Talk:Charles Edward Stuart, Count Roehenstart

Pictures?

are there any pictures of him?Ericl (talk) 15:13, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

"Count" title

I asked at the reference desk regarding the appropriate title for Charles Edward Stuart and consensus is that the title "Count Roehenstart" is self-styled. At such, I think that the article title should be moved to reflect that as the current title is misleading. Charles is not a Count and reliable sources agree on that point. Bejinhan talks 10:25, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

In naming biographical articles, Wikipedia follows the line of using the commonest form of the subject's name, and what we have is the commonest form of this man's name, with the names he did not use left out. "Screaming Lord Sutch" was not a lord, he was Mr David Sutch, and "Lewis Carroll" was a name made up by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, but we use the names they were known as.

I don't look on the reference desk as authoritative, to go there is rather like going to the nearest student pub and asking what the people at the bar think, but if you had notified me, I would have taken part in the discussion. The standard biography of Roehenstart, by Professor George Sherburn, is called "Roehenstart: A late Stuart Pretender: Being an account of the life of Charles Edward August Maximilien Stuart, Baron Korff, Count Roehenstart". Roehenstart was the name used to register his baptism, and he used it as his principal name throughout his life. In later life, he adopted Stuart as his surname, with every right to do so, as it was the name of his mother, who so far as we know was not married. However, while "Stuart" was his correct surname, it was not the name he was known by. We therefore need to include both Stuart and Roehenstart, and I see no other way to do it: Roehenstart has never been called "Stuart-Roehenstart", that would be to make up a new name which never existed. Burke's Peerage invents "de Rohan-Stuart", a name which he never used; and one reason for that is that he never referred to Rohan as his father. Burke seems to miss the point that in the beginning "Roehenstart" was evidently a spelling adopted to obscure both of his parents' names, for good reasons, and the spelling never changed, with Roehenstart pretending to the end of his life that it was the name of his father.

I agree that it seems very likely Roehenstart awarded himself the title of Count. He may have taken the view that as the pretender to a throne he had the right to do so, and it appears that no one ever challenged him over it. In any event, the English tradition is that your name is what you call yourself, this fellow called himself in English "Count Roehenstart", in German "Graf Roehenstart", and in French "Comte de Roehenstart", and that became his name, whether it was a title of nobility, a title in pretence, or merely a pen name. His contemporaries called him that, and secondary sources of all kinds have used it, too. Moonraker2 (talk) 21:09, 24 March 2011 (UTC)