Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (38 page)

A large crowd had gathered, however, at the gates of the Muti Palace. They watched, noisy but intent, as Charles was helped from the coach and into the palace. Those who remembered the ebullient, golden boy who had left his father's house twenty-two years earlier stared in curiosity at the stooped, crippled, middle-aged man before them with the coarse and weary face. Could this be King Charles III, of whom so much had once been expected? Inside the palace some of the Roman nobles waited in an antechamber to pay their respects. They were curious too, for so little had been heard about Charles in recent years that many of them had believed he was dead. He passed among them, assisted by his servants and obviously in pain, returning their civilities with an effort and soon taking his leave to rest in the apartments which had been prepared for him.

It took Charles a while to recuperate from his accident and from the fatigues of his journey, but as the weeks went by the swelling in his legs went down and he was able to walk unaided through his apartments and eventually to go out riding with Henry in his coach. According to Lumisden, Charles still possessed the ingenuous charm which had made him so appealing as a younger man. He did his best to hide the resentment he felt toward the pope and College of Cardinals, leaving it to Henry to make his protests for him and hoping that in time he would be given the recognition he deserved. Henry made a great show of parading through the city with Charles seated on his right—a privilege reserved for royalty—and angered Pope Clement by encouraging others in the city to defy his mandate. One of these was Cardinal Orsini, the minister of Naples, who made a formal visit to Charles and, it was said, addressed him as he would a sovereign.

Even more gratifying to Charles was the treatment he received at the hands of the students and rector of the English Convent of St. Thomas, who turned out to welcome him attired in their ceremonial habits and conducted him to a royal chair of state. They greeted him as "Charles the Third, their Sovereign," and sang a Te Deum in his honor, even though they knew the act of defiance would lead to punishment from Pope Clement. Three days after the English students displayed their Stuart loyalties, the Irish and Scottish students did the same, causing the rectors of all three colleges to be banished from the papal city.
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Shortly after this Charles retired to the country to hunt, both because the weather and his health had improved and because he had little stomach for controversy, especially when it looked as though he was not going to gain the goals he sought. He stayed on, month after month, living at Albano with frequent visits to Henry at Frascati. It was a lonely life, largely devoid of society. ""He says he is like one on shipboard," Lumisden wrote of Charles. "He converses only with his own little crew." As an Anglican, he was an outsider to the religion of Rome; as ''Baron Douglas"—the only title the pope permitted him to use—he was an outsider to the higher ranks of aristocratic society. His only hope was that Pope Clement XHI, who was in poor health, would die soon and that his successor would be less scrupulous in his observance of protocol.

At least his financial troubles were greatly eased. James left an estate in money, jewels and plate worth many hundreds of thousands of Roman crowns, an estate which included the Crown Jewels James H had brought from England in 1688. The scepter, the collar, George and the star of the Garter and the St. Andrew's cross were all being held securely in a strongbox in one of Rome's banks. Not trusting Charles to deal prudently with his inheritance, James had left to Henry the legal responsibility for looking after his brother's money; Henry gave Charles an allowance of ten thousand Roman crowns a month—roughly twice his own income.

Pope Clement did not die, and Charles continued to live in a kind of limbo, an outsider to Roman society yet without any alternative community to belong to. Visiting Britishers, who were few and far between, found him pathetically eager for their company. An English woman who spent some time with him in 1767 noted her observations. His appearance, she thought, was "rather handsome, his face ruddy and full of pimples. He looks good natured," she went on, "and was overjoyed to see me; nothing could be more affectionately gracious." He was quite melancholy, however, and "distracted" in his conversation—he admitted to her that his memory was failing him and that he found it hard to concentrate—and his features clouded over with depression from time to time.

"He has all the reason in the world to be melancholy," wrote Charles's visitor, "for there is not a soul goes near him, not knowing what to call him. He told me time lay heavy upon him. I said I supposed he read a good deal. He made no answer. He depends entirely tor his subsistence upon his brother whom he never loved, much less now, he having brought him into the scrape."

His dependence on Henry had probably become a major irritant. After more than a year of living in virtual isolation, with the well-meaning but increasingly custodial Henry as his only real companion, Charles had taken to drink with a vengeance. "Could we but get the better of the nasty bottle," Henry wrote in the spring of 1767, "which every now and then comes on by spurts." Charles's "difficulties and odd notions" were driving his sedate brother mad. He had dismissed his British servants—including Lumisden—in a fit of pique and installed Italians to take their place. With these Italians in tow, he spent drunken evenings in search of pleasure, attending the theater, making a spectacle of himself at public performances, and even, with one of the men on hand to support him, trying to dance on his uncertain legs.

Time indeed hung heavy on his hands, and his brother's intolerance was even more burdensome. To Henry, Charles was nothing but an embarrassment, while to Charles Henry had come to seem like a jailer. He was shackled hand and foot: the pope kept him from enjoying his true rank and status, his brother held his purse strings, and he had no one else to turn to.

His hopes rose briefly when a papal election was held in the spring of 1769. Cardinal Stoppari, who might be expected to acknowledge Charles's titles, had a good chance of being chosen to be the new pope. But when Cardinal Ganganelli was elected instead, taking the name of Clement XIV, Charles was in despair again. This Clement looked more kindly on Charles than his predecessor had, but still felt constrained to deny him the honors he sought. He regretted having to make this decision, he told Charles in a personal interview, especially as he had once served James as chaplain and had "the greatest regard for his family." If it were not for political considerations, things would be far different.
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The pope's kindness was a small consolation for the despondent Charles, who sank deeper into his lethargy and isolation. A visitor who saw him the following year was struck by his excessive stoop and his corpulence. "He appears bloated and red in the face," she wrote, "his countenance heavy and sleepy, which is attributed to his having given in to excess of drinking." On the whole, she thought. he had a "melancholy, mortified appearance," though his presence was still noble and his manner graceful. At fifty, he was rapidly sinking both physically and spiritually. The Jacobite prince who had once dreamed of possessing three kingdoms had been dispossessed even of the empty name of king, and was caged like an aging beast in his brother's care.

Chapter 24

In the summer of 1770, Charles broke away from the withdrawn life he had been leading in Rome and went on a tour of Tuscany. He was drinking as heavily as ever and everywhere he went his tipsy eccentricity caused comment. However, he was very gratified to find that the Tuscan peasants, unlike the Romans, were not only tolerant of his antics but called him "Majesty' when they addressed him. The title was music to his ears, and the respect he received when he walked in the streets and attended the local fairs won him over completely.

With his retinue of four footmen and two gentlemen servants he lodged at an inn in Florence, and was delighted to find that the Florentine nobles too were very courteous, if not deferential; they did not call him "Majesty," but they did pay calls on him, and invited him to call on them in return. At the theater, where, as it happened, he had a box next to that of his longtime foe Horace Mann, he enjoyed the attention he received on entering and leaving and took pleasure in paying visits to highborn ladies in their boxes.
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Livorno, Lucca and Pisa were as hospitable as Florence, Charles found, and he prolonged his stay in Pisa, taking the waters for his diseased legs during the day and attending the public casino at night, wearing his Garter star under his coat and his badge of St. Andrew in his waistcoat. He called himself "Count of Albany," and played cards with the notables who frequented the casino, no longer feeling like an injured outcast, as he had in Rome, but basking in the attention he received and vastly enjoying his role as a fascinating new celebrity. He was particularly pleased when several beggars suffering with what was then still called the "king's evil," scrofula, approached him and asked him to touch them with his royal hands.
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Charles was so pleased with the stir he caused in the Tuscan towns that he preferred to ignore the clear evidence that it was bound to turn sour. When after taking the waters at Pisa he returned to Florence for a second stay, he was pointedly ignored by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and found that fewer of the town's nobles were willing to pay him social calls. His attendants scented conflict in the wind, and urged him to leave, but he stayed on, waving aside their entreaties. Growing increasingly anxious, his Master of the Horse Count Spada and his gentleman Count Vegha appealed to Charles's acquaintances to prevail on him to go back to Rome, but they refused to interfere. In desperation, fearful that the "natural violence" of Charles's temper, made worse by three days of nearly constant drinking, might "induce him to commit some great irregularity in public," they appealed to Henry in Rome. Finally, at Henry's urging, he agreed to leave Florence.

The following summer, however, Charles was back in Tuscany, renting a villa near the Pisan baths and, once installed in it, resuming his "irregular life" of conspicuous public drunkenness and embarrassing evening forays into society. Then, in mid-August, he disappeared.

At first it was said that he had gone to Poland, at the suggestion of the Polish Princess Tablonowsky—a Sobieski relative who had made his acquaintance in Rome. Then it was discovered that in fact he had made the difficult journey to France—particularly difficult for a man of fifty-one with bad legs—in order to attend to some "family business." Rumors flew, all the more so when Charles reappeared in Pisa, alone and secretive about his doings. There was a marriage in the air, people said—but marriage to whom? And when?

in Holy Week of 1772 the mystery was solved. Charles had himself driven in an open carriage to Macerata, a town in the Umbrian marshes near Ancona, to the palace of a local nobleman where he met his bride-to-be. She was Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, a lively, intelligent and attractive nineteen-year-old with fair hair and hazel eyes. Their meeting in Macerata was their first; quite possibly, if Louise had encountered Charles before the marriage negotiations were concluded and her fate sealed, she might have refused to marry him.

Louise was spirited, youthful, brimming with energy and curiosity. An acquaintance described her expression as "'bright, mischievous and sensitive," with undertones of malice. She was nothing like the coarse-fibered and compliant Clementina, and had none of Clementina's loyalty or Jacobite idealism. Louise had better breeding, was much more sure of herself, and came from royal stock—in her marriage contract she was called "'Most Serene Highness." In heredity she was Charles's equal, for although her father, the late Gustav Adolf of Stolberg-Gedern, was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire and not a king, at least he had held on to his throne, unlike Charles's grandfather, and his title was not disputed.

Charles, on the other hand, had become truculent, obnoxious and at times hateful. He was far from being a physical wreck, but he was corpulent and crippled, and his flushed and puffy face, slightly pop eyes, jowly cheeks and double chins made him a grotesque figure beside his fresh young bride, even in an age when middle-aged men regularly married much younger women.
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His relations with women had never been good, tending to veer from demanding infatuation to abusive tyranny with no middle ground between the two extremes. Certainly he expected to exercise unchallenged dominion over his wife, all the more so given the difference in their ages. He was not prepared to tolerate any degree of independence whatever, and no doubt saw himself as favoring the relatively humble Louise, daughter of a petty German princeling, with the grand title and rank of Queen Consort of England, Ireland and Scotland. That she would be queen in name only (and in Rome, not even in name) was in Charles's view an irritating detail.

Given their very different natures and expectations of one another, Louise and Charles were bound to clash. He brought out her rebelliousness, stifling her passion and making her long for escape. She in turn brought out the bully and ultimately the sadist in him, exacerbating his inherent possessiveness until he became—or tried to become—her jailer.

The partners in this ill-fated marriage were toasted and serenaded by the local notables of Macerata after the wedding, and the governor of the district made them a brief congratulatory speech. They left for Rome on Easter Sunday, and Louise became mistress of the Muti Palace, where she was nicknamed "Queen of the Apostles," because of the proximity of the palace to the Church of the Santi Apostoli. As might have been predicted the pope refused to recognize Louise as Charles's queen consort, and the longstanding battle between Charles and the curia over rank and title continued. Still, observers took it as a good sign that, now that he was married, the Count of Albany drank much less and appeared to be on the road to reform. He was even physically more active, fencing with foil, mask and gloves and playing the violin in amateur concerts— possibly at the urging of his new wife, who played the guitar.