Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  The forced resignation of d’Aiguillon in any case brought the first set of negotiations to a sudden halt, much to the relief of the Polonius-like duc de Fitzjames.4 The prince pressed ahead through the supposed new channel. His arguments were threefold: kings by divine right owed a duty to each other; the French had done amazingly well out of the ’45; and finally, the French had actually promised a subsidy when Charles was in Paris in September 1771.

  But now the prince muddied his own waters. After putting out an initial feeler to the duc d’Orléans, he switched to lobbying Maurepas.5 Charles Edward’s old adversary from the days of the arrest and expulsion had been recalled by Louis XVI after twenty-five years in the political wilderness. Maurepas was now in his early seventies. Louis installed him in rooms directly above his own at Versailles. Every morning, when the king heard his minister stirring, Louis would visit him to talk over the problems of the day.

  On the face of it, then, Maurepas was uniquely well placed to promote the prince’s cause at the French court. Yet the prince had discounted three factors. In the first place, it had been a serious blunder to contact Orléans, a known enemy of Maurepas.6 If the prince wanted favours from Orléans, he should not have approached Maurepas, and vice versa. Second, Maurepas was retained by Louis XVI as Minister without Portfolio, so had no departmental resources to command, whatever his feelings for the prince. Third, and most importantly, the new king himself wanted to sever the French connection with the Stuarts. He regarded them as an unlucky, even accursed family, and felt they were an anachronistic impediment to proper relations with England, an unacceptable joker in the international pack.

  Maurepas demonstrated that he had lost none of his old cunning. In his reply (indirect, using the excuse of protocol) to the prince, Maurepas expressed himself keen to help but unable to do anything: the spirit of divine right solidarity was willing but the ministerial flesh was weak (or non-existent). He suggested an approach to the new Foreign Minister comte de Vergennes.7

  After another few ineffectual stabs in Maurepas’s direction, the prince decided to take his advice.8 By this time even Abbé Gordon, who had fancied himself as having the ear of the duc d’Orléans, regretted opening that channel.9 Finding it quite useless for their purposes, the Jacobites shut it down and threw all their efforts into lobbying Vergennes.

  But Vergennes had been appointed to retrench and make economies. At his first interview with the duc de Fitzjames, he overwhelmed him with fiscal detail, leaving him in no doubt that there was no money to spare for Jacobite affairs, not even in a case allegedly involving a moral obligation.10

  The prince’s impatience with the slow progress of negotiations at Versailles and his general paranoia about France began to feed into each other.11 Brusquely, he informed his agents to go back to Maurepas and lay before him the entire correspondence with Orléans and Vergennes. This was a matter of deep embarrassment to the inept Jacobite negotiators. They knew only too well what Maurepas would make of such incompetence.12 They counselled patience; but as usual the prince would not listen to such ‘prevarications’.13

  At this point Louise decided to lend a hand, on the ground that it was her queenly duty. She told the duc de Fitzjames that her husband would rather have an outright refusal than another two and a half years of double-talk.14 The prince was desperate. There is a poignant quality to his appeal to Abbé Gordon in November 1774: ‘It would be the last of cruelties were they not to give me a definite answer, for I cannot possibly stand it any longer. My debts augmenting so considerably every day puts me in the greatest of desolations.’15

  Yet Vergennes and Louis XVI were determined to win the war of attrition with the Jacobites. At the end of the year Gordon told Caryll that Fitzjames was no farther forward than he had been when the new king came to the throne.16 In exasperation (and not before time) the prince gave up on the feckless Fitzjameses and appointed Gordon to head the negotiations, adding the all but impossible remit that Gordon was to secure not a penny less than James used to receive.17 The appointment of Gordon produced a quick answer from Vergennes, but it was not one the prince wanted to hear. Vergennes returned to the old stalling tactic used by d’Aiguillon: France would proceed only with Spanish collaboration, and liaison between the two courts would take time.18

  Charles Edward then trumped Vergennes’s ace, at least to his own satisfaction. Since Fitzjames and the other French Jacobites had not pulled their weight at Versailles, so that the French subsidy was not forthcoming, he, the prince, would cease paying out pensions to his followers in France.19 Moreover, he was now in dudgeon with Spain. Since Madrid had meted out ‘disgraceful treatment’ to him, there was no question of his going cap in hand there. All the prince would allow was direct negotiations with Maurepas.20

  This was self-destructive behaviour with a vengeance (quite literally!). Not surprisingly, the French negotiations fizzled out. Gordon ducked out by claiming that he lacked the personnel to go at the speed Charles Edward required. When the prince mentioned Father Welsh, Prior of English monks in Paris, Gordon simply passed the buck to him.21 Maurepas, meanwhile, solved the Jacobite problem by not answering their letters.22

  However, the French had a final card to play which, long-term, cannot have helped Charles Edward’s marriage to prosper. They announced that since Louise of Stolberg had been so diplomatic and reasonable, in contrast to her husband, they were prepared to grant her a small personal pension of 60,000 francs.23

  While this fiasco was resolving itself, the prince and his queen moved their tiny court from Rome to Tuscany. There were several motives for the move: Louise’s discontent with Roman social life (or rather, its absence); Charles Edward’s desire not to be in Rome while the hated Clement XIV celebrated his lustrum; and simple economy, since living expenses would be less in Tuscany.24 Another telling consideration was the prince’s health. Already he was complaining of severe piles and agonising pains in his leg.25 His illnesses became more frequent and acute as the disappointments from the abortive negotiations with the new regime in France accumulated.26

  The royal party travelled first to Siena, arriving in mid-July.27 After staying there a month, they proceeded to Pisa to take the waters.28 This interlude suited Louise very well; she enjoyed the spa atmosphere.29 After a month in Pisa, they returned to Siena.30 Then, in the middle of October, they moved on to Florence, intending to make only a short stay before returning to set up a permanent base in Siena.31 But Louise liked Florence and prevailed on the prince to stay on. They rented the Villa Corsini, close to the walls of the town, until Lent 1775. The lease was taken out in the name of the count of Albany, Charles Edward’s new pseudonym.32 There, at No. 40 via del Prato, the prince was to live from 30 October 1774 until early July 1776.33

  The prince engaged boxes in both theatres in Florence and again took up the heavy drinking he had temporarily laid aside while taking the waters at Pisa.34 Within weeks Charles Edward was making news. His hatred of the French for the further humiliations they were now making him undergo led to an altercation with a French officer in his box. The prince made an insulting remark. Pompously the officer replied that perhaps the count was unaware who the man was whom he had insulted. ‘Je sais que vous êtes français et cela suffit,’ Charles answered.35 (‘I know that you are French, and that’s enough.’)

  Now came a fresh source of uncertainty and anxiety. Suddenly Clement XIV died. The conclave to elect his successor was by common consent going to be a difficult and protracted one. Perhaps someone favourable to the Stuarts would be elected, possibly someone like Stefano Borgia, who had close links with both Henry and Mare-foschi?36 At the very least, the prince would get his fourth chance to achieve papal recognition.37

  The predictions of a hard fought papal election – since there was no obvious candidate to hand – were soon borne out. The conclave met in November 1774 and was still in session at the end of December.38 It became obvious that none of the front-runners could secure the necessary majority and that
a compromise candidate would have to be chosen. Charles Edward seriously considered that this ‘dark horse’ could be his brother: he admitted that Henry would have had no chance in normal circumstances but might just squeeze through this time, as he was not allied to either of the main factions.39

  But Henry was not truly papabile. For one thing, to be elected he would have needed the support of the Spanish cardinals. Yet he was in bad odour at Madrid. The Spanish court remembered how he had abstained in the voting on the proposed beatification of the anti-Jesuit Spanish Bishop Palafox, a great favourite of Charles III and his then chief minister Ricardo Wall.40 On the other hand, Henry had won no laurels from the Jesuit faction either, for he had also opposed the beatification of their favourite Robert Bellarmine.41 What the Cardinal Duke saw as even-handed statesmanship his critics saw as systematic trimming, dictated by his dependence on French and Spanish benefices. The reality of the 1774–5 conclave was that Henry’s name was never once mentioned as a serious contender.42 Charles Edward’s best chance turned out to be none other than his old friend Cardinal Marefoschi, who was at one time being seriously promoted as a ‘dark horse’.43 In the end, Cardinal Brasini, formerly Vatican treasurer, emerged as Pius VI. Almost his first act was to invite the duke of Gloucester to Rome again to press forward the policy of English conciliation.44

  The prince went through the motions of applying for papal recognition as ‘Charles III’, but he must have known his quest was vain. He presented his compliments through the nuncio at Florence, promising to return to Rome if he were given his father’s titles.45 When the nuncio did not reply, Caryll was sent to see him as the bearer of a long palimpsest of complaints, going back to 1766. It is significant of the prince’s state of mind that the events of that year were described as part of a Jesuit plot against the Stuarts!

  But the prince was on firmer ground in his rebuttal of the argument that papal recognition would offend the English. On the contrary, the prince thundered, if I do not get it, I shall leave Italy. Then the English will really have something to be worried about, at the very time their hands are full of the rebellious American colonists.46

  This was hardly the acme of statesmanship. Henry had to spend a lot of time in the Vatican undoing the effects of his brother’s fulminations, just to make sure the papal pension to the prince was not cut off.47 But the prince insisted on a categorical reply and he got it.48 In no circumstances would the new Pope recognise him as ‘Charles III’. The prince openly expressed his contempt for ‘such low proceedings so contrary to the principles of their religion’.49 He vowed never to return to Rome.50

  This further bitter disappointment determined Charles Edward to remain in Florence. He extended the lease on the Villa Corsini beyond Lent 1775. But any hopes of a serene domestic situation to compensate for the run of diplomatic disappointments were shattered by two not unconnected events.

  For a long time Lord Caryll had been disillusioned with the prince on a number of counts: for his drunkenness, his treatment of Charlotte, his unappreciative attitude towards Louise, and most of all, the extravagant nature of the tasks he (Caryll) was called upon to perform as royal secretary.51 His appetite for his job cannot have been increased by the fact of its being unpaid. As John Farquharson, one of the dwindling band of Scottish Jacobites, remarked to Bishop Gordon in February 1775: ‘He has not even dog’s wages for his trouble but does all for stark love and kindness.’52

  Matters came to a head in March 1775. Caryll had urgent family business to attend to in Rome. Charles Edward categorically refused him permission to make the trip, on the fantastic ground that none of his ‘subjects’ could be permitted to go there until the Pope decided to treat him as his father had been treated.53 This was too much for the long-suffering secretary. He and Lady Caryll packed and decamped, provoking a great outcry from the prince about disloyalty, ingratitude and treachery.54

  One result of Caryll’s departure was to leave Louise more isolated inside the Palazzo Corsini. It was true that her band of admirers swelled in Florence. Following Coke, among Englishmen there was Henry Seymour.55 Everywhere Louise won golden opinions. General Lockhart’s wife described her as ‘one of the prettiest and most agreeable of her sex I ever conversed with’.56

  Another visitor to Florence to fall under her spell was Dr Moore, physician to the duke of Hamilton. The two Englishmen one day encountered the prince’s suite on one of the avenues of a public walk near the city. Charles Edward, sporting the inevitable Garter, was with count Spada and his Italian courtiers and in deep conversation with the Prussian envoy to the court of Turin. Louise had Lucille de Maltzam, her new lady-in-waiting, with her. Maltzam was at this time carrying on a passionate affair with Bonstetten’s travelling companion Scherer. Four liveried servants made up the entourage.

  Moore and Hamilton yielded right of way and pulled off their hats. The Prussian envoy whispered something in the prince’s ear. He looked very earnestly and steadily at the duke of Hamilton and returned the compliment. But what struck the visitors most was Louise. ‘She is a beautiful woman,’ wrote Moore, ‘much beloved by those who know her, who universally describe her as lively, intelligent and agreeable.’57

  Above all her admirers was the twenty-nine-year-old literateur Charles Victor Bonstetten who adored Louise just this side of madness. Charles Edward in general approved of all these gallants, especially when they were willing to listen to his long, rambling stories about the ’45, as Bonstetten was. He was even prepared to overlook the quaint gaucheries of the Swiss in the Palazzo Corsini when he made hamfisted attempts to help Louise carve a roast turkey.58 Adoration from afar, of the medieval chivalric variety, was fine, provided the legitimacy of any heir was not thrown in doubt.

  But for all her conquests, Louise could not confide in any of these beaux her secret fears and misgivings. Caryll had provided her with a shoulder to cry on. He had dampened down her complaints about her husband and headed off marital crisis. Now he was gone, the safety-valve was removed. Significantly, immediately after Caryll’s departure, Louise’s first overt complaints are recorded. In a long letter she outlined her principal grievances. First, she had to traipse around the streets of Florence for one and a half hours in the excessive heat of June at midday, just because her husband was bored in his rooms. Then, there was the prince’s insistence on waking her up at 7 a.m. when she did not get to sleep until two in the morning. In general there was his refusal to listen to reason.59 ‘Have you, who have always been a byword for gallantry, so declined that you do not want to stay just a few hours in bed with a pretty young woman who loves you?’60 Perhaps already dimly perceiving the end of the road, Louise circulated this remonstrance to her friends.

  Louise’s spirits were farther cast down by having to share a bedroom with a man who snored excessively and whose health was already giving cause for concern. At the beginning of 1775, one of Glenbucket’s descendants was granted a morning audience and found the prince looking ‘old in complexion and pretty stout in person’.61

  This was not the worst of it. Gluttony and excessive drinking were bringing even Charles’s iron constitution close to the point of collapse. His body was attacked in two main areas. He developed asthma and heavy catarrh, which his Italian physicians diagnosed as apoplexy and treated with emetics and leeches.62 At the same time the sore leg that had troubled him for the past few years began to discharge pus. When the doctors closed up the suppurating leg, this produced a slow fever with other complications. The pent-up purulence then threatened to break out in the other leg.63

  The prince consulted an eminent physician in Paris. His expianation of the illness was piteous. He explained that his brain was being affected, that there were times when he could barely sign his own name. He could not remember proper names, wrote Gordon when he meant Caryll, and so on. The doctor poured scorn on blood-letting and recommended instead alkalines and a light, healthy diet. The prince should take exercise, use no drugs and abstain from all alcohol except a mere si
p of the very finest vintages.64 Since the prince was already in the habit of drinking six bottles of Cyprus wine a day, sleeping off one drinking bout and then getting drunk again, it can be imagined that this advice was not what he wanted to hear. Nevertheless, his frequent consultations with outside physicians effectively turned him into a hypochondriac and amateur dabbler in medicines.65

  For Charles Edward’s medical progress we are largely indebted to Mann’s spies. By September 1775, it was reported that the discharge from the leg had stopped, but that he now experienced violent stomach cramps after eating.66 It gradually became clear that Charles Edward was suffering from aggravated dropsy. The suppurating leg acted as a conduit for the excess liquid he was retaining. He had two choices. He could either endure great pain from his swollen legs and thighs, which in turn produced severe fits of colic. Or he could have the opening in his leg sealed up, in which case he experienced general breathlessness and a panicky feeling of suffocation around his chest.67 The severe stomach pains and indigestion gradually turned him against food, but he would never give up drink.68 All in all, he preferred to suffer the pain of the discharging leg rather than the feeling of suffocation.

  Absurdly, while resolutely refusing to abstain from alcohol, Charles Edward tried to put into practice the rest of the Parisian physician’s prescriptions. He went out every day in his coach to take the air.69 And he was an habitual frequenter of the theatre, where his normal mode was semi-somnolence. Gradually the drowsiness would turn to outright slumber. A bed was moved into his box at the theatre. When he had one of his bad attacks of stomach pain, he had to dash for the public passageway, where he was violently sick.70

  This was a state of affairs that would have taxed the powers of an older woman, genuinely in love with her husband, who had the memory of better days to live on. Louise had none of these attributes to sustain her. She had problems of her own, quite apart from a drunken husband. Louise had long argued for residence in Florence, in preference to Siena, on the grounds that the latter city had not received her and her husband with proper respect.71 But Florence soon showed itself no more willing than the other Italian city-states to offend the mighty English.