Sold with copies of two manuscript letters dated respectively 12 December 1838 and 30 December 1852, referring to a gun (sold by Christie's King Street in the sale of Fine Antique Arms and Armour on 27 March 1996, lot 266), the mitre-cap and an unidentified sword all claimed to have belonged to Charles Edward Stuart. The earlier letter, which is addressed to Thomas Churchill Thompson and politely refuses his offer to add these 'valuable relics' to those 'which have been saved from the wreck of a Family which it has pleased Heaven to have all but destroyed', is signed 'Charles Edward Stuart'. The writer was Charles Hay Allan, the younger of two mysterious and romantic Sobieski Stuart brothers, who claimed to be the grandchildren of the Young Pretender, and who wrote a famous and highly controversial book on Scottish dress, the Vestiarum Scoticum (1842). The other letter is from R.W. Billings offering to sell the pieces to William Murray for '35 and giving an account of their recent history.
For the Sobieski Stuarts see J. Telfer Dunbar, History of Highland Dress, 1962, p.113

The mitre-cap appears to be the only known example of its type to survive and can be associated with three Scottish regiments in the service of France - Le Royal Ecossais, raised in 1744, Le régiment d'Ogilvie or Le régiment d'Albanie, both raised in 1747