by Alan Gold
He was the son of a king and yet he would never be a king in his own right. He called himself Majesty, yet his own Scottish people hated and despised him for his drunkenness and violence, for the loss of human life they’d sustained through his adventures, but mostly for the loss of their land and their ancient clan hierarchy because of his presumption in trying to gain control of the English throne without a French army to back him up. Twice he’d returned to England and Scotland to rouse what remained of the clans, once in 1750 and again four years later, but on both occasions, he’d been rebuffed even by those who had been his most ardent supporters. His friends, those who remained by his side, had told her that he’d returned to Italy in a state of humiliation and deep despair and had consoled himself with copious quantities of wine, brandy, and women.
When they met for the first time a month after their wedding, she had felt sorry for him and understood his drunken rages. She thought that she could pull him back from the precipice of despair—that by her ministrations she could save him from himself. She’d tried to pacify him, to offer him her lap for a pillow, but when he turned his fists against her, not once but a dozen times, she had demanded a separate bedroom and had not been a wife to him since. And nor would her body be his until he stopped drinking and controlled his fury.
So what title did she use when they were together? How did a wife view her husband when he was neither king nor prince nor Italian nor Scot nor Englishman nor anything? Yet he demanded deference from everybody he met. And worse, most blasphemous, most evil of all above the temporal titles he awarded himself . . . he dared call himself Catholic, yet he cursed God and Jesus for being the instruments of his failure rather than accepting his rightful fate; and while he was cursing the names of the most holy, Charles drank himself into unconsciousness every night, and when he was sober, he would attempt to seduce any woman who came upon his path—any woman except his young and terrified wife, whose virtue and modesty infuriated him and whose boudoir door was bolted against him when he returned home in his drunken state!
Was it any wonder that His Holiness Pope Clement XIV wouldn’t change the decision of his predecessor in refusing to recognize Charles as King Charles III of England and Scotland? Why would such a holy man as Giovanni Vincenzo Ganganelli offer the blessings of the papacy to a man who could control neither his rages nor his drinking? Why would the papacy support such a disreputable pretender to the throne of England, even if it had the advantages to the Catholic universe of replacing the Protestant Hanoverians with a Catholic Stuart?
Princess Louise gripped her comb tightly as she contemplated rising from her dressing table, opening the door to her bedroom and treading the creaking corridor past Charles’ quarters to descend into the breakfasting salon where their table had been set. For she knew that today would be no different from yesterday or the day before. She would creep past his room, and he would awaken to the creaking noise that the wooden floorboards made. He would call out and demand her presence in his bedroom. If she pretended not to hear him and ran downstairs, he would appear moments later at the dining table in his nightshirt, still drunk from the excesses of the previous night, and ridicule her in front of the servants. If she entered his room and closed the door, she risked a beating for daring to reject his sexual advances.
He called himself husband, yet he was a brute who thrashed her in his continuous drunken wrath, and she wore the bruises and scars of his evil ways when she walked the streets of Rome and people looked at her in pity and knew what she suffered.
She felt herself on the verge of tears. It was a common enough occurrence since she’d been married to the brute. They’d been wed by proxy in March, she in Austria and he in Paris. They had met for the first time in April, and although he was older and much fatter than she’d been told by her protectress, Princess Maria Theresa, she knew that as the daughter of an impoverished noble family, marrying a king in exile, was the very best she could hope for.
But in the intervening months between April and July, as they’d traveled around Italy on a honeymoon, her worst fears about the rumors she’d heard of him became more and more pronounced in her mind. A honeymoon should have been a period of joy and delight for a young couple getting to know each other. He was older than her by thirty years and treated her as a dullard and a child, demeaning her in front of hoteliers and visitors and clerics and even the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow alone and without her.
And when she complained, he had sulked off to his rooms and stayed there for hours, only emerging looking like a disheveled footpad demanding more wine. The first time she’d tried to stand up to him, he’d hit her brutally and she had been forced to run to her room and close the door. The other guests in the hotel complained to the manager who deferentially took her husband’s side. Yet the second and third time it happened, they had been asked to leave the hotel, and from that moment onward, her husband’s mood had become increasingly terse.
Now his entire life was a state of drunkenness or recovery and with drunkenness came more and more violence. He’d been thrown out of inns to sleep in the filth of the roadway until he was carried home on a cart by his servant to sleep until evening when the whole thing would begin again.
She’d hoped that their return to Rome might calm him down—that the pressures of mixing with elegant Roman society would have a positive influence on him. It was, after all, his home—the city where he’d been born, the society that had accepted him and encouraged him in his endeavors to reclaim the Stuart dynasty and to rid England of the hated Hanoverians. It was the city he’d left as a young man full of ambition and promise, but it was also the city to which he’d returned when he’d been defeated in England and spurned in France—a city that looked on his growing inebriation and violence and intemperate moods as increasingly unacceptable, and which, like France, spurned him from its society.
No, returning to Italy with a new young bride hadn’t been a positive influence on him. Instead, it exacerbated his drinking and his continuous rages as he walked the outer corridors of the elegant houses and palaces to which they were invited as a couple, complaining how dowdy and run-down Roman society was these days under the Holy Roman Empire, and how London’s palaces were so elegant and rich and beautifully designed. In the first week of their return, they had received numerous invitations; but as time wore on and the rumors about him transmuted to known facts, they were lucky if they went out to a party or soiree once a month.
She sighed heavily and plucked up the courage to leave her room. She opened the door and saw to her horror that Charles’ bedroom door along the corridor was open. His servant must have entered to see if his master was still alive, and failed to close it properly. Princess Louise tiptoed past, but she saw Charles through the open doorway sitting in bed, sipping a cup of coffee and reading a letter.
He saw the motion in the hallway and called his wife into his room. She entered, and curtsied.
“Good morning,” she said, her throat dry with dread.
“Good morning, Louise. How are you today? Did you sleep well?”
She smiled and nodded, unsure why he wasn’t screaming at her.
“I thought that this morning, we could take the carriage and visit the Gardens beside the Tiber. It’s a beautiful day and we should both get out more,” he said.
She continued to look at him, mute, wondering what was going to happen next.
“Is that agreeable to you, my dear?” he asked.
She nodded.
“You’re very quiet. Is something wrong?”
“You seem in an unusually calm mood, Charles. Normally nobody can speak with you until well into the afternoon and you’ve recovered from the previous night’s entertainment. But it’s not yet midday and you seem . . .” she searched for the word . . . “composed.”
“As would you be had you received this,” he said, struggling to rise from his bed and handing her the letter. She looked at the crest, seal, and stamp and saw that it was written by none
other than His Holiness, Pope Clement XIV. He moved his legs from the bed onto the floor and supported his weight on a wooden upright, standing there while he gained both balance and posture. He was lightheaded from the exertion and moved slowly, cautiously toward the chair of the dresser.
“I don’t understand. Why would the pope write to you?”
“Because I am the king in exile to the throne of England. Because by rights, England should be a Catholic nation and the pope obviously wants me to make it so.”
“But his predecessor said . . .”
“I wrote to His Holiness last week, requiring an audience in order to present new grounds for his support of my claim to the throne of England. His secretary has written back, asking me to attend an audience with His Holiness next Tuesday.”
He grasped the chair, and pulled it away from his dresser and sat down heavily. Looking at him in the mirror, she was shocked to see that his eyes were red, the rims dark from lack of sunlight. He was a denizen of the night and his face suffered from the way he led his life.
“Charles,” she said softly, “should you build up your hopes when His Holiness is so busy with the problem of the Jesuits? The French, Neapolitans, Portuguese, and Spanish ambassadors are continually petitioning the pope to ban the Jesuits. As the king of France has withdrawn support from you, is it likely that His Holiness will offend King Louis by supporting your claim? Forgive me, husband, for commenting on your affairs, but I don’t want you to be disappointed should your audience not proceed as you would like.”
He turned and smiled. She hated his smile. She compared it to the smile of a reptile. What teeth he still had left were stained the color of mustard. “Child,” he said, “these matters of international politics are very complex, and you are looking at them with a simple eye. I’ve involved myself in the politics of the world for my entire life. Trust your husband when he says that there is more which is hidden in a letter, than that which is written.”
His servant entered the room without knocking, moved toward the dressing room, and took down his clothes for the day. Moving to where the pretender king was sitting and without a by-your-leave from Princess Louise, the servant dressed him quickly, paying far less attention to his clothes, powders, and wig than her maid paid her. They left his bedroom to descend to the dining salon, where they would eat breakfast, and then they would order their carriage be brought to the front of the Hotel, where they would ride in the open to the banks of the River Tiber, barely visible in the distance. The gardens were becoming a fashionable place for gentlemen and their ladies to walk, and they would be noticed.
Was this a new beginning, she wondered, or merely a brief respite from the nightmare of the past three months? Only time, His Holiness, and his next drink would tell.
HALIFAX, IN THE ROYAL COLONY OF NORTH CAROLINA THE DOMINION OF AMERICA
AUGUST 13, 1772
The house was larger than they had originally intended, and they quickly ran out of the wood that had been deposited on their land by the local committee. They’d cut down trees from their property and fashioned them into planks that enabled them to extend the footprint of the house so that there were three bedrooms instead of just two, and the eating and sleeping quarters were separated from each other by a double thickness of timber and Hessian sacking that they’d taken from sacks of flour and sugar they’d purchased and washed clean in the stream.
The long pathway from the road to the house was now cleared of trees, and Luke, always the artist, had fashioned a sign, using fire to etch letters outlined for him by the literate Jamie, which now proudly proclaimed to any passerby that this house belonged to
The Macdonalds of Halifax NC
formerly of Armadale in Skye
Anno Domini 1772
Life was more pleasant than Flora had a right to believe. They lived in a new land with good, decent, honest hard working people. During the week, neighbors came to visit and brought food and drink in case they ran short while building their home. On Sunday mornings, they went to the tiny wooden Catholic Church beside the river and prayed. On Sunday afternoon they visited their new friends, and in the evening the men, and in this she included all of her sons, went to the saloon and sat and drank ale and whisky and played cards and came home at midnight and slept late on Monday morning until mother and daughters hurried them out of bed because chores had to be done.
The girls of the house spent Sunday evening with other young women of the district, planning dances and balls and parties that never seemed to eventuate. And Flora grew to know and like her neighbors, almost all of whom were Scots from the Highlands, as well as English men and women who had come for a better life.
What Flora found to her amazement was that she was renown throughout North Carolina as the woman who rescued Bonnie Prince Charlie. It was so long ago, so much a part of history, that she’d assumed it would have been long-forgotten. But it appeared to be an important Highland legend, and having lived for so long on Skye, where Flora was so well known but where the outside world never seemed to impinge, it never occurred to her that men and women from Aberdeen, Inverness, and other parts would be singing her praise.
And her fame reached the ears of one who was already very well known in the English Dominion of America. A certain Mr. Benjamin Franklin, who, when he heard that Mistress Flora Macdonald, the heroine of the Highlands and the prisoner in the Tower of London during the reign of George II had come to America, decided to ride to North Carolina and pay his respects to her.
A man of vast bulk, sitting atop a sagging horse, Ben Franklin rode slowly along the banks of the Roanoke River. His imminent arrival had been the talk of the town for more than two hours prior to his exhausted horse plodding through the open wooden gates. He slid down from the saddle and onto the ground in a pall of dust. He was greeted by Gabriel Sheldon, the Mayor of Halifax, supported by an assembly of important townspeople.
“As I live and breathe. Mr. Benjamin Franklin. Why sir, I’d know you anywhere. It’s an honor and a privilege to have you come to our town of Halifax. I’m Mr. Gabriel Sheldon, the Mayor. What brings you to Halifax if I might ask, sir?”
“I’m here to visit one Mistress Flora Macdonald, Mr. Sheldon. Are you acquainted of a lady by that name?”
“Sir, we have many Macdonalds in our fair town. But yes, the Mistress Macdonald you speak of arrived here not all that long ago. I visited the family myself just last week, and they’re building a fine house five mile out of town. But how long will you be staying in Halifax, Mr. Franklin? A week? More than a week?”
Ben Franklin smiled. “Mr. Mayor, both a fish and visitors tend to stink after three days, which is when I’ll be leaving. I have to pay my compliments to Mistress Macdonald.”
The Mayor was surprised. “Mistress Macdonald is known to you?”
Franklin looked at the Mayor. “Sir, Mistress Macdonald is known to the whole of England, Scotland, and no doubt France and Italy. She is a heroine, sir, of the Jacobite uprising of 1745. You are honored to have her in your county.”
The mayor stared at Franklin. “The heroine . . . but she never said . . . she’s just an ordinary woman and I . . . well damn me . . .”
“People that are wrapped up in themselves make small packages, Mr. Mayor. I’m sure that Mistress Macdonald’s modesty is an aspect of her heroism. Now, sir, if you could direct me to an inn or a hostelry, I shall avail myself of their facilities and then travel to Mistress Macdonald’s homestead in the morning.”
The arrival of Benjamin Franklin, the brilliant, acerbic Pennsylvania printer and politician, was known to the entire community of Halifax and by morning, when he mounted his horse and prepared to follow the directions of the Mayor and ride out toward the Macdonald homestead, a crowd of some thirty men and women had gathered outside the Inn to look at him. He greeted everyone as though he was running for office and gave a short speech about the importance of townships like Halifax to the opening up of the hinterland and the growth of America; he was cheer
ed on his way and rode through the open gates of the settlement along the road that serviced ten farms stretching toward the distant lofty hills. The Macdonald’s farm was fourth along the narrow and dusty track.
His horse carefully negotiated the wheel ruts, which had inscribed deep grooves in the earth, and clopped at a leisurely pace toward the far-off mountains. After half an hour, he was delighted to see a burnt wooden sign, announcing the Macdonald household.
No fences, no gate, no formal entryway; just a clearance of trees that formed an alley leading toward a pleasant timber shack, newly built with construction material still splayed all over the ground. In the far distance, barely visible from the house’s entryway and beside a stream that meandered through their land, were an older gray-haired man and several young men engaged in the act of felling timber. They were working so hard that they didn’t notice him arriving at their homestead. Beside the house were two young women, little more than girls really, washing clothes in a tub. And sitting on the porch plucking a huge bush turkey was a matron who was obviously the mother of the household.
The girls and the mother looked up as soon as Franklin’s horse neared. Initially concerned that they were alone, but knowing that all she had to do was to sound the iron triangle and they’d come running, Flora looked at the man who approached. From his age and girth, she knew that he posed them no threat.
“Do I have the honor of addressing Miss Flora Macdonald?” he asked.
“You do sir. And who are you if I might be so bold as to ask?”
Franklin introduced himself, and Flora said that yes, she had heard of him. He was well known to her as a scientist and writer and philosopher and in other spheres as well.
“You must excuse me, sir, for I was not expecting company, and this bird is our food for the week. Had I known you were coming, I would have accorded you the dignity to which you are entitled.”
Franklin smiled. “Ma’am, it is I who come to accord you respect. You are the Flora Macdonald, who assisted the Prince Charles Edward Stuart in his attempt to rid England of the Hanoverians, are you not?”
