Maria Stella

Maria Stella Wynn, Lady Newborough (later Baroness Ungern-Sternberg; ; 16 April 1773 – 23 December 1843) was an Italian-born memoirist, the self-styled legitimate daughter of Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. She was the second wife of the Welsh peer Thomas Wynn, 1st Baron Newborough, after whose death she married the Estonian Baron Heinrich George Eduard von Ungern-Sternberg. According to her, King Louis Philippe I was not the son of Philippe, Duke of Orléans, but a suppositious child, his father being one Lorenzo Chiappini, a constable at the village of Modigliana in Emilia Romagna. The story is that the Duke and Duchess of Orléans, travelling under the incognito of Comte and Comtesse de Joinville, were at this village on 16 April 1773, when the duchess gave birth to a daughter; and that the duke, desiring a son in order to prevent the rich Penthièvre inheritance from reverting to his wife's relations in the event of her death, bribed the Chiappinis to substitute their newborn male child for his own. Life Maria Stella Petronilla Chiappini was born to an ordinary Italian family in 1773, in a small village called Modigliana, near Forlì. According to Maria's autobiography, she was treated poorly by her mother as a child, while her brothers and sisters gained all the attention. Years later after the death of her father, who had sent her a letter confessing that he was indeed not her biological father, she understood the treatment that she had been given by her mother and Countess Camilla Borghi's kindness towards her. Maria Stella, the supposed daughter of Chiappini, went on the stage at Florence, where her putative parents had settled. There, on 10 October 1786 at the age of thirteen, she became the wife of the Thomas Wynn, 1st Baron Newborough. The couple had two sons: Thomas John Wynn, 2nd Baron Newborough (3 April 1802 – 15 November 1832) Spencer Bulkeley Wynn, 3rd Baron Newborough (23 May 1803 – 1 November 1888)