by Roger Powell
Although Charles adored his little ‘Pouponne’, his relationship with Clementina was deteriorating because of his heavy drinking, justified fear of assassination by the Hanoverians, and constant travelling in desperate attempts to rescue something of the Stuart Cause. Towards the end of 1755 and until 1756 the family lived together in Basle as Dr and Mrs Thompson – the Hanoverian minister in Berne described their appearance as: ‘persons of easy fortune, but without the least affection of show or magnificence’.
Charles’ condition reached rock bottom upon the death knell of the Stuart Cause when, in November 1759, a French naval force under his nominal command, led by the Duke d’Aiguillon and the Count de Conflans, was destroyed in Quiberon Bay by Admiral Hawke during an attempt to invade Ireland. The much abused Clementina could take no more and in July 1760 fled with Charlotte from the Château de Carlsbourg to Paris with the help of Charles’ father and the protection of Louis XV. Charles was beside himself with grief but, unable to get his beloved daughter back, could only cope with this loss by cutting off all contact with her and Clementina.
In Paris, mother and daughter lived quiet lives under the care of the Archbishop of Paris at the Convent of the Nuns of the Visitation whilst Charles isolated himself at Carlsbourg until succeeding his father in Rome upon the latter’s death in 1766.
The French then produced a young bride for Charles – Princess Louise von Stolberg-Gedern. The couple were married in early 1772 and the bride’s single task was to produce a male heir to keep the Stuart card in play. But Louise proved barren whereupon, having recovered his health, Charles relapsed into drinking. Finally, Louise began an infamous affair with the young playboy, Count Vittorio Alfieri, and she and Charles were formally separated in 1784.
This marriage and its failure to produce an heir had a profound effect on Charlotte Stuart’s life. Upon his father’s death, Charles angrily refused to maintain Clementina and Charlotte’s allowance, maintaining his total silence towards them, refusing to answer a single letter from either. So his brother Henry took this duty upon himself, though reducing their pension from 6,000 to 5,000 livres and demanding from Clementina her written declaration that she and his brother had never married. Mother and daughter had to leave Paris for cheaper lodgings in the Convent of Notre Dame de la Miséricorde in Meaux-en-Brie.
Horrified by the implications of her father’s marriage, Charlotte travelled with Clementina to Rome in 1772 to appeal for recognition, bravely refusing to see her father without her mother. Forced back to Meaux by Henry, he at least agreed to allow them to move back to Paris where Charlotte’s petition to Louis XVI for material assistance was refused because, as Horace Walpole observed: ‘The House of FitzJames, fearing their becoming a burden to themselves, prevented the acknowledgement of the daughter’.
The next blow came in early 1775. Despite having ignored his daughter for so long, Charles decided he néeded to keep Charlotte in reserve as the Stuarts last hope. Though at her most eligible age, he forced her to promise neither to marry nor take the veil. These orders were communicated to her by Abbé Gordon, Principal of the Scots College in Paris who wrote back to Charles that:
‘Your letter touched her to such a degree that I was sorry I had spoken to her so freely … She was only six years old when she was carried off, so that she ought not to be entirely ruined for a fault of which her age hindered her to be anybody’s partner … She deserves better, being esteemed by all who know her as one the most accomplished women in this town …’
It was this most impossible of social situations which convinced Charlotte in early 1776 to resign herself to the drab life of an honorary canoness at a convent in Franche-Comté. On her way she was invited to dinner by Lord Elcho. She was twenty-two, outgoing, full of common sense and very patient. She had dark blond hair and bright blue eyes, being described by Horace Mann as having: ‘a good figure, tall and well made’. There she met and fell in love with her relation, the handsome, thirty-seven year old Prince Ferdinand de Rohan. Like Charlotte he too was neither free to marry nor have a family. For as the youngest son of the Duke de Montbazon he had been pushed into a church career and become the Archbishop of Bordeaux.
Changing her plans, Charlotte returned to Paris where Ferdinand leased a house for her and her mother on the same Rue St Jacques upon which stood the convent in which they lived as lady pensioners. He also acquired a country home for them south of Paris at Anthony. Having given up all hope of ever being recognised by and reconciled with her father, Charlotte began a secret family with Ferdinand. Between 1779–84 she bore him three children, Marie Victoire, Charlotte and Charles. For years their fates remained one of the mysteries of late Stuart history.
Yet it was precisely at this time that Charles’ relationship with Louise von Stolberg was breaking up and his robust health beginning to fail. This prompted him to perform an astonishing volte face. In a document dated March 23rd with a codicil dated two days later, Charles decided to make Charlotte his sole heir. In addition he created her Duchess of Albany, a dukedom traditionally reserved for the heirs of Kings of Scots. Five days later he raised her to the status of legitimate child with the additional title of Her Royal Highness and secured recognition of all this by the Vatican as well as the King and Parliament of France. Ultimately he invested her with the Order of the Thistle and even passed to her the right of Royal Succession. Yet it wasn’t until Charles recovered from his second near-fatal stroke in early 1784 that he wrote to Charlotte, telling her of his decisions and asking her to come and live with him in Florence. It should have been the answer to her prayers. But she had long given up hope for such a thing and was at that time pregnant with her third child.
Charlotte was unable to breathe a word of her secret family to either her father Charles in Florence nor uncle Henry in Rome. So she left her three children in Paris under the care of their grandmother, Clementina Walkinshaw as well as Ferdinand de Rohan and left for Italy, assuming their separation would not last too long.
Arriving in Florence on October 5th, 1785 Charlotte managed to nurse both her father and his finances back to health, bringing him greater happiness than he had known at any time since the Highland Rising. She also became the only woman to win and keep the heart of her uncle with whom she reconciled the notoriously difficult Charles after decades of estrangement, and returned her father into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church of his birth, winning praise from the Pope himself. Charlotte finally managed the unthinkable – Charles began to write warm and courteous letters to her mother. In her own to Clementina she revealed how badly she missed her family, openly hoping they would soon be reunited.
Her friends called her ‘the angel of peace’ and ‘her father’s guardian angel’. As the author of Charles’ happy twilight after her own long years of denial, Charlotte deserved much when her father finally died in 1788. But she had contracted a malignant cancer of the liver. Her last weeks of life were lived out in the knowledge she would never see her children, mother nor Ferdinand again, and in desperate concern for their safety in Paris with the outbreak of the French Revolution. In October 1789 Charlotte wrote to Clementina:
‘Don’t worry. I am well. I love you and will send news as soon as possible. Please kiss my dear friends for me’.
She died in Bologna one week later, at the house of the Marchesa Giulia Lambertini-Bovio who wrote to Henry that: ‘So blessed was her death, that the tears I pour out from grief are tears of tenderness’.
SECTION III
HANOVERIAN
BASTARDS
1714–1901
Chapter VII
The Bastards of George I (1660–1727)
Anna Louise Sophie, Grafin Von Delitz (1692–1773)
Unlike their Stuart predecessors, the early Hanoverian Kings of England did not publicly acknowledge any of their illegitimate children. However there is enough contemporary documentary evidence to attribute paternity, and most modern German historians now believe that George I was the father of a
t least three illegitimate children: Anna Louise Sophie, Grafin von Delitz, Petronelle Melusine, Countess of Chesterfield (see page 120) and Margaret Gertrude, Grafin zu Schaumburg-Lippe (see page 122).
Anna Louise Sophie was born in January 1692, and registered as the child of Friedrich Achaz von der Schulenburg and his wife Margarethe Gertrud. The latter, a daughter of Gustaf Adolf, Baron von der Schulenburg, was a sister of the celebrated Ehrengard Melusina, Duchess of Kendal and mistress of King George I. By attributing the paternity of his child to another, George was simply following accepted convention and one only has to remember the example of the Countess of Castlemaine, all of whose children bore her husband’s surname until acknowledged by King Charles.
Anna Louise Sophie’s mother was in fact Ehrengard Melusine, but for the duration of her mother’s life she was officially passed off as her niece. Why George never acknowledged her is unknown, but it might have been because she was born before his divorce, and the scandal that was attached to it, plus the discretion demanded by his father in all matters of the heart, did not encourage him to do so. However this was in strange contrast to the honour accorded to George’s half sister Sophie Charlotte von Kielmansegg, who was granted the Brunswick arms, by George, with the obligatory baton sinister to denote illegitimacy.
By not publicly acknowledging Anna Louisa Sophie as his daughter, there was much speculation about her origins and status. Some of her contemporaries assumed that she was George’s mistress, and others (Lord Hervey) claimed that she performed a similar service for George II and Frederick, Prince of Wales. Lord Hervey said of her:
‘Madame d’Elitz was a Schulenburg, sister to my Lady Chesterfield, a very handsome lady, though now a little in her decline, with a great deal of wit, who had had a thousand lovers, and had been catched in bed with a man twenty years ago (1716) and been divorced from her husband upon it. She was said to have been mistress to three generations of the Hanover family; the late King, the present, and the Prince of Wales before he came to England ...’
Except for a minor indiscretion in his youth, George did not take another mistress after Ehrengard Melusine. Indeed in many ways she, together with their three girls, made the happy family unit that George himself lacked, and upon arriving in England in 1714, he lost little time in arranging their passage from Hanover. By this time Anna Louise Sophie had been married off to the noble Ernst August Philipp von dem Busshe-Ippenburg, a relative, it would seem, of Johann von dem Bussche, brother-in-law of the Countess von Platen und Hallermund, sometime mistress of George I’s father, Ernst August. Sadly the marriage did not last as has been explained above. She was by all accounts a witty and accomplished young woman and, despite her behaviour, George remained fond of her, so much so that he bought her a beautiful palace at Herrenhausen in Hanover and arranged with the Emperor that she should be granted the title of Grafin von Delitz in 1722.
Eventually she sold the palace and bought a house in Paddington instead. She was not her mother’s favourite child, for that honour went to her younger sister Petronelle. Of her mother it is reported that upon her arrival in England, she was mobbed and booed by a crowd whilst riding in her carriage. Frightened she cried out ‘Goot peoples, ve haf come only for your goots!’ The crowd replied wittily ‘Yes! And for our chattels too’.
The Grafin von Delitz eventually died in 1773, aged eighty-one, without issue, requesting that her body be buried with that of her mother Ehrengard in South Audley St Chapel, London. The Complete Peerage records that at her death, she was known as the Hon Lady Dallet, presumably a corruption of the name Delitz.
Petronelle, Countess of Chesterfield (1693–1778)
Petronelle was the second daughter of King George I by his favourite mistress Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg, in Germany, a Maid of Honour to the Electress, Sophia of Hanover, later she was created Duchess of Kendal for life in 1716 in the English Peerage, and was also created by the Emperor, Princess of Eberstein in 1723.
Ehrengard was appointed a Lady in Waiting to the Electress Sophie in 1690 and within a short time had captured the heart of her son George. She came from a very illustrious Altmark family, who could trace their ancestry back to the 13th century. Her eldest brother, later a Field Marshal, was in the service of the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttal. She was tall and thin, thus earning her the nickname ‘Malkin’ (scarecrow/hoppole). In temperament she was pliant and patient and shared with George an interest in music and the theatre. Her future son-in-law the Graf zu Schaumburg-Lippe praised her desire ‘to do all the good she can’.
Petronelle was born in 1693, a year before her father’s marriage was dissolved. Like her elder sister, she was registered as the child of Friedrich Achaz von Schulenburg and his wife Margarethe Gertrud. However, like her sisters she was never publicly recognized by her father by the usual means of a grant of the royal arms, duly differenced. Contemporary sources speak of Petronelle as good looking and spirited enough to speak her mind to George on issues where she disagreed with him. Like her mother she was appointed a Lady in Waiting to her grandmother the Dowager Electress.
Why she chose to marry Lord Chesterfield is unknown. His reputation did not stand up to close scrutiny. He was after all a member of the Hellfire Club and had taken as his mistress the notorious Elizabeth Dennison, a celebrated bawd, who ran a bawdy house in Covent Garden in the 1730s. Although known as ‘Hell-fire Stanhope’ she was a woman of ‘Pleasant manners, humour and wit’. Chesterfield also took a fancy to George Anne Bellamy, a celebrated actress, the illegitimate daughter of James O’Hara, Earl of Tyrawley, whose ‘beauty, wit and intelligence, --- talents, --- generosity and refined manners irresistibly attracted everyone to her’.
As a prospective son-in-law he was less than appealing. He was also the grandson of Philip, Earl of Chesterfield, the first love of Barbara Palmer, subsequently Lady Castlemaine.
In 1722 Petronelle was created Countess of Walsingham for life, but after her marriage in 1733 to Philip Dormer (Stanhope), 4th Earl of Chesterfield, KG, she adopted the title of her husband and died without children in 1778. ‘Her portion’, according to the Complete Peerage was said to have been ‘£50,000 down and £3,000 per annum payable out of the Civil List revenue in Ireland during her life’.
Her mother, the Duchess of Kendal, who died in 1743, left her a part of her immense wealth, but according to one source (Lord Hervey), both mother and daughter had been defrauded out of the money left to them by George I as a result of his successor (George II) burning the will. When the Earl threatened to take legal proceedings, George II gave him £20,000 as a quietus. However a copy of George’s will has survived and in it he left his mistress almost £23,000, thus seemingly disposing of the rumour that she was defrauded out of her bequest
The earl held a number of important appointments and served twice as a Lord of the Bedchamber to King George II, as Captain of the Yeoman of the Guard, as Ambassador to The Hague (where he distinguished himself by the magnificence of his entertainments), as Lord Steward of the Household and as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He was the author of the Chesterfield Letters written to his illegitimate son, which, according to Dr Johnson ‘inculcated the morals of a Strumpet and the manners of a dancing master’. He died in 1773 ‘of a slow decay’ at Chesterfield House, Mayfair aged seventy-eight.
Margaret Gertrude, Countess von Schaumburg-Lippe (1701–26)
Margaret Gertrud was the youngest daughter of King George I by his favourite mistress Ehrengard Melusine, Baroness von der Schulenburg and was born in 1701. The gap between her birth and that of her elder sisters is curious, given that their father was not absent on campaign. However, like them she was registered as a child of different parents: Rabe Christoph von Oeynhausen and his wife Sophie Juliane von der Schulenburg, sister of the Duchess of Kendal.
’Trudchen’ – Gertrud’s nickname – was her father’s favourite and at the age of twenty was married to Albrecht Wolfgang, Graf zu Schaumburg-Lippe, who succeeded his father as ruler of Schaumb
urg-Lippe in 1728. She was by all accounts a beautiful and accomplished young woman, but one that was not destined to survive her husband, dying in 1726 of tuberculosis, having borne him two sons. She was also trilingual and able to speak fluent German, French and English as could her two sons.
Her husband and his brother had both been educated in England because of their parents estrangement, and in 1720 the elder had entered George’s service before being chosen as Margaret’s husband. That it was a political marriage that later turned into a love match, is clear from the knowledge that George I stated in their marriage contract, that he would defend Schaumburg-Lippe against all its enemies and the affection in which they held each other.
However, their elder son died young, having been killed, it was rumoured, in a duel whilst studying at Leiden University. The younger, who succeeded his father, was an ally to Britain during the Seven Years War and was entrusted by the Portuguese King with the reorganisation of that monarch’s army; he also wrote treatises on the art of war. All in all, a very accomplished young man.
Chapter VIII
The Bastards of George II (1683–1760)
Field Marshal Johann Ludwig, Count von Wallmoden (1736–1811)
Johann Ludwig von Wallmoden is believed to have been the illegitimate son of King George II by Amalie Sophie Marianne von Wallmoden, the daughter of Johann Franz Dietrich von Wendt, a general in the Hanoverian Service by his wife Friederike Charlotte von dem Busshe, first cousin of Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegge, George I’s illegitimate sister. As he was born three years before his mother’s divorce in 1739, for propriety’s sake Johann was given the surname of her husband, Gottlieb Adam von Wallmoden, Oberhauptmann of Calenberg (by whom she had already had a son Franz Ernst). Like Johann’s aunts, the illegitimate daughters of George I, he was never publicly acknowledged or granted the royal arms with due differences. He therefore used the arms of Wallmoden, whose name he bore.