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John Stuart Hay (27 September 1875 – 26th April 1949) was an English historian and author, best known for producing the first full-length biography of the Roman emperor Elagabalus The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus, Hay would later go onto produce the Hay Plan to counter the Irish Conscription Crisis of 1918. After the war Hay would move to Athens, Greece and work as an antiquities dealer until his death.

Early life
John Stuart Hay was born on the 27th of September 1875 to John Hay, a shipbroker in Lancashire. John was born into a middle-class background and lived in Seaforth, Lancashire, before moving to Croydon in 1891. Hay’s education started at Whitgift Grammar School, now known as Whitgift School, in Croydon, at which point, leaving at the age of eighteen, he subsequently joined St John’s College to read modern history.

Hay's middle-class upbringing can be evidenced by his inclusion in the 1896 Oxford University calendar in which he is listed as a “commoner”, the term used to describe students who lacked a scholarship or exhibition and thus could pay the tuition on their own. Hay attended St John's from 1895 to 1899 and was active in the college debating society. He graduated in 1899 with a 3rd class degree.

Religion and early career
Hay was born into the Roman Catholic Church and on the 11th of March 1902, he arrived at Beda College in Rome, a seminary in which Hay would train to become a Roman Catholic Priest. Established in 1857, the college was set up within the already long-established Venerable English College, and such is where we find records of Hay’s attendance.

Hay would spend the next two years at Beda College and eventually be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest by the Archbishop of Trebizond, Edmund Stonor who was a member of the British aristocracy tasked with maintaining a relationship between the court of St James and the Papal court. Thus with this position, Stonor would have maintained close links with the two English colleges in Rome and would have frequently visited the college, often visiting to ordain students as priests in a ceremony that would have mirrored Hay's Oxford graduation.

Hay’s experience with Catholicism would strangely come to an end in 1905 when he was received into the Church of England. Hay initially took a position at a small Oxford church called St Peters-In-The-East, a now-defunct church that sits amongst the Oxford campus. The Church closed down in 1967 and now operates as the library for St.Edmund’s college, but during Hay’s time would have been a small church that served a congregation of mainly Oxford students and staff. Hay would spend two years in this church from 1906 to 1908, where he would have had nearby access to the vast library of his Aluma Mater St John’s college to aid his research into Emperor Elagabalus.

The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus
In 1911, Hay published his book The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus, a groundbreaking biography of the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, which was the first time his life had been explored in a full-length biography.

The book, which Macmillian published, was introduced by the prominent classicist John Bagnell Bury who Hay cites as contributing significantly to the research behind the text. The book spans 300 pages and is split into two parts; part I deals with the ‘recorded’ history of Elagabalus which was taken from texts produced by German and Italian scholars whilst part II works almost exclusively with Lampridius’s text Vita Heliogabal which today is known as Historia Augusta provides a major source for the part II which examines the character of Elagabalus in detail.

World War One and the 'Hay Plan'
Once Hay published The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus in 1911, he decided to once again return to Catholicism in 1912 and would stay in the Catholic church for the rest of his life. Hay would become friendly with significant figures within the Church and, during the war, would attempt to use his friendships to turn the tide of Irish conscription, although damaging his prospects in the British military at the same time.

Hay joined the newly formed British Intelligence Corps on the 9th of September 1914 and was awarded the rank of Lieutenant. The Intelligence Corps would have awarded hay a temporary commission under a condition known as “Temporary Gentleman”, a derogatory term placed upon temporary officers by their more experienced comrades. These “TGs” would have undergone little training as the commissions were awarded on a merit-based approach or, in the case of Hay, by the needs of the service.

The Intelligence Corps was only founded in August 1914 by an initial cadre of fifty officers. Initially, the Corps was designed as a small force to accompany the British Expeditionary Force to France. It would collect information on enemy movements and coordinate observations from the air. The Corps was then expanded for the first time in September 1914. The cadre included Hay, who would have been a valuable asset for information-gathering purposes due to his ability to understand German, French, Italian, and Greek.

Hay's medal records indicate that he served on the Western Front during the war and was most likely involved in collecting information on enemy movements. By 1918 Hay had been promoted to Captain and had been attached to the Department of Information under English press baron Lord Northcliffe.

The Hay Plan
On the 20th of July 1918, Hay received an order from William Sutherland, Lloyd George’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, a member of the House of Commons who acts as the “eyes and ears” for the Prime Minister. This order which came from David Lloyd George, was for Hay to devise a plan to persuade Irish nationalists to volunteer to join the French Army as a way out of the conscription crisis that Ireland was undergoing in 1918.

The Irish conscription crisis was the British government's attempt to impose conscription in Ireland as a solution to the manpower crisis that Britain was undergoing during the end of the war. This proposal encountered widespread backlash in Ireland and caused multiple strikes and demonstrations against Lloyd George’s government. Therefore, the Hay plan attempted to defuse this anti-war and anti-conscription sentiment by employing the Catholic Church and implying that it was an Irish Catholic's duty to the Church and to God to serve in the French Army. It was believed that by suggesting the French Army, an organisation with significant Catholic links, instead of the British one, Irish men would be more willing to serve in the war. Hay was likely chosen to devise this plan due to him being an Ordained Catholic priest who had significant connections to Cardinal Logue, who at the time for the prelate of the Irish branch of the church.

On the 22nd of July, Hay met with Lloyd George to propose his plan. He would propose this plan to Cardinal Logue through Sir Fredrick Shaw, a British General. The latter commanded an Irish division and thus had significant attachments to Ireland to cover the plan's origins being from Westminster. The plan would suggest that Irish men join the French army as labourers first and then later transition to a combat role and that by placing a non-combat role on the table, more Irish men would be willing to serve. Hay would then travel to France to meet with the French minister for war, George Clemenceau, to convince him of the plan. At this stage, the British ambassador to France, George Stanley, started to question Hay’s authority to go directly to Clemenceau, and it was at this point that the plan started to fall apart. The British government could not risk news of this plan being leaked out and therefore acted swiftly to cover up the plan and remove Hay from service. On the 15th of August 1918, Hay was ordered to go for a complete medical and was immediately removed from the service on being medically unfit for duty.

If it had gone ahead, the implications of the Hay plan for the war effort and potentially the course of the Irish national movement would have been significant. The Hay plan would have encouraged another new 100,0000-200,000 men to join the war effort in the French army and would have helped reassure the French army that it could continue the fight. The plan would have also helped Lloyd George’s government silence internal calls for conscription amongst cabinet members. That being said, the Irish nationalist movement would have benefited the most from the Hay plan. Cardinal Logue and the Catholic church were in favour of a united Ireland, and Cardinal Amette, a senior French Archbishop, stated to Logue that if “Ireland would give invaluable help to our just and great cause [France] would give herself a new right to the esteem of France and the Civilized World.” This sentiment implied that if Ireland supported France through the Hay plan, France would put its weight behind support for a united Ireland. The threat of a united Irish national movement under the Catholic church could have been enough reason for Lloyd George to stop the Hay plan even without the ambassador to France’s imposition. Thus, the plan could have been doomed to fail from its origin point.

Captain Stuart Hay and Captain John Stuart Hay
The first in-depth investigation into John Stuart Hay was undertaken by the French historian Jerome ann de Wiel in his article titled “The Hay Plan: An Account of Anglo-French Recruitment Efforts in Ireland, August 1918.” Wiel’s article, which was translated from French, explores details of the context behind the need for such a plan before investigating the details of the plan itself and concludes with a discussion on the implications of the plan. Wiel’s article, which is used as the basis for both the sub-category in the Wikipedia page for the Irish Conscription Crisis of 1918 and an article by the Waterford Museum, lists the figure behind the Hay plan as “Captain Stuart Hay,” a name which meant that the Plan was disregarded in initial research on John Stuart Hay’s life. Due to this, Captain Stuart Hay is now credited for creating the Hay plan instead of John Stuart Hay. Through an investigation into the sources of Wiel’s article, one can identify that John Stuart Hay has been incorrectly misnamed as Stuart Hay throughout the article and modern scholarship of the Hay Plan. This conclusion has been developed from a selection of primary sources that mention John Stuart Hay.

Within the Biography of Wiel’s article, he cites the source of the letters to Cardinal Logue as “Ara Coeli Armagh, Logue Papers, Report of J.-S. Hay.” This citation states that the source came from the significant archives of the Archdiocese of Armagh in Northern Ireland, which holds a collection of Cardinal Logue's private diaries.

The name of the source already states “J.-S. Hay” which could mean John Stuart Hay, and this is further confirmed by citation 44 in Wiels article, which reads “Id., John Stuart Hay to Logue, 01/09/18." Potential reasoning for this could come from the tendency in French to have their preferred name as their ‘middle name’ rather than their ‘first name,’ thus, Wiel might have understood John Stuart Hay simply as Stuart Hay. The misnaming of Hay is an unfortunate error point in John Stuart Hay’s life story and has caused substantial confusion in previous attempts to discover the identity of Captain Stuart Hay.

The confusion in identifying the identity behind John Stuart Hay first came to light from a discussion on the digital library, Wikisource, which is a database for contextualising sources that the Wikimedia Foundation operates on the same open access principles as Wikipedia. The discussion, which is titled “Author Talk: John Stuart Hay” contains multiple attempts to identify details about the author of the Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus and involves multiple commenters discussing Hay’s life throughout the last twelve years

Later Life and Death
Hay’s post-war career was spent in Greece and unfortunately not much is known about what he was doing whilst in the country. The sources we do have for Hay come from the diaries of Robert Byron, an English travel writer who invited Hay to join him on an Exhibition to Mount Athos in the summer of 1927. The only source we have for his exhibition is the diaries of Robert Byron, who provided substantial photographic and written records of his trip. It is from these sources that the first pictures of Hay have been identified.

Robert Byron who also went to Oxford has been credited with developing travel writing into the form it is in today and in his 1927 book, The Station Byron takes explores Mount Athos, a Greek Island in which only men are allowed to visit, alongside Hay and other companions. Byron’s The Station was a landmark piece of travel literature that gave Edwardian Britain one of its first looks at the famously isolationist island monastery. According to Robert Byron, Hay accompanied him on the trip to Mount Athos in order to buy “treasures” from the Monks so he could later sell them to British and American collectors and although Byron mentions that Hay was working for the British Museum during this trip, the Museums archives were unable to verify this claim. Hay’s understanding of Greek was also helpful as he acted as the translator for the party and would help to arrange accommodation during their travels.

Hay’s career in Athens is not known after the entry in Byron’s diaries, which does not allow a significant amount to be said about what he was doing in Greece. Hay’s death certificate states that he died on the 27th of April, 1949 at the age of 62 from myocarditis. His death certifcate also mentions that he remained of the Catholic faith throughout the rest of his life and was self-employed when he died. Hay died without any family in Greece and would have been buried in Athens shortly after his death.

Works

 * The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus (1911)