by Roger Powell
In England, however, he was regarded as an embarrassment. Although the Duke was outlawed in 1695 it has not deterred his descendants from using his various titles. A present day descendant in Spain is Maria Rosario Cayetana FitzJames Stuart y Silva, Duchess of Alba, Duchess of Liria and Xerica, Duchess of Montoro, Duchess of Arjona, Duchess of Hijar, Duchess of Olivares and forty-three other titles. If the outlawry were to be reversed, the present heir male to the Dukedom of Berwick would be Jacobo Hernando FitzJames Stuart Gomez, Ducque de Penaranda de Duero. The Duke of Berwick’s descendants in France, the Ducs de FitzJames, are now extinct in the male line.
Henry FitzJames, Duke of Albemarle
(1673–1702)
Henry FitzJames was created Duke of Albemarle by his father King James II on 13 January 1696. He had been born in August 1673, the younger of James’s sons by Arabella Churchill and he and his elder brother James were educated at the Colleges of Juilly, near Meaux, Plessis and La Fleche under the care of Father Gough (sic) a Jesuit, who had performed a similar service for the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son.
He was by all accounts a very headstrong young man and would prove to be something of a liability to his father. He had a strong fondest for the bottle and was the complete opposite to his brother in this regard. They spent most of their early years in France but their reception at the English Court in 1685 caused quite a stir and angered the Queen, Mary of Modena. The Florentine Ambassador Terriesi observed:
‘She spent the whole of last week weeping bitterly; the reason alleged is that the King has received his two sons by the sister of Lord Churchill, at Court, and, in a measure, has begun to recognise them’
A week later he wrote:
‘There are no signs of abatement in the passionate emotion aroused in the Queen … by the report that the King has re-taken Madam Sedley into favour and meets her in the house of Mr Grime when he is hunting … But the true reason may be the coming to Court of Madam Churchill’s two sons contrary to the King’s promise…He is sending them back to France shortly for their education’.
In December 1686 the King recalled them again and the younger Henry was sent to sea on HMS Sedgemoor under the command of Capt David Lloyd ‘to observe the motions of the Algerines’.
Henry appears to have had his fair share of mishaps during his youth. In 1684, on one of his visits to England – during the reign of his uncle Charles II – he had an accident which threatened to disfigure his face.
‘I was very sorry to hear this morning of the accident which happened to your brother Harry’ [wrote his father], ‘and send this footman on purpose to you, to have an account from you how he does. They tell me his face will not be marked with it … Remember me to your brother James, and tell him I am sorry his journey should be stopped for some days, especially by such an accident; and tell Harry I Hope he will be carefuller for the time to come, and now that he do what the chirurgeons will have him….’
When William of Orange invaded England in 1688 and King James withdrew to France, his illegitimate sons James and Henry joined him at St Germain. However, within two months they all sailed from the French port of Brest with the French expeditionary force commanded by Lieutenant-General Rosen and landed in Ireland in March 1689. The expedition conveyed by fourteen ships of the line, eight frigates and three fireships commanded by the French Admiral Jean Gabaret, landed at Kinsale.
Young Henry, only seventeen years old, was made Colonel of a Regiment of Infantry but his conduct did not impress the French ambassador d’Avaux who thought him ‘a very debauched young man, who burst himself daily with brandy’. Curiously this did not prevent King James from writing to the Grand Master of the Order of St John of Jerusalem and obtaining the title of Honorary Grand Prior of England for his son. Another example of this young man’s behaviour was again recorded by the French Ambassador:
One day the Duke of Berwick and his brother entered a room where Lord Dungan (son of the Earl of Limerick) and four or five sparks of the army were cracking a bottle of claret. Presently an Officer blamed the Grand Prior for having broken a certain captain of his regiment. Henry FitzJames replied offensively, Berwick good humouredly suggested that instead of wrangling they should drink to the health of all true Irishmen, and confusion to Lord Melfort, who had well-nigh lost them the kingdom. Whereupon the Grand Prior angrily protested that Melfort was a right good fellow, and a friend of his, and if anyone dared drink such a toast, he would pitch a glass of wine in his face. Some of the gentlemen remarked that FitzJames had no business to fall into a passion if they chose to drink the toast; and then, raising an empty goblet, made the usual reverence. Instantly the ill-conditioned Prior flung his wine into Dungan’s face, the glass cutting his lordship’s nose in two places. The bystanders rushed between the parties. However, Dungan, though a high spirited young man, treated the insult with contempt. ‘Never mind’ he said, ‘the Prior is not only a child, but the son of my King’
Unlike his brother James, Henry was not created a Duke whilst his father was still in possession of his kingdoms, for he had to wait until he was an exile in France. At the beginning of 1695 it was rumoured that young FitzJames had married in Paris ‘a Mrs Rogers, the daughter of his father’s tailor’. The rumour was, of course, untrue but his brother James did propose marriage to one of the daughters of the Count d’Armagnac without the knowledge of his father but was promptly turned down. St Simon’s assessment of this young man’s character was less than flattering, he considered him ‘the stupidest man on earth’. However, if true, that did not prevent him from being placed in command of the French fleet at Toulon in 1696 whilst his father was waiting on the coast of Normandy to invade England. That he had some ability is clear because he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General and Admiral in the French service in 1702.
Henry eventually married on 20 July 1700 Marie Gabrielle (who married secondly on 25 May 1707 John Drummond, 2nd Earl of Melfort and died 15 May 1741), the only child of Jean D’Audibert, Count de Lussan. Her dowry was twenty thousand pounds with free board and lodgings at Versailles. Only two years after their marriage, Henry died suddenly on 27 Dec.1702, at Bagnols in Languedoc, leaving a daughter, Christine Marie Jacqueline, who was baptised on 22 May 1711 at St Germain-en-Laye, and whose godparents were James III and his mother Mary of Modena.
Arabella FitzJames (1673–1704)
Berwick’s and Albemarle’s younger sister, Arabella, was born year in February 1672/3, the youngest child and only daughter of James, Duke of York, later King James II, by Arabella Churchill, whose name she was given. Her mother later went on to marry Colonel Charles Godfrey, Master of the Jewel Office who died in 1714, whereas she survived him for another sixteen years, dying in 1730 and having further children.
Meanwhile, in April 1689 Arabella became a novice in the Benedictine congregation at Pontoise and was professed there a year later on 30 April 1690, taking the name Dame Ignatia; the ceremony being witnessed by Queen Mary of Modena. Fourteen years later, she died in November 1704, unmarried and aged only 32. According to the nuns
‘She was ever pious and ye fear of God rul’d all her actions; sickness and infirmity grew up with her, which was a great hinderance to her zeal in all common observances ….’.
Katherine, Countess of Anglesea, later Duchess of Buckinghamshire & Normanby (1681–1742) and James Darnley (1685–86)
The Lady Katherine Darnley, as she was styled on her marriage licence, was allegedly born 1681/2, the third and youngest surviving illegitimate daughter of James, Duke of York, later King James II.
Her mother Catherine, Countess of Dorchester, became James’s mistress in the late 1670s and bore him a number of children, of whom the only survivor was the Lady Katherine. The birth of their first child was heralded by a contemporary in the following terms:
‘The daughter of Sir Charles Sedley, being reputed a maid, was brought to bed of a child and layd it to ye Duke of York, before he went beyond the seas; which, tog
ether with the thought of departing out of England, made his Duchess very melancholy’.
If the dating is correct the child was born in fact shortly before 9 March 1679, when the Duke and his wife departed for Flanders following the Exclusion Crisis. The Duke was again banished to Scotland in October 1680. The Duchess went with a heavy heart, her situation being reported by Henry Sidney as follows:
‘The Duchess is very melancholy; but whether it proceeds from the apprehensions of making another journey or seeing the Duke so publicly own Mrs Sedley, I cannot tell’.
Mrs Sedley’s association with James continued to cause his wife acute embarrassment. When he succeeded to the throne in 1685, he attempted to send her away, but before long had renewed his relationship with her, plunging his wife into a deep melancholy: ‘The Duchess … prays all day almost She is very melancholy; the women will have it for Mrs Sedley’. Mrs Sedley’s hold over James was because of her wit and frankness, characteristics she inherited in abundance from her father Sir Charles Sedley. At the revolution, when taxed with his ingratitude to King James, he wittily replied that: the King having made my daughter a Countess, it is fit I should make his daughter a Queen’. When Queen Mary cut her dead at a Court function on one occasion, the Countess declared
‘Why so haughty madam? I have not sinned more notoriously in breaking the seventh commandment with your father, than you have done in breaking the fifthe against him’.
On her one time royal lover’s choice of mistresses, she commented, ‘We are none of us handsome, and if we had wit, he has not enough to discover it’.
Once canvassed as a possible wife for John Churchill, the celebrated Duke of Marlborough, Mrs Sedley lost out to the beautiful Sarah Jennings. She eventually married, aged almost forty, Sir David Colyear, who was created Earl of Portmore in 1703 by Queen Anne. Initially the Countess was violently opposed to William III’s usurpation of the crown, and when the Earl of Ailesbury, a known Jacobite, was asked to carry the Sword of State before him at his Coronation, she retorted ‘Did you not wish the sword in his body’. However, in 1696, the year of the assassination plot, she fell into a dispute with Lord Ailesbury and shouted at him ‘I will make King William spit on you! Go to your ----King James’.
Lady Katherine inherited her mother’s quick temper and was described by Horace Walpole as ‘more mad with pride than any Mercer’s wife in Bedlam’. In an attempt to cure her of this, Lady Dorchester informed her that she was in fact the daughter of Colonel James Graham, of Levens, to whose legitimate daughter, the Countess of Berkshire, she is alleged to have borne a striking resemblance. However, she was most unfortunate in her choice of husbands. The first whom she married in 1699 was James (Annesley), 5th Earl of Anglesey (who died without any male issue early in 1701/2), but they had been separated after a few months on account of his cruelty. Their only child Catherine was born in 1701 and she married William Phipps from whom descend the Marquesses of Normanby. In his will the Earl gave his daughter a dowry of £15,000 but with the proviso that she was never again to see her mother and grandmother, the Countess of Dorchester. He also placed her under the guardianship of Lord Haversham
Katherine married again in 1705/6 at St Martin in the Fields, as his 3rd wife, John (Sheffield), 1st Duke of Buckinghamshire and Normanby (who died in 1720/1), a nobleman with a very colourful and scandalous past The only son of the 2nd Earl of Mulgrave, he had been a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to King Charles II, whose sentiments towards the opposite sex he shared. In 1673 it was rumoured that he had got Barbara, the Duchess of Cleveland, the King’s ex-mistress, with child and the following year he was involved in a love triangle with Mary Kirke, a Maid of Honour to the Duchess of York, who was also sharing her favours with the Duke of Monmouth and the Duke of York. The child born of these proceedings, a boy, died a few hours after its birth. To his credit the lady never accused him ‘of getting ye child or any other act’ therefore the paternity must be laid at the door of one of the other participants.
In Bishop Burnet’s estimation, Buckingham was
‘a nobleman of learning, and good natural parts, but of no principle; violent for the High Church, yet seldom goes to it; very proud, insolent and covetous, and takes all advantages’.
It is recorded of him that when James II had just returned to London after his first ineffectual attempt to leave the country, Mulgrave, as he was then known, produced a warrant ready drawn for signature by the unfortunate King which would have created him a Marquess, whereupon the irritated King exclaimed ‘Good God, what a time you take to ask a thing of that nature’. Unsuccessful in his attempt he had to wait until 1694, when William III created him Marquess of Normanby. He received his Dukedom from Queen Anne in 1703, an honour perceived by some as just reward for his courtship of her some twenty years previously.
Although the Duchess bore her second husband several children, only one survived to adulthood. When her first son was born in 1710 and died an infant, her mother accused the Duke of killing it with over care because
‘he wou’d not let it suck from the apprehension he had that there was no sound woman to be mett with, nor fed with a spoon because he designed the Dutchess when she was well enough shou’d give it suck herself, so he had an invention of a sucking bottle wch was so managed in short the child was starved…’
Their only surviving child Edmund, who succeeded his father as Duke of Buckinghamshire, served under his uncle the Duke of Berwick during his last campaign in Germany, and died in 1735, of consumption.
The Duchess, who survived until 1742, was an assiduous supporter of the rights of her half brother the Old Pretender and visited him often in Rome. On one occasion, in 1731, upon her return, she met with the King’s first minister Robert Walpole in an effort to convert him to the cause, only to find herself unwittingly betraying to him her plans for a restoration. Her haughtiness was a byword, and after hearing Whitefield preach, wrote to Lady Huntingdon in the following words:
‘I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers. Their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with impertinence, and disrespect towards their superiors. It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth. I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding’.
Katherine’s younger full brother, James Darnley Fitzjames,was born in 1685, but died the following year when he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Chapter VI
The Bastards of Charles Stuart (1720–88)
HRH Charlotte Stuart, LT, Duchess of Albany (1753–89)
Charlotte was the illegitimate daughter of Charles Edward Stuart, de jure King Charles III, known to history as Bonnie Prince Charlie, the hero of the 1745 Jacobite Rising and the eldest grandson of King James II in the legitimate male line. Of her Robert Burns wrote:
‘This lovely’s maid’s of Royal blood, that ruled Albion’s kingdoms three, but oh, Alas, for her bonnie face, they’ve wronged the Lass of Albany. We’ll daily pray, we’ll nightly pray, on bended knée most fervently, the time will come, with pipe and drum, we’ll welcome home fair Albany’.
Wronged poor Charlotte certainly was. The famously unlucky star which afflicted the Stuarts began its malign influence with her birth and waned only with her death.
It was in December 1745, during the Highland Rising, that Charles met Charlotte’s mother, shortly after the retreat from Derby to Glasgow. She was Clementina, daughter of the ardent Jacobite, John Walkinshaw of Barrowfield and Camlachie by Catherine, daughter of Sir Hugh Paterson of Bannockburn and Lady Jean Erskine, daughter of Charles, 5th Earl of Mar.
Charles, conspicuous for his lack of womanising, formed an attraction for Clementina at Bannockburn House whilst she nursed his severe fever after the victorious Battle of Falkirk. The attraction was mutual, but the relationship platonic, overtaken by events culminating in Charles’ defeat at Culloden, the legendary five
months on the run in the Western Isles and his eventual escape to France. Once on the continent Charles vented his anguish by a descent into alchoholism and the high emotion of two passionate love affairs. The first was with Louise de Rohan, Duchess de Montbazon, his first cousin on his maternal Sobieski side. It produced the elder of his two illegitimate children, a little boy named Charles who was born weak and died in early 1749 aged nearly six months. Immediately afterwards, Charles fell into the arms of another Polish cousin, Marie-Anne Jablonowska, Princess de Talmont – an explosive relationship which ended without issue.
In May 1752, desperate for the warmth of domesticity, Charles sent for Clementina Walkinshaw with whom he set up home. They lived together as Count and Countess Johnson in Liège where their daughter, Charlotte, was born in 1753 and christened in October in the Church of La Bienheureuse Vierge Marie des Fonts. It was this open demonstration of a family life, which gave rise to the doubtful view that it constituted marriage under Scots Law. Concern that they had actually married provoked Charles’ younger brother, Cardinal Henry, into demanding from Clementina a written declaration to the contrary on pain of forfeiting her allowance. She had little option but to agree. Yet that was in 1767, after the couple had separated, and was designed to clear the way for Charles to marry and produce the legitimate male heir who was never to be.