Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (40 page)

Charles had made overtures to his daughter three years after Louise of Stolberg left him, legitimizing her and making her his heir. She was then living in Paris as "Lady Charlotte Stuart," unmarried and, apparently, well disposed toward the father she had not seen since the age of six. He wrote to her, calling her his "dear daughter" and telling her that everything he had would be hers when he died. In 1784 he sent his most trusted servant John Stuart to Paris to convey his sentiments in person and to escort Her Royal Highness Charlotte, Duchess of Albany, to Italy. Since then she had been his companion, his hostess, his sole family. She stood by him while he worked out his money problems (he complained of being "overcharged with debt"), she helped him arrive at a reconciliation with his brother, from whom he had been alienated. She could not cure him of the varicose ulcers, stomach complaints and dropsy that wore down his aging body, but her presence put new heart and life into him, and was a tonic in itself.
¹

Before Charlotte came to join him, Charles had been lonely, isolated in the aftermath of his separation from Louise, an object of scorn and ridicule. He had turned from public entertainments to private ones, inviting the musician Domenico Corri to his palace and sitting with Corri, night after night, in a candlelit room playing duets. Corri sat at the harpsichord, while Charles alternated between the cello, French horn, a wooden wind instrument called the flageolet and the bagpipes. Old Scottish melodies were his favorites; when he played "Lochaber no More," he wept inconsolably.

But with Charlotte beside him, Charles once more went out in public, proud to display his daughter, giving balls in her honor and pleased that the Florentine notables once again left their calling cards at the Guadagni Palace. On St. Andrew's Day, 1784, Charles honored his daughter at a banquet. He presented her with the green ribbon of the Order of the Thistle, drawing her officially into the Jacobite circle. The contrast between that evening and the sordid St. Andrew's Day of four years earlier could not have been more pronounced. Then Charles had unleashed his darkest side; now he was a benign patriarch, his melancholy lightened by the vicarious pleasure he took in his daughter and what she represented.

Charlotte worked hard to protect her father from his most poignant memories. One evening Charles was visited by an Englishman called Greathead, who wanted to hear from the old man's own lips what it had been like to live through the excitement of the Forty-Five. Charles, it seems, obliged his guest, retelling his stories of the victories and defeats of the Highland army and of his own adventures in hiding. But when he came to speak of the ghastly executions that followed his defeat, and of the sufferings of the Highlanders, he lost his animation entirely and fell to the floor in a fit. Charlotte rushed in horrified.

''Oh sir," she cried out, "what is this? You must have been speaking to my father about Scotland and the Highlanders! No one dares to mention those subjects in his presence."

Charlotte generally tried to keep Charles from talking too much, as it made him too excited and later exhausted. But she could not prevent one further exchange with the same Mr. Greathead. At a public gathering he imperiously called the Englishman to his side and said loudly, though in a voice which broke, "I will speak to my own subjects in my own way. Sir." He imitated Greathead's less than cultivated English pronunciation. "And I will soon speak to you. Sir, in Westminster Hall.
²
Such outbursts were pathetic, yet at times Charles was still capable of displaying the dignity and finesse of one born to royalty. One night at the opera house a young English officer waited to get a close look at the Pretender as he emerged from his box. Charles noticed the young man, paused, and did his best to stand alone, waving his attendants aside. Then he slowly and ceremoniously removed his cocked hat and saluted the Englishman before continuing unsteadily toward his carriage.

In December of 1785 Charlotte and Henry persuaded Charles to return to Rome, though his Florentine physicians advised against it. He had trouble breathing, all his limbs were swollen and painful, and he was plagued with recurrent nausea. He had already survived longer than anyone believed possible, long enough to become a legendary figure in Scotland, where songs were sung about his exploits which would outlast his unsavory reputation in Italy. In the popular mind he had come full circle, from youthful hero to aging debauchee to deathless, eternally youthful hero once again.

Charles had outlived most of those who fought with and for him, and many of those who had once mattered to him were also dead. One who was not was Clementina Walkinshaw. A year before he died Charles wrote Clementina a letter, signing it shakily "Charles R." "Be assured," he told her, "that I am and shall be your good friend."
³
There was no way he could reconcile himself with Louise de Rohan-Guéméné, who had been dead for six years, nor was he inclined to offer forgiveness to Louise of Stolberg, who was living happily with Alfieri and would continue to share his life for many years.

As for the thrones of England and France, the one his nemesis and the other his perpetual traducer, it was hard for him to find the energy to hate their present occupants, George III and Louis XVI. King Louis had recently settled a yearly pension of sixty thousand crowns on Charles, which enabled him to live in great comfort and luxury, and King George, who had much kindliness beneath his gruff exterior, felt sorry for Charles and privately wished there was something he could do to ease the elderly Pretender's last years.

Though more feeble than ever, once he was settled into the Muti Palace in Rome Charles would not go to bed and wait to die. He had himself driven to Albano in the warm season, where he took the waters and where peasants, many of them older and sicker than he was, came to him to plead for his healing royal touch. Charlotte never left him, and Henry too was attentive. At the head of his household staff was John Stuart, the Atholl man, whose young son was Charles's namesake. Stuart hovered near him, as the months passed and the last of his master's strength ebbed.

Charles's sixty-seventh birthday came, and not long after it he had a stroke. One side of his body was paralyzed, and he could not speak. He lingered for several days, semiconscious, Charlotte and John Stuart at his bedside. Then either on the night of January 30 or the morning of January 31 he died, surrounded by those who loved him best.

There was gossip in Rome that the official announcement of the time of death was a fabrication. Because January 30 was the anniversary of the execution of Charles II, it was thought to be an ill omen that Charles III had also died on that date, so the servants put abroad the fiction that he had not died until the following morning. The Stuart stigma that had dogged Charles throughout his life beclouded his death as well.

His obsequies, however, were as grand and regal as his brother could make them. In the Muti Palace, six altars were erected in the antechamber where two hundred masses were said for Charles's soul. (He had been persuaded to return to the Catholic fold before his death.) The Irish Franciscans of St. Isidoro chanted the office of the dead. A cast was taken of his face, and his body was embalmed, dressed royally and with a carved wooden crown and scepter placed under the coffin lid. "Charles HI, King of Great Britain" read the leaden inscription.

Because the pope forbade a royal funeral within the walls of Rome, Henry ordered his brother's remains removed to Frascati, where the interior of the cathedral was draped in black cloth with gilded trim. More than a hundred large tapers burned around the high catafalque, and scores of black-clad mourners, many of them English, filed in to hear the cardinal perform the funeral mass.

In his will Charles left all his earthly possessions to his daughter, but Charlotte died less than two years after her father, the victim of what may have been liver cancer. In any case, it was Henry who was heir to the Stuart claims and cause. He lived on for another two decades, preserving the outward symbols of monarchy but never pressing its political claims. He called himself "Henry IX, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith," and dressed his footmen in liveries of the English royal house. But though Henry gave formal acknowledgment to Charles-Emanuel IV, King of Sardinia, as his heir (the king was the great-grandson of Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, sister of Charles II, and as such the next Stuart claimant), events in Europe soon swept monarchy and many of its representatives from the stage.

Soon after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the majority of Henry's benefices and revenues were confiscated, and not long afterward he was forced to sell the Sobieski jewels to raise money to help pay the huge fine Napoleon levied on Pope Pius VI. Early in 1798, when the French occupied Rome, Henry fled to Naples, then was taken in a British warship to Messina. With other displaced ecclesiastics he ultimately made his way to Venice, where a defiant conclave-in-exile elected Pius VII pope. An old man in his seventies, dependent on charity for his sustenance, Henry was in every sense a relic of the past. George III, now aging himself and beleaguered by war, intermittent ill health and a bevy of disappointing children, took pity on the last Stuart Pretender and gave him a life pension of four thousand pounds.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson,
Inglorious Rebellion: The Jacobite Risings of 1708, 1715 and 1719
(London, 1971), p. 53.

2. W, A. Speck,
Stability and Strife: England 1714—1760
(Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 173-74.

3. Charles Petrie,
The Jacobite Movement: The First Phase 1688—1716
(London, 1948), p. 154.

4. Ibid, 177-78.

5. Mar's circular letter is printed in Robert Patten,
The History of the Late Rebellion
(London, 1717), pp. 221-22.

6. Quoted in
Sinclair-Stevenson
, p. 126.

7. Patten, p. 245.

8. Mar's Journal, cited in
Patten
, p. 242.

9. Patten, pp. 229-30.

CHAPTER 2

1. Marchesa Nobili-Vitelleschi [Amy Cochrane-Baillie],
A Court in Exile: Charles Edward Stuart and the Romance of the Countess d'Albanie
(London, 1903), I, 102.

2. Ibid., 104, citing the
Cracas
, or Roman newsletter, for May 16, 1719.

3. Alistair and Henrietta Tayler, eds..
The Stuart Papers at Windsor
(London, 1939), pp. 63-64.

4. Nobili-Vitelleschi, I, 115-16, citing the Roman Cracas of January 4, 1721.

5. These are the names that appear on Charles's baptismal certificate; the Roman Cracas adds the name "Severino."

CHAPTER 3

1. Blandford's letter is in Alexander Charles Ewald, The Life and Times of Prince Charles Stuart (London, 1883), pp. 6-10.

2. Quoted in Clennell Wilkinson, Bonnie Prince Charlie (Philadelphia, 1932), p. 34.

3. Ewald, p. 17.

CHAPTER 4

1. A. J. Youngson, The Prince and the Pretender (London, 1985), p. 174, citing a letter of James, January 10, 1742.

2.
Stuart Papers
, p. 84.

3. Ibid., 85.

4. Ibid., 85-86.

5. Youngson, p. 174.

6.
Stuart Papers
, p. 89.

7. Murray's long account of events at Gaeta is in
Stuart Papers
, pp. 90-97.

8. Ewald, pp. 28-29.

9.
Stuart Papers
, p. 95.

10. Ewald, p. 29.

CHAPTER 5

1. Youngson, p. 175.

2.
Stuart Papers
, p. 104.

3. Ibid, 125.

4. Ewald, pp. 44-45.

5.
Stuart Papers
, pp. 106-9.

6. In fairness to Henry it must be noted that Murray's description of him is unlike any other, and that other observers thought him to be "lively," "virtuous," "exceedingly good natured and well bred," and able to converse well with "a keen interest in English affairs." Ewald, pp. 45-46.

7. Ewald, pp. 43-44.

8. Cited in
Youngson
, p. 183.

CHAPTER 6

1. William Cobbett,
The Parliamentary History of England
(London, 1806-20), X, 402-3.

2. Ibid., 400-1.

3. Cited in Paul S. Fritz,
The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745
(Toronto and Buffalo, 1975), p. 105.

4. Ibid, 111.

5. Lesley Lewis, Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth Century Rome (London, 1961), p. 90.

6. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "Account of the Court of George I," in
Letters and Works
, ed. Lord Wharncliffe (London, 1837), I, 107-8.

7. John Hervey,
Some Materials Towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II
, ed. R. Sedgwick (London, 1931), II, 485-88.

8. Ibid

CHAPTER 7

1. Lewis, p. 24.

2. Ewald, p. 52.

3. Andrew Lang,
Prince Charles Edward Stuart
(London, 1903), p. 63.

4. F. J. McLynn,
France and the Jacobite Rising
of 1745 (Edinburgh, 1981), is the best background work on French policy and the French involvement with the Jacobites in the 1740s.

5. Cited in Lang, p. 71.

6. Cited in Lang, p. 70.

7.
Stuart Papers
, pp. 113-14.

8. Ibid., 112.

9. Ibid., 116.

10. Cited in Lang, p. 78.

CHAPTER 8

1. Cited in Ewald, p. 59.

2. Cited in David Daiches,
Charles Edward Stuart: The Life and Times of Bonnie Prince Charlie
(London, 1973), p. 100.

3. W. Drummond Norie,
Life and Adventures of Prince Charles Edward Stuart
(London, 1903), I, 106.

4. The memorandum is in
Stuart Papers
, pp. 122—23.

5. Drummond Norie, I, 122.

6. Lang, p. 82.

7. Stuart Papers, pp. 118—19.

8. John S. Gibson,
Ships of the '45: The Rescue of the Young Pretender
(London, 1967), p. 11.

9. McLynn,
France and the Jacobite Rising
, p. 32, states that the Elisabeth had "about a hundred marines" aboard; other authorities say that there were from five hundred to seven hundred fighting men. Charles gave a figure of seven hundred {Stuart Papers, p. 132). In the subsequent battle with the H.M.S. Lyon, the Elisabeth lost 57 men killed and 176 wounded—numbers which argue for a fighting complement of many hundreds of men.