Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  Louise showed her true opinion of the ‘friend’ she had flattered for years. She promoted the rumour that Henry ran a puritanical regime in his See at Frascati, which he aspired to turn into a secular monastery; ‘a comic figure’, she summed him up savagely.115

  So ended the ill-starred marriage of Charles Edward Stuart. A final assessment seems in order. Louise of Stolberg claimed that in nine years the prince made her the most miserable person that ever existed and that only Christian charity stopped her hating him. Her protestations of virtue sound somewhat hollow alongside her frequent denunciations of her husband: unlivable with, repository of all the vices, possessing the sensibility of a lackey, these are merely the mild criticisms. ‘An old walking relic,’ ‘Useless people never die,’ ‘It would be a good thing to deliver the world of his weight, with which it has been overcharged too long,’116 these are some of the epistolary comments of this exemplar of Christian charity.

  Louise of Stolberg presents more than usually difficult problems of biographical interpretation. Opinions on her have been wildly divergent. Proto-feminist writers have seen her as the classical emancipated woman yet condemned to be the victim of a drunken, loutish husband. Bonnie Prince Charlie hagiographers have viewed her as low, mean-minded and contemptible. The truth, as so often, lies somewhere between these two extremes. It is true that by the 1770s the prince was impossible. His drunken rages and physical violence fully justified Louise’s departure in 1780. But it would be a mistake to deduce from this alone that Louise was a simple avatar of sweetness and light. She was a cold, unsentimental, ruthless woman, one of those people with a much higher opinion of herself than was warranted by any wit or wisdom she produced.

  She could be charming and delightful but, like most charmers, she calculated the effects to a nicety. She was a consummate coquette but, as with most coquettes, sex was not the spur. She had pretensions as a blue-stocking, but was not in the same class even as a Madame du Deffand or Lady Wortley Montagu, to say nothing of the far superior Madame de Stael. She lacked the wit and accomplishment of the Princesse de Talmont or the spontaneous sexual passion of the duchesse de Montbazon.

  Moreover, the indictment against Louise must show that she systematically deceived her brother-in-law out of a mercenary desire not to suffer the financial consequences that would normally have flown from her adultery. The idea of Louise of Stolberg as a woman who would sacrifice everything for love is too wildly at variance with the facts to be taken seriously. She was an accomplished liar, cold, cynical and egotistical.

  What she did have was a certain aesthetic sense that allowed her to appreciate the gifts of Bonstetten, Fabre, Alfieri and others. She was an aesthete rather than an intellectual. She was either bored or contemptuous in the company of statesmen or soldiers; a less satisfactory choice as wife for a warrior prince could scarcely be imagined. Moreover, the prince’s heavy drinking was peculiarly calculated to elicit a distaste in such a woman. No woman would have relished Charles Edward’s drunkenness, but the evidence suggests that Clementina Walkinshaw feared the violence it engendered. What seems to have hurt Louise most was the lack of ‘style’ involved; the prince behaved like a lackey.

  When to the considerable difference in their ages and the basic disharmony between their temperaments is added the mutual disappointment over the marriage, with both parties feeling that in some sense it had been contracted under false pretences, one can only be surprised that the relationship lasted as long as it did. In this connection it is fascinating to observe that both Clementina and Louise of Stolberg endured a little over eight years of the prince before decamping to convents. Cohabitation with Charles Edward, it seemed, produced not so much a seven-year itch as an eight-year frenzy.

  38

  The Duchess of Albany

  (1784–8)

  APART FROM THE divorce and departure of Louise of Stolberg, 1784 brought two more highly significant developments in Charles Edward’s life. The first was a partial resolution of his financial difficulties. The second was the reappearance of his daughter Charlotte.

  The financial resolution showed Henry in his least favourable light. With Louise out of the picture, both brothers felt able to bring the Sobieski monies out into the open. Liquidating these assets would have put all money worries behind the prince. But Henry was afraid that, when the statute of limitations on Polish redemption of the Sobieski rubies expired, Charles Edward would sell them off to the highest bidder.1 Since the disposal of the assets in the Monte di Pietà required the signature of both brothers, Henry got what he wanted by refusing to sign. This was completely contrary to the 1742 agreement, which explicitly stated that the disposal of these jewels was Charles Edward’s prerogative.2

  Henry, who had huffed and puffed over his own technical rights during Gustav III’s financial settlement, was unwilling to concede his brother’s much clearer rights in this instance. He compounded his hypocrisy in 1786 by having the great Sobieski ruby set in his bishop’s mitre.3 And in 1796 he did what he had so denigrated his brother for having supposedly wanted to do: he sold a ruby from the collection, described as ‘as large as a pigeon’s egg’ for some £60,000.4

  To palliate his poor treatment of his brother, Cardinal York offered him the rest of the Sobieski jewels without argument. This was no hardship to Henry. In contemporary terms he was a millionaire. His annual income from land and church benefices was in excess of 600,000 French livres. And he had just received the arrears from his Mexican benefices, whose payment had been suspended during the north American war. This amounted to 180,000 Roman crowns (£45,000).5 The charge of avarice and miserliness and love of money, so often brought against Charles Edward, ought rather to have been laid at his brother’s door.

  The freeing of his assets in Rome from any further claims from Louise of Stolberg also enabled the prince to improve his living standards in other ways. Further items of furniture were brought up to Florence from the Palazzo Muti.6 The prince went so far as to ask the Grand Duke of Tuscany if he could place a canopy with a cloth of state over his box at the theatre. This was refused, but permission was given the prince to line the box as he pleased. In one of the Florentine theatres he furnished his box with crimson damask and cushions laced with gold. In the other theatre box the same process was repeated, except for the substitution of yellow damask.7

  Yet this increased material prosperity was insignificant compared with Charles’s reconciliation with his daughter Charlotte.8 Even after the humiliating rebuff in Rome in 1773, Charlotte refused to take no for an answer. She had all her father’s dogged stubbornness. Using her friend Abbé Gordon, in 1774 she threatened to marry some unknown commoner unless Charles did something for her. Angry at being threatened like this, the prince warned her that she could be cast into anathema for ever if she took such a step.9 Baulked in this tactic, Charlotte then bombarded the French court with memoranda, lamenting her own and her mother’s plight.10 She won the powerful support of the duc de Richelieu and the duc de Bourbon.11

  Charles Edward would have done well at this stage to silence his daughter by promising her something, for Charlotte’s appeals to Versailles cut across Charles Edward’s own lobbying of the French court (this was just after 1774 when the prince was writing to Maurepas and Vergennes). Faced with competing claims, Louis XVI decided that Clementina Walkinshaw and Charlotte had the more deserving case. Their suit would also be cheaper to settle. ‘Pouponne’ and her mother were awarded a small pension.12

  Charlotte meanwhile kept plugging away at her father, undeterred by his refusal to answer her letters.13 In 1774 she found a new ally. Doctor Mahony, James’s personal physician, appealed on her behalf, explaining to Charles Edward about the obstruction in her liver and the pain it produced.14 The prince’s reply to this was shockingly callous. He simply reiterated his warning that if she again strayed out of France for any reason, she would lose all hope of any future advantage or protection.15 No amount of special pleading about the prince’s worries abo
ut the succession can mitigate the lack of compassion in that letter.16

  Gordon and Caryll, Charlotte’s great champions, were left to shake their heads in disbelief at her father’s coldness. This lack of paternal feeling for a seriously ill young woman certainly played its part in Caryll’s decision to quit the prince’s service in 1775. Gordon was particularly disgusted at Charles’s ‘dog in the manger’ attitude to his daughter. He would neither offer her a word of encouragement nor allow her to marry someone with enough money to keep her, ‘since she is at present of a proper age, and if she were to wait much longer, it is probable she would find none’. All her doctors were agreed that her spirits were dashed by Charles Edward’s uncompromising posture, and that this depression augmented the organic symptoms in her liver. After all, as Gordon pointed out, ‘she was only six years old when carried off that night. She ought not to be utterly ruined for a fault of which her age hindered to be any ways partner.’17

  Yet as soon as she recovered from that buffet, Charlotte kept up the steady drip-drip of pressure on her father.18 She hinted that if forbidden to marry, she would join a mendicant order of nuns. How she fused secular and religious ambitions will shortly appear. And, to the prince’s fury, his new Paris agent (a replacement for the ageing Gordon) took up the refrain. William Cowley, Prior of the English Benedictines in Paris, started to press her case, repeatedly referring to her bad health and the ominous swelling in her side.19

  These representations must have kept Charlotte at the back of the prince’s mind. Nevertheless, his action in June 1784 surprised a lot of people. No sooner was the ink dry on Gustav III’s divorce settlement than the prince announced that he was recognising Charlotte as his legitimate daughter and heiress. This would entitle her to the appellation ‘duchess of Albany’.20 The prince then asked her to come with all speed to Florence.21

  In the act of legitimation the prince referred to himself as ‘grandson of James II, king of Great Britain’. He then wrote to Vergennes to get his solemn deed of recognition registered with the Paris Parlement and to renew the call for the money Gustav was supposed to have negotiated out of Versailles.22

  As with everything Charles Edward touched, problems of protocol immediately arose. Louis XVI recognised Charlotte as the ‘Pretender’s daughter’ by letters patent of August 1784, registered by the Parlement of Paris the following month, but refused to accept the title of the duchess of Albany.23

  Armed with this patent, the prince tried to browbeat the court of Tuscany. He asked for his daughter’s recognition as duchess, alleging that the French king had already allowed this. The Grand Duke knew the true situation. He allowed the act of legitimation to be published in Florence, but deleted all references to ‘the Duchess of Albany’.24

  Nevertheless, this was a great achievement for Charlotte. All her highest hopes had come to fruition, thanks to her patient and dauntless perseverance. But why did the prince come round so dramatically, after years of cold and callous disregard? The answer is to be sought in his psychology rather than his emotions. There was little of the light on the road to Damascus here.

  The delayed shock of Louise’s departure took time to make its full impact felt. But after 1781 it is safe to say that there are signs of senility in Charles Edward. His rapturous reception of Gustav III was significant. Having previously displayed a capacity for relatively mature functioning, the prince in the last phase of his life entered a period of regression. Characteristically, this psychological condition involves cleaving to people who will treat the subject as a favoured only child, and holding at arm’s length those who will not accord him that status.

  In short, Charles Edward’s seemingly magnanimous actions towards his daughter in 1784 are far more likely to have reflected his own needs than spontaneous emotion for the once much-loved Pouponne.

  Charlotte was indifferent to such nuances. She had achieved her life’s ambition. In high excitement she made ready to leave the convent of St Marie in Paris. She wrote to Henry in rather vainglorious style, presuming to address him as uncle now that she was legitimate daughter and heiress of the prince.25 Then, on 18 September 1784, she started south for Florence.26

  At the beginning of October she arrived in the Tuscan capital.27 The prince tried to arrange for her to be presented to the Grand Duchess, but this ploy failed since Charlotte had no letter of recommendation from the French queen.28 But her coming did cause a minor sensation in Florence, as Mann reluctantly conceded, though granting Charlotte only the status of curiosity value:

  she is allowed to be a good figure, tall and well-made, but that the features of the face resemble too much those of her father to be handsome. She is gay, lively and very affable, and has the behaviour of a well-bred French woman, without assuming the least distinction among our ladies on account of her new dignity.29

  The fashionable ladies of Florence flocked to leave their cards at the Palazzo Guadagni. Charlotte, who was a good administrator, set about organising the household. She made sufficiently rapid progress to be able to take Charles Edward on a tour of Tuscany two weeks after her arrival.

  Clearly the condition in which she found her father deeply shocked her. She decided he needed fresh air and an escape from the tedious Florentine routine in which he had become ossified for the past decade. They headed west to Lucca to see a much-praised opera.30 On the way there the prince gave ample proof that he needed round-the-clock nursing. At Pistoya he was convulsed with an apoplectic fit that lasted four hours. But Charlotte persisted with the excursion. They proceeded to the theatre at Lucca.31

  The coming of the prince’s daughter seemed to change his luck. There had been a long silence from Versailles since Gustav’s intervention.32 Suddenly word came that Vergennes had granted a pension of 60,000 livres a year to the prince, with a reversionary payment to Charlotte of 10,000 livres a year to her on his death.33 To clear up any doubts about Charlotte’s eligibility to bequests on his death, the prince made a solemn declaration that Charlotte was his only child and that he had no others, especially not with Louise of Stolberg.34

  The other piece of good fortune was the Pope’s recognition of Charlotte as duchess of Albany. Pius VI had received reports that Charlotte had brought about a miraculous transformation in the prince’s temper and bearing. As a reward, he granted her the title that neither France nor the duchy of Tuscany were prepared to concede.35

  This papal recognition left Cardinal York out on a limb. Furious both about Charlotte’s legitimation, on which he was not consulted, and with her ‘impertinence’ in writing to him in an over-familiar tone, he had resisted her blandishments.36 When he protested to the prince, Charles Edward coldly told him that it was not his business, nor was it for him to cavil where the Pope and the French court had raised no difficulty; since he did not dispute Henry’s rights, Cardinal York ought not to dispute his.37

  Henry always squirmed under the lash of his brother’s rebukes. He looked around for a means of petty vengeance. Thinking that Louise of Stolberg had now renounced Alfieri for ever, he began to soften towards her. There was a brief resumption of their correspondence. Louise, now in Bologna and jealous of Charlotte’s ‘usurpation’ did not waste the opportunity to pour out her bile:

  The king continues to do a thousand absurdities in Florence, although he can scarcely move from one room to another by means of his swollen legs. His illness does not, however, prevent him bestowing the order of St. Andrew at the end of a banquet on his daughter and on a certain lord who attends him. It is all very ridiculous.38

  Ridiculous was an epithet better applied to the situation Cardinal York now found himself in. It took the acidulous Walpole to put his finger on the central absurdity: ‘So the Pope, who wouldn’t grant the title of king to the Pretender, allows his no-Majesty to have created a Duchess! And the Cardinal of York, who is but a ray of the Papacy, and who must think his brother a king, will not allow her title!’39

  In what was left of 1784 Charlotte had no time to concili
ate her uncle. Her hands were full with the ailing prince. By now his health had declined to the point where he no longer took the air in his coach twice daily, as accustomed. He complained of being permanently in great pain and of a feeling of suffocation in his chest.40 Mann continually remarked that Charlotte would not have to wait long to reap her inheritance.

  Charlotte did her best to amuse and distract him. The French traveller Dupaty praised her work as nurse in the most glowing terms.41 Private balls were held at the house three times a week. The prince would watch Charlotte’s lady friends dancing for a while, then gradually doze off.42

  With the position in the Palazzo Guadagni stable at the beginning of 1785, Charlotte set out to achieve a reconciliation with Cardinal York. On 23 and 30 April she sent Henry two humble and deferential letters, in which she spoke of the grief that prevented her writing at greater length; she hinted also at the disease in her liver. Henry was obviously moved. On 4 May he came round to her decisively. ‘Since you appear so anxious for my friendship and my confidence, which greatly pleases me, I can assure you sincerely that you have both.’43 Henry then wrote to the Pope to say that although certain aspects of the legitimation process had been offensive to him, he now accepted Charlotte unreservedly both as niece and duchess.44