No amount of remonstration from physicians made any impact on the prince. He redoubled his alcoholic frenzy. When he went to the theatre, he took a little bottle of Cyprus wine in his pocket. His inebriation led to minor scandals. On one occasion, at a masked ball, he insisted on dancing a minuet with a young lady, but came close to collapse on the ballroom floor and had to be supported by count Spada.124 Such incidents further increased the contempt in which the prince was held by Florentine society.
By 1779, even allowing for the likely exaggerations by Horace Mann and his agents, it is clear that the prince was in a deplorable state of physical and mental health. Mann summed it up as follows: a declared ulcer, great sores in his legs, insupportable in stench and temperature. The piles from which he had suffered for years now became augmented to the point where he had almost permanent pain in his bowels.125
The strain on Louise, already considerable from carrying on a clandestine love affair with Alfieri, was close to breaking point. It is doubtful whether she had ever loved her husband, but now she hated him. The hatred was reciprocated. About this time Charles Edward penned his most revealing comments on women, proving beyond doubt that a true relationship with them had always been beyond him. He told a story of a man whose mistress had been unfaithful in order to get revenge. Was that revenge on the man because he had loved too much or too little, the prince queried; in other words, there was no pleasing women. The prince reckoned himself a reasonable judge of men (which he was not); but as for women, he went on: ‘I have always thought a study of their sex useless, as they are much more wicked and impenetrable.’126 Written at a time when he was almost certainly impotent, the last word must suggest a classic Freudian slip.
37
‘A Man Undone’
(1780–4)
EVENTS NOW MOVED rapidly towards the collapse of Charles Edward’s marriage. Tired of the drunkenness, the beatings and the demand for sexual variations,1 Louise laid contingency plans for absconding. She had some powerful allies. Her chief help was her lady-in-waiting and confidante Mlle de Maltzam.2 She had the secret assistance of count Spada, who carried messages from Louise to Alfieri at the poet’s home, and enjoyed sitting with her lover and denigrating the prince. Yet Spada covered his tracks well. It was a full year after Louise’s departure before Charles Edward discovered his treachery. Even then, it came to light only after a heated altercation when Spada refused to accompany his master to the theatre.3
The other allies who played a key role in Louise’s flight were Madame Orlandini and Mr Geoghan. Madame Orlandini was a scion of the Ormonde family; she was the daughter of a Jacobite general in the service of Austria and had made a military marriage to a Florentine general. Now widowed, Madame Orlandini lived secretly with an Irishman, Charles Geoghan.
Geoghan was typical of the adventurers attracted to the exiled Stuart court. After offending his father and being cut off without a penny he came to Italy in search of easy pickings. His handsome face enabled him to live well as a gigolo; it was in this capacity that he snared the wealthy widow Orlandini. The couple even went through a form of marriage, which could not be publicly divulged, lest Madame Orlandini forfeit her rights to her late husband’s fortune according to the terms of his will.4
This, then, was the unsavoury quartet that plotted Louise’s deliverance and the prince’s downfall; a supposed Jacobite widow, an Irish gigolo, a treacherous private secretary and a woman (Mlle de Maltzam) who seems to have been animated by a quite singular hatred of the prince.5 They took soundings from the Grand Duke of Tuscany as to his attitude in the event of a separation in the Stuart household. The duke, who had never liked the prince, intimated broadly that Louise would have his tacit support.6
The speed with which events unfolded, once the prince fell into the trap that had been laid for him, demonstrates clearly that Louise’s flight was no spontaneous, unpremeditated affair. The fatal night was 30 November 1780, St Andrew’s Day. This was a day that the prince always liked to celebrate, but it had painful associations for him, since it reactivated his feelings of guilt about the clansmen he had destroyed in the ’45.
The prince drank even more heavily than usual that day.7 When he came to bed that night, he was already on the high seas of rage, his inevitable reaction to excessive guilt. Louise must have said the wrong thing at the wrong time. The prince went berserk. He beat her around the head, tore out chunks of her hair, and kicked her out of the bed.8 Scrambling after her, he then attempted to strangle her. By this time her screams had aroused the whole household. The drunken prince, by now totally beside himself, was dragged off his wife.9
That disgraceful episode clinched matters for Louise. She gave orders to her fellow conspirators to put the escape plan into operation. Nine days after the assault, on Saturday 9 December, they lured the prince into a well-concealed trap.10
That morning Madame Orlandini came to breakfast at the Palazzo Guadagni. Casually she mentioned that she was going that day to the convent of the Bianchette to view some needlework done by the white nuns; would the count and countess like to come?11 Suspecting nothing, Charles entered the carriage with the two women for the short drive to the convent on the via Mandorlo (now via Giusti). On arrival at the outside of the convent they ‘by chance’ came upon Geoghan. The two ladies nimbly ran up the steps and pulled the bell on the convent door. The lame and dropsical prince, supported on Geoghan’s arm, followed slowly and painfully, some way behind.12
By prearrangement Louise and Madame Orlandini were immediately admitted. To the prince’s astonishment, the door was closed before he got to it. Angrily he banged on the door with his stick. The nuns milked his rage for all it was worth. After an infuriatingly long interval, the Mother Superior came to the grille at the door. She announced that Louise had sought sanctuary from a brutal husband and that it had been granted.13
After further futile angry antics, the prince returned to the Palazzo Guadagni. Now discerning something of the truth, he told his dinner companions that night that he would give half his fortune to see Geoghan shot.14 On being told of this, the young roué had the effrontery to ask for satisfaction.15 He ran little risk that his challenge would be accepted from an old man who suffered from dropsy, asthma and apoplexy! Geoghan justified his treachery – for the prince had always been fond of him and treated him well – by claiming that a male accomplice was necessary for the convent escape, since Charles Edward always carried a brace of pistols on his person.16
While the prince vainly sought redress by sending count Spada to remonstrate with the Grand Duke (double jeopardy!), Louise sought Cardinal York’s blessing on the desperate course she had taken. Henry replied that her news came as no surprise; he had foreseen something like this for years.17 He conferred with the Pope. Pius VI agreed that she had served her time in the vale of tears with the prince.18 The upshot was an invitation to reside in the same convent (and the very same apartment) in which Clementina Sobieska had taken refuge forty-five years before.19 To this end the Pope was prepared, provided the Grand Duke of Tuscany did the same, to approve her immediate departure for Rome.
On the night of 27 December 1780 Louise left for Rome. Elaborate precautions were taken to prevent the insensate prince from abducting her. Both Alfieri and Geoghan accompanied her part of the way; Alfieri then returned to Florence to avoid scandal.20
The prince meanwhile sat stunned in the Palazzo Guadagni. At first he thought of making difficulties over the clothes Louise requested him to send on, then thought better of it.21 He was now in possession of the full facts regarding his wife and Alfieri. Over the dinner table he poured out his bitterness against the Piedmontese poet. Emboldened by the prince’s lack of response to his earlier bravado, Geoghan claimed to be outraged by the imputations that the ‘noble Count Alfieri’ was a seducer, and sent a second challenge to a duel.22 For double-dyed humbug and cowardice, allied to his general depravity, this Irish adventurer took some beating.
But very soon the focus of the p
rince’s rage shifted from Alfieri to his own brother. There was certainly something peculiar about the gusto with which Henry took up his sister-in-law’s case. Notions of sibling rivalry spring to mind. This was Henry’s unconscious revenge for the snubs and humiliations he had received over the years at the prince’s hands. That there was something unseemly about the avidity with which Henry supported Louise’s uncorroborated assertions was noticed by Horace Mann. With his usual prurience, he remarked sneeringly: ‘Are they Jews enough, if the Count should die, to uncanonise the cardinal, and make him raise up issue for his brother, which the brother could not do for himself?’23
Henry’s actions lent a specious plausibility to such a scenario. As soon as Louise arrived in Rome, he arranged an audience with the Pope. Thereafter Louise was a frequent visitor to the cardinal’s palace at Frascati. He even offered to let her have the use of his town house in Rome at his expense, but she declined, saying she did not want to remain in Italy.24 She did, however, accept the offer from Cardinal Conti of the loan of his villa at Frascati for the month of July.25
Throughout 1781 the relationship between Cardinal York and the ‘Queen of Hearts’ continued warm. By now a supremely accomplished coquette, Louise’s tactic with Henry was to lay it on with a trowel.26 Still protesting that her relationship with Alfieri was entirely platonic, she sent the cardinal a new copy of Virgil, using her poet-lover as messenger, and alleging that he just happened to be dining with her at the time!27
It was not just in dealing with Henry that Louise showed herself to be a skilled politician. Unerringly, she made herself agreeable to Charles Edward’s arch-enemy Cardinal Bernis.28 To cap all, the Pope assigned her half of the papal pension of 12,000 crowns that he paid to the prince.29
In addition, Louise persuaded the queen of France to assign her a pension of 20,000 crowns (£5,000) a year for life.30 This was over and above the personal allowance of 4,000 crowns that Henry paid her plus the expenses of a sumptuous apartment with a fine equipage and servants.31 It has to be remembered that all this time Louise was carrying on her affair with Alfieri in secret and joking with him about the fatuousness of Cardinal York, as she later admitted. For Louise had not remained long in the Ursuline convent. She cajoled and pleaded with Henry to allow her a more worldly existence. Within a month she transferred to the Palace of the Cancelleria, where she remained until the summer of 1784.32 Once Alfieri heard that she had exchanged her sacred sanctuary for a ‘profane’ one, he left Florence secretly to join her in Rome.
The more Charles Edward heard of his wife’s financial prosperity and her cosy relationship with his brother, while he himself struggled in Florence to make ends meet on a reduced pension, the more angry and depressed at his brother’s treachery he became. His wife’s extravagances, he claimed, had already brought him close to ruin.33 Now she was being encouraged to commit further follies in Rome while his own pension was being cut to accommodate this.
His letters were divided between expressions of indignation at his wife’s conduct and stupefaction at Henry’s reaction to it.34 At first he was inclined to quit Florence. He spoke of going to Venice for the 1781 festival and then settling in Genoa.35 Then he decided to stay and fight. Initially his position was that he was prepared to have his wife back provided she repented publicly.36 As this looked increasingly unlikely, he turned to tougher strategies. In November 1781 he wrote to the bishop of Florence to have his case put before an ecclesiastical court.
The stubborn, streetfighting Charles Edward is still in evidence in this letter. He asked how it was that an adulterous woman could find sanctuary in a Florentine convent, then proceed to Rome without let or hindrance from the ecclesiastical authorities, and finally stay in the house of his own brother, a cardinal. I had always thought, he concludes sardonically, that the Catholic religion supported the rights of the husband in such cases.37 Since the Pope had extended his personal protection to Louise, it is not surprising that the prince’s application was unsuccessful. Bishop Antonio Martini simply referred the matter to Henry, with a request for guidance. The appeal to the bishop of Florence thus became one more futile appeal to Cardinal York.38
As 1782 opened, the tenor of Charles Edward’s complaints against his brother for treachery became increasingly shrill. ‘It is impossible that such a man can be a brother,’ he concluded despairingly. ‘How can my brother be so blind?’39
Charles decided to send his gentleman of the bedchamber, Sgr Cantini, to Rome to lay the full facts before Henry. Cantini had taken over Spada’s duties after the latter’s dismissal in 1781. Cantini was to stress particularly that it was the prince, not Cardinal York, who suffered from Louise’s extravagances.40 The halving of his pension continued to be a festering wound; how could the prince doubt that his brother was now his prime enemy?41
As 1782 progressed, Charles Edward continued to inveigh against his monster of a brother. He alleged that Henry’s treatment of him had turned him into the laughing-stock of Florence. The humiliation over Louise was compounded by desperate money shortages. The Palazzo Guadagni was in urgent need of repair after a recent earthquake; he was down to two good horses and could afford no more.42 His only consolation was that some of the Florentine nobility were so shocked by Henry’s unbrotherly behaviour that they went out of their way to be seen in the prince’s company.43
Part of the prince’s trouble was that he had no one of sufficient gravitas to go to Rome and plead his case before the Pope. That defect was partly remedied by the unexpected arrival of the duke of Fitzjames on an Italian tour.44 At once Charles deputed him to lay his version of events before the Vatican.45 Meanwhile, the prince took advantage of the Austrian emperor’s visit to his brother the duke of Tuscany to lobby him for support.46
When Fitzjames arrived in Rome, he sought out Prince Bartolomeo Corsini, a long-time supporter of Charles Edward.47 Together Fitzjames and Corsini sought and obtained an audience with the Pope and explained Charles’s position. They asked for three things: the return of the prince’s wife; the banishment of Alfieri from Rome; and the payment of the entire papal pension to the prince without deductions.48
Pius VI was sufficiently disturbed by what he heard to call in Henry for further consultations. Unfortunately, Henry was still disposed to accept at face value Louise’s protestations of innocence in her dealings with Alfieri.49 He described her conduct during 1781 and 1782 as ‘impeccable’ and declared that hers was the clearest right to asylum he had ever encountered.50
Prince Corsini then came into the firing line from three directions. The Pope censured him for having accepted such a commission. The Grand Duke of Tuscany rebuked him for acting contrary to Florentine interests – since the decline in Charles Edward’s income kept him at home and away from the city’s casinos and theatres.51 Finally, Henry weighed in by writing Corsini an open letter on the subject. He dealt firmly with his brother’s arguments. Quite apart from the fact that Charles Edward’s expenses must now be less, on his own admission since his ‘extravagant’ wife had left him, the papal pension the prince received was entirely a grace and favour matter at Henry’s discretion; the papal pension had been left to Henry in James’s will.52
The mission ended in catastrophe. Fitzjames, whose track-record of work for the prince was singularly disastrous, found his failure so humiliating that he did not even deign to visit Charles on the return journey. He merely wrote a few lines from Genoa to advise the prince that all hopes of getting his wife back were vain.53 Then he hurried on to the calmer pastures of France.
Yet, just when it seemed that Louise had won a final victory and that her position was unassailable, the tide turned against her in dramatic fashion. Suddenly the prince fell seriously ill. The dropsy on his chest made breathing even more difficult and painful. He appeared to be coming to his last gasp. Extreme unction was administered and Henry was sent for.54
The prince’s illness was grave. His left leg was now in the throes of elephantiasis, his entire body was swollen, h
e struggled for every breath. The prince cried out in agony to his doctors during the worst crisis. His chief physician, sixty-four-year-old Natalis Joseph Palucci, bathed his legs twice a day in a bath of milk and applied poultices to raise blisters on the skin.55
Meanwhile Cardinal York sped northwards in his famed fast-horse carriages, the dread and envy of the Campagna. At Siena he paused and sent on an emissary, expecting to hear that his brother had already died. But that admirable constitution had secured the prince a reprieve. Although his fever increased and he was subject to dreadful attacks of diarrhoea, he was saved once again by the suppurating leg. Once this began to discharge, the swelling in his thighs and on his chest lessened. For the moment Charles Edward was out of danger.56
When Henry arrived in Florence, on 29 March 1783, the two brothers were in that mood of dispassionate lucidity often induced by a brush with death. After finding lodgings at a convent near his brother’s house, Henry spent Sunday 30 March at his bedside.57 That day Charles told the cardinal the full story of Louise’s liaison with Alfieri, adding the kind of circumstantial detail that put the gist of his story beyond doubt. At last Henry’s eyes were opened. He began to realise how deeply he had been duped by the Queen of Hearts. With his anger fuelled by self-contempt at having been so ingenuously gullible, the cardinal sped back to Rome to settle accounts.58
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Page 69