Open Veils · Answer
Prince Michael of Albany
Prince Michael of Albany is the regnal styling adopted by Michel Roger Lafosse, a figure who sits at the intersection of Jacobite legitimism, esoteric chivalric orders, and disputed dynastic history. His claim rests on a secret papal annulment and clandestine remarriage of Bonnie Prince Charlie — a lineage mainstream historians flatly reject but which carries significant weight in certain Grail-bloodline and Priory of Sion research circles. His association with a self-styled Knights of Malta federation and a diplomatic post in São Tomé points toward the murky world of para-sovereign orders that researchers like Tracy Twyman and Laurence Gardner have mapped extensively.
Evidence
- According to Wikipedia's current record, Michel Roger Lafosse claims that Charles Edward Stuart secretly obtained a papal annulment of his marriage to Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern and subsequently contracted a secret marriage to Marguerite O'Dea d'Audibert de Lussan, Comtesse de Massillan.
- The late Laurence Gardner, whose works Bloodline of the Holy Grail and The Illustrated Bloodline of the Holy Grail reconstructed Stewartian and Merovingian dynastic claims in exhaustive detail, treated the Albany lineage as a living thread of sacred kingship suppressed by Hanoverian statecraft.
- Lafosse's diplomatic credentials derive from a self-styled 'Federation of Autonomous Priories of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta' — distinct from both the Vatican-recognized SMOM and the Protestant Alliance Orders.
- In the broader esoteric historiography shaped by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the survival of Jacobite bloodlines into modernity was posited as a live political and spiritual reality — one that institutions have every incentive to suppress.
- This union allegedly produced a son in 1786 — Edward James Stuart, Count Stuarton, Count of Albany — from whom Lafosse claims descent, making him the 7th Count of Albany and legitimate Jacobite heir to the Scottish throne.