The seal of amity was set on this relationship during a tour of Tuscany. In May 1785 Charlotte and her father were in Pisa for the waters. The prince was very ill; but for the duchess the doors of the Pisan nobility were all open.45 Encouraged by her reception there, Charlotte set out for a more extended progress around Tuscany in the autumn.46 It was at Monte Freddo village near Perugia in October 1785 that she and the prince met Henry. Careful diplomacy had prepared all three for this summit conference. It was a complete success. The two brothers claimed to have regained their childhood love for each other. The cardinal was even more charmed by Charlotte than he expected to be.47 The two of them agreed that the interests of Charles Edward’s health were best served by a removal to Rome. They made plans to quit Florence.
Meanwhile, along with her strategy of achieving a total rapprochement with the cardinal, Charlotte had been encouraging the two brothers to co-operate in the second of her two grand aims: the humbling of Louise of Stolberg. After her release from Rome in July 1784, Louise was reunited with Alfieri at Colmar. This was risky. If it was found that the recently divorced countess of Albany was living in sin, her pensions both from the Pope and the prince were likely to be stopped. In mid-October 1784, the lovers parted again, he to Pisa, she to Bologna. Then in May 1785 Louise appeared in Paris.
Charlotte had by this time collected enough incriminating evidence against Louise to damage her badly. When the full details of Louise’s continuing affair were laid before him, Henry was outraged. For a second time he had trusted her and for a second time she had made a fool of him. Henry wrote to Charles Edward, suggesting strong measures against an ‘object’ like Alfieri, who had besmirched the Stuart family name.48
The prince was happy to oblige. He decided to renege on the financial side of the settlement negotiated by Gustav III. Since he had contracted the marriage in the first place only on a false promise from France, it was for France to bail out the ‘Queen of Hearts’, if that was Louis XVI’s desire.49
But the joint remonstrance Charles and Henry sent to Vergennes was designed to ensure that such would not be the French king’s desire. Warning the court not to be gulled by the adulterers, the brothers asked Louis XVI to stop her pension if she persisted in living in sin with Alfieri.50 A full recital of facts and dates relating to the liaison was provided. Henry juxtaposed intelligence reports of the couple’s cohabitation in Rome, Baden and Colmar with Louise’s letters to him on the same dates, letters full of pious humbug. Other details of her financial chicanery were included.51 All in all, it was a damning document.
When Louise arrived in Paris, she found she had a tough fight on her hands to save any of her pension. For the next year she was involved in interminable wrangling with Versailles.52 The French saw the force of the Stuart memorandum, but as they had been the prime movers behind the marriage in 1772, Louis XVI’s credibility would have suffered if he had cut Louise adrift.
Charles and Henry were also adamant that they wanted Louise cut out of the Stuart will entirely, so that their joint fortunes would devolve on Charlotte.53 The brothers were fortified by a legal opinion that the 1772 covenant regarding the jointure and pin money had been subsumed in the 60,000 francs pension Louise obtained from France in 1776.54 Another favourable opinion held that the jointure was invalid under French law, since no particular property of the prince’s had been charged with it.
A good deal of hard bargaining now took place. Finally, in September 1786, a face-saving compromise was reached. Charles Edward’s advocate M. Vulpian signed an agreement with Louise’s lawyer Busoni before the chancellor of the French consulate in Rome, which stipulated an annual pension of 20,000 livres from Stuart monies (Louise had asked for 40,000) in addition to the 60,000 francs French pension. There were two conditions. One was that the jointure was redeemable after Charles Edward’s death for a capital sum of 200,000 livres. The other was that Louise had to sign a statement absolving the Stuarts from all further liability, agreeing that the settlement was a grace and favour matter and involved no responsibility of any kind, and accepting that thenceforth she and her ex-husband would be complete strangers to each other.55 At the very least, this was a victory on points for the Stuarts. Given the arduous wrangling Louise had to endure at Versailles to achieve even that much, one can reasonably conclude that Charlotte had finally outfoxed the fox.
Gradually Charlotte became a great favourite of Cardinal York’s. Apart from the demonstrations of obeisance she had made him, and her skill in putting Louise in her place, what certainly attracted Henry to Charlotte was his assumption that, like him, she was a virgin.56 After the worldly cynicism of Louise of Stolberg, who had posed as an ingénue while being the most practised intriguer, Charlotte seemed innocence itself. Once again, Henry was hopelessly at sea, though neither he nor Charles Edward ever realised their misapprehension.
In fact, Charlotte had long been the mistress of the archbishop of Cambrai (Prince Ferdinand de Rohan-Guémèné). She had borne him three children, the last, a son, just before she set out for Rome. One can only imagine how Henry, who claimed to be scandalised by his brother’s mere acceptance of her existence early in 1784, would have reacted had he known the full facts about his beloved niece. Charlotte, it turned out, was every bit as insincere in her attitude to Cardinal York as Louise had been, and even more cunning. Not only had she outmanoeuvred Louise and put herself in line to inherit £100,000 from her father,57 but unlike Louise, she had managed to cover up all traces of her clandestine affair.
The other fascinating aspect of Charlotte’s secret liaison is that once again we see the long arm of the Rohan-Guémèné family enveloping the Stuarts. Charlotte’s lover was a younger brother of that Guémèné prince whom Charles Edward had cuckolded in 1747–8. French aristocratic circles were such a small world that it is sometimes hard to remember that eighteenth-century France had a population of twenty millions.
Final arrangements were now made for the return to Rome. The prince realised that he would still be known to the Pope as the count of Albany, but the solidarity of family reconciliation with his brother and daughter seemed to make up for that. The journey was delayed because of the prince’s illness but finally, after spending his last St Andrew’s Day in Florence, he and his party departed southwards on 1 December 1785, intending to travel twenty miles a day. Rather surprisingly, the prince stood up well to the trip, even after twelve hours a day sitting in a carriage.58 At Viterbo Henry came out to meet them. He accompanied them back to Rome and then took both Charles and Charlotte to a private audience with the Pope.59 So it was that the prince returned to the Palazzo Muti, where he had been born sixty-five years before.
That Charlotte now had a special place in Cardinal York’s affections became clear when he made over to her all the Sobieski jewels, except the one he had set in his bishop’s mitre. Significantly, this time he handed over the great ruby, confident at last that his brother was in responsible hands.60
Further steps were taken to put the Stuart finances on a sound footing. The negotiations on the ‘Fund of Ohlau’ were still dragging on, but this was clearly a hopeless cause. More hopeful, in the light of the English government’s virtual admission in 1784 that the Jacobite scare was a thing of the past, was the money due from Mary of Modena’s jointure. The arrears on this sum, which England promised to pay by the terms of the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick but never did, amounted to two and a half million pounds by the time of Mary’s death in 1718. By the mid-1780s they had grown to an incalculably greater sum.61
Through Charlotte’s good offices, Lord Caryll was restored to the prince’s favour after ten years of disgrace and commissioned to lobby the court at Versailles for assistance in pressing the Stuart demand for satisfaction on the unpaid jointure.62 This suit fared no better than the various attempts to turn the ‘Fund of Ohlau’ into hard cash. After much prevarication, the English government finally issued a categorical statement in 1787, repudiating the debt.63
In theory, somethi
ng could be done about money. It was otherwise with the prince’s health. Both Charlotte and Henry agreed that the prince could not last long. In March 1786 Cardinal York was summoned from Frascati to administer the viaticum. The prince was seized with an epileptic fit, which continued for long enough to be mistaken for apoplexy. But the ‘man of iron’, as Louise of Stolberg had dubbed him, pulled through once again.64
This was not altogether welcome to Charlotte. She matched her father in the unsentimentality of her real motives for the rapprochement. She was prepared to spend a certain amount of time on the cross as Charles Edward’s nurse as the price for securing his money for her three children. But she had underrated his staying power and began to realise that she could be in for a long haul. This was both irritating to her and more profoundly distressing, as it increasingly looked as though she was in a race against time. She was aware that her own days were possibly numbered, and at times was just as seriously ill as her patient. Surely the ‘man of iron’ would not manage to outlive her?65
Her mind must have been set at rest by the prince’s steep decline at Rome in 1786–7. He now exhibited terminal symptoms of decay. He was often seen, by Goethe among others, struggling out of the theatre, dressed even in summer in a velvet greatcoat and a cocked hat, the sides of which were half drawn up with gold twist.66 And there was the inevitable Garter, as if the prince constantly needed to remind himself who he was.
The overdressing, even in the summer heat, was made necessary by his declining health. There were times when his leg swelled up to half the size of his body. But nothing would induce him to give up drink. Charlotte made little attempt to stop him. The combination of alcohol and great pain made lucid moments increasingly rare. The Lutheran theologian Friedrich Munter tried to engage him in conversation about freemasonry, but found his mental faculties too far decayed.67
Occasionally, if there was company in the Palazzo Muti, Charlotte would try to correct his worst alcoholic excesses. On one such occasion, the prince in a cracked voice addressed an English visitor, one Bertie Greathead (an empty-headed, callow youth) in the following terms: ‘I will speak to my subjects in my own way, and I will soon speak to you, sare [sic], in Westminster Hall.’ Faced with this outburst, Charlotte simply shrugged her shoulders.68
It was the same Greathead, apparently, who stirred Charles Edward’s deepest feelings by foolishly getting him to reminisce about the ’45. Overwhelmed by mixed, cross-cutting emotions of grief, regret, nostalgia and guilt, the prince was in a wretched tearful state when Charlotte arrived to break up the poignant scene and reprimand the interlocutor.69
In the summer of 1786 the Stuart family retired to Albano where, on a whim, the prince revived the practice of touching for the King’s Evil.70 When he returned to Rome, he learned that his old enemy Sir Horace Mann had died. Whatever his infirmities, the prince was managing to outlast most of those who were with him in his great days: Louis XV, Frederick the Great, Earl Marischal were all dead. So too were most of his companions in the great adventure of 1745: Lord George Murray and every single council member save Lord Ogilvy (Elcho died in 1787); all Seven Men of Moidart; John Holker apart, virtually every individual of the Jacobite officer class. Many of the prince’s ladies were gone too: the duchesse d’Aiguillon in 1772, the Princesse de Talmont in 1773, Louise de Montbazon in 1781. That the prince had outlived his own era was made clear by the final restitution of the forfeited estates in 1784 to the heirs of the ‘rebels’ of 1745.71
From the autumn of 1786 the prince was in steep decline. The end came shortly after his sixty-seventh birthday. A severe stroke in January 1788 left him semi-paralysed. This time he did not recover. Henry rushed in from Frascati to request a king’s burial in St Peter’s. But even in death the Pope would not acknowledge Charles III. Henry made plans to bury him in Frascati.72
On the morning of 30 January 1788 the end came. Henry administered the last rites of the Catholic Church, that institution the prince so despised. Charles Edward died in his daughter’s arms shortly after 9 a.m. Henry became the Cardinal King in partibus.73
Altars were erected in the ante-chamber and masses said for the repose of the prince’s soul. After thirty hours’ keening by Irish Franciscan monks, a plaster cast was taken of the prince’s face and the body was moved to Frascati. On 3 February Henry conducted the funeral service in the cathedral there. Overcome with emotion, the Cardinal King faltered his way through the office of the dead. Charles Edward’s body was temporarily interred by the central west door of the cathedral.74 Much later, it was buried in the vaults of St Peter’s.
Charlotte inherited an immediate £3,000 per annum on her father’s Italian revenues and an indeterminate amount on his French holdings.75 But she never lived to see the final resolution of the Byzantine wranglings at Versailles about exactly how much France owed her as beneficiary of Charles Edward’s will.76 It was almost as though destiny had reserved her solely for the purpose of easing her father through his last painful years. The cancer in her liver now returned in even more virulent form. On 17 November 1789 she died in Bologna.77 So passed the last woman for whom the prince had even vestigial affection.
Even in death the prince managed to win a symbolic victory. As if to illustrate that he departed just on the cusp of a new historical era, the first Australian colonists landed at Botany Bay a few days before his demise. One of the first oaths the new governor Arthur Philip had to take was that he would not attempt to restore Charles Edward Stuart to the English throne.78 The terror of the prince’s name lived on. The legend of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ was already in the making.
Conclusion
Any assessment of Charles Edward must attempt to winnow the historical wheat from the legendary chaff and then examine their interplay. ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ is a creature of myth in more ways than one. The approach suggested by Robert Graves in Homer’s Daughter is a fruitful one. In order to bring Homer’s hero into sharper focus, he disentangles the ‘historical’ Odysseus from the mythical Ulysses. A similar operation has to be performed with the prince. There is the historical Charles Edward Stuart, long regarded as of little importance to serious scholars. And there is the legendary ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, the archetypal hero suffused in a golden halo, swathed in the nimbus of the imperishable memory of the ’45.
With the recent revival in Jacobite studies, we are at last able to appreciate the deadly threat to the regime posed by the 1745 rising.1 Some of the finest young historians at work today now rate the ‘mixed’ phenomenon of domestic rebellion and foreign invasion threat, as in 1779, 1798 and, most clearly, 1745, as more important threats to the social and economic order than the much trumpeted ‘revolutions’ of the 1640s and 1688.2
The mind that conceived and carried out the 1745 rising was more than a mere adventurer’s. It was that of a man with real strategic flair. The problem was that the prince’s qualities did not fit easily into the eighteenth-century context. It is not just in his disdain for organised religion and his contempt for conventional forms of authority that the prince impresses as a ‘modern’ figure. The impatience and dislike for people who tried to ‘give him laws’ extended into the military sphere. Lord George Murray and his followers were ‘by the book’ conventional commanders. Murray was a very fine specimen of that genus to be sure, but he never transcended the limitations of blinkered eighteenth-century thinking: the slow, ponderous build-up; the slogging, murderous set-piece battles of Malplaquet, Laffeld and Minden.
The prince was not hidebound in this way. He understood that the great exploits of human history were all ‘impossible’ until someone actually did them. He had the intuitive military flair of a Montrose (but without his tactical ability); he possessed the panache of a great cavalry commander like Murat. It was no accident that the prince was a great hunter. He thought of making war in terms of the chase: rapidity of movement, lightning thrusts, economy, sudden death.3
That such qualities can coexist with tactical myopia and in
eptitude in the world of day-to-day politics has, I hope, been made sufficiently clear. We should not, however, be seduced into overstating the case. Charles Edward Stuart did not conquer Scotland simply on the basis of an ineffable magnetism that led important leaders of Scottish clan and feudal society into lemming-like suicide against their own interests. There was a pre-existing dynamic of social conflict at work in Scotland that Charles Edward was able to energise. Unless we admit this, we shall be nudged dangerously close to the more extreme version of the ‘great man’ theory of history. If the Scottish clan system was, as some historians claim, a peacefully evolving organism with decades of life left in it, which was convulsed by the thunderbolt arrival of the prince as if from outer space, then Charles Edward must indeed be one of the great figures of world history.4
Such a view, even if arrived at by implication, is a gross exaggeration. But we must never forget Charles Edward’s real achievement in the ’45 and how close he came to success. Paradoxically the danger of forgetting this is especially acute for the prince’s biographer. In the forest of detail, including much that is detrimental to the prince’s reputation, through which he must hack, there is a risk that by being too close to him the biographer will omit the aerial view. But for historians and general readers alike, Charles Edward’s claim to fame must always stand or fall on his achievements in 1745–6. The biographer is at fault if he does not give this fact due weight.
The transition from historical figure to creature of legend can be charted only if the decline in the real Charles Edward is first traced. At his peak, the prince was handsome, intelligent, deeply compassionate, with great charm and affability, and possessed of a powerful personal magnetism. He enjoyed superb natural health and had tuned himself to concert pitch as a warrior. He was a crack shot and a fine horseman. His energy and charisma in the first four months of the ’45 laid deep foundations for the later legend of the Bonnie Prince. He seemed to lack none of the qualities of the ‘parfait, gentil knight’.
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Page 72