‘They succeeded in fabricating around them an aura of bogus royalty which attracted the allegiance of a few romantic Jacobites in Victorian times’. Herbert Vaughan called their story ‘an impudent fabrication’ and ‘an unblushing fraud’ but it was as Sir Charles Petrie wrote ‘proof of the hold which the House of Stuart has never ceased to exercise upon popular imagination in the British Isles, so that ... if a man were to declare himself the heir to the Yorkist or Tudor dynasty, he would attract but little attention, yet if he claim to be a Stuart he will find hundreds ready to believe him’.