The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain

by Allan Massie

  In 1719 James was thirty-one. He had devoted the dozen years of his manhood to action and had made repeated attempts to launch expeditions to regain his rightful throne. All had failed. He had narrowly escaped capture and assassination. He knew what it was to be surrounded by spies and traitors, to have his every action, and many of his words, reported by the agents of the British Crown. An exile from his own country since infancy, he had been expelled from the once-friendly France, first to Avignon, until the Royal Navy’s threat to bombard Civitavecchia in the Papal States had persuaded His Holiness to order James to remove to Italy. For a little while he resided at Urbino, then came south to Rome, where the Pope installed him in the Palazzo Muti in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli. It is an insignificant building, overshadowed not only by the Church of the Apostles but by the neighbouring palazzi belonging to the Roman noble families, the Colonna and Odealeschi. The Palazzo Muti would be the principal residence of the exiled Stuarts till they were extinct; an inscription within its little gateway records that in 1788, James’s younger son, Henry, was there proclaimed King of Great Britain, France and Ireland.

  James had recently, with some difficulty, found and married a wife. She was Clementina Sobieski, the granddaughter of the Polish hero-king John Sobieski, who in 1683 had driven the armies of the Ottoman Empire back from the gates of Vienna and so repelled the last attempt of the Turks to expand their empire into the heart of Europe. Stuart and Sobieski made for a rich and foolhardy mix, and Charles Edward, the couple’s elder son, born on the last day of 1720, was to display Stuart obstinacy and that disregard for the odds characteristic of Polish gallantry.

  Their second child, Henry, followed in 1725, his birth giving the lie to the British government’s agent in Rome, the art-dealing Baron von Stosch, who had assured his employers when Charles was born that Clementina could never bear another child. He was not the most reliable of agents, for he had also reported that Charles was deformed; news that was equally welcome and equally untrue.

  The marriage was never happy, and, as is usually the case, its unhappiness was the fault of both husband and wife. Clementina was devout, but also light-minded and frivolous, an uncomfortable combination. James was preoccupied with his business of politics. He did not understand his young wife’s wish for a lively social life, or if he did understood it, he did not sympathise. She was baffled and bored by his gravity and industry. Moreover, she was angered by his refusal to exclude Protestants from his service. To her, they were heretics; to him, his loyal subjects who had suffered exile for his sake and for their devotion to the cause. He not only felt he owed a duty to them; he knew that a Jacobite restoration was only possible if the fears of the Protestant majority in England and Scotland were allayed. So he held out against his wife’s pious demands, and even persuaded the Pope to grant a dispensation that would allow Protestant rites to be celebrated in the little chapel of the Palazzo Muti.

  For James had not abandoned hope of becoming king in reality as he already was by right. His restoration was still the task to which he devoted himself, and hours both by day and night were spent with his secretary, James Edgar, writing letters (many in cipher) to his adherents and sympathisers, and to kings and ministers all over Europe. Other states might have found it in their interest to acknowledge the German elector as King of Great Britain, or been compelled by force of circumstance to do so, but James remained a piece of some value on the chessboard of international politics. He knew it, and felt himself to be more than a mere pawn.

  Yet his behaviour after he settled in Rome has puzzled some historians and aroused the contempt of others. The young man who had been so keen and active in his cause now seemed gradually to have sunk into passivity, and, as the years slipped unprofitably by, to display a fatalistic resignation. He never left the Papal States again, but moved with apparent tranquillity between the city and the Palazzo Savelli, the country house His Holiness had bestowed upon him, situated on the outskirts of the little town of Albano overlooking the Roman Campagna.

  The explanation is simple. James had not changed; circumstances had. Western Europe was experiencing two decades of unaccustomed peace. In Britain the government was in the hands of Sir Robert Walpole; in France, after the regent’s death in 1723, of the aged and pacific Cardinal Fleury. Walpole and Fleury understood each other, and preferred political quiet. Both were committed to a policy of peace.

  Peace was bad news for the Jacobites. Only a state of war could persuade France or Spain or any other power to give them military help. Only Britain’s danger could be the Jacobites’ opportunity. And only war, with the British army engaged on the Continent, could offer a rising any chance of success.

  So there was little James could do except try to keep his party in being and his interest alive at other courts. Moreover, with France barred to him, and the British government quick to remonstrate with any state that seemed well disposed to the Jacobite cause, Rome was as good a place as anywhere for him to live. At least the Pope paid him a regular pension, while the pensions granted him by France and Spain were often in arrears, and even the rent due from his investment in the Hotel de Ville in Paris could not always be relied on. He himself paid pensions to many who had lost their estates on account of their loyalty to the cause, Ormonde and the Earl Marischal being only the most distinguished among those who depended on him.

  There were some five hundred exiled Jacobites – Scots, English and Irish – in and around James’s little court in Rome, and no one knows how many in France and other countries. Some obstinately continued to wait and wait in hope of a restoration. Some, like the Earl Marischal’s brother, James Keith, took service in other armies. He became a Russian general before transferring to the Prussian service, where he would be Frederick the Great’s most valued marshal. He was the greatest of Jacobite soldiers, but lost to the cause. Others, like Lord George Murray, had returned home and made their peace with the government. Yet James, writing to the exiled Marquis of Tullibardine, never failed to ask him to convey his ‘kind compliments’ to his brother, Lord George. Whatever his faults, James did not forget the sacrifice many had made for his sake, and was ready to understand and forgive those who had given up hope and accommodated themselves to what seemed to be reality.

  As the years passed, it became harder for the King himself to believe in the possibility of his restoration. In 1727 Lord Orrery, reporting to James on the accession of George II, observed disconsolately, ‘there do not appear to be many discontented persons’. The next year the veteran Jacobite George Lockhart of Carnwath laid aside his memoirs, concluding that few were now ready to fight for the King, so that the cause ‘must daylie languish and in process of time be forgot’.2 Perhaps this was the will of God, to which James too must resign himself.

  James had reason to be pessimistic. Bolingbroke had long since made his peace with the British government and been permitted to return to England on condition that he abstained from politics and was denied his seat in the House of Lords. Mar had done so also; indeed for some years he had been a double agent, reporting to the British ambassador in Paris. There were still Jacobites in England, but they were men of sentiment rather than action. They might, like the Duke of Beaufort, sigh loyally, or, like the heads of old Catholic families in the north and west, speak longingly of the day when the rightful king would come into his own again; but they had nothing but words to offer. Likewise, discontented and impecunious intellectuals like the young Samuel Johnson and his friend, the talented but disreputable poet Richard Savage, might walk the night streets of London talking sedition and Jacobite politics; but to no avail. Years later Johnson would affirm that if England were fairly polled the exiled King would be restored; but then admitted that no one would lift a finger to bring this about. The truth was that Englishmen had too much to risk losing and too little to gain. Only a fantasist could suppose that a rising there had any chance of success.

  Nor were Jacobite prospects much better in Scotland. Though there was still
discontent and resentment of the Union, by the 1730s its benefits were beginning to be felt. The new regime was attaching the propertied classes to itself by interest, if not affection. Ideas of social and economic ‘improvement’ were in the air; the first flickers of the Enlightenment were evident in Edinburgh. Lowland Scotland at least was putting the political and religious quarrels of the seventeenth century behind it, and looking towards the dawning of a prosperous new age.

  Jacobite sentiment survived among the nobles and lairds of the Episcopalian north-east, and in parts of the Highlands, but even there it was weaker than it had been. A hundred years previously, during the civil war, Montrose had been able to call on the support of clans accustomed to warfare. This was no longer the case. In the words of a modern historian, ‘the great clan wars had blown themselves out well before even the ’15’.3 Even the chiefs of clans traditionally loyal to the Stuarts were paying more attention to the development of their estates than to thoughts of a new rising. The father of Donald Cameron, Younger of Lochiel, had been an exile since the ’15, but the son managed his estates as a commercial enterprise. He was an enthusiastic and efficient forester, was involved in the West Indian trade, and had business interests on the mainland of North America in partnership with his cousin Euan Drummond of Balhaldie. So if the cause was not yet dead, it seemed moribund, and James’s resignation is understandable.

  His elder son, Charles Edward, was of a different temper, and in 1745 he would embark on a desperate adventure for which he had been preparing himself since boyhood. His enterprise was as thoughtless as it was audacious, and would have tragic consequences for those who responded to his appeal. He has been blamed for this by historians unwilling to make the leap of imagination needed to understand that he lived in the certainty that it was his duty and destiny to regain the thrones of England and Scotland for his father.

  Charles was reared in Italy. His spirit had survived his upbringing in a quarrelsome, often melancholy, court. He knew himself to be surrounded by spies; could never be certain who was trustworthy and who had been recruited by his enemies. Some of the errors he made in his great year of action may be attributed to the suspicions engendered by his youthful experience of treachery.

  As a child he was vivacious and attractive. The Marquis of Blandford, Marlborough’s grandson, pronounced him to be ‘a really fine, promising child’,4 though the boy was only six months old at the time. More interestingly, Blandford had several conversations with James on this visit to Rome, and found that the exiled King ‘talks with such an air of sincerity that I am apprehensive I should become half a Jacobite, if I continued following these discourses any longer’. Most of the Stuarts had personal magnetism – unlike the Hanoverians, who had none – and neither James nor Charles was an exception.

  Charles grew up speaking English, French and Italian indiscriminately, and there is some evidence that he always spoke English with an Italian accent. He was no scholar, and early showed an aversion to Latin. He spelled abominably in all three languages, but few young noblemen of the time were secure spellers.

  James saw to it that the Prince should not be educated only by Catholics: any restoration depended on winning the trust of the Protestant majority. In any case, ‘It should never be my business to be an Apostle,’ he declared, ‘but a good King to all my subjects.’ Clementina thought differently. She once said she would kill her children with a dagger rather than see them apostasise. Charles in fact grew up with no feeling for religion at all, unlike his younger brother.

  By 1730, when Charles was nine, James was so weary of his wife’s behaviour that he was wishing he could find ‘some prudent means of separation’. Indeed, she had left him once and retired to a convent, from where she persuaded the Pope to send a bishop to accuse James of infidelity and of intending to bring up the princes as Protestants. James replied that if he had taken this message seriously, the Bishop ‘would have run the risk of leaving the house by the window rather than the staircase’.

  One can’t judge what effect the unhappy marriage of his parents had on Charles, and any attempt to do so is likely to lead to absurdity. One modern biographer surmises that ‘he was old enough to have witnessed many quarrels, and, like many children of parents who separate, perhaps he felt in some way responsible’5 – a peculiarly twentieth-century interpretation. The Palazzo Muti was small, but it was not a suburban villa, and it is improbable that as a small boy Charles saw much of either parent.

  Nevertheless, James was not only attentive to his heir’s education – so far as that went – but showed himself affectionate. He called his son by a pet name, Carluccio, and even when they were estranged in later years, his concern for him remained constant, reproofs being administered in a tone of sorrow rather than anger – which may of course have made them harder to bear.

  James may have preferred his younger son, Henry, Duke of York. He was a pretty, affectionate, intelligent and tractable child, and Charles himself seems to have thought Henry his father’s favourite. There were five years between the boys, too wide a gap for real intimacy perhaps, this being anyhow precluded by their different interests and tastes. But they were close enough for Charles to tease his younger brother and call him a ‘cacciatore di pan’ bianco’ – a white-bread hunter or sportsman (the English equivalent might be ‘fair-weather’). This clearly became a family joke. In February 1745, Charles wrote from France to his father saying, ‘It is now two months I have not handled a gun, because of the bad weather and the cold, for which I would be called “cacciatore di pan’ bianco” by the Duke, if he knew it, in revenge for my calling him so formerly.’6

  The two boys won general admiration. Their cousin, the Duke of Liria (Berwick’s son and heir), described the six year-old Charles as of ‘great Beauty…remarkable for dexterity, grace, and almost supernatural address’.7 James Edgar called the Prince ‘the admiration and joy of everybody. You would be surprised to see him dance, nobody probably does it better.’ One of his favourite pastimes was ‘the Golf. It would very agreeably surprise you to see him play so well at it.’8

  Charles’s aversion to study was noted. The Earl Marischal observed that at the age of thirteen he had ‘got out of the hands of his governors’, but his passion for field sports was held to be to his credit. Not only was this a suitably royal diversion – his distant cousin Louis XV was miserable if he missed a day’s hunting – but it trained his body for the rigours of war. During the hunting season he spent every day on the Alban Hills. ‘I doubt if you could find many that would not tyre with the constant fatigue and exercise he takes,’ his father marvelled. It was certainly more to his taste than being cooped up in the Palazzo Muti – ‘no place for an honest man’, in the Earl Marischal’s opinion.

  In 1734, aged fourteen, Charles had his first experience of war. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been awarded to the Austrian Habsburgs in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht, but Spain was supporting a rebellion there, and a Spanish prince, Don Carlos, was installed as king. However, the Austrians still held several fortified towns, and Charles’s cousin Liria, now after his father’s death Duke of Berwick, was laying siege to Gaeta. The Prince left Rome, with his father’s blessing, to join the army, accompanied by his old tutor, Sir Thomas Sheridan (reputedly a grandson of James VII and II), and was greeted with royal honours and made a general of artillery. Eager for action, he was soon in the trenches, and Berwick reported that he showed ‘not the least concern at the enemy’s fire, even when the balls were hissing about his ears’. Clearly the Prince was marked out to be a hero. His daring was such that Berwick was relieved when the Austrians surrendered. He had found Charles’s ‘manner and conversation really bewitching’ and wished ‘to God that some of the greatest sticklers in England against the family of the Stuarts had been eye-witnesses of the Prince’s resolution during this siege, and I am firmly persuaded that they would soon change their way of thinking’.9

  Reports of the Prince’s conduct gave his friends cause for prid
e, his enemies for alarm. The English agent Baron de Stosch took time off from his art-dealing to observe that ‘everybody says that he will be in time a far more dangerous enemy to the present establishment than his father ever was’. Don Carlos, now King Charles III of the Two Sicilies, was so taken with the Prince that he invited him to accompany him to Naples. On board the galley, Charles Edward’s hat blew into the sea. The sailors made to retrieve it, but Don Carlos cried out, ‘Never mind. It floats towards England and its owner will soon go fetch it.’ Then he threw his own hat after it, and the whole company followed suit, crying, ‘To England, to England.’ Reports of this display of boyish high spirits infuriated George II, and the Spanish ambassador was called in to apologise.

  Back in Rome, Charles found Henry indignant at having missed the fighting, and his mother dying. Both sons were with her at the end, and the Pope paid for a splendid funeral attended by more than thirty cardinals.

  After the excitement of Gaeta, Charles had to fall back on sport. There was no employment for him. When he visited Florence, the Grand Duke, unwilling to offend England, refused to receive him. A visit to Venice led to the expulsion of the Venetian ambassador from London. Charles could only wait and hope. He had no taste for dissipation, despite the urging of the errant Duke of Wharton, Jacobite, spendthrift and profligate, who urged that he be given ‘a polite taste for pleasurable vice’. This was not something he would ever learn, and such vices as he did indulge in would bring him little pleasure.