CLEMENTINA

Clementina is a 1901 historical adventure romance novel by A. E. W. Mason. The book was initially serialized in The Sphere in 1901, with illustrations by Bernard Partridge. The first edition was published in the UK by Methuen in 1901 and the first American edition by Frederik A. Stokes, Publishers that same year. The novel is a fictionalized account of the true historical rescue mission of Maria Clementina Sobieska from her imprisonment at the hands of Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor prior to her marriage to James Stuart, the Jacobite claimant to the British and Irish thrones. Several of the characters, Wogan, Gaydon, Misset and O'Toole are all based on real people. Before the real-life husband and wife separated, Maria Clementina bore James two sons, Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie") and Henry Benedict Cardinal Stuart (Jacobite Duke of York). The idea for the novel was suggested to Mason by his friend Andrew Lang who had been working on the historical material, including a surviving account by Charles Wogan himself. The romance between Wogan and Clementina is fictional.