TO my great surprise, I am not aware of any considerable celebrations or commemorations of an important anniversary this week connected to one of the legendary figures of Scottish history.

On Hogmanay the 300th anniversary of the birth of Bonnie Prince Charlie will take place, and the tercentenary of the most famous prince in Scottish history seems set to go by unnoticed.

That is a great pity, because Charlie is one of the most enduring characters in the history of Scotland, even though he proved a massive failure at the one thing that dominated his life – trying to win back the throne for the Stuarts from the House of Hanover.

First of all let us clear up a problem about his birthdate. In the Gregorian calendar used in much of Catholic Europe and Scotland after its introduction by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, Charles Edward Louis John Sylvester Maria Casimir Stuart was born on December 20, and that was the birthdate observed by most Jacobites. England and other Protestant countries stuck to the Julian Calendar but in 1750, the Westminster Parliament passed the Calendar New Style Act and in 1752, Wednesday September 2 was followed by Thursday September 14, thus correcting the 11 days anomaly between the two calendars. Historians tend to adjust all dates to New Style so that is why most history books say Charles was born on December 31, 1720.

The events of Charles’s later life, especially his leadership of the Jacobite Rising of 1745-46, are well enough known across the world, so today I will tell of the romantic tale of his birth.

His father James, known as James VIII and III to Jacobites, had tried and failed to invade Scotland and raise the clans against King George I. He wasn’t even at the Battle of Sheriffmuir in 1715 which effectively ended the Rising that year, and had to return to exile in France having arrived at Peterhead after the stalemate at Sheriffmuir. He had been promised French troops but France signed a peace treaty with England and no such troops were forthcoming. The Spanish-inspired rising of 1719 was an even more dismal failure, and James went to exile in Italy.

By that time a marriage had taken place between James and Maria Clementina Sobieski, and it is the circumstances of this marriage which provide a suitable preface to the arrival of Prince Charles. For one of the great untold stories of Scottish and Jacobite history is of how an Irish adventurer, Charles Wogan, foiled a dastardly Hanoverian plot to stop James and Clementina marrying and enabled the couple to live together as man and wife.

Wogan was from Rathcoffey in Co Kildare and was born in 1689. He had fought in the 1715 Rising in the north of England and been captured and imprisoned, and looked certain to be sentenced to death for treason. On the night before his trial in May, 1716, he and seven other Jacobites escaped from Newgate Prison in London and he made it to France where he became one of the most trusted advisers of King James VIII.

One of his tasks was to find a suitable marriage for James, and eventually he made his way to the court-in-exile of James Sobieski where he met Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska, granddaughter of Jan Sobieski III, the famous King of Poland who defeated the Turks at the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

The historian Dr AR Gillespie states: “Maria Clementina was one of the most well-connected young ladies in Europe at this time. She was also related to many royal houses on her mother’s side, which made her a most desirable candidate for marriage for an exiled king]. Among her prestigious relations were her first cousins Elizabeth Farnese, the Queen of Spain, King John V of Portugal, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI. Her second cousins were Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary, and Charles, Duke of Parma, later King of Naples and King Charles III of Spain, and her godfather was Pope Clement XI.”

Wogan described her in a letter as “The last of ye daughters who is the darling of the family by the advantage he has over the others in point of sense, discretion, evenness of temper and a very becoming modesty.” It was arranged that she would meet James Stuart in Italy, so Wogan began to arrange her passage.

A great catch for James then, but there was a problem – George I was determined to stop James having an heir by such a titled aristocrat as that would surely inspire the Jacobites to rise against him. So he asked his ally Emperor Charles to stop her en route, and offered the Prince of Baden the extraordinary sum of £100,000 to make Clementina his fiancée.

The Emperor put Clementine and her mother Princess Hedwig Elisabeth Sobieska, formerly the Countess Palatine of Neuburg, under house arrest in Innsbruck in modern-day Austria.

James wrote to Wogan saying: “All I shall say is that every moment the Princess remains in the Emperor’s power, she plainly runs the risque of looseing her liberty intirely, the consequences of which are easily seen, so that I hope when you communicate this to her, she will not want any other motive to part without delay.”

Eventually Wogan came up with a daring escape plan. He and three companions, Richard Gaydon, Captain Missett, and Ensign Edward O’Toole, devised the escape which they then carried out with two of them dressed as women. They got clean away and delivered Clementina to James. Bonnie Prince Charlie emerged the following year. There have been plays, books, television series and films made about this great romantic story, but precious few of them produced in Scotland. Could the tercentenary of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s birth not inspire someone to write it?