voltaire is anything but fictional, and his penchant for collecting a large and diverse cabal of correspondents has been recorded in great detail.
That the pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart, sought the hand in marriage of the Polish noblewoman, Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska, is also historic fact. As is the story that the Hapsburg Emperor Charles had her detained at King George’s request while she was en route to her wedding. And group of errant Irish ‘Wild Geese’ officers did indeed free her as a service to James Stuart, although the exact circumstances of that event are not quite as recorded in this novel!
James Stuart did maintain a court in exile in Rome, largely funded by the Pope, and it was notorious as a hotbed of intrigue and treachery. However, it would have been historically impossible for a real life James Lindsay to have been there at the time of Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska’s arrival, let alone to have been involved in her escape from the Emperor Charles. In the real historic timeline, all those events were unfolding barely three months after the Battle of Glenshiel.
Also, in the real world, there was no Dorothea von Kettler, although the von Kettler family were the hereditary Dukes of Courland, and they did conduct a generational struggle for independence from their overbearing neighbours, imperial Russia, and to a lesser extent, Poland. So it would be no surprise if a von Kettler was known to the Stuart court, especially since the pretender’s consort was such a senior Polish noble.
However, there is no historical basis to the idea that the pretender ever considered putting his name forward as a contender for the Polish throne, or sought to become involved in the subsequent War of the Polish Succession, which broke out in 1733, more or less in the way described.
There was a King Stanislas I of Poland, and he was elected by the Polish nobility. Austria, Saxony and Russia did indeed object to his ascending the throne, and did drive him from Warsaw to Danzig, where a Russian army did indeed besiege him. And, as described in this fiction, Stanislas had high hopes of being relieved, namely by his father-in-law, the French King Louis XV. However, while the French did send ships, and troops, to relieve Stanislas, they were too few and were subsequently vanquished. But not at any ‘Battle of Westerplatte’. No such clash took place, and is an invention of the author.
The real end of Stanislas was far more prosaic. The siege of Danzig ended with the defenders capitulating, and Stanislas, intending to fight on, fled to the countryside to conduct a guerrilla war. All his noble resolve, however, was eventually bought off by the offer of the Duchy of Lorraine, and the war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Vienna in 1738.
That James Lindsay and Dorothea von Kettler made it to Sweden in the aftermath of the Danzig surrender, would not however have guaranteed them any long-lasting peace. A war was brewing between Sweden and Russia, and when it broke out in 1741, James would find the Russian armies were again being led by his old friend from the siege of Danzig, Peter Lacy, and its navy, by a Scottish admiral called Thomas Watson – both men very real life characters from history. But that is for another story!
