Anastasia and Other Imposters

Episode 59 Anastasia and Other Imposters

Vortigern (Shakespeare’s Lost Play)
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/ireland-vortigern

Inspired’ by Mary Shelley’s “The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck,” this episodes examines 4 fascinating imposters - Perkin Warbeck, Thomas Chatterton, Henry Ireland, and Anna Alexander (Anastasia)

00:00 Introduction
00:39 Perkin Warbeck, School, and Poe
04:14 Historical account of Warbeck
08:22 Thomas Chatterton
11:46 Henry Ireland (“lost” Shakespeare play?)
14:57 Background and life in Europe
17:49 Life and marriage in Virginia
23:21 Mystery of Anastasia solved
25:59 Sources
26:57 Future Episodes

• Learn about Perkin Warbeck - a major pretender to the throne of England
• Learn about Thomas Chatterton and his counterfeits
• Learn about Henry Ireland and “Shakespeare’s Lost Play”
• Learn about Anna Alexander and her attempts to prove she was a Russian princess
• Learn how the identity of Anastasia was determined

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

00:00 Introduction 

Welcome to Celebrate Poe - every Monday night at 12:00 Midnight. This is Episode Fifty Nine - Anastasia and Other Imposters.  As you may know, last week I spoke with my cousin in Virginia, a former college professor, and she told me about her recollections of Anna Alexander and Anna’s controversial claim that she was Russian Royalty.  Anna Alexander had a fascinating story, and this episode will examine her claims.  

00:39 Perkin Warbeck

But first I want to examine the story of another person who claimed to be royalty - in this case, the son of a Flanders boatman who claimed that he was the rightful king of England - a man by the name of Perkin Warbeck.

I was looking at the accomplishments of Mary Shelley, and saw that she wrote several volumes after her husband, Percy Shelley, died.  One was entitled, “The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.”  I saw that and thought to myself, “Where have I heard that name before - like a friend that you met 10 years ago, knew well for several days, and then never heard of again after that.    Then it hit me - PERKIN WARBECK! - the imposter!!!

You see, in grad school, I was assigned to do presentation for my class about Perkin Warbeck - a pretender to the throne of England.

I got the idea of doing a computer animation about imposters with Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Motion called “The Top 10 Imposters of All Time,” and ended with a section on Perkin Warbeck.  I worked for hours on it, and was really proud of it.

For the major part of our grades, we were to grade each other.  And i thought that would be really simple - look for the best parts in everyone’s presentation, and give them a good grade based on that.  Look for the best in other people.

The next week, the professor gave use back the comments, and said “Everyone gave excellent comments, except for one of you.”  And at that, he stared straight at me, and it was clear who he was talking about.  You have no business saying good things about those in your class. The people in this class are not your colleagues - they are your competitors and your enemies.  So get used to it if you ever want to succeed in academia.

So I still have bad memories associated with Perkin Warbeck - or least with that assignment.  Maybe I was trying to repress them.  I just don’t have that dog-eat-dog instinct to ruthlessly get ahead at all costs.

But I digress …

Mary Shelley’s novel, “The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck,” is slightly different from the historical accounts of Perkin Warbeck, but I wanted to emphasize the historical story of Perkin Warbeck for this podcast.  

Later Celebrate Poe will deal with the tradition of the imposter or the person who claims to be someone different that he or she is because, along with horror and mystery stories, Poe delighted in portraying events that weren’t true - or might even be considered a scam.   For example, in 1844, Poe published a story about a three-day trip across the Atlantic Ocean in a gas balloon.  It was later revealed as a complete hoax, and the story was retracted.  And this wasn’t the only time Poe presented a hoax as a true story.

04:14 Historical account of Warbeck

But back to Perkin Warbeck - who WAS a real person - but there the truth becomes murky.  

Probably the most reliable information we have about him was obtained as a result of questionable means just before his execution - but the information he gave regarding his family does match up with his family records, and is probably reliable.  Besides, why would you lie in a confession before execution?  There is always the distinct possibility that Perkin Warbeck wasn’t his real name, but I am going to call him Perkin Warbeck for simplicities sake.  

So stay with me on this one - I could really get into the historical weeds, but I am going to try and stick to the basics, and keep the lengthy titles to a minimum. Now Edward IV was king of England, and during a revolt, two of his sons two of his sons were captured when they were children and are known as the “Princes in the Tower.”  The elder, Edward V, would have been next in line for the throne, and if Edward died, his brother Richmond would have become king.

At first, the general consensus was that both young princes had died as a result of being kept prisoner in the Tower of London - whether it was from natural causes or murdered in the Tower.  But rumors arose that while Edward, the older brother had died, his younger brother, Richard was still alive.  And a significant number of English citizens began to believe that Richard was actually a man by the name of Perkin Warbeck.  It was also possible that Perkin Warbeck received support because there was considerable support to reclaim the throne from the current king, Henry VII.

His story was that his brother Edward had been murdered, but he had been spared by the murderers, and had been sworn to not reveal his true identity for a number of years.  And Perkin Warbeck was handsome, well-mannered, and acted like the perfect prince - in other words, a natural fake-it-til you make it.

In 1495, he hope to lead a popular uprising would happen, but instead the locals rallied for Henry, and the battle was over before Perkin even got off the boat.

Eventually, he was imprisoned in England, and paraded through the streets on horseback as a trophy. He confessed to being an imposter, and was given a room at Henry’s court where he was able to attend royal banquets. After 18 months of this sort of house arrest in a gilded cage, Warbeck tried to escape. He was quickly recaptured and was then sent to the Tower of London. Supposedly he tried to escape in 1499, was recaptured, and hanged.

Many authors believe that Perkin Warbeck was actually who he said he was – how could a lowly country boy speak English so eloquently, and understand English manners so well at court if he hadn’t been brought up in it?   Most historians don’t believe that he was Richard, Duke of York, but it would have been interesting if he had have been able to escape from the Tower of London.

TRANSITION MUSIC

08:22 Thomas Chatterton

The next two imposters were both teenagers when they pulled their most impressive frauds.   Both lived in the 18th century, and both forged some pretty impressive literature.

Thomas Chatterton became known as the ‘Marvelous Boy.”  “Before he was ten he had taught himself how to write in Gothic characters by copying from an old Bible. In 1765, when he was only twelve, he started producing ancient poems which he claimed he had found in an old chest in the local church. He said they had been written by a priest named Thomas Rowley, possibly around Chaucer’s time – 400 years earlier.

The scholars of the time were very impressed, and Thomas left his native Bristol for London. But the London experts were not fooled so easily and declared his works to be forgeries.

Although he had a minor success with his own poems and political satires, Thomas Chatterton’s career was soon in ruins and at seventeen he took his own life.

In his will, he left ‘all the young ladies my letters and poems. I leave my mother and sister to the protection of my friends if I have any.”

The ironic part is that Chatterton could have succeeded just on his own genius.  Unfortunately it appears that he suffered from depression - always feeling that his work was not good enough. He work later became an inspiration to such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge. He was immortalised in a painting by Henry Wallis and is the only forger to have had an entire opera written about him – Leoncavallo’s Chatterton. 

There is even a collection of "Chattertoniana" in the British Library, consisting of works by Chatterton, newspaper cuttings, articles dealing with the Rowley controversy and other subjects. 

The great English poet John Keats - who this podcast discussed in Episodes 45 and 46 - was also one of the many Romantic writers who greatly admired Chatterton.  Keats, who also died young, wrote the following sonnet in honor of Chatterton -

Sonnet to Chatterton

O Chatterton! how very sad thy fate!
 Dear child of sorrow – son of misery!
 How soon the film of death obscur’d that eye,
 Whence Genius mildly flash’d, and high debate.
 How soon that voice, majestic and elate,
 Melted in dying numbers! Oh! how nigh
 Was night to thy fair morning. Thou didst die
 A half-blown flow’ret which cold blasts amate.
 But this is past: thou art among the stars
 Of highest Heaven: to the rolling spheres
 Thou sweetly singest: naught thy hymning mars,
 Above the ingrate world and human fears.
 On earth the good man base detraction bars
 From thy fair name, and waters it with tears.

11:46 Henry Ireland (“lost” Shakespeare play?)

There was another teenage forger of the time who wrote a rather mediocre, play, and passed off as originally being written by Shakespeare.

Henry Ireland had started early by handing giving what he claimed were Shakespearian manuscripts and artifacts to his father, a London bookseller and Shakespeare enthusiast. William claimed that while working as a solicitor’s clerk, a mysterious gentleman had entrusted all the documents into his safekeeping. These he showed his father, who showed them to friends – and the news of the Shakespeare discoveries spread like wildfire.

This may have begun as a small time scan, but developed into almost an industry.  Henry Ireland then produced a land deed and other private papers of William Shakespeare. This led him to become got bolder and produced original transcripts of parts of King Lear and extracts from Hamlet. These were so convincing that even the diarist and biographer James Boswell paid homage. He said: ‘I now kiss the invaluable “relics of our bard.  Thank God that I have lived to see them.” I guess you could say that some people were willing to believe anything.

“With this sort of success under his belt, Ireland really went to town. At the age of seventeen, he ‘discovered’ a brand new Shakespearean play which no one had seen before. He called it Vortigern.

The play was produced at the Drury Lane Theatre - a really big deal - on April 2, 1796. The actor-manager John Kemble, who was to play the lead, actually had his doubts about the authenticity of the piece. He even suggested that it would have been more appropriate to open the play a day earlier - which would have been April Fool’s Day. But although the play did open on April 2, Kemble got the last laugh. In Act Five there was a speech which contained a line that brought the house down. . . .

‘And when this solemn mockery is ended. . . .’

The audience hooted the rest of the play off the stage. The first performance of Vortigern was also its last and the game was up for Ireland. The rest of his forgeries were detected and the teenager confessed to everything — although his old father could never bring himself to believe that his treasured possessions were all fakes.”

I have a link to the text of Vortigern on the top of the show notes and transcript for this episode - not going to subject you to the text - it is pretty dry - but if you can’t sleep some night, you might want to check out Vortigern - or Shakespeare’s lost play.

TRANSITION MUSIC

14:47 Background and life in Europe

I’d like to end this episode with the story of Anna Alexander - a lady who claimed she was Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.  This is a rather complicated, but fascinating story, so I hope you will stick me as we explore the case of an individual who many people feel was the world’s most well known imposter.

It all began with the 1917 Russian Revolution.  The  Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Nicholas II and Alexandra, were captured and murdered in a  basement of an old house in Siberia.  The story goes that their four daughters, and young son, the heir to the throne of Russia, were also shot.

3 years later, several police found a lady trying to commit suicide by jumping into Berlin River. She was rescued by a police sergeant and taken to the local Elisabeth Hospital. Since she was without papers and refused to identify herself, she was admitted as Miss Unknown to a local mental hospital where she remained for the next two years. The lady had scars on her head and body, and spoke German with an accent that the staff described as “Russian.”

Later, she used the names Tschaikovsky and then Anderson. In March 1922, claims that Anderson was a Russian grand duchess first received public attention. Most of those who had been around the royal family, said Anderson was an impostor but others were convinced she really was Anastasia. In 1927, a private investigation identified Anderson as Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker with a history of mental illness. After a lawsuit lasting many years, the German courts ruled that Anderson had failed to prove she was Anastasia, but through media coverage, her claim became more and more well-known.  Basically, people wanted to believe that she was a princess. 

Hundreds of pages have been written about Anna’s claims and how they became known all over the world.  After all, laying claim to being Russian nobility, and heir to the billionaires of dollars in assets that the royal family owned would really be a big deal.  And for a great and rather detailed account of the rest of the story, I highly recommend The Resurrection of the Romanovs: Anastasia, Anna Anderson, and the World’s Greatest Mystery by Greg King and Penny Wilson. 

But I am going to skip ahead to her last years in the United States.

17:49 Life and marriage in Virginia

Anna Anderson had an especially strong supporter in the person of Gleb Botkin. During the 60’s, he was living in the town of Charlottesville, Virginia - the site of the University of Virginia.  Botkin was a good friend of John Monahan, the head of the history department at the University of Virginia, and genealogist - so Monahan knew a thing or two about the past and blood linesl.   Botkin and Monahan paid for Anderson’s journey to come to the United States.  

It is said that Anna Anderson had previously known Jack Monahan, and she entered the country on a six-month visitor's visa. Shortly before the visa was due to expire, Anderson married Manahan, who was 20 years her junior, in a civil ceremony on 23 December 1968. Botkin was their best man.

Jack Manahan enjoyed this marriage of convenience, and jokingly described himself as "Grand Duke-in-Waiting” and "son-in-law to the Tsar". 

The couple lived in separate bedrooms in a house on University Circle in Charlottesville, and also owned a farm near Scottsville.

Now a little interjection here - Homes and land near Charlottesville are astronomical in price. John Grisham, Sissy Spacek, Art Garfunkel, and Dave Matthews are among the many wealthy people who have homes in Charlottesville.

So it helps to have a great deal of money to own a home in Charlottesville.

Scottsville is a country area near Charlottesville, and due to some zoning arrangement when Scottsville was established, each property has to have at least 100 acres.   I can’t even imagine the price of land around Charlottesville.

In other words, Jack Manahan was a very wealthy man, and felt that proving Anna Anderson was actually Anastasia would be his crowning academic achievement.

Anna legally changed her name to Anastasia Manahan.   As I have mentioned, the Manahans were extremely wealthy, but lived in squalor with large numbers of dogs and cats, and piles of garbage.   John Manahan was fond of calling himself “Charlottesville’s biggest eccentric.”   The Manahans were fond of attending social events - my cousin - you know - the retired college professor I mentioned last week -  and her husband saw a play at the University of Virginia where Dr. Manahan and his wife were in attendance.  My cousin said that she remembered them as a couple that wanted to be the center of attention, but at the same time did not want anyone to notice them.

Botkin died in December 1969, and the during the next year, the many lawsuits involving Anastasia’s identity finally came to an end, with neither side able to establish Anderson's identity.

On 20 August 1979, Anderson was taken to Charlottesville's Martha Jefferson Hospital with an intestinal obstruction.  Now with both Manahan and Anderson in failing health, Anderson was institutionalized, and an attorney, William Preston, was appointed as her guardian by the local circuit court. A few days later, Manahan “kidnapped" - I guess that is the best way to put it -  Anderson from the hospital, and for three days they drove around Virginia eating out of convenience stores like teenage robbers on the lam.  I get this image of an elderly Bonnie and Clyde on the run.

After a 13-state police alarm, they were found and Anderson was returned to a care facility. In January she was thought to have had a stroke, and on 12 February 1984, she died of pneumonia.

With all that has been written about Anna Alexander, it seems that everything published about her claims to have THE TRUTH about what happened.  In reality, what you read largely depends on when the book was written.  Those written before the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union often give credence to Anna Alexander’s claims, or at least talk their way around it.

23:21 Mystery of Anastasia solved

But after the fall of communism, the locations of the bodies of the Tsar, Tsarina, and all five of their children were revealed. Multiple laboratories in different countries confirmed their identity through DNA testing. DNA tests on a lock of Anderson's hair and surviving medical samples of her tissue showed that her DNA did not match that of the Romanov remains or that of living relatives of the Romanovs. Instead, Anderson's DNA matched that of Karl Maucher, a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska - the Polish factory worker. Most scientists, historians and journalists who have discussed the case accept that Anderson and Schanzkowska were the same person. Repeated and independent DNA tests proved that the remains were the seven members of the Romanov family, and proved that none of the Tsar's four daughters survived the shooting of the Romanov family.

Opinions vary as to whether Anderson was a deliberate impostor, delusional, traumatized into adopting a new identity, or someone used by her supporters for their own ends. According to writer Michael Thornton, "Somewhere along the way Anna Anderson lost and rejected her Polish identity. She lost that person totally and accepted completely she was this new person. I think it happened by accident and she was swept along on a wave of euphoria." Lord Mountbatten, a first cousin of the Romanov children, thought her supporters "simply got rich on the royalties of further books, magazine articles, plays etc." Prince Michael Romanov, a grandson of Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna of Russia, stated the Romanov family always knew Anderson was a fraud, and that the family looked upon her and "the three-ringed circus which danced around her, creating books and movies, as a vulgar insult to the memory of the Imperial Family.”

As mentioned before, we will learn that the theme of fraud and imposter was central to several of Poe’s works - especially in the science fiction genre.  

25:59 Sources 

Sources for this episode include World Famous Crooks & Con Men by Vikas Khatri, The Princes  in the Tower by Allison Wier, The Fate of the Romanovs by Greg King, The Resurrection of the Romanovs: Anastasia, Anna Anderson, and the World’s Greatest Mystery by Greg King and Penny Wilson. 

 Why not visit my podcast web site at celebratepoe.buzzsprout.com - click on the episode you want to learn more about to see its show notes and a transcript. 

26:57 Future Episodes 

Now after the special episodes for Pride Month in June, Celebrate Poe is going to take a deep dive back into the life and writings of the Poe.  There are so many subjects involved in trying to understand Edgar Allan Poe, and his complex works, but I feel that a solid understanding of his greatness rests on mainly two aspects - his creativity - and by creativity, I am including his inspirations and imagination.  And I believe the second main reason for his greatness is his use of language - his understanding of words and how to use them - especially in getting an effect.

Beginning in July, Celebrate Poe will get back to two other imaginative genres largely from Europe that influenced Poe - starting with the vampire/undead genre from the Villa Diodati - and then covering the fascinating story of The Black Vampyre, as well as later vampire stories and even movies.

It is also felt that the werewolf genre of stories influenced Poe - especially in his use of the doppelgänger theme.

Then Celebrate Poe will specifically cover Poe’s years as a child in England - especially his education .  I am finding some exciting stuff  regarding the information that he learned - especially in the form of classical rhetoric - to become one of America’s greatest writers.

Discussing classical rhetoric might seem a bit dry when you first look at it, but I have a feeling that you will find it fascinating, and understand Edgar Poe in an exciting new way.

The episode to be released June 7, at Midnight deals with Bayard Taylor, the author of Joseph and His Friend - a book written in 1870 that is generally agreed to be the first novel about a homosexual relationship by an American.  

On June 14, the episode will be about Fitz-Greene Halleck, an extremely popular author who was greatly admired by Poe, as well as the public in general.  He was sometimes called “the American Byron,” and his works have been studied a great deal recently for their homosexual themes.

The episode to be released on June 21 deals with the homoerotic works of Walt Whitman, one of America’s greatest poets, and a man Poe actually met and regarded highly.

And finally on June 28, this podcast will have an episode on an individual who was greatly influenced by Poe - Oscar Wilde.  This episode will deal with the friendship of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman, the years Wilde spent in prison, and a comparison of Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Grey with two stories by Poe - William Wilson and The Oval Portrait.

Thank you for listening to Celebrate Poe.