The Last 'True King' of England

 

There has rarely been a shortage of claimants and pretenders to the throne of England. The succession was not always smooth. Neither William nor Harold at Hastings had a good claim to be king and indeed were not at first chosen by the Witan, the Anglo-Saxon Council of Elders who, at least nominally, presided over king-making. And neither William Rufus nor Henry, the Conqueror’s sons and next two successors, had an undisputed claim: there was an elder brother, Robert, and a candidate from the Royal House of Wessex, Edgar Aetheling.

The civil wars between Stephen and Matilda; the various Plantagenet intrigues; the Wars of the Roses; the Tudor struggles between Catholic and Protestant; the Civil War; the Monmouth Rebellion; the Glorious Revolution; the Act of Succession; the Jacobite cause and the wars of 1715 and 1745; all these and other historical episodes amply demonstrate that the path to the throne was never, as it might now seem, part of any settled order of things.

Even in the late 19^th century there was a Jacobite conspiracy to seize the throne whenever Queen Victoria’s reign should come to an end (it is satirised in Allen Upward’s Lord Alistair’s Rebellion, 1909). The queen, in her long years of mourning, had become less popular, and there were doubts about the raffish character of her son, the future Edward VII. Certainly this Jacobite scheme was a quixotic, rather whimsical affair, but for a time the movement had its own newspaper (The Whirlwind – Arthur Machen was a contributor) and issued other publications, there was a cycle of clandestine meetings, and even Parliamentary candidates, some from a fiery Huntingdonshire family of innkeepers and artists. Some Nineties figures, such as Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and Macgregor Mathers, also embraced a Romantic Jacobite nostalgia.

If this Jacobite Twilight was all a rather cavalier escapade, tinged with Scottish and Irish nationalism, it still had just enough adherents to be not entirely dismissed. J B Priestley’s first novel, the Stevensonian romance Adam in Moonshine (1927), depicts just such a Stuart conspiracy involving a mysterious prince in the Yorkshire moors. It admits the comic-opera absurdity of it all while admiring its glamour and panache. But The Old Cause had in fact received something of a knock. By most (but not all) Jacobite reckonings, the correct monarch was the Duke of Bavaria who had, unsurprisingly, fought on the side of Germany in the Great War. This made presenting him as the proper English king a somewhat tricky proposition.

However, this was not the last flourish of the trumpets in the long story of those who put forward an alternative claim to the throne. In the early Thirties another candidate emerged, from a different line, with a strange story to tell. Anthony William Hall (1898-1947), who called himself Anthony Tudor, claimed to be the true king of England, descended from a son of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, prior to their official espousal. This son had been brought up by a farmer named Hall. The subsequent state marriage of the pair, it was claimed, legitimised the line. Hall sent “a lengthy epistle of eleven foolscap pages” to “George Windsor” at Buckingham Palace, requiring him to “relinquish the Imperial Crown”. Elaborate genealogical information was submitted in support of this claim.

Hall had been born in Chiswick: his father was a seafarer. His family had some Welsh Border links and he joined the Shropshire Constabulary as a police constable just after World War I. By the early age of 28 he had risen to the rank of Inspector, one of the youngest in the country. But, according to a police history study, “His meteoric police career came to an abrupt end in the mid-twenties after a disagreement with his chief constable. On leaving the force, he went to North America, returning to this country some time in late 1930, when he went to live at Hereford” (Douglas J Elliott, Policing Shropshire 1836-1967, 1984).

It seems to have been after this that he began his rather Ruritanian campaign for the throne. The same source says he spoke to large crowds in Castle Square, Ludlow and St Peter’s Square, Hereford (which he planned to make his capital), and “it is said that in a six year period he addressed 1,000 meetings”, attracting a largely tolerant and sometimes sympathetic audience. In the Thirties of the Depression some of his policies, such as having a Ministry of Pleasure, abolishing income tax, increasing the strength of beer and building many more homes, won light-hearted approval among the populace, and this support began to trouble the authorities. But he also railed against George V as a German impostor and this began to cause even greater consternation.

Official government records of correspondence from the Palace at the time, expressing royal concern, were released in 2006 and gave the daily papers a passing novelty story. At first, it had been suggested that perhaps Hall might be detained on mental health grounds. However, the doctors disobligingly found that, though eccentric, he was not legally speaking of unsound mind. One of them thought his policies were quite sensible. So instead other measures were adopted. The soi-disant King was frequently arrested, and charged with obstruction, breach of the peace and similar public order offences.

He was repeatedly fined, bound over, and eventually imprisoned for short spells. But this did not work. He did not regard the court’s findings as binding upon him. This was on the understandable grounds, from his point-of-view, that the proceedings were brought against him in the name of the Crown (as are nearly all criminal prosecutions in England) but, since he was the Crown, they could not be valid. The prosecutions also increased sympathy for him and made it look as though there could be something in his claims, else why pursue him?

He was still campaigning in the late Thirties. The poet and essayist Derek Stanford, a champion of Eighteen Nineties writers, gives a sympathetic vignette of King Anthony in London, circa 1937, in his memoir Inside the Forties (1977):

‘On the steps of the war memorial seat beside the entrance to Lincoln’s Inn grounds, Anthony Tudor would stand and address the lunchtime strollers on his own unimpeachable claims to kingship. He was a fair-haired mass of a man, a young middle-aged bull in his prime, whose features showed a memento or two of that bluff, polygamous King Henry in his heyday. Bluff and amiable was [Anthony] Tudor, happy to answer questions about the predicament of England today . . . ’

Stanford added, ‘On the credentials of his line of descent, I would not care to pronounce; but I thought he evinced a pragmatic approach such as characterised Henry VIII. To me, a collector of lost causes, this seemed refreshingly unusual.’ Stanford at the time regarded himself as a philosophical anarchist in the Kropotkin tradition, but was also a dandy and aesthete. He reports with delight the stance taken by the poet Fred Marnau, who came from an Austro-Hungarian background. Attracted (like Joseph Roth) by both the old Double Monarchy, and by a louche, bohemian lifestyle, Marnau declared himself ‘an anarcho-monarchist’, thereby enjoying, as Stanford puts it, ‘the best of all impossible worlds!’    

It seems a pity, in a way, that King Anthony was not so prolific a writer and publisher as Count Potocki of Montalk, a contemporary claimant to the Polish throne, even more colourful, with whom he was sometimes compared. The British Library catalogue only has a pamphlet, Prince Anthony’s Manifesto, Revised programme of national reconstruction, attributed to ‘Anthony TUDOR, calling himself Prince Anthony’, 1932, and the National Library of Wales has something similar published in Ebbw Vale. He also printed his own currency, signed Antony I. All this ephemera connected with him is now vanishingly scarce.

He died, aged 49, in the quiet village of Little Dewchurch, Herefordshire, once the family home, about five miles from his intended capital, and is buried in the churchyard there. He is not known to have left any heir to continue his claim.

Though the historical lineage was no doubt fanciful or somewhat over-elaborated, the general idea that the country awaits a New King, the True King, has mythic resonances and is often found in literature and legend. It may be that, as well as his flamboyant personality and agreeable policies, King Anthony appealed to his Thirties audiences because of just such a romantic yearning. 

(Mark Valentine)