During the 1930s, our archives indicate that H.I.M. Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (1892-1975) exercised a role of Royal Patronage towards the San Luigi Orders. He was regent of Ethiopia from 1916 to 1930, and Emperor from 1930 to 1974. By tradition, he was the descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and has been acclaimed by the Rastafari movement as the Biblical Messiah.
>>Biography (Wikipedia)
>>Biography (Ethiopian Treasures)
Documentary: The Lion of Judah
Captain Henry Stuart Wheatly-Crowe (1882-1967) (often rendered Wheatley-Crowe) was a Commandeur of the Order of the Crown of Thorns.
Wheatly-Crowe devoted the greater part of his energies and much of his inheritance to the two causes of Jacobitism and the restoration of the commemoration of the martyrdom of King Charles I to the calendar of the Church of England. His addition of “Stuart” to his forenames reflected his claimed descent from the Lennox Stuarts. He was using the title Baron Montrencie from early adulthood onwards, though the provenance of this title is unclear. Later he would assert his right to the title of Duc de Saint-Quentin in the Peerage of France.
His career was with the Army, and he was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the 1st Cheshire Royal Engineers (Volunteers) in July 1900, becoming Second Lieutenant in the 6th Battalion, The Lancashire Fusiliers, in September 1902. In October 1914 he was gazetted as temporary Captain and thereafter served during the First World War with the Manchester Regiment. In 1919 he resigned his commission on account of ill-health and was permitted to retain the rank of Captain.
A High Church Anglican, he inaugurated his campaign for King Charles the Martyr by founding the Royal Martyr Church Union in 1906. This attracted around 500 members at its peak, including a number of peers of the realm. In 1911, the Memorial of Merit of King Charles the Martyr was established, and a revival of this body continues today. This was conceived as a system of honours within the Anglican Communion, and its Statutes received the approval both of the Archbishop of Canterbury and King Edward VII.
Unfortunately for the Royal Martyr Union, little headway was made with the Anglican hierarchy, and as members died, others did not come forward to replace them. There was also dissent within its ranks, and during the 1930s this seems to have resulted in Wheatly-Crowe being sidelined for a time. By the 1960s, and back in charge, Wheatly-Crowe had no regrets, although the whole endeavour was estimated to have cost him some £25,000. He said, “I’ve done what I said I would do. I’ve tried. And I would do it again.”
Jacobitism began to gain some ground in the aftermath of the First World War, and in 1926, Wheatly-Crowe founded the Royal Stuart Society, and subsequently in 1932 the Order of the Crown of Stuart, which were to prove key organizations for the British Jacobite movement.
During the 1930s, Wheatly-Crowe was mostly a supporter of the claim of Prince Rupert of Bavaria (Robert I and IV) to the British throne, although at other times, because of the descent of Prince Rupert from an uncle-niece marriage, he gave support to the Infanta Alicia de Borbon or other Jacobite claimants in his stead. The Abdication Crisis of 1936 presented an opportunity for Jacobites to capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the House of Windsor, and Wheatly-Crowe accordingly issued a proclamation that declared himself to be “His Highness the Lord Regent of England, Scotland and Ireland” based on a letter of authority from Prince Rupert of 22 February 1937. As Regent, Wheatly-Crowe’s first act was to issue a strongly worded protest against the coronation of George VI.
Prince Rupert had generally been extremely circumspect about advancing any Jacobite claims, and the publicity that attended Wheatly-Crowe’s actions was not welcomed. He ordered his Chancellor, Erwin Freiherr von Redwitz, to write to Wheatly-Crowe making it clear that he refuted any claims made in his name, and that if Wheatly-Crowe persisted in them, legal action would follow. This setback meant that the Jacobite cause lost what temporary momentum it had gained.
A newspaper report of 1951 details Wheatly-Crowe’s custody of the mummified heart of the Marquess of Montrose, which had been gifted to him in 1931 and had successively reposed in a glass case in his Hampstead home and under the bed in his New Forest residence. The Marquess had been executed in 1650 as a result of his failed attempt at a rebellion in favour of the restoration of Charles II. The reporter recalls that Wheatly-Crowe brought the relic down while he was having tea with him, and placed the “brownish-black, leathery lump” on the table. Wheatly-Crowe eventually sent the heart by registered air mail to a descendant of Lord Napier, a prior recipient, in Canada.
The Order of the Crown of Stuart rose to greater prominence amid the chivalric revival of the post-war years, although Wheatly-Crowe’s tenure at its helm was not consistent and at one point he found himself ousted by modernisers. Its structure under his leadership was that of a chivalric confraternity – doubtless in remembrance of those Jacobite orders and chivalric societies revived under the Earl of Ashburnham and the Marquis de Ruvigny in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, to which it saw itself as the successor. Knighthood was conferred in three ranks, including provision for hereditary Chevaliers, and with other nobiliary distinctions introduced.
A thorough revision of the membership was undertaken in 1960. At this time, Wheatly-Crowe was Grand Master and among the officers were the Most Revd. J.E. Bazille-Corbin (Grand Chancellor; also a member of the Order of the Crown of Thorns) and Professor Vincent Powell-Smith (Registrar; also an Officier of the Order of the Crown of Thorns until his withdrawal from the Order in June 1962). As of 1959, the Chaplains of the Order included not only representatives of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches but also the Revd. Geoffrey Paget King, as representative of the Old Roman Catholic Church. Mgr. Paget King was also a Prelat-Commandeur of the Order of the Crown of Thorns. During the 1960s, the Order of the Crown of Stuart and the Memorial of Merit published a joint newsletter entitled Legitimist Notes.
The pattern of the Order established by Wheatly-Crowe was not to the approval of all those involved, and harsh criticism from both present and former members brought about fundamental changes that sought to remove the chivalric and nobiliary elements that he saw as essential to its character. By this time, he was no longer able to maintain the staunch resistance he had always offered to such developments, and it would perhaps be true to say that the Order as he had created it died with him.
Maurice Beddow Bayly (1887-1961) was a Chevalier of the Order of the Lion and the Black Cross.
He was a medical doctor by profession, graduating MRCS and LRCP. His principal work was in campaigning against vivisection for medical purposes, being a member of the Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, and against vaccination, in which connexion he was a member of the National Anti-Vaccination League.
He published many papers and pamphlets on these subjects, and in 1944 wrote on vaccination, “Perhaps the greatest evil of immunization lies in its diversion of public attention from true methods of disease prevention. It encourages public authorities to permit all kinds of sanitary defects and social problems to remain unaddressed, particularly in schools. It ignores the part played by food and sunlight and many other factors in the maintenance of health. It exaggerates the risk of diphtheria and works upon the fear of parents. The more it is supported by public authorities, the more will its dangers and disadvantages be concealed or denied.”
Concerning vivisection, he commented, “In a universe which embraces all types of life and consciousness and all material forms through which these manifest, nothing which is ethically wrong can ever be scientifically right; …in an integrated cosmos of spirit and matter one law must pervade all levels and all planes. This is the basic principle upon which the whole case against vivisection rests. Cicero summed it up in the four words: “No cruelty is useful”.
Bayly was admitted a Chevalier of the Order of the Lion and the Black Cross in February 1961, four months before his death. His letters expound his philosophy of religion. He was a member of the Liberal Catholic Church and Secretary of its church at Tekels Park, Camberley. Earlier in life, he had received the minor orders in that body, but did not proceed further “since I considered it too serious a step to take, unless I was likely to be in a position to carry out regular duties as a priest.” He was an active member of the Theosophical Society.
He wrote “All the ancient legends concerning King Arthur and his knights have an immense appeal for me, for whatever the historical facts may be the central theme of the Quest for the Holy Grail is a living reality today as it ever was and ever will be.”
>>Biography (Wikipedia)
>>Various writings, quotations etc. (whale.to)
Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902-85) was a member of the Order of the Crown of Thorns. He served as a senator for Massachusetts as well as as United States Ambassador to the United Nations, South Vietnam, West Germany and the Holy See (as Plenipotentiary). In the 1960 Presidential Election he was the Republican nominee for Vice-President.
>>Biography (Biographical Directory of the United States Congress)
>>Biography (Wikipedia)
Interview given as campaign manager for General Eisenhower, 1952
Frederick Bowman (1893-1969) was an Officier of the Order of the Crown of Thorns and also an Officier of the Order of the Lion and the Black Cross. Described in an obituary as “the last of Liverpool’s notable eccentrics” his life was of such unusual variety that the late Grand Prieur, Mgr. George Tull, at one point planned to write his biography. It was said of him that “everything he did was in inverse proportion to his diminutive size.”
The exact date of Bowman’s birth was not even vouchsafed to the authorities at the hospital where he passed away. His early career was as an actor (he claimed Sir Donald Wolfit among his friends, and compared notes with him on their respective portrayals of Richard III) and he appeared often in the Liverpool music halls in melodrama and as an orator. He would customarily appear in public in the same uniform of tailcoat and buttonhole that he had worn upon the stage. In June 1934 he was formally presented to King George V at a levée.
As time wore on, he gained a reputation for litigiousness. On one occasion, a printer whose bill he had failed to pay was unwise enough to make some derogatory remarks about him in a letter. Bowman successfully sued him for libel, winning £400 damages, a considerable sum in those days.
At some point in early adulthood, he became a Muslim and adopted the name Hameedullah, being particularly impressed by the reverence of that faith for the suffering of animals. However, he later decided that he “did not know enough to be religious at all”. By the time of his admission to the OCT, however, he was able to complete the required subscription to the Nicene Creed without overmuch difficulty.
A fierce pacifist and member of his friend the Marquess of Tavistock’s anti-war (and at various times anti-Semitic and pro-fascist) British People’s Party, he was interned during the Second World War, and clearly felt his duty lay in maximum resistance to the authorities. He founded the Frederick Bowman Freedom League in Brixton Prison in 1942, and in June of that year attempted to escape while disguised as a clergyman. Recaptured and put on bread and water, he went on hunger strike on several occasions and was forcibly fed by tube. The authorities offered him conditional release, but he refused their terms; they then opted for unconditional release, having previously considered forcibly expelling him from the prison. Bowman then sued the prison governor and the Home Secretary for having ordered that he be force-fed: although this act was clearly illegal, Bowman’s appearance pro se before the judge antagonized him, and he lost the case.
Shortly after his release, in March 1943, he received a knighthood from Count Potocki de Montalk, who was a rather tenuous pretender to the throne of Poland as King Wladyslaw V. Potocki was a determined controversialist, fierce anti-Semite and practising pagan as well as a poet and private printer of some note. The service of investiture included a reading from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, prayers for those working for peace and an invocation to the sun god. The following year, Potocki deprived Bowman, whom he had (with characteristic contempt for the British Establishment) encouraged to use the title “Sir Frederick”, of his knighthood for alleged lèse majesté and breach of his oath of fealty. All this was reported in the less salubrious quarters of the press of the day.
Bowman continued to be interested in phaleristic matters, and particularly their insignia and minutiae of dress, and in due course was introduced to the Order of St Stanislas as well as to the San Luigi Orders. In 1928, he had co-founded the weekly periodical The Liverpool Examiner and Talking Picture News and also at some point published The Theatrical Observer and The Liverpolitan. Most editions of the first of these titles carried a photograph of him, usually taken some twenty years previously. Curiously, they also carried on occasion reproductions of British coins and stamps on which Bowman’s head replaced that of the monarch.
By now, he was dedicated to the great cause of his life, which was animal welfare. As founder-president of the Animal Service Association, his home, “Humanimal House”, became a refuge for innumerable itinerant cats which he fed at his own expense, leading to his acquiring a rather fishy effluvium that made it sensible to keep downwind of him on occasion. One letter details in heroic terms his rescue of a spider from his sink. Other associations included Alma Chetwynd Aid for Strays (Mrs Chetwynd ventured out late at night to feed them, accompanied by Bowman as her protector), M.D.-W. Pigeon Relief, anti-vivisection, and the campaign to end the ill-treatment of transported horses from Ireland. One of his letterheads indicates in no uncertain terms, “No connection with those now running what they call the league against cruel sports. No sympathy about people killed while hunting.”
Alongside this, he worked for the peace movement and for relief for the deaf-blind community. He joined the Guild of St Francis under Mgr. Tull, which had an especial care for animal welfare.
In 1960, he was persuaded to revive his compact version of East Lynne at Liverpool’s Pavilion Theatre; he played the villain, Sir Francis Levison. He authored a number of plays, some of which were professionally performed, and wrote many songs, including a March Song for the Order of the Crown of Thorns which has subsequently been adopted as the Anthem of San Luigi.
His correspondence with Mgr. Tull concerning the San Luigi Orders was voluminous and conducted with great energy and enthusiasm, with typescript at all angles of the page and copious handwritten additions. It is clear that the appointment to the Orders caused him to rediscover the Catholic Faith and to become more attentive in his devotions after many years of indifference. In 1961 he wrote to Mgr. Tull “Your friendship is an inspiration and encouragement in troubled times, and it seems as if you had been spiritually impelled to get in touch with me when you did. I feel it is something for which my gratitude is due to God himself.”
Late in his life, Bowman was in ailing physical and financial health and approaching a Christmas that would have been spent on his own and with few comforts, when he was telephoned by the then Mr (later Bishop) Mervyn Thompson-Butler-Lloyd, a local hotelier, who arranged for him to enjoy a free Christmas dinner at the hotel with taxi service to and from his house. In recognition of this kind gesture, Bowman arranged for Mr Thompson-Butler-Lloyd to be admitted to the Order of the Crown of Thorns, although Bowman had passed away before this honour was conferred.
The obituary published in “Les Chroniques de Chevaliers” read, “Following a short illness, he died in a Liverpool hospital, after a life of kind and useful service to humanity and animals. Devoted to the Orders and the ideals of true chivalry; staunchly celibate, he left no next of kin, but many friends in Liverpool and far beyond. The Grand Prieur will remember him with especial affection as a loyal comrade.”
Emirto de Lima y Santiago (1890-1972) was a member of the Order of the Crown of Thorns (in the photograph he wears the miniature insignia, fourth from left on his left breast). He was a Colombian musician and musicologist, studying first with his father in Curaçao, then with Pedrell in Barcelona and finally at the Schola Cantorum de Paris under Vincent d’Indy.
He spent time in Ottawa, and from 1929-30 served as a conductor for the new radio station there. He was also involved with the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra and as a music critic.
He was for a time in charge of his own academy of music, but when this ran into financial difficulties as a result of changes in musical fashions (he was a staunch opponent of jazz) he was appointed consul general in Barranquilla for Liberia and Honduras. The manner of his death was mysterious, with all his possessions, including manuscript scores, being seized by the authorities and not released to this day. He was a dedicated phalerist and member of many chivalric orders.
The works that are available to the public today show his creation of a nationalist Colombian style and range from orchestral tone-poems (Poema indio) and ballets (Sonatina (fantasy ballet), 1929; Triunfo del amor, 1949), to many piano and instrumental miniatures. There is also a major study of ethnography (Folklore colombiano, 1942). He wrote “I have a deep, firm, unwavering belief in the bright future of national music, and I think all who contribute to its dissemination, maintenance and improvement (whatever the sphere in which they are placed) meet not only with a imperative duty of gratitude and affection for this lush, gentle and strong land , but cooperate in the task in which they are committed to the great men of the country, that is, to assert more and more the ideal colombianista.”
His piano music has been recorded on CD by Harold Martina in a disc supported by the Colombian Ministry of Culture.
Emirto de Lima’s Contemplación, played by Luis Felipe Pennett
H.E. Colon Eloy Alfaro (1891-1957) was Ambassador of Ecuador to the United States of America between 1936 and 1944. He was a member of the Order of the Crown of Thorns.
He was the son of Eloy Alfaro, President of Ecuador, and after studies in his native land proceeded successively to the U.S. Military Academy, German Cavalry School and George Washington University. He was consul general to the Canal Zone, Panama, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and the United States. He additionally served his country on many diplomatic missions. From 1947, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Pan-American Union, Washington, DC. In 1950 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Florida.
Count Andrzej (Andrew) Skarbek (1925-2011) was the son of Count Stanislaw Skarbek (see previous article) and like his father was a member of the Order of the Crown of Thorns.
His obituary in The Daily Telegraph summarized his life by saying that he “made a hair-raising escape from occupied Poland under the eyes of both the Soviets and the Nazis; after the war he settled in Britain, where he became one of a group of pioneers who helped to develop psychotherapy services in the NHS.” But there was much more to him than this.
“Andrzej Karol Skarbek was born on January 10 1925 on the family estate of Drohowyze in Lwow (now Lviv in Ukraine), the younger son of Stanislaw Skarbek, a cavalry officer in the Polish Lancers and the last curator of a family charitable foundation dedicated to the care of orphans and the poor.
The Skarbeks were an ancient family who traced their history back to 1109 ; in 1410 one ancestor helped to drive the Teutonic Knights from Poland. The family obtained the hereditary title of Count in Galicia in 1778, and in Austria and Russia in 1835. Andrzej’s mother, Zosia, née Czecsz de Lindenwald, came from a prominent family in the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The Skarbeks owned estates in Lwow, Kraków and, most famously, at Zelazawa Wola, near Warsaw, where the composer Chopin was born. Chopin’s father, Nicholas Chopin, was tutor to the Skarbeks and married a distant relative of the family. Their musical son, Frédéric, was named after the then Count Skarbek, who became the boy’s godfather.
Andrzej Skarbek and his elder brother Jas were brought up in Lwow and, like many aristocratic families of the time, were taught in French and Polish mainly by tutors and governesses. When, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Germans invaded eastern Poland and took Lwow in September 1939, the Skarbeks were able to continue a relatively normal life, but the Germans soon withdrew and the Russians occupied the city. That October, informed by a family retainer that they were on a Communist “hit list”, the family fled westwards to stay with relatives, moving to family estates in Tarnagora and then Milocin, near Lublin. There Andrzej, through a cousin, became involved in the Polish Resistance. Using the limited medical experience he had acquired working in the family charitable foundation in Lwow, he was reputed to have bluffed his way into the concentration camp at Majdanek and rescued 24 wounded Polish hostages.
In 1944, with the Russians closing in, the Skarbeks had to flee again, this time in a sealed compartment in a Hungarian troop train to the temporary safety of Budapest.
There they stayed with a protégé of the Regent of Hungary, and Andrzej was able to charm his way into attending medical lectures at the university. When the Red Army arrived in Hungary, the Skarbeks were smuggled across Russian lines by a Jewish family and found refuge with relatives in the Clam-Gallas Palace in Vienna. When the Russians eventually entered that city, they only just escaped in the back of a British jeep.
In 1945 Andrzej Skarbek joined General Anders in the Polish II Corps in Ancona, Italy. At the end of the war, aged 21, he arrived by troop train in London, where his father had been appointed Minister of Defence in the Polish government-in-exile in Eaton Square. Andrzej learned English and gained entry to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where he qualified as a doctor in 1954.
During his studies, in 1952, he undertook the harrowing task of identifying the body of his cousin, Krystyna Skarbek, who had been stabbed to death at a Kensington hotel where she worked.
During the war Krystyna (operating under the nom de guerre Christine Granville) had worked behind enemy lines for SOE, helping Polish soldiers and airmen escape Poland; after D-Day, under the alias Pauline Armand, she joined Francis Cammaerts, SOE’s “Roger”, in charge of the SOE circuits in south-eastern France, becoming involved in the Battle of Vercours and surviving several brushes with the Gestapo. She had become known as Churchill’s favourite spy and it is thought that Ian Fleming based the Bond girls Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale and Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love at least partly on her.
Andrzej’s first jobs, which were in paediatrics at the children’s unit at Paddington Green, brought him into contact with the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose influence was instrumental in Skarbek’s decision to specialise in psychiatry. In 1965, while carrying out research for a PhD in this field, Skarbek travelled to Poland — his first visit since the war — to see relatives and family estates. He was deeply affected when former retainers warmly welcomed the return of their young “master” .
In the 1960s Andrew Skarbek, as he was known, became involved with the Langham Clinic as a colleague of R.D. Laing. He became, in 1969, clinical director of the London Clinic of Psychotherapy, which he ran from his home in Belsize Square, also building up a successful private practice, which continued until a few years ago.
Following appointments at University College Hospital and at the King George Hospital, Ilford, Skarbek’s NHS career culminated in his appointment, in 1977, as consultant psychotherapist at Runwell, Rochford and Basildon Hospitals, where he remained until retirement. Here he developed a psychodynamic psychotherapy service (psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to reveal the unconscious content of the patient’s psyche in order to alleviate mental stress) .
An incurably romantic and charismatic figure, Count Skarbek was proud of his aristocratic Polish heritage and found it difficult to overcome the scars left by his wartime experiences. Yet he lived life with an escapist intensity and could often be seen at family parties, glass of vodka in hand, laughing and dancing to Polish tangos or Hungarian czardas, or singing along to the waltz from Lehar’s Merry Widow.
In 1952 he married Shelagh de Fane Edge Morgan, with whom he had four children. The marriage was later dissolved, and in 1974 he married the investigative writer Marjorie Wallace who, stimulated by his knowledge of psychiatry, later founded the mental health charity SANE. They had three sons and although they later separated they remained close.”
The following letter from our archives shows Count Skarbek’s generosity and support for the San Luigi Orders.
The Abbey-Principality of San Luigi 
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