Royal Marriage Secrets

by John Ashdown-Hill

  As for Clementina Walkinshaw, later Countess of Albestroff in Lorraine,2 she was born in 1720, possibly at Camlachie in Scotland. Some accounts name her birthplace as Rome, but this is unlikely. She was roughly of an age with her future partner, for ‘Charles [III]’ was born in Rome on 31 December 1720. Of course it is obvious that Clementina was named in honour of Charles’ mother, the Polish princess – and the Jacobite English and Scottish ‘queen’ – Maria Clementina Sobieska. Writers who ascribe Clementina Walkinshaw’s birth to Rome also assume that ‘Queen’ Maria Clementina was her godmother and that this accounts for the baby girl’s name. However, this is improbable. There is no evidence that Clementina Walkinshaw was ever in Rome as a child. Moreover, reportedly, other girls born to Jacobite families at that time were also named in honour of the new ‘queen’.3 Incidentally, various versions of Clementina Walkinshaw’s name are extant, including ‘Clementine’ and ‘Clemintine’, but the version which will be used here is ‘Clementina’.

  Clementina was the youngest of the ten daughters of Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Walkinshaw of Barrowfield (1671–1731), a wealthy Glasgow merchant, an Episcopalian and a Jacobite who had fought in the 1715 uprising on behalf of the Old Pretender [‘James III and VIII’]. Her mother was Catherine Patterson, the daughter of Sir Hugh Patterson of Bannockburn. Catherine’s date of birth is variously cited as 1677 and 1683. The couple married in 1703, and the eldest of their ten daughters, Barbara Walkinshaw, was born at Barrowfield the following year. Two years later, in 1706, a second daughter, Margaret, made her debut. The dates of birth of the later daughters are only known approximately. Catherine Walkinshaw was born in about 1708, Anne probably in 1709, Elizabeth in about 1711, Mary in 1713, Jean in 1715, Helen in 1717 and Lyonella in 1718.4

  Clementina’s father owned land at Camlachie and also the estate of Barrowhill. He had been captured during the 1715 rebellion and was briefly imprisoned at Stirling Castle, from which he escaped to the European mainland. In 1717 he was pardoned by the British Government and returned to Scotland. Indeed, his third daughter, Catherine, subsequently entered the service of the Hanoverian dynasty in London. In 1736 she was appointed ‘sempstress’ (seamstress) to Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1719–72), the consort of Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707–51),5 and by 1767 she was a woman of the bedchamber to the (by then) dowager Princess of Wales. She remained in Princess Augusta’s service until 1772, and her Hanoverian royal employment, together with the curious fact that she was Clementina’s sister, was recorded in surviving letters written by Horace Walpole, later fourth Earl of Orford (1717–97).6

  Clementina was largely educated on the Continent and she was either baptised or – perhaps because she was educated at a convent – brought up as a Roman Catholic. At all events she was a Catholic throughout her adult life. She returned to Scotland in time for the 1745 Jacobite uprising, and was staying at the home of her uncle, Sir Hugh Walkinshaw, at Bannockburn near Stirling, in January 1746, when Sir Hugh received Prince Charles (Bonnie Prince Charlie) there as a guest. This was her first meeting with the Jacobite Prince of Wales. The prince’s visit was short, but later in January he came back to Sir Hugh’s house so that Clementina could nurse him while he recovered from a bad cold. Obviously Clementina had attracted the prince’s notice. This is clear both from his return to Bannockburn, and from later events. The fact that Clementina remained unmarried in the following years has been interpreted as evidence of her love for Prince Charles. However, there is no firm evidence that the relationship between the young couple progressed to a physical level in 1746.

  After his disastrous defeat at the battle of Culloden, Prince Charles’ stay in Scotland was cut short. He was forced to flee back to France where he had illicit relationships first with his cousin, Louise de Montbazon (whom he deserted when she became pregnant), and then with the Princesse de Talmont. Later, in 1750, during a secret visit to London, Charles nominally forsook his Roman Catholic faith and became an Anglican, in the vain hope that this would help the Stuart cause. During this period Charles fell victim to depression, which subsequently caused him to succumb to alcoholism.

  In 1752 Clementina was again on the Continent, at Dunkirk. ‘Much against the wishes of her family she had decided to enter one of those religious houses for the daughters of nobility on the Continent … She left Scotland sometime in 1751 and possibly stayed at a convent in Boulogne’.7 The initiative for renewed contact between her and Prince Charles seems to have come from the prince, who made it clear, even at the cost of some important friendships, that he was planning a sexual relationship with Clementina. First he sent her fifty louis d’or. Subsequently he sent Sir Henry Goring to Dunkirk to ask Clementina to come to Ghent and live with him. Many Jacobites were opposed to this relationship and distrusted Clementina because her sister served the house of Hanover. In fact it was widely assumed that Clementina was a spy acting on behalf of the British Government. Nevertheless, the couple was living together by November 1752, and they remained together for the following eight years. After a short time they moved from Ghent to Liege, where on 29 October 1753 their only child, a daughter, was born. Despite her father’s nominal change of religion three years earlier, the baby was baptised into the Catholic faith at the church of Ste Marie-des-Fonts. She was given the name of Charlotte. It seems unlikely that the then Anglican Prince Charles attended his daughter’s baptism, and neither he nor Clementina was named on the baptismal record in the parish register.

  Charles did not treat Clementina well. His increasing dependence on alcohol made his temper very difficult and uncertain, and his behaviour towards Clementina alternated between the violent and the obsessively possessive. Those who knew the couple at this time reported frequent arguments between them. By 1760 they had moved to Basel in Switzerland. Here Clementina decided that she could not cope either with Charles’ temper or with their peripatetic lifestyle any longer.

  She wrote to Charles’ father, the Jacobite ‘King James III and VIII’, asking for his help. She told him that she wanted to ensure a Catholic upbringing for her daughter, while for her own part she wished to retire to a convent. ‘James III’ agreed to pay Clementina an annuity of 10,000 livres, and there is evidence that he helped her to escape from Charles, taking her 7-year-old daughter with her. Clementina and Charlotte subsequently took refuge at the convent of the Nuns of the Visitation in Paris. She left Charles a letter explaining what she had done and why. Charles was reportedly furious, and tried to get both of them back, but to no avail. Charles never forgave Clementina for depriving him of ‘ye cheild’.

  Until the death of ‘James III’ in 1766, Clementina and Charlotte were able to live safely in various French convents, thanks to the annuity he paid them. But when James died in January 1766 – thus bringing to an end the longest ‘reign’ in English, Scottish and Irish history8 – they found themselves in trouble. Appeals to Charles were of no avail. Finally Clementina was forced to approach Charles’ younger brother, Cardinal Henry Stuart, Bishop of Frascati, and the Jacobite ‘Duke of York’. The Cardinal eventually agreed to pay Clementina a reduced annuity of 5,000 livres, on condition that she sign a statement avowing that she had never been married to Charles. Clementina had little choice. She signed the required affidavit on 9 March 1767 – though later she sought to retract it. Based on the reduced income which Henry paid her, she found herself new and cheaper accommodation at the convent of Notre Dame at Meaux-en-Brie.

  At various times prospective brides such as the Princess de Bouillon, the Princess de Conti and the Princess of Massa had been considered for Charles, and in the early 1740s he had even sought an alliance with a daughter of Louis XV, but all these projects had come to nothing. In the 1750s ‘James III’ again urged his son to marry, but no suitable bride could be found. It was not until 1772 that ‘Charles III’ finally decided to contract a marriage with Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, a relative by marriage,9 who, at the age of 19, was just one year older than his daughter Charlotte.
Louise’s subsequent love affair with Count Vittorio Alfieri comprises an interesting story in its own right, but it is one which we shall not explore here, given that our focus is on whether Charles’ marriage to Louise may have been bigamous.

  Meanwhile Charlotte had been in contact with her father for the first time since 1760. She asked him to allow her to join him in Rome (where Charles was now residing in the Palazzo Muti) and to recognise her as legitimate. After some correspondence the Stuart ‘king’ agreed to receive her, but only on the condition that she leave her mother. This Charlotte absolutely refused to do. As a result ‘Charles III’ broke off the correspondence.

  However, later the same year Charlotte and her mother made their own way to Rome, though they could ill afford the journey. Charles refused to see them, but Charlotte continued to plead by letter. She felt that the only course for her was to marry as soon as possible. However, her father refused to give her permission either to marry or to become a nun. At this time Charlotte and Clementina were in dire straits, and Charlotte was already ill with the liver complaint (part of her Stuart heritage) which would eventually bring about her early death.

  In view of her father’s refusal to permit either marriage or a religious life, Charlotte was trapped. She needed a protector and since she could not marry she was more or less forced to enter into an illicit relationship. The protector she ultimately chose was Ferdinand Maximilien Mériadec de Rohan, Archbishop of Bordeaux and Cambrai. She bore the archbishop three children: Marie Victoire, Charlotte and Charles Edward. She kept these children secret from her father, and very little was known about them until last century.

  On 23 March 1783 ‘Charles III’ finally legitimised his daughter, who joined him in Florence. Charlotte was accorded the rank of ‘Royal Highness’, and created Duchess of Albany in the Jacobite peerage of Scotland. The Stuart ‘king’, now in his sixties, was ailing and it was Charlotte who took care of him in his last years. In order to do this, she left her children in her mother’s care.

  ‘Charles III’ died on 31 January 1788. His daughter survived him by just under two years, dying in Bologna on 17 November 1789. Charlotte’s will, written just before her death, left 50,000 livres to her mother, together with an annual annuity of 15,000 livres. However, the new Jacobite king ‘Henry IX’ (Cardinal Stuart) took two years to release these moneys, and only did so on the condition that Clementina sign a ‘quittance’ renouncing, on behalf of herself and her descendants, any further claims on the Stuart estate. Clementina Walkinshaw survived until 1802, seeking refuge from the French Revolution in Switzerland. In terms of financial support, ‘Henry IX’ is said to have treated her shamefully and cruelly, and she died ‘aged and poor’.10

  So was Clementina married to Charles? No record of a marriage has ever been found. Nevertheless the urgent demands of Cardinal Stuart that Clementina sign an affidavit denying that she was married to his brother show that the rumour was current in Jacobite circles in the 1760s. Indeed, Clementina herself may have believed that, under Scottish law, she had been Charles’ wife, even though no formal marriage ceremony had ever taken place between them. Charles’ younger brother, the cardinal, who saw himself as the heir to the Stuart claim, was obviously extremely anxious to have any question of such a marriage set aside. Nevertheless, Clementina only signed the cardinal’s affidavit because at the time her poverty left her no option. One historian has declared that ‘the document was a nonsense’,11 and certainly Clementina later consistently sought to repudiate it and to assert the claim that she had been married to Charles.

  It is also interesting to note that Charlotte herself asked, in her letters to her father, to be recognised as his legitimate daughter, and that in the end ‘Charles III’ granted this request. Until the day of her death Charlotte consistently claimed that her parents were husband and wife, and the basis of her claim was the law of Scotland, which at that time – and indeed up to the present century and the year 2006 – recognised a type of marriage which was officially described as ‘marriage by cohabitation with habit and repute’. The chief requirements for such a marriage were that a couple should live together publicly as husband and wife for a number of years, and should be known to others as husband and wife.

  There can be little room for doubt that Charles and Clementina’s case meets these criteria. When Clementina came to live with Charles in Ghent, in 1752, they cohabited ‘a preti house’ in the Rue des Vernoples, where they were known to their neighbours as ‘Count and Countess de Johnson’.12 Thus we have clear evidence of cohabitation and that they used appellations which gave out that they were husband and wife. Indeed, Charles ‘generally presented Clementina in public as his wife’.13 Their cohabitation led to the birth of their daughter, Charlotte, in 1753, after which they lived together as a family, first in Liege and later in Basel. In Switzerland Charles and Clementina continued to give themselves out to their neighbours as man and wife, this time by calling themselves ‘Dr and Mrs Thomson’.14 It is therefore clear that they cohabited as a married couple and were known as such from 1752 until at least 1756, and probably up to Clementina’s flight with Charlotte in 1760. On this basis Charlotte may seem justified in claiming that under Scottish law her parents had been married. Nothing further needed to be demonstrated, and there was, in fact, no need to show evidence of a marriage registration, or to prove that a church ceremony had ever taken place. Unfortunately there is just one flaw in Clementina’s case. As the parallel case of MacCullock v. MacCulloch (1759) showed, in order for the Scottish marriage law to apply, the cohabitation had to have taken place in Scotland.15

  15

  REVIEW OF ALLEGED

  ‘TUDOR’ AND STUART

  SECRET ROYAL MARRIAGES

  In theory the period under study in this section might perhaps have been expected to produce clearer outcomes than the medieval period in terms of its disputed royal marriages, since the circumstances under which marriages were contracted in the second half of the sixteenth century and during the seventeenth century were supposedly more precisely regulated in legal terms. In principle not only should weddings have been preceded by the public reading of banns (as indeed had also been theoretically the case in the later medieval period), they should also have been concluded by a formal written record of what had taken place, naming the parties concerned and their witnesses.

  In fact, however, as we have seen, the reality was rather different. Secret marriages were still taking place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester made at least one secret contract in the second half of the sixteenth century, and Charles II’s brother and cousin did so, or were suspected of having done so, in the seventeenth century. It is possible that Charles II did likewise, though the king himself denied this.

  However, the strong probability which has emerged is that neither Elizabeth I nor Charles II ever contracted secret marriages, despite the fact that this has been alleged against them. There are good grounds for believing that Elizabeth I may have found the whole notion of marriage intimidating, because of her family history. Also, if she ever did contract a secret marriage one would be forced to conclude that she cannot have taken it very seriously. At all events, such a secret marriage (if it ever existed) apparently did not prevent her from contemplating the notion of a different and public marriage, even if she would thereby have been committing bigamy. Of course, this point does not, in itself, completely rule out the possibility of a secret marriage on the part of the queen. We have already seen that neither Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, not her great-grandfather, Edward IV, seem to have been intimidated by the prospect of bigamy. Nevertheless, the fact remains that throughout her reign Elizabeth I continued to play publicly with the idea of a possible marriage as though she believed herself to be still single; she never lived openly with any man as with a husband, she is not known to have borne any children, and she certainly did not recognise any. Also the favourite candidate for the role of her secret husband, Robert Dud
ley, Earl of Leicester, himself contracted other unions during the period of his relationship with the queen. Overall, the weight of this combined evidence argues strongly that Elizabeth I never married.

  As for Charles II, he certainly was not intimidated by marriage. However, he stated publicly and unambiguously that he only ever had one wife: Catherine of Bragança. Therefore if he had previously married Lucy Walter, Charles must clearly have been telling a deliberate lie. Not only that, but it would have been a lie which completely undermined the life and career of the son whom he adored. This would have been very strange and inexplicable behaviour on the king’s part, given that in all other respects he appeared eager to support and promote the Duke of Monmouth. Thus although it is just possible that Charles II’s public statements that he was never married to Lucy Walter should be disbelieved, this would confront us with the enormous question of why the king told lies. What could his motives possibly have been for such behaviour? After all, many people half expected him to recognise his son by Lucy Walter as legitimate – and may even have hoped that he would do so. Again, therefore, the balance of the evidence in the case of Charles II favours the view that he was never secretly married to Lucy Walter. Of course, this does not mean that the Duke of Monmouth may not have genuinely believed that his mother and father were married. It also does not rule out the possibility that Lucy Walter herself may have imagined that she had been married to Charles. We must also note that it leaves unexplained some evidence dating from the 1650s; evidence which appears to suggest that Charles referred at that time to someone – possibly Lucy Walter – as his ‘wife’.

  The case of ‘Charles III’ is very different. First, there is no doubt whatever that he had a sustained relationship with Clementina Walkinshaw, and that this relationship produced a child who was eventually recognised by Charles himself as legitimate and accorded the rank of ‘Royal Highness’. There is also no possible question about the fact that Charles and Clementina lived together for a number of years, during which time they were publicly known by appellations which implied very clearly that they were a married couple. Thus ‘Charles III’ was believed by some to have had a secret wife. This was not as a result of a clandestine marriage ceremony of any sort, but merely due to contemporary Scottish law – a unique survival which permitted and recognised a kind of common law marriage. Belief in their marriage ‘by cohabitation with habit and repute’ is strengthened by the insistence on the part of their daughter, Charlotte, that she was legitimate. It is also reinforced by the insistence of Charles’s younger brother, ‘Henry IX’, that he would only give Clementina financial support if she signed an affidavit denying that she had been married to Charles, and also by Clementina’s reluctant acceptance – and subsequent repudiation – of this affidavit.