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Pretender   Listen
noun
Pretender  n.  
1.
One who lays claim, or asserts a title (to something); a claimant. Specifically, The pretender (Eng. Hist.), the son or the grandson of James II., the heir of the royal family of Stuart, who laid claim to the throne of Great Britain, from which the house was excluded by law. "It is the shallow, unimproved intellects that are the confident pretenders to certainty."
2.
One who pretends, simulates, or feigns.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pretender" Quotes from Famous Books



... but the Pallantids, though they had been mad enough before? And one shouted, 'Shall we make room for an upstart, a pretender, who comes from we know not where?' And another, 'If he be one, we are more than one; and the stronger can hold his own.' And one shouted one thing, and one another; for they were hot and wild with wine: but all caught swords and lances off the wall, where ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley

... indebted for the success of our Revolution. By passing to the people it vested in a community every individual of which had equal rights and a common interest. There was no family dethroned among us, no banished pretender in a foreign country looking back to his connections and adherents here in the hope of a recall; no order of nobility whose hereditary rights in the Government had been violated; no hierarchy which had been degraded and oppressed. There was but one ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson

... mon maitre," said Antonio to me, in French, "those two fellows are Carlist priests, and are awaiting the arrival of the Pretender. Les imbeciles!" ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... scarcely deigned to pretend. Colonel John had been duller than the dullest if he had not seen in the white shreds for which the men had scrambled, and which they had affixed with passion to their coats, the white Cockade of the Pretender; or found in Uncle Ulick's couplet—uttered while in a careless fashion ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... than her gifts of person and character, deserved a better fate, attained in a moment a notoriety far from enviable; rumour's hundred tongues alleging, and probably with truth—for what father can vie with a gallant in a maiden's eyes?—that her inclinations were all on the side of the pretender. At any rate, St. Mesmin had credit for them; there was talk of stolen meetings and a bribed waiting-woman; and though such tales were probably as false as those who gave them currency were fair, they obtained credence with the thoughtless, and being ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... that I would say in a word. Let me put an illustration to explain what I mean. Suppose, after the execution of King Charles I., in some corner of the country a Pretender had sprung up and said, 'I am the King!' the way to end that would have been for the Puritan leaders to have taken people to St. George's Chapel, and said, 'Look! there is the coffin, there is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... pretender seems a precious swell. His curly poll will grace the hangman's pole, A charming barber's block, upon my soul! 'Twill cut a figure in our "Rotten Row;" I think that jest is ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... fourteen capital burgesses. In 1680 the burgesses were obliged to resign their charters, and received a new one, which did not, however, alter the government of the town. Derby has been represented in parliament by two members since 1295. In the rebellion of 1745 the young Pretender marched with his army as far south as Derby, where the council was held which decided that he should return to Scotland instead ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... foresight of troublous times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender, wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.[301] Besides ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... the knife and the whetstone. Harlequin, under the reforming hand of Goldoni, became a child of nature, the delight of his country; and he has commemorated the historical character of the great Harlequin Sacchi. It may serve the reader to correct his notions of one, from the absurd pretender with us who has usurped the title. "Sacchi possessed a lively and brilliant imagination. While other Harlequins merely repeated themselves, Sacchi, who always adhered to the essence of the play, contrived to give ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... There the second pretender, Perkin Warbeck, had found a warm reception from the young and chivalrous James IV: he there married a lady of one of the chief houses: accompanied in person by this sovereign he made an attempt to invade England, which ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... what must be true, that he had great executive skill, a clear method, and a just attention to all the details of the task in hand. Plainly he was no boaster or pretender, but a man for up-hill work, a soldier to bide the brunt; a man whom disasters, which dishearten other men, only stimulated to ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... more than any single document I know, shows the hopeless weakness of the Stuart character, and the unhappiness of serving the Stuart cause; this letter might have been written by Mary, Queen of Scots, or by James II, or by the Old Pretender, or by the Young Pretender; in all alike we find what this letter shows, a certain gracious melancholy, a lack of moral courage, a great self-pity, and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... unannounced into King Humphrey's study, where the monarch conferred dispiritedly with Captain Bors's uncle, the exiled Pretender of Tralee, who listened with interest. The king was talking ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... fear that Lord Curzon's description of Persian untruthfulness may be illustrated by the career of the Great Pretender. The Ezelites must, of course, share the blame with their leader, and not the least of their disgraceful misstatements is the assertion that the Bāb assigned the name Baha-'ullah to the younger of the two half-brothers, and that Ezel had also the [non-existent] ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... for Charles, and suffered exile in his name. 'Twas love for King James that sent my father hither, though he swore allegiance to Anne and the First George. I can say with pride that he was no indifferent servant to either, refusing honours from the Pretender in '15, when he chanced to be at home. An oath is an oath, sir, and we have yet to be false to ours. And the King, say I, should, next to God, be loved and loyally served by his subjects. And so I have served this George, and his grandfather before him, according to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... chief beauty of the town was its little port, with its stone pier. The houses leading down to it are the quaintest in Roscoff, of sixteenth century date, with many angles and gables. In one of them lodged Charles Stuart, the Young Pretender, when he escaped after the battle of Culloden, the quaintest and most ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... does appear as a compensation for the misery of her domestic life that she was accorded a position in the world gratifying to her nature to hold. Fate certainly owed the woman destined to live for a few years only, but those years long ones, the wife of that Stuart known as the Pretender, many years in which she could be mistress of herself and the recipient of kindly consideration, if not some measure of posthumous fame. The book gives us pictures not only of the countess, but of many persons of more or less renown with whom she was associated. We are introduced to a somewhat ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... of the committee, to reconsider the question of the selection of the artist. It is a gross job of Sir Frederic Trench's, and has been so from the beginning, the Duke being a mere cat's-paw of that impudent Irish pretender. The Duke of Wellington himself thinks it a great job, and would be very glad to see it defeated; but he said that 'his lips were sealed, he could take no part, the Duke of Rutland had been so personally kind to him, but that it was the damnedest ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... thou?" Echo as stern cried, "Who art thou?" "Know I'm a lion, hear and tremble!" Replied the king. Cried Echo, "Tremble!" "Come forth," says Lion, "show thyself!" Laconic Echo answered, "Elf!" "Elf dost thou call me, vile pretender?" Echo as loud replied, "Pretender?" At this, as jealous of his reign, He growled in rage—she growled again. Incensed the more, he chafed and foamed, And round the spacious forest roamed, To find the rival of his throne, Who durst with him dispute the crown. A Fox, who listened all the ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various

... matchlock for the Castle-people and Sir John Hope, or merely looked over from the kale-beds at the victorious fighters for Prince Charley, I cannot learn; it is certain only that before Culloden, and the final discomfiture of the Pretender, he avowed himself a good King's-man, and in many an after-year, over his pipe and his ale, told the story of the battle which surged wrathfully around his father's kale-garden by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... this belief is probably your own, and is held by many of those most valuable to me, your honoured brother among them), a faithful and obedient son, a leader beloved to rapture by his soldiers. If more could be to say, I would hasten to cry it aloud. You tell me, with noble frankness, he is a pretender for the hand of my beloved Margarita; already it has been my happiness to be aware of it. Senor Montfort, to see these two admirable young persons united in the holy bondages of weddinglock is the last and chief wish of my life. I earnestly beg your sanction of their ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards

... listen to the information which he gave, all of which the Duke transmitted to Queen Anne, although he concealed the name of his informant. In consequence of Fraser's disclosures, several persons coming from France to England were apprehended on suspicion of being engaged in the Pretender's service, and an universal alarm was spread, as well as a distrust of the motives and proceedings of Queensbury, who thus acted upon the intelligence of an avowed spy, and noted outlaw, like Fraser. A temporary loss of Queensbury's political sway in Scotland was the ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson

... found out, and the traitor then put an end to his own life, to escape from punishment and self-reproach. By this treachery of Demetrius, Philometor was made his enemy, and he joined Attalus, King of Pergamus, and Ariarathes, King of Cappadocia, in setting up Alexander Balas as a pretender to the throne of Syria, who beat Demetrius in battle, and put him to death. Philometor two years afterwards gave his elder daughter, Cleopatra, in marriage to Alexander, and led her himself to Ptolemais, or Acre, where the marriage was celebrated ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... he wrote and printed most of his tragedies; and he formed that relation, common enough in the best society of the eighteenth century, with the Countess of Albany, which continued as long as he lived. The countess's husband was the Pretender Charles Edward, the last of the English Stuarts, who, like all his house, abetted his own evil destiny, and was then drinking himself to death. There were difficulties in the way of her living with Alfieri which would not perhaps have beset a less exalted lady, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... certainly in a precarious position. After showing himself so weak in the face of the long and ruthless British provocations, he has to play the strong man with Germany. Otherwise he will lose what prestige he has left, and he knows that in the background the pretender to the throne, Mr. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... United States, Eaton had been instructed by the President to take command of an expedition on the coast of Barbary in connection with Hamet. It had been determined to furnish a few pieces of field-artillery, a thousand stand of arms, and forty thousand dollars as a loan to the Pretender. But when the President heard of Hamet's reverses, he withheld the supplies, and sent Eaton out as "General Agent for the several Barbary States," without special instructions. The Secretary of the Navy wrote at the same time to Commodore ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... differ, the church has driven millions of Godfearing men into passive indifference or overt opposition, and the number is rapidly increasing. The church does not realize how stupendous this army really is. Not every man who regards the church as but a pretender proclaims that fact on the housetops. It is not "good policy," and policy is the distinguishing characteristic of this day and age. Church people are very sensitive to criticism of their creed (perhaps the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... the insults that were offered to the flag in President Buchanan's time as coolly as if that were the proper course of things, while the attack on Sumter had the same effect on us that the acknowledgment of the Pretender as King of Great Britain and Ireland by Louis XIV. had on the English. War was then promptly accepted, and has ever since been waged, with that various fortune which is known to all contests, and which will be so known while wars ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... the temporizing and crafty policy of his father, the young earl, soon after his accession to the title and fortune of the former, began openly to hold a correspondence with the court of the pretender, which finally resulted in his becoming one of the first noblemen to assist in raising the rebel banner in Scotland, in the year 1715. After running through a short career of active service, George Armstrong the last Earl of Derwentwater, found his vast ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker

... small steel pistol when unwarily opened. My hand is but slightly wounded, yet I cannot hold my sword, nor hath my search brought me any news of Alan Breck. He has vanished like an emissary of the Devil or the Pretender, as I doubt not he is. But I will have his blood, if he is not one of their Scotch fairies.— Your ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... itself, and the Mogul cloud was on the horizon. There were 'Abd-allah ibn al-Mu'tazz, died 908; Abu Firas, died 967; al-Tughrai, died 1120; al-Busiri, died 1279,—author of the 'Burda,' poem in praise of Muhammad: but al-Mutanabbi, died 965, alone deserves special mention. The "Prophet-pretender"—for such his name signifies—has been called by Von Hammer "the greatest Arabian poet"; and there is no doubt that his 'Diwan,' with its two hundred and eighty-nine poems, was and is widely read in the East. But it is only a depraved taste that can prefer such an epigene to the fresh ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... I. The scheme was, with four distinct bodies of Jacobites, to seize the Tower and the Bank, to arrest the king and the prince, and capture or kill Lord Cadogan, one of the Ministers. At the trial it was proved that Layer had been over to Rome, and had seen the Pretender, who, by proxy, had stood godfather to his child. Troops were to be sent from France; barricades were to be thrown up all over London. The Jacobites had calculated that the Government had only 14,000 men to meet them—3,000 of these would ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... Canoness of Ste. Wandru in that town: Louise, Princess of Stolberg, now in her twentieth year, had been betrothed, and, a few weeks ago, married by proxy in Paris to Charles Edward Stuart, known to history as the Younger Pretender, to popular imagination as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and to society in the second half of the eighteenth century as the Count of Albany. The match had been made up hurriedly—most probably without consulting, or dreaming of consulting, the girl—by her mother, the dowager ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... and banished for life. Calls Pope as a witness to his innocence. Goes to Paris, and becomes Prime Minister of King James. Retires from the court of the ex-King. Death of his daughter. Induced by the Pretender to return to Paris. His defence of the charge of having garbled Clarendon's History of the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... lives Don Carlos, a pretender to the throne of Spain. He traces his descent from Carlos, the second son of ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various

... idle about her, should, in imitation of her ancestress, have gone out with her pitcher on her head to draw water from the well, while in all her own courtyards pipe-led streams gushed forth, would have acted the part of the pretender; that had she insisted on resuscitating her loom and had sat up all night to spin, she could never have produced those fabrics which alone her household demanded, and would have been but a puerile actor; that it was not ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... already—has all his lessons. A notable fellow! —Lord W.'s necessary-man was Paul before he went to sea. A more sensible rogue Paul than Joseph! Not such a pretender to piety neither as the other. At what a price have I bought that Joseph! I believe I must punish the rascal at last: but must let him marry first: then (though that may be punishment enough) I shall punish two at once in the man and his wife. And how richly does Betty ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... obvious meaning in the adoption by the Jacobites of this flower as the emblem of the Pretender, to whose service they were secretly sworn. It was the white rose that was especially affected by the Stuarts, and the Pretender's birthday, the 10th of June, was for long known as 'White Rose Day,' much as 'Primrose Day' is now definitely associated with the late Lord Beaconsfield. ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor

... Spoons, liquors, and furniture went by the board; He saw—at a distance, the rebels appear, And "rode to the front," which was strangely the rear; He conquered—truth, decency, honor full soon, Pest, pilferer, puppy, pretender, poltroon; And was fain from the scene of his triumphs to slope. Sure there never was fortunate hero ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... I shall have a perfectly horrid time. Not only shall I be wincing under the degrading knowledge that I'm a base pretender, but I shall be wretchedly homesick and bored within an inch of my life. I shall be, in the sort of environment Ellaline describes, like a mouse in a vacuum—a poor, frisky, happy, out-of-doors field-mouse, caught ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... other provinces. There was at that time a magus named Gaumata; he deceived the people by saying that he was Smerdis, the son of Cyrus. Then the whole people rose in revolt, forsook Cambyses and went over to the pretender. After this Cambyses died from a ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... melancholy stroll through those gorgeous halls, every picture on whose walls seemed, even to my own sympathetic vision, to glow with a sort of insolent renewal of strength and lustre. The eyes and lips of the great portraits appeared to smile in ineffable scorn of the dejected pretender who had dreamed of competing with their triumphant authors; the celestial candour, even, of the Madonna of the Chair, as we paused in perfect silence before her, was tinged with the sinister irony of the women of Leonardo. Perfect silence, indeed, marked our whole progress—the ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James

... De-spite'ful-ly, maliciously, cruelly. 10. Pub'li-cans, tax collectors (they were often oppressive and were hated by the Jews). 11. Mete, to measure. Mote, a small particle. 12. Hyp'o-crite, a false pretender. 17. Scribes, men among the Jews who read and explained ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... was distinguished among fig trees; the others offered no invitation, gave no promise; "the time of figs was not yet"; they, in due season would bring forth fruit and leaves; but this precocious and leafy pretender waved its umbrageous limbs as in boastful assertion of superiority. For those who responded to its ostentatious invitation, for the hungering Christ who came seeking fruit, it had naught but leaves. Even for the purposes of the lesson involved, we cannot ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... and then rose to welcome her visitor. A woman twenty years her senior, bright, capable, energetic, with a shrewd face and kindly eyes whose keen glance was quick to pierce the flimsy veil of humbug, and a tongue whose good-natured sarcasm had made more than one pretender feel ashamed. ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black

... "And your paid clergy! and your office-holding bishops! On the day when a pretender shall have employed in such enterprises the government, the magistracy, and the army; on the day when all these institutions shall drip with the blood shed by and for the traitor; when, placed between the man who has committed the crimes and God who orders an anathema ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo

... moderate Royalist, and their ranks were swelled at last by the very founders of the Commonwealth. Nothing marked more vividly the strength of the reaction against the Protector's system than the union in a common enmity of Vane and Haselrig with the partizans of the Stuart pretender. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... masters and apprentices dipped their spoons indiscriminately, and dined at twelve; the ladies went out visiting at two in the afternoon, and attended church at four. Manchester was conservative in the Jacobite rebellion, and raised a regiment for the Pretender, but the royalist forces defeated it, captured the officers, and beheaded them. Manchester politics then were just the opposite of its present Liberal tendencies, and it was Byrom, a Manchester man, who wrote the quaint epigram regarding ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... hurt nobody but a witch or a Papist. He had no opportunity to injure members of either class, but it is plain, from his four large quarto volumes, called Analecta, that he did not lack the will. In his Analecta Mr. Wodrow noted down all the news that reached him, scandals about 'The Pretender,' Court Gossip, Heresies of Ministers, Remarkable Providences, Woful Apparitions, and 'Strange Steps of Providence'. Ghosts, second sight, dreams, omens, premonitions, visions, did greatly delight him, but it is fair to note that he does not vouch for all his marvels, but merely ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... man much inclined to suits of law, contentious, vain, deceitful, and addicted to follow ill courses. He whose forehead is very low and little, is of a good understanding, magnanimous, but extremely bold and confident, and a great pretender to love and honour. He whose forehead seems sharp, and pointed up in the corners of his temples, so that the bone seems to jut forth a little, is a man naturally weak and fickle, and weak in the intellectuals. He whose brow upon the temples is full of flesh, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... the pretender go hobbling. He changed his gait and hurried to the eastern side of Valhalla. There a great oak tree flourished and out of a branch of it a little bush of Mistletoe grew. Loki broke off a spray and with it in his hand he went to where the AEsir and the Vanir were ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum

... of the pretender's having been introduced in a warming pan into the queen's bed, though as destitute of all probability as of all foundation, has been much more prejudicial to the cause of Jacobitism than all that Mr. Locke and others have written, to show the unreasonableness and absurdity of the doctrines of ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... two men, Nathaniel and Demas, encountering a pretender to miracles, a Simon Magus of the scriptures. Nathaniel is guileless, sweet-hearted and of strong moral sense, but in worldly matters rather a simpleton. Demas is a sharp man, who gets on well in the world, quick of eye and shrewd of wit, hard-headed and not to be imposed upon by ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... encounter the Rajah Laut, and Lakamba, with momentary resignation, subsided into a half-cultivator, half-trader, and nursed in his fortified house his wrath and his ambition, keeping it for use on a more propitious occasion. Still faithful to his character of a prince-pretender, he would not recognize the constituted authorities, answering sulkily the Rajah's messenger, who claimed the tribute for the cultivated fields, that the Rajah had better come and take it himself. By Lingard's advice he was left alone, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad

... to be set on a pike over the gateway of the Fort, for these our Fathers were not of our day or thought in such matters; and these Englishmen did but follow the usage of England, when so lately as 1747 the heads of the unhappy Pretender's more unhappy followers defiled the air of ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... was no fool—the populace was wrong—he was a man so natural and free from cant that he appeared to the triflers and pretenders like a pretender, and they asked, "Is ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... Fontenoy or Lauffeld is a question which a man can only answer when he has been specially crammed for examination and his knowledge has not begun to ooze out; while the abnormal incapacity of our rulers was displayed at the attack upon Carthagena or during the Pretender's march into England. The history becomes a shifting chaos marked by no definite policy, and the ship of State is being steered at random as one or other of the competitors for rule manages to grasp the helm for a moment. Then after ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... of Austria, the queen-mother. Another identifies him with a supposed twin brother of Louis XIV., whose birth Richelieu had concealed. Others make him the Count of Vermandois, an illegitimate son of Louis XIV.; the Duke of Beaufort, a hero of the Fronde; the Duke of Monmouth, the English pretender of 1685; Fouquet, Louis's disgraced minister of finance; a son of Cromwell, the English protector; and various other wild and unfounded guesses. After all has been said, the identity of the prisoner remains ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... would," said Sir Henry, who in his elation and belief that he had won Hilary over to the Pretender's cause ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn

... September 1752. In her youth she was a canoness of Ste. Wandru at Mons, but in her twentieth year she was affianced, at the instigation of the duke of Berwick and with the secret connivance of the French Court, to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, "the Young Pretender,'' self-styled count of Albany. She was wedded to the prince at Macerata, near Ancona, on Good Friday 1774, and the married pair for over two years resided in the old Stuart palace at Rome. Pretty, intelligent, charming and witty, Louise fascinated Roman society, wherein she ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... without anxious consideration. But it was quite obvious to her that the enemy was daily gaining strength, and therefore the sooner she came to open hostilities the better, for it was equally obvious to her mind that Olga was a pretender to the throne she had occupied for so long. It was time to mobilise, and she had first to state her views and her plan of campaign to the ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... wherever I should meet the Cloven-Hoof, I should expect that the Devil was not far off, and should be apt to raise the Posse against him, to apprehend him; yet it may happen otherwise, that's certain; every Coin has its Counterfeit, every Art its Pretender, every Whore her Admirer, every Error its Patron, and every Day ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... the Rab Mag will return," said the erect promenader. "And will not the king ere long set apart another day for the public worship of the gods? And if this foreign pretender escapes now, justice will overtake him then. The vengeance of our deities will not always slumber, and these worshipers of other gods shall soon know that the best offices in our government and the best interests ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones

... was plotting for his dukedom and Malatesta was building his Rocca in Rimini; while the Pope was a fugitive, and the kingdom of Naples in a state of anarchy, is famous, so far as Genoa is concerned, for her victory at sea over King Alfonso of Aragon, pretender against Rene of Anjou to the throne of Naples. The Visconti sided with the House of Anjou, and Genoa, in their power for the moment, fought with them; so that Biagio Assereto, in command of the Genoese fleet, not only defeated the Aragonese, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... The emblem of the Jacobites, a white rose, was worn by them, in honour of the young Pretender's birthday, on the 10th ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... caps, the faded blouses, the big sabots. At the end of an hour's drive (they assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will spend double that time), I passed through a sort of gap in a wall, which does duty as the gateway of the domain of an exiled pretender. I drove along a straight avenue, through a disfeatured park, - the park of Chambord has twenty-one miles of circumference, - a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy plantation, in which the timber must have been cut many times over and is ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... Bourbon Princes became more and more unfavourable, and their finances, as well as their chances of success, were so much diminished that about this period it was notified to the emigrants in Brunswick that the pretender (Louis XVIII.) had no longer the means of continuing their pensions. This produced great consternation amongst those emigrants, many of whom had no other means of existence; and notwithstanding their devotion to the cause of royalty they found a pension very useful ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... rule has come down from the beginning, even before any of the earlier heresies, much more before Praxeas, who is of yesterday, the lateness of date of all heresies proves, as also the novelties of Praxeas, a pretender of yesterday. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.

... himself and Mademoiselle Georges? Have not almost all the royal family of England—even those of the House of Hanover—been notorious for their connection with celebrated women? Has he never heard of Mrs. Walkinshaw, ostensible mistress of Charles Edward the Pretender, of Lucy Barlow, mistress of Charles II, mother of the Duke of Monmouth? Of Arabella Churchill and Katherine Sedley, mistresses of James II? Of the Countess of Kendal, mistress of George II, who was received everywhere in English society? Or of George IV and the Marchioness of C——? Of the ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... Nation Captain Kidd Meeting of Parliament Attacks on Burnet Renewed Attack on Somers Question of the Irish Forfeitures: Dispute between the Houses Somers again attacked Prorogation of Parliament Death of James the Second The Pretender recognised as King Return of the King General ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... that if he were lord in name he was not so in fortune, and I was astonished to see him driving such a handsome carriage, and still more so at his blue ribbon. In a few words he told me that he was going to dine with the Pretender, but that he would sup at home. He invited me to come to supper, and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... that he is a pretender to the throne of Babbiano? You will remember that he is cousin to ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini

... fun for my money. I'm not making any complaint at all. When a pretender invades a country to put the reigning queen out of business he has a license to expect a real warm welcome. Well, ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... unlucky sage was born at Apone, near Padua, in the year 1250. Like his friend Arnold de Villeneuve, he was an eminent physician, and a pretender to the arts of astrology and alchymy. He practised for many years in Paris, and made great wealth by killing and curing, and telling fortunes. In an evil day for him, he returned to his own country, with the reputation of being ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... to strike the first blow. The title of the Peshwa was not undisputed. A portion of the Mahratta nation was favorable to a pretender. The Governor-General determined to espouse this pretender's interest, to move an army across the peninsula of India, and to form a close alliance with the chief of the house of Bonsla, who ruled Berar, and who, in power and dignity, was inferior ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... in her illness, for repenting the step! For Mathews —I know my own utter unfitness for such a task. I am no hand at describing costumes, a great requisite in an account of mannered pictures. I have not the slightest acquaintance with pictorial language even. An imitator of me, or rather pretender to be me, in his Rejected Articles, has made me minutely describe the dresses of the poissardes at Calais!—I could as soon resolve Euclid. I have no eye for forms and fashions. I substitute analysis, and get rid ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... two years old now. Half the gentry of England have joined it," said Anthony bitterly. "It is to persecute to the death any pretender to the Crown other ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... nothing, ever faithful to the dead past; he was one of the last representatives of that lofty obstinate noblesse which dies when it finds itself without an effort to escape its fate. The judge, who at least had a pretender living, relied on a miracle, and demonstrated the necessity for one if France were not to sink into the depths of misfortune and completely disappear. And as for the General, all that he regretted of the two Empires was their great wars; he left the faint hope of a Bonapartist restoration on ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... Galland was a candidate for the legislature in a district composed of Hancock, Adams, and Pike Counties. He resided in the county of Hancock, and, as he had in the early part of his life been a notorious horse thief and counterfeiter, belonging to the Massac gang, and was then no pretender to integrity, it was useless to deny the charge. In all his speeches he freely admitted the fact."—FORD's" ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... fiend she detected the woman who was wearing the dry-cleaned cast-off clothing of her sister in the city. What she saw the office knew, though she kept her conclusions out of the paper if they would do any harm or hurt anyone's feelings. No pretender ever dreamed that she was not fooling Miss Larrabee. She was willing to agree most sympathetically with Mrs. Conklin, who insisted that the "common people" wouldn't be interested in the list of names at her party; and the only place where we ever ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... scarcely have succeeded, great as his armament was, had it not been for the diversion effected in his favour by the landing of the Scandinavian pretender in the North, and the failure of provisions in Harold's Channel fleet, which compelled it to put into port. Louis of France was called in as a deliverer by the barons who were in arms against the tyranny of John; and it is not necessary to discuss the Tory description of the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... of the official organ of the Russian Empire at Brussels, Le Nord, a journal certainly not predisposed in favour of the House of Orleans by the success of the Orleanist Prince Ferdinand in Bulgaria. 'The appearance of this young exile,' said Le Nord, 'on the soil of France, not as a pretender or with political ideas, but simply as a Frenchman coming to establish his moral rights as a citizen by claiming to be allowed to perform his civic duties, and this with a rare combination of youthful dash, irreproachable modesty, and skilful self-possession was admirably fitted ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... the big sabots. At the end of an hour's drive (they assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will spend double that time), I passed through a sort of gap in a wall which does duty as the gateway of the domain of a proscribed pretender. I followed a straight avenue through a disfeatured park—the park of Chambord has twenty-one miles of circumference; a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy plantation, in which the timber must have been cut many times over and is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so many spots in France, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... lad's minority and vastly enriched by the care of that administration. He had sent the lad to Oxford, and afterwards—the more thoroughly to complete his education—on a two years' tour of Europe; and on his return, a grown and cultured man, he had attached him to the court in Rome of the Pretender, whose agent he was ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... heard of; and his reputation, like his works, never extended beyond his own country. What did he think of himself and of a fame so bounded? Did he ever dream he was indeed an artist? Or how did this feeling in him differ from the vulgar conceit of the lowest pretender? The best known of his works is a portrait of an alderman of Exeter, in some public building ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... deck and sniff the wind like a connoisseur.... And there was a manuscript poem of his father's in the Irish letter, Leaba Luachra, "The Bed of Rushes," which he had discovered and had framed. And there was a prized thing of his boyhood there, a dagger the Young Pretender wore in his stocking, and he in Highland dress, as he swung toward London with pipe and drum. Alan Donn had given it to him, and he after getting it on a visit to Argyll. "Not only is it Charlie's, but it's a nice handy thing, thon!" ... ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... VI. did not live at St James's Palace regularly, but Queen Mary patronized it, preferring it to Whitehall. It was granted to Prince Henry during the reign of James I., and Charles I. spent the last three days before his execution here. The Prince known as the "Pretender" was born in one of the palace apartments, and many historians have commented on the fact that this chamber was conveniently near a small back-staircase, up which a new-born infant could have been smuggled. During the reign of King William ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... must be premised, the United Kingdom was in a state of great excitement from the threat generally credited of a French invasion. The Pretender was said to be in high favour at Versailles, a descent upon Ireland was especially looked to, and the noblemen and people of condition in that and all other parts of the kingdom showed their loyalty by raising regiments of horse and foot to resist ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... sot, To boast of favours that he never got; Of which, whoe'er lacks confidence to prate, Brings his good parts and breeding in debate; And not the meanest coxcomb you can find, But thanks his stars, that Phillis has been kind; Thus prostitute my Congreve's name is grown To every lewd pretender of the town. Troth, I could pity you; but this is it, You find, to be the fashionable wit; These are the slaves whom reputation chains, Whose maintenance requires no help from brains. For, should the vilest scribbler to the pit, Whom sin and want e'er furnish'd ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... what I say;—pretending to do it. Even that's a good deal for Lord Dumbello; isn't it?" And then Lord Lufton, not being a pretender himself, put his arm round her waist, and away they went up and down the room, and across and about, with an energy which showed that what Griselda lacked in her tongue she made up with her feet. Lord Dumbello, in the meantime, stood by, observant, ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... rude, disrespectful, pert, saucy, impertinent, impudent, insolent. Importance, consequence, moment. Impostor, pretender, charlatan, masquerader, mountebank, deceiver, humbug, cheat, quack, shyster, empiric. Imprison, incarcerate, immure. Improper, indecent, indecorous, unseemly, unbecoming, indelicate. Impure, tainted, contaminated, polluted, defiled, vitiated. Inborn, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... vision or naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel her to go his way. What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to seek and live the ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... two Gods—two real Gods—president over the actions of men. That were unthinkable. Of two claimants to that sceptre, one must be a pretender, ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... what if I should do it in effigies? Is there never an old pope or pretender to hang up in my stead? We are not so unlike but ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot

... restoration of the exiled house was possible, or seriously wished that it might take place. The remembrance of the rising of '45 strengthened the general feeling of loyalty to the reigning house; the Old Pretender had lost all interest in public affairs, and his son, Charles Edward, was a confirmed drunkard, and had alienated his friends by his disreputable life. Englishmen were determined not to have another Roman catholic ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... be present at the Opera House in Paris when the young Pretender was arrested, and being indignant at this breach of hospitality, and believing that the honour of the nation had been compromised, he wrote these bitter verses. His punishment was severe. He was arrested and conducted to the gloomy fortress of Mont-Saint-Michel, where he remained for ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... and shot; and the unfortunate lady herself confined in a Roman monastery. A plan for the liberation of Ferdinand was about the same time detected by the emissaries of the French police: the real agent being arrested, a pretender, assuming his name and credentials, made his way into Valencay, but Ferdinand was either too cunning, or too timid to incur this danger; revealing to his jailers the proposals of the stranger, he escaped the snare laid for him, and thus cheated Napoleon of a pretext for ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... Parisian wits and caricaturists from which it has never entirely recovered. The "umbrella" of the Orleans family, which the ribald press of that day made the emblem of their royalty, still figures in the lampoons addressed to the present pretender. The caricature of the royal physiognomy as a pear is one of the most famous in history. Louis-Philippe wore his hair piled in a species of pyramid over his forehead, which lent plausibility to this defamation; ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... as lord treasurer, who was succeeded by Harley, created Earl of Oxford. Sunderland, too, was dismissed, and his post of secretary of state was given to St. John, created Viscount Bolingbroke. Lord Cowper resigned the seals, and Sir Simon Harcourt, an avowed adherent of the Pretender, became lord chancellor. The Earl of Rochester, the bitterest of all the Tories, was appointed president of the council. The Duke of Marlborough, however, was not dismissed from his high command until 1711. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord

... this impudent villain, the master of this house, hath had the impudence to tell me, nay, to stand it out to my face, that your ladyship is that nasty, stinking wh—re (Jenny Cameron they call her), that runs about the country with the Pretender? Nay, the lying, saucy villain had the assurance to tell me that your ladyship had owned yourself to be so; but I have clawed the rascal; I have left the marks of my nails in his impudent face. My lady! says I, you saucy scoundrel; my lady is meat for no pretenders. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... alluded to the facility with which he had nullified the last 'Senatus-consulte'. He scarcely seemed to hear me, so completely was his mind absorbed in the subject on which he was meditating. At length, suddenly recovering from his abstraction, he said, "Bourrienne, do you think that the pretender to the crown of France would renounce his claims if I were to offer him a good indemnity, or even a province in Italy?" Surprised at this abrupt question on a subject which I was far from thinking of, I replied that I did ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... that no mere pretender could exhibit these proofs; and that, where they were taken as the sole measure of a man's worth, dexterity with a rifle must be of more value than the accomplishments of a talker—Indian-fighting a more respectable occupation than speech-making. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... examples of Norman architecture in the north of England; that Charles II had hidden there for some days after his disastrous defeat at Worcester. Part of the castle had been battered down by Cromwell, and later it again proved the refuge of a Stuart when the Pretender made it a temporary place of concealment. The new Lord Rantremly, it seemed, had determined to demolish this ancient stronghold, so interesting architecturally and historically, and to build with its stones a modern residence. Against this act of vandalism the writer strongly protested, ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... cost the poor pretender to reply, 'It 's the last farthing I have, my man,' the postillion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... arose from the aforesaid long-deferred discovery —a new and strong word was adopted into the Australian vocabulary: Bunyip became, and remains a Sydney synonoyme for impostor, pretender, humbug, and the like. The black fellows, however, unaware of the extinction, by superior authority, of their favourite loup-garou, still continue to cherish the fabulous ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... sharply with her fan. "What a humbug you are—the Great Pretender! But tell me, am ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... infantry with magnificent valour on the right centre had pierced through the French lines, only to find themselves deserted and overwhelmed by superior forces. This victory was vigorously followed up. The Jacobite rising under Charles Edward, the young Pretender, had necessitated the recalling not only of the greater part of the English expeditionary force, but also, under the terms of the treaties between Great Britain and the United Provinces, of a body of 6000 Dutch. Before the year 1745 had ended, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... the great conflict known in Europe as the War of {206} the Spanish Succession. The reckless ambition of Louis XIV., then in the plenitude of his power, had coveted the throne of Spain for his own family, and brought him into conflict with England when he recognised the Pretender as the rightful heir to the English Crown. Queen Anne, the daughter of James II. and sister of Mary, queen of William III., had succeeded to the throne, and the war which was declared on the 15th May, 1702, was thereafter known in America by her name. The Abenakis, who had promised ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... always call it) there was on the right hand, half the way up, a maison de sante, or boarding-house, kept by one Madame Pele; and there among others came to board and lodge, a short while after our advent, four or five gentlemen who had tried to invade France, with a certain grim Pretender at their head, and a tame eagle as a symbol ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... fellow; he has the audacity to say that he has never heard of Calros the pretender, who ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... Young Pretender, was at that time residing in Florence, in company with his wife, the Countess of Albany, whose maiden name was Louisa Stolberg, of the princely house of that name. The following is Alfieri's description ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... the power did not descend to Mary, William, or Anne. It was for this reason that Boswell said that Johnson should have been taken to Rome; though indeed it was not till some years after he was 'touched' by Queen Anne that the Pretender dwelt there. The Hanoverian kings never 'touched.' The service for the ceremony was printed in the Book of Common Prayer as late as 1719. (Penny Cyclo. xxi. 113.) 'It appears by the newspapers of the time,' says Mr. Wright, quoted by Croker, 'that on March 30, 1712, two hundred persons ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... as lord and master, nor was it possible for them to resign themselves to the fate that had put this young scapegrace into the shoes, so to speak, of the grim old barons Rothhoefen, who whatever else they may have been in a high-handed sort of way were men to the core. This pretender, this creature without brains or blood, this sponging reprobate, was not to their liking, if I am to quote Conrad, who became quite forceful in his harangue against the ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... was of them. My Tom is not the filius nullius that has been among us, and this grandfather, if he has not actually stolen the name, has got it by these doubtful means. As for the Wycherly, it should pass for nothing. Learning that there is a line of baronets of this name, every pretender to the family would be apt ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper

... of the house of M'Alister "flourished for the last time, they were blighted for ever." The closing scene of this prophetic curse was equally tragic and romantic; for, whilst espousing the cause of the Pretender, the young and promising heir of the M'Alisters was taken prisoner, and with many others put to death. Incensed at the wrongs of his exiled monarch, and full of fiery impulse, he had secretly left his youthful wife, and joined the army at Perth that was to restore the Pretender to his throne. For ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... and enabling Admiral Russell to win his naval victory at La Hogue. The former shows how nearly an Arthur Devis at Preston paid the penalty of death owing to his strange resemblance to Charles Edward the Young Pretender, for whom the savage Government of the time offered a reward of L30,000 to any one who could catch him alive or dead. My mother's ancestor was thus very nearly murdered in 1745 for his good looks, as a life-sized portrait ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... Whether Burke had had time to do more than glance at them—for they had been in his hands but a few hours—is uncertain. But it may well have been that the tone as well as the substance of Crabbe's letter struck the great statesman as something apart from the usual strain of the literary pretender. During Burke's first years in London, when he himself lived by literature and saw much of the lives and ways of poets and pamphleteers, he must have gained some experience that served him later in good ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger

... her shoulders of rosy marble, her particular grace of a young matron, at once handsome, loving, and chaste—all that, joined to a spotless reputation and to sixty thousand francs a year, could not fail to bring forward more than one pretender. And indeed they sprang up in legions. Reason, and public opinion itself, which had done full justice to her husband and to herself, were both urging her to a second wedding. Her own private feelings, whatever might be their natural delicacy, did not seem likely ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet

... novel, from the next circulating library, he sends his imagination a-gadding, and gains acquaintance with people and manners whom he could not hope otherwise to know. Twopence a volume bears us whithersoever we will;—back to Ivanhoe and Coeur de Lion, or to Waverley and the Young Pretender, along with Walter Scott; up the heights of fashion with the charming enchanters of the silver-fork school; or, better still, to the snug inn-parlor, or the jovial tap-room, with Mr. Pickwick and his faithful Sancho Weller. I am sure that ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... born at Laurel Branch, the estate of his father, fourteen miles from Petersburg, Dinwiddie County, Virginia, June 13, 1786. His grandfather, James Scott, was a Scotchman of the Clan Buccleuch, and a follower of the Pretender to the throne of England, who, escaping from the defeat at Culloden, made his way to Virginia in 1746, where he settled. William, the son of this James, married Ann Mason, a native of Dinwiddie County and a neighbor of the Scott family. Winfield Scott was the issue of this marriage. There were ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright

... never heard the note of a nightingale, but I made it pour out its loves to the rose; and wherever I went I never failed to produce my poetry and chant it out in the assembly. At this time the king was waging war with Sadik Khan, a pretender to the throne, and a battle was fought, in which his majesty commanded in person, and which terminated in the defeat of the rebel. I immediately sang the king's praises. In describing the contest I made Rustam appear standing in a cloud over the field of battle; who seeing ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... with me, And one of more especial gravity; Say that there lurked among our motley band Some sneaking, sly pretender to her hand; Say, his attentions became undisguised,— We ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen

... believe a single word of it!" declared Queen Selina, as defiantly as if this were the fact. "It's a wicked plot to set up my own governess as a pretender, but there's a very short way of settling that! I shall send for the Marshal"—and she made a movement towards a handbell of exquisitely engraved crystal with a sapphire tongue. "I shall tell him ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey

... his military tyranny. The Medici were conscious that they, selfishly, had most to gain by supporting despots who in time of need might help them to confirm their own authority. With the same end in view, when the legitimate line of the Bentivogli was extinguished, Cosimo hunted out a bastard pretender of that family, presented him to the chiefs of the Bentivogli faction, and had him placed upon the seat of his supposed ancestors at Bologna. This young man, a certain Santi da Cascese, presumed to be the son ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... the one because there was but the one to bring. There exists none other but that one. It belongeth to the king of the Demons of the Sea. This man is a pretender, and ignorant, else he had known that that weapon can be used in but eight bouts only, and then it vanisheth away to its ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... (1748) terminated one of the wars of England with Louis XIV. The renunciation by France of the cause of the Pretender was the most material advantage accruing to England from that treaty. But the ink was hardly dry with which it was written, before England took umbrage at France for efforts to rebuild her navy, which had been seriously reduced and crippled by the events of the previous ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... I, "the prince of all conspirators and machinators; he made sure of placing the Pretender on the throne of these realms. 'I can bring into the field so many men,' said he; 'my son-in- law Cluny, so many, and likewise my cousin, and my good friend;' then speaking of those on whom the government reckoned ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... his men, and propose the mediation of these Government friends for his pardon. Upon his submission the King was graciously pleased to send down orders that upon giving up his arms and coming into Inverness, he might expect his pardon; yet upon the Pretender's Anvil at Perth and my Lord Huntly's suggestions to him that now was the time for them to appear for their King and country, and that what honour they lost at Dunblane might yet be regained; but while he thus insinuated to my Lord Seaforth, he privately found that my Lord Seaforth had by ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... with Lord Stair because he believed that he had done him an ill office with the King of England, and prevented the latter from entering into the alliance with France and Holland. If that alliance had taken place my son could have prevented the Pretender from beginning his journey; but as England refused to do so, the Regent was obliged to do nothing but what was stipulated for by the treaty of peace: that is to say, not to succour the Pretender with money nor arms, which he faithfully performed. ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans

... infancy, and retains in the bodily memory: and he is particularly cautious, lest anything of the wild concupiscence prevalent in his spirit should discover itself. Hence every man who is not interiorly led by the Lord, is a pretender, a sycophant, a hypocrite, and thereby an apparent man, and yet not a man; of whom it may be said, that his shell or body is wise, and his kernel or spirit insane; also that his external is human, and his internal bestial. Such persons, with ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... business, had afterwards found it equally necessary to remain there for some time, to attend to his mercantile affairs. Here he became acquainted with a Miss Campbell, a Scotch lady of about thirty years of age, very beautiful, but poor. Her father had been taken prisoner at the defeat of the Pretender's army at Culloden, in which army he was an officer, and immediately executed without a trial, by the blood-thirsty and infamous Duke of Cumberland. Her mother died of grief a few months afterwards, leaving her an infant, and the sole surviving ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... strokes less elegant, and less decent; such as the Pretender's Journal, in which one topick of ridicule is his poverty. This mode of abuse had been employed by Milton against ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... is inconsistent, that after having called Seneca one while very wise, and again a mortal enemy to Nero's vices, makes him elsewhere avaricious, an usurer, ambitious, effeminate, voluptuous, and a false pretender to philosophy, his virtue appears so vivid and vigorous in his writings, and his vindication is so clear from any of these imputations, as of his riches and extraordinarily expensive way of living, that I cannot believe any testimony to the contrary. And besides, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... though ye be my son, never mair shall I call ye so, if ye join the rabble that young scamp has got together, and never mair shall ye darken the doors of Dunmorton if ye gae wi' him. Noo choose between that young pretender and your ain people." ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy

... distant it seems from our profession, that may not, some time or other, be useful; and Mr. Gresham, after he had conversed sufficiently with me both on literature and science, to discover that I was not an ignorant pretender, grew warm in his desire to serve me. But he had the politeness to refrain from saying any thing directly about medicine; he expressed only an increased desire to cultivate my acquaintance, and begged that I would call upon him at any hour, and give him the pleasure of my conversation, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth

... the catch-word Reaction—night, in which all cats are grey, and allows them to drawl out their drowsy commonplaces. Indeed, at first sight, the party of Order presents the appearance of a tangle of royalist factions, that, not only intrigue against each other, each aiming to raise its own Pretender to the throne, and exclude the Pretender of the Opposite party, but also are all united in a common hatred for and common attacks against the "Republic." On its side, the Mountain appears, in counter-distinction ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx

... many Frenchmen when called on to support Charles VII was now removed. He had been publicly stigmatized, even by his own parents, as no true son of the royal race of France. The queen-mother, the English, and the partisans of Burgundy called him the "Pretender to the title of Dauphin"; but those who had been led to doubt his legitimacy were cured of their scepticism by the victories of the holy Maid and by the fulfilment of her pledges. They thought that heaven had now declared itself in favor of Charles as the true heir of the crown of St. Louis, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... but these names will certainly kill him, and he will never be anybody in the popular estimation. The public finds out speedily that he is not Sydney Smith, and it resents the extravagant claim for him as if he were an impudent pretender. How many authors of fair ability to interest the world have we known in our own day who have been thus sky-rocketed into notoriety by the lazy indiscrimination of the critic-by-comparison, and then have sunk into a popular contempt as undeserved! I never see a young aspirant ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... health from the reviving vigour of the national brain? Or is all this a mere wild hope, and shall we, after perhaps some small flutterings of effort, the foundation of some ridiculous little academy of literary busybodies and hangers-on, the public recognition of this or that sociological pretender or financial "scientist," and a little polite jobbery with picture-buying, relapse into lassitude and a contented acquiescence in the rivalry of Germany and the United States for the moral, intellectual and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... of what was then called pot paper—a large size of foolscap. Campbell was a bookseller, and the postmaster of Boston. The paper was printed by Bartholomew Green. The first number contained the Queen's speech to both houses of Parliament; some notice of the attempts of the Pretender, James the Eighth of Scotland, who was said to be sending over Popish missionaries from France; three or four paragraphs of domestic intelligence; four items of ship news from Philadelphia, New York, and New London; ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... excess of weakness, to support a position of an equivocal nature. A gentleman never derogates from his true position, let him be placed in whatever circumstances he may; and an over-fastidious traveller, or a pretender to great importance in a new country, is the most ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... "For the Popish Pretender," said the Doctor, who could speak no smooth things when it was a matter of the Revolution Settlement and the government of ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... few paragraphs in the newspaper, sir," Hal answered. "Enough to know that some pretender in the country across the border is trying to upset the present government in ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock

... in the belief that he was a base pretender, "clad in a little brief authority." We had not awakened as yet to the fulness of janitorial ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine

... soldier put in his word, well garnished with oaths. "Now that there's war up and down and so many of us are going out of the country, there's a saying that the Pretender may e'en sail across from France and beat a drum and give a shout! ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... and pleasure burst from the Carlists on hearing the name of an officer and battalion, well known and justly dreaded among the adherents of the Pretender. Their leader again threw the light of the torch on the features of the Christino, and gazed at him for the space of a minute with an expression of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... FOREIGN CONNEXIONS!—OLD ENGLAND FOR EVER! This acclamation, however, was not so loud or universal, but that our adventurer could distinctly hear a counter-cry from the populace of, NO SLAVERY!—NO POPISH PRETENDER! an insinuation so ill relished by the cavaliers, that they began to ply their horsewhips among the multitude, and were, in their turn, saluted with a discharge or volley of stones, dirt, and dead cats; in consequence of which some teeth ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... difference ceased upon the earth? And, moreover, did not the faithful know that the true Mahdi was born in the year of the Prophet 255, from which it surely followed that he must be now 1,046 years old? And was it not clear to all men that this pretender was not a ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... when Don Carlos de Bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all Europe against the excesses of communistic Republicanism, made his attempt for the throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of Guipuzcoa. It is perhaps the last instance of a Pretender's adventure for a Crown that History will have to record with the usual grave moral disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the departing romance. Historians are very ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... de), a French officer in the army of the Chevalier Charles Edward, the Pretender.—Sir W. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... discussion on the upper degrees expresses the opinion that these hucksters were "Jacobite emissaries disguised under the form of a pretended Masonry," and that "by Italians and Italian Order he intends a reference to the Court of King James III, i.e. the Old Pretender at Rome, and to the Ecossais (Italic) Order of Masonry."[360] It is much more likely that he had referred to another source of masonic instruction in Italy which I shall indicate in a ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... weaknesses, he is still a gallant lad and a gentleman. Poor boy! he is very strangely placed here at the court, an attendant on the Prince and Princess, while his father is known to be a staunch adherent of the Pretender—a Jacobite. He was your father's closest friend, and I knew his poor wife—Andrew's mother—well. It was very sad her dying so young, and leaving her motherless boy to the tender mercies of a hard ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn

... made the town of that name the home of his wife and children; and there Edward, the second of his four sons, was born, April 19, 1757. Their mother was the daughter of a Jacobite gentleman, who had been out for the Pretender in 1715,—a fact which probably emphasized the strong Hanoverian sympathies of Samuel Pellew, whose habit was to make his children, every Sunday, drink King George's ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... Rome to Spain, relieving the tedious difficulties of his march with the entertainments {41} of his muse. Augustus was not only a patron, but a friend and companion of Virgil and Horace, and was himself both an admirer of poetry and a pretender too, as far as his genius would reach, or his busy scene allow. 'Tis true, since his age we have few such examples of great Princes favouring or affecting poetry, and as few perhaps of great poets deserving it. Whether it be that the fierceness of the Gothic humours, ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... was judged inexpedient that royal insanity should be exhibited upon the stage. In 1808 a play, called "The Wanderer," adapted from Kotzebue, was forbidden at Covent Garden, in that it dealt with the adventures of Prince Charles Edward, the Pretender. Even after the accession of Queen Victoria, a license was refused to an English version of Victor Hugo's "Ruy Blas," lest playgoers should perceive in it allusions to the matrimonial choice her Majesty was ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... orders had detached to the southward in January. Upon Clinton's appearance, the royalists in North Carolina had risen, headed by the husband of Flora Macdonald, whose name thirty years before had been associated romantically with the escape of the young Pretender from Scotland. She had afterwards emigrated to America. The rising, however, had been put down, and Clinton had not thought it expedient to try a serious invasion, in face of the large force assembled to resist him. Upon Parker's coming, it was decided to make ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan

... his "Lectures on the English Language," says that the deviser of the locution in question was "some grammatical pretender," and that it is "an awkward neologism, which neither convenience, intelligibility, ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... Truth has no sympathy for error. In Science, the cure of the sick demonstrates this grand verity of Christian Science, that you cannot eradicate disease if you admit that God sends it or sees it. Material and mortal mind-healing (so-called) has for ages been a pretender, but has not healed mortals; and they are yet ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy



Words linked to "Pretender" :   trickster, fraud, beguiler, impostor, cheater, cheat, imposter, shammer, Tartuffe, phoney, fake, whited sepulchre, sham, Tartufe, smoothie, charmer, role player, ringer, dissembler, claimant, faker, name dropper, whited sepulcher, deceiver, phony, pretend, dissimulator, pseudo, smoothy, slicker, pseud



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