Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  I am sorry to have occasion here to confirm to you that the queen herself, the midwife and the doctors have all been mistaken in thinking Her Majesty to be with child. Now it is very certain she is not, nor has been at any time.42

  When a sense of chaos so clearly impresses itself across the centuries, we may well speculate what life in this hothouse of illness, rumour and uncertainty were doing to Charles Edward. All we know is that he spent most of the autumn days of 1728 playing golf, at which he became expert.43

  Still James dithered about how to resolve his personal affairs. He had ennobled his favourites the Hays – they were now Lord and Lady Inverness – but Clementina had insisted on their banishment. He longed to recall Inverness, but feared that this might precipitate a second flight by Clementina.44 Yet since the Pope was now showing signs of greater friendliness after their dramatic quarrel over the queen, James began to nurture hopes that his affairs might take an upward turn if he took his court back to Rome and was publicly reconciled with the Pontiff. He decided on an exploratory visit to Rome. Such was James’s indecisiveness still that he even found it hard to decide whether he should travel to Rome publicly or incognito.45 Eventually he made up his mind and set off for Rome at the beginning of January 1729.46

  On arrival at Rome, he had an audience with the Pope. It went well: Benedict even sent back a blessing for the prince who had refused to kiss his feet five years earlier.47 James decided to resume residence in the Palazzo Muti, intending his family to join him there in the spring.48

  Feeling more settled in mind, and doubtless a little guilty about the uncertainty and chaos he had lately visited on his eldest son, James took the opportunity to write one of his effusive letters to Charles Edward, full of praise for the prince’s patience and his ‘mighty well writ letters’.49 Significantly, perhaps, the prince was at that moment once again in a low state of health. The departure from Bologna was delayed to enable him to get his strength up for the journey.50 To Clementina meanwhile James gave a hint of what he expected at Rome by writing that what his health needed now was not drugs but an absence of stress.51

  Arrangements were made for the royal family to move down in May.52 ‘Be sure you are very good to Sir Thomas [Sheridan had been knighted] on the road and to behave yourself so that I may have a good account of you when you come here,’ his father wrote to Charles Edward.53 The clear inference is that Sheridan had previously encountered behaviour problems. Given the sustained confusion of 1725–8, it is not hard to see why.

  So, at the end of April 1729, after an absence of two and a half years, Charles Edward returned to the city of his birth.54 His mother remained in Bologna, again convinced that she was pregnant, this time asking for the papal blessing on her expected third child.55

  What kind of a place was eighteenth-century Rome, in which Charles Edward spent his formative years? It was a city of churches and palazzi that occupied about a fifth of the area of Imperial Rome and had about one-tenth of its population (around 150,000 in the 1730s). The limits of habitation were set by the Quirinal, the Porta del Popolo and the bend in the Tiber. The most densely populated areas were in the Trastevere district and around the baths of Diocletian. Rome was a tightly controlled, hedonistic society, marked by relative absence of class conflict and the absolute domination of the Catholic church.

  Daily life for Charles Edward and his brother involved riding in the Villa Borghese, promenades in selected locations (the baths of Diocletian were a great favourite with James), formal appearances in the Piazza Navona and, always, frequent attendance at Mass, especially in the church of the SS Apostoli adjacent to the Palazzo Muti. In the evenings there would be visits to the great houses and entertainment by the great names in the Roman nobility. The same names recur in Walton’s endless and meticulous accounts of the movements of the Stuart family: Villa Ludovici, Bolognetti, Patrizi, Palazzo Corsini.56 Occasionally the odd distinguished visitor came to call on the family. On 25 June 1729 Clementina received Montesquieu at the Palazzo Muti while James was at Albano. The two princes were present and Montesquieu was very taken with them.57

  During his active periods, Dunbar made a point of showing off Charles Edward’s undoubted talents as a dancer.58 And on special occasions there would be an audience with the Pope. Clement XII, who became Pope in 1730, took a liking to the prince and gave him presents of money over and above the papal pension paid to his father: 600 scudi in November 1731, 1,000 pistoles in March 1732, and 4,000 scudi in May of the same year, raised from a lottery in Genoa.59 So embarrassed was Walton by these signal marks of papal favour that he concocted an absurd story whereby the Pope allegedly tried to space out visits from the Stuart family at long intervals, because of the cost of his own generosity!

  The humdrum tenor of everyday life for the prince masked the continuing tensions in the Palazzo Muti. Even though mother and son were capable of conducting their own relationship by now, James’s brooding presence lowered over everything. A series of letters passed between Clementina and Charles while the queen, pleading the cold weather, delayed her journey to Rome.60 Fussily James oversaw the correspondence, explaining to his wife that ‘Carluccio’ was now capable of reading her letters without much help from Sheridan.61

  Finally, at the end of May 1729, Clementina set off for Rome via Loreto, her letters to her son full of the prayers she was saying for him.62 Her marriage with James was still extremely shaky. The king chose to travel up to Rome from Albano to meet her but his note describing the meeting to his favourite Inverness is eloquent: ‘The very next morning she showed a little humour which she might have spared me.’63 It was already quite clear that no true marriage any longer existed. The couple rarely ate or slept together.64 Predictably, there was another report of a pregnancy, but this time the queen’s physician remained sceptical.65

  Finally in November James admitted the truth to John Hay (Lord Inverness). The queen’s self-mortification and fasting was playing havoc with her menstrual cycle. After heavy bleeding, she went for five months without a period (thus raising the hopes of a pregnancy), only to fall ill to another bout of dysmenorrhoea.66 Once more James collapsed with nervous exhaustion. Again he was very ill with a series of mysterious maladies.67 For the most part thereafter, James chose to live with his sons at Albano while Clementina remained in the Palazzo Muti.

  Although the turbulence of his family life continued, the eight-year-old prince was already coming into his own as a charmer. James made a point of showing him off to the nobility and Jacobite exiles of Rome, with such success that Stosch/Walton grudgingly conceded that it had been a propaganda masterstroke on James’s part to return to Rome from Bologna.68 The prince seemed to have put all health problems behind him. He was robust enough for James to make him keep Fridays as meatless days in accordance with strict Catholic practice.69 His prowess as a hunter continued too. To his father’s great delight he shot a bird on the wing during a caccia at Albano when he was still two months short of his ninth birthday.70

  But 1730 brought a major health anxiety. Shortly after James’s illness Dunbar, recently returned from an extended sick leave, went down again, this time a victim of a ’flu epidemic that was raging through Europe.71 Charles Edward was kept well away from him. The royal household, Dunbar excepted, seemed to have come through the epidemic unscathed. Then in July the prince succumbed to smallpox.72 Fortunately, it was a mild attack and left no disfiguring scars. The prince’s recovery was aided by the exceptionally mild Roman summer that year. By August he was completely recovered.73

  What of the prince’s education during this period? By June 1730 he had sufficiently satisfied Sheridan as to his competence in Italian to be started on Latin.74 Sheridan of course continued to spoil him shamelessly. The dour Dunbar could scarcely act as a counterweight for, apart from his frequent illnesses, his heart was not in the job. The sustained sniping at his suitability and competence by Atterbury, Lord Marischal and others finally wore him down. He offered James his resignation, poi
nting out that since he was apparently so obnoxious to the English Jacobites, this vitiated the original purpose of his being the prince’s governor – which was to reassure the English on the religious issue.75 He cited the dismissal of the Invernesses as the obvious precedent for his own departure and wound up his representation to the king by saying that he would remain only if he received an express order.76

  James had accepted the departure of the Invernesses with great reluctance and was not prepared to make another concession to English Jacobite opinion, especially as he thought Dunbar’s critics were being manipulated by Hanoverian agents. Rejecting Dunbar’s analogy with the Invernesses, he gave him an express order to stay, on pain of forfeiting the royal favour.77

  The year 1730 brought another significant development. Benedict XIII, so long a thorn in James’s side, died in the great epidemic and was succeeded by Clement XII. The new Pope took an altogether more benign view of James and conceded that he had been in the right in the dispute with Clementina. The result was that the Stuarts became frequent visitors at the Vatican.78 Yet the new Pope drew the line at James’s wish to have the Invernesses back, correctly conjecturing that this would bring on another crisis with Clementina. Try as he might, James could not budge Clement on this issue, even after a solemn promise that his two sons would always be brought up in the Catholic religion.79 To soften the blow, Clement backed James’s application to the French court for a pension for Charles Edward, but this was refused.80

  One unfortunate result of the new Pope’s support for James was to entrench Clementina even more firmly in her self-imposed regime of martyrdom. There is real anguish in James’s report to his French agent in November 1730:

  The Queen is not at all in a good state of health. Ever since her coming out of the convent, she has put herself on a footing not only of not taking any diversion but even of scarce ever taking the air, more than going from one church to another. She eats excessive little and does not allow herself to sleep what is necessary for her. All that has been said to her on those matters has yet had no effect, although besides its making it next to impossible her having any more children, it manifestly ruins her health and may, ’tis to be feared, soon call her into a decay of which she has even already some symptoms.81

  James ‘solved’ the problem of his marriage by, in the main, living at Albano while the queen remained in Rome. She would come out for day trips to Albano to see the children and return to Rome at night.82 Normal marital relations between James and Clementina seem to have come to an end after the final dénouement of the series of false pregnancies. The only sustained period Clementina spent with her children (or, which came to the same thing, at Albano) was when James was away on a sightseeing tour of Naples in May 1731.83 For the most part, Charles Edward’s relationship with his mother was carried on by letter.84

  There was now an explosive combination of factors in the ten-year-old’s life. He had parents who rarely saw each other, a mother in the grip of religious mania, and a father prey to melancholia and psychosomatic illnesses. His governor was in post under duress, his brother seemed to be overtaking him in matters intellectual and artistic, and there was already clear evidence that Henry was James’s favourite son.85 Only Sheridan’s continuing devotion buoyed the prince up. The upshot was that the prince reacted with stubborn rage to his father’s (and Dunbar’s) regime. At Albano he frequently had his privileges withdrawn – ‘in penance’, as James put it, for his disobedience.86 The prince’s response to this was illness.87

  His anxieties must have been exacerbated by the realisation that his brother Henry, more than four years his junior, was already his equal in French, Italian and English; only in Latin did Charles Edward have the advantage at this stage.88 Fortunately the prince still retained his taste for music and the opera; yet even here Henry was challenging him.89

  Only very occasionally did Charles Edward please his father by showing real flashes of wit and wisdom. One such occasion was when a French bishop was talking self-satisfiedly over table at the Palazzo Muti in February 1732 about how Louis XV had recently silenced the French parlements. The prince, who had been speaking in English (his first language) suddenly rounded on the cleric in a torrent of French: ‘Mais, monsieur, à quoi peut donc servir un Parlement quand on lui défend de parler? Autant vaudrait-il en avoir un composé de muets?’90 (‘But sir, what is the use of a Parliament if you don’t allow it to speak? Wouldn’t it be better, then, to have an assembly of the dumb?’)

  As James turned his attention increasingly away from Clementina and towards his two children (‘for I cannot expect to have any more. The Queen has been six months out of condition of becoming with child and I fear it is but too probable she may always continue in that state’)91 he began to ponder Charles Edward’s future. This reduced itself to three main issues: should he arrange a marriage for the prince at this stage: should he send him abroad; how should he plan for the rest of his education?

  The first suggestion of a childhood marriage – to the Emperor of Austria’s youngest daughter – had been made in March 1726.92 Now, thinking back to the groundwork laid by the duke of Liria on his mission to Russia in 1728–30, James toyed with an alliance between Charles Edward and the Princess of Mecklenbourg, heiress presumptive to the Russian crown.93 This would link neatly with the other scheme Liria had promoted during his three years in Moscow: the ultimate accession of the prince to the Polish throne.94

  But other events conspired to abort this scheme. Having the prince in eastern Europe would take the Jacobites farther away than ever from a Stuart restoration. It was more expedient to think of opportunities closer to home. Throughout 1732 and 1733 James puzzled over what these should be. The king inclined to the view that Charles Edward’s first trip abroad should be a preliminary reconnaissance in France.95 The problem here was that France was bound by its treaties with England not to give support to the House of Stuart. Nor were the French ministers keen on the idea. The vehemently anti-English Chauvelin thought that the Stuart prince should be brought to France only when a genuine attempt at an invasion was about to be mounted. With the pacific and pro-English Cardinal Fleury at the helm in France, there was no chance of that. However, Fleury himself heard of the idea, claimed to see merit in the prince’s being educated away from Rome, and suggested Switzerland as a venue.96

  Yet it was clear enough that in that country Charles Edward’s religious affiliations might wither. There was the even greater danger that a prince’s party might form in opposition to the king’s party.97 Moreover, James was so closely associated with the papacy that his restoration in England could be achieved only through foreign invasion. But if Charles Edward lived in a Protestant country like Switzerland, he might even be called in to legitimate an internal revolution in England and thus be restored over his father’s head.98

  There was another factor that gave James pause. The person pushing hardest in France for Charles Edward’s education was none other than the erstwhile Jacobite and turncoat Viscount Bolingbroke, in whom James had no confidence at all.99 All in all, given the worries about his son’s religion, the security risks in Switzerland, and the fact that the French were pressing for a Swiss domicile for the prince yet washed their hands of any consequences, James could see no advantages in the idea. His son would be a virtual prisoner even in a Catholic canton, surrounded by so many Protestant neighbours. Most of all, he suspected the motives of the Bolingbroke faction in promoting the idea.100

  Then there was the personality of his son to be taken into account: ‘The Prince is now in a critical age, he is mighty lively, and though he has a quick apprehension, yet he is a good deal thoughtless, so that it would be more dangerous to expose him to certain dangers and temptations than most children of his age.’101 James decisively rejected the idea of Switzerland and held out for Paris (though this was clearly a forlorn hope).

  The statement above by James to his agent O’Brien in Paris was the fullest utterence yet of his reservations abou
t his son. The truth was that Charles Edward’s educational progress had proceeded anything but smoothly. James’s letters to Clementina are full of strictures on his eldest son’s unsatisfactory behaviour.102 His resistance to all forms of discipline, especially of the intellectual kind, was becoming more pronounced. A progress report from Dunbar in January 1733 is typical:

  The Prince grows tall, strong and is, I believe, the most beautiful figure this day in the world, but to be ingenuous with you, it is impossible to get him to apply to any study as he ought to or indeed in any tolerable degree, by which means the Latin goes ill on, but he speaks both French and Italian easily.103

  One ray of hope was his liking for design, for which he had a decided talent.104 Dunbar encouraged him in this, hoping it would lead him on to geometry and other mathematical subjects.105 But tension between Charles Edward and authority soon surfaced again. Since the Prince could not strike at the obvious target (his father), he struck at Dunbar, James’s instrument of discipline. In September 1733 a furious row erupted over the prince’s studies. Dunbar attempted to chastise him. Charles Edward lost his temper and kicked Dunbar. He followed this up with a threat to kill his governor if he laid a hand on him.106

  James’s retribution was swift. The prince was locked in his room and kept there the best part of a week until he purged his contempt. What particularly troubled James was that his son had sworn revenge against Dunbar and refused to relent in his resolve for several days. Yet there are clear signs that James was already preparing to accept the inevitable with his truculent elder son. He was not temperamentally the sort of father who favoured beating his son – and childbeating was already going out of fashion in pedagogic circles anyway. He faced the problem with resignation. Two months after the fracas with Dunbar, he allowed his son for the first time to make the ride from Albano to Rome without him.107

  That Charles Edward was a confused and rebellious boy as he entered adolescence cannot be doubted. What general account can be given of his relations within the troubled Stuart family? There can be no questioning the closeness of his relationship with his mother. It was Clementina’s policy to stay away from Albano and James as much as was consistent with keeping up appearances, yet when she heard that her beloved Carluccio had a bad cold, she sped out there to comfort him (October 1732).108