John Stuart

John Ferdinand Smyth Stuart (1745 – 20 December 1814), known until 1793 as John Ferdinand Smyth and mostly after that as Ferdinand Smyth Stuart, was a Scottish-born American loyalist and physician who claimed to be a great-grandson of King Charles II. As the author of A Tour in the United States of America (1784), he used the name John Ferdinand Dalziel Smyth. Leaving America during the Revolutionary War, Stuart spent the rest of his life in England and the West Indies. Background and early life Stuart was born in Scotland in 1745 and began life there as John Smyth or John Ferdinand Smyth. He later wrote that he was the son of R. Wentworth Smyth, a gentleman who had fought in the Jacobite rising of 1715 and also the later one of 1745. According to Stuart's account, in 1744 his elderly father married Maria Julia Dalziel, a widow of fifteen, as his second wife. He reported that his mother was a granddaughter of General James Crofts, a natural son of the Duke of Monmouth, who was a son of Charles II, and that Wentworth Smyth was Monmouth's son by Henrietta Maria Wentworth, a daughter of Thomas, Lord Wentworth, and granddaughter of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Cleveland. Henrietta Maria had died in 1686, not long after Monmouth's execution, and Stuart said a Colonel Smyth, an aide-de-camp of Monmouth's, had adopted her son and made him his own heir. Consequently, Stuart's father had grown up in France, from where he returned to Scotland at the time of the 1715 Rising. Stuart stated in 1808 that he had been named for his godfather, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick. The historian Allan Fea states in his biography of Monmouth that Major-General James Crofts married a daughter of Sir Thomas Taylor (“after 1706, when he is described as single”) and had a daughter, Maria Julia; and that she married first a Mr Dalziel and secondly R. Wentworth Smyth-Stuart, who claimed to be Monmouth's son by Henrietta Maria Wentworth. Fea was convinced that Monmouth ”undoubtedly left a son by her (born in 1681), who was adopted and educated in Paris by Colonel Smyth”. A genealogist, Anthony J. Camp, has cast doubts on this account.