Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  Born the son of a baker in Ayr in 1686, Ramsay had already made his name as a writer of politico-theological treatises, and was later to be a significant figure in French freemasonry in the 1730s. He had won James’s favour by dedicating his latest work to him, flattering him as a potential royal patron. Yet in many ways the choice of Ramsay was imaginative. His educational thinking was in advance of his time: he believed in drawing out his pupils, not in learning by heart or rote.

  Ramsay arrived in Rome from Paris in January 1724, but he was fated to spend only nine months with the prince. Ramsay was indissolubly associated with the Mar faction among the Jacobites, and it was in 1724 that James broke decisively with Mar, after the bishop of Atterbury had exposed Mar’s secret double-dealing overtures to London.50 By November Ramsay, no longer in James’s confidence, was on the road back to Paris.

  In recoiling from the protégé of a man he considered a traitor, James unwittingly went on to open a Pandora’s box. His next solution to the problem of Charles Edward’s education was to summon James Murray of Stormont from Paris as his governor, while recalling Thomas Sheridan from his duties as an emissary in Vienna to be under-governor.51

  Since this action was to lead straight to the greatest crisis in James’s life, it is worth asking why he felt impelled to take it. From the fact that James’s correspondence is full of references to the need to remove the young prince from the company of females, dilettante critics have assumed that he was motivated by general misogynism or a vague distaste for the female sex. The truth is altogether more prosaic and more specific. It was an abiding fear of aristocratic parents in the eighteenth century that children left too long in the company of maids would be sexually molested. No less a person than Cardinal Bernis testified to having suffered such a fate as a child.52

  If James’s motives were characteristically sound and conscientious, his handling of the prince’s transition from female to male care turned out to be a disaster. To assess correctly the causes of the sensational marital rift in the Stuart household caused by this transfer of power, we need to retrace our steps in an attempt to chart the mental progress of Queen Clementina.

  It is clear that James was misled as to the intensity of the queen’s feelings for her first-born and judged by appearances alone. Clementina, it is true, did not give the appearance of being inseparable from her child, but sober reflection might have alerted James that there were good reasons for this.

  The most important of these was Clementina’s poor health and the uncertainty surrounding her future childbearing potential. There were repeated false alarms about a second pregnancy for Clementina, most notably in May 1721, June 1722 and November 1723.53 Hopes of another Stuart child were so regularly disappointed that the English spy Stosch (codename Walton) reported to London that an ‘obstruction’ meant Clementina’s childbearing days were already at an end.54

  In addition, Clementina’s mother died in 1721, causing her great grief.55 Moreover, there are solid grounds for thinking that Clementina very soon found James a disappointment. His dour, stoical, pragmatic approach to life failed to strike a chord in her romantic soul. To make up for her sadnesses and disappointments she turned for solace to her infant son. This process was camouflaged by her frequent absences from his side, whether on villegiatura at Albano or on more extended trips, such as that to Lucca in 1722.56

  James for his part might well have underrated the queen’s attachment to Charles Edward, since he himself was so besotted with the child. His pet name for his son, ‘Carluccio’, made its first appearance in May 1721.57 On Charles’s birthday James asked whether it was appropriate for one so young to be made a knight of the garter. He received the reply that (quite apart from the consideration that a monarch is not constrained in such matters) there were precedents in the honours given Edward, son of Edward IV, and Richard, duke of York, not to mention Henry VII’s son Arthur.58 James determined on the honour as Charles Edward’s second birthday present. A letter on 27 December 1722 neatly encapsulates the joy of the doting father:

  I gave my son the Garter and the St Andrew on Christmas Day. He continues, thank God, very well except suffering now and then a little on pushing his teeth, and he is already such a lover of music that I shall be tempted to carry him one night to the Opera.59

  Both the prince’s parents, then, were in thrall to unusually strong emotions over their son. It has to be remembered that such strong bonding was by no means the norm at the time. One leading authority on eighteenth-century childhood has gone so far as to suggest that high infant mortality actually imposed a ‘tenderness taboo’ between parent and child and so kept such strong emotions at bay.60 No such consideration weighed with James and Clementina. In retrospect their conflicting needs and requirements for their son had already set them on a collision course.

  The departure of Ramsay in November 1724 coincided almost exactly with the announcement that the queen was again pregnant. This time the pregnancy was successful.61 The imminent arrival of a second child concentrated James’s mind. It was immediately after the birth of Henry Benedict, in March 1725, that James took the final decision to put Charles into the hands of Murray and Sheridan.

  James’s decision was singularly unwise on a number of counts. It failed to take account of the fact that the queen might perceive a causal link between the birth of Henry and the departure of Charles Edward from the care of the women. There is some reason to think that after bringing forth her second son Clementina suffered from a form of post-puerperal depression.62 In this state, her imagination might have magnified the significance of James’s move to regularise Charles Edward’s education. She could well have seen it as an attempt to drive a wedge between herself and her first-born.

  Certainly the queen’s confidante Mrs Sheldon did nothing to disabuse her of the idea. James had been unhappy with the governess’s behaviour for some time. When it was announced that the prince was to be taken out of her hands, she struck back with a whispering campaign directed at the impressionable Clementina. Angered by her meddling, James tried to dismiss her.63 This drew tearful reproaches from the queen. To placate her, James switched to praises for Sheldon’s qualities and offered to soften the blow by putting Henry in her charge. But when it became clear that there was no going back on the decision to place Charles Edward with Sheridan and Murray, Mrs Sheldon, presuming on the queen’s protection, flew into a violent rage and was openly impertinent to James.64 James retorted by ordering Sheldon to leave Rome. The governess then successfully appealed to Clementina for reinstatement.

  Charles Edward, meanwhile, is likely to have experienced feelings of double jeopardy. The birth of a sibling is always a traumatic event for a pampered only child.65 To have juxtaposed the birth of a rival with an order expelling Charles from the care of the women was insensitive of James, to say the least. Charles Edward’s natural feelings of resentment towards the fledgling Henry would have been compounded by a sensation of the ‘end of Eden’. Such a transition was far too brutal.

  In this single act of transfer to the male world (unexceptionable in itself) lay the seeds of the entire later family tragedy: Clementina’s abrupt separation from her husband, the fatal rift between her and James and much else. Charles’s dislike for his brother never abated. Clementina herself never displayed much affection for Henry. James too would later sense the truth that Clementina had preferred her son to her husband. Most important of all, the unconscious mutual antagonism between James and Charles Edward began at this point.

  In part James’s insensitivity to the superheated atmosphere within his own family may have been the result of his preoccupation with public affairs. The years 1721–5 had seen an alarming decline in Jacobite fortunes. The regular correspondence with Philip V of Spain had tailed off; the Atterbury plot of 1722 in England had failed disastrously; the traditional French support for the Stuarts had been put into reverse under the duc d’Orleans and the Abbé Dubois and later the duc de Bourbon. Most crushingly of all, in th
e very month of Henry’s birth Peter the Great died, the Czar who had written to James in his own hand assuring him that he would definitely send an expedition to England to restore the Stuarts.

  Faced with this plethora of frustration, one unconscious motive in James’s mind in bringing Charles Edward out of the hands of the women might have been a desire to accelerate the pace of Jacobite activity. His sense of impatience and frustration, particularly noted at this time by the spy Walton,66 might well have led him to leave his domestic flank unguarded.

  At all events, James remained unaware of the storm about to break around him. On 25 September 1725 he wrote blithely to Atterbury: ‘The Prince has left the women without concern, and will, I hope, now improve faster than he could have done amongst them.’67 To celebrate the event Murray was given the titular earldom of Dunbar.68 Dunbar did not long enjoy his triumph. Clementina at once struck back. She ordered her women, and Mrs Sheldon especially, not to release the prince into Dunbar’s tutorial care.69

  This immediately drew an angry response from James. He at once dismissed Mrs Sheldon, accusing her of meddling beyond her proper sphere.70 Clementina’s response to this was massive retaliation. Taking Mrs Sheldon and all her retinue with her, the queen sought sanctuary in the Ursuline convent. Since she held the Hays responsible for Sheldon’s dismissal, she informed James that she would return to the Palazzo Muti only when her bêtes noires were dismissed and Mrs Sheldon reinstated. Again James responded hamfistedly. Always at his worst when on his royal dignity, he wrote the queen a pompous letter which is, however, significant for the latent tensions it hints at in the Palazzo Muti.71 After referring patronisingly to ‘the weakness of your sex’, he moved on to the real nub of her grievance: that with the importation of Sheridan and Dunbar she too was being edged away from contact with her son:

  It is true I have given a general order that the governor and under-governor should never leave him for a moment and they always accompany him to my chamber, even though they don’t always do it to you, for example when you were dressing. The reason for this order is that he should not escape among the servants, where children learn nothing good.72

  After assuring her that it was never his intention to deprive her of sight of her son, James went on to draw a clear distinction between the courtesies he was prepared to offer his queen and his unyielding resolution to exercise his rights as paterfamilias; these included the irrevocable dismissal of Mrs Sheldon and his equally inflexible determination to keep on John Hay and his wife. He concluded by asking Clementina to admit that her dissatisfaction with life in the Palazzo Muti did not just begin when he took his son out of the hands of the women.73 As for Dunbar, he had chosen him after mature reflection and on the basis of a long acquaintance with his character and merits. He found it incredible that Clementina should object to him.74

  But Clementina was as adamant in her resolve as James in his. Neither side would capitulate; neither would compromise. The unsavoury row between Stuart king and queen became the sensation of Europe. Untold harm was done to the Jacobite cause. James’s envoys had laboured hard to build up an anti-Hanoverian alliance of Spain, Austria and Russia. All their hard work now lay in ruins. Stuart credibility was totally lost. The Jacobites never recovered from this crushing blow. The Whigs moved in for the kill. Their Roman agent Walton spewed out the most scurrilous propaganda, to the effect that the real reason for Clementina’s flight was that Mrs Hay was James’s mistress.75 This was nonsense, but some of the mud stuck.

  Meanwhile Cardinal Alberoni, ostensibly pro-Jacobite but really in the pay of the English, was instructed to do his utmost to make sure that Clementina stayed in the Ursuline convent. Small wonder that Sir Robert Walpole in Paris declared himself publicly one of Clementina’s supporters.76 English intelligence unaided could never have pulled off such a stunning anti-Jacobite coup as this family débâcle.

  James – looking for the beam in Paris and not seeing the mote in Rome – was still obsessed with the idea that the queen’s flight was some Machiavellian contrivance of his arch-enemy the earl of Mar, and quickly revealed himself to be out of his depth. He continued to take up a rigid posture, standing on his rights as paterfamilias and insisting on Clementina’s duty to obey him.

  The most the Jacobites could achieve was to limit the damage. The Pope was asked to keep Clementina in the nunnery at all costs so that her poisonous allegations could be contained within Rome.77 But at this stage sympathy was overwhelmingly running with Clementina. Alberoni had cleverly persuaded her to focus on the issue of the education of her son. He knew that the Pope would not support her against her husband on issues within the jurisdiction of a paterfamilias, such as Mrs Sheldon’s dismissal and the prince’s transfer from women to men. Nor would she be able to light much of a spark with her personal animosity towards the Hays. The trump card to play was the issue of religion. She should attempt to persuade the Pope that Charles Edward’s immortal soul was in danger, that it was James’s intention to bring him up as a Protestant.

  This idea was not of recent vintage and had long worried Catholics in Rome. Much of the disappointment among the Jesuits and zelanti over the failure of the Atterbury plot focused on this issue. The thinking was that unless James regained the throne before Charles Edward reached the age of reason, any Jacobite restoration might involve as a quid pro quo the prince’s education as a Protestant.78 The fact that Dunbar and John Hay were Protestants provided Alberoni with the ammunition he needed. He persuaded Clementina to concentrate on this issue in her protestations to the Pope.79

  The tactic worked beautifully. The Pope became deeply concerned about a Protestant Charles Edward. The Papal Inquisition was asked to investigate the extent of Anglican practices in the Palazzo Muti.80 The appearance on the scene of the Inquisition seriously alarmed James. One afternoon Charles Edward was just about to be taken out for his daily constitutional in a carriage when James issued orders that he was to be kept inside the Palazzo until further notice, for fear he would be kidnapped by the Inquisition and brought up in secret as a fanatical Catholic.81

  The perception of being under siege at the Palazzo Muti was not lessened when the Pope, acting as intermediary, gave his verdict on the affair. He informed James that if Mrs Sheldon were reinstated and the Hays dismissed, the queen would return forthwith. Meanwhile, as Sovereign Pontiff he shared the view that it was undesirable that Dunbar be put in charge of the prince’s education.

  James exploded with rage at this ‘impertinent’ intervention. Loftily he answered that he did not need the Pope’s advice or consent on matters concerning the private affairs of his family. His state of mind can be seen from the following letter to Atterbury in December 1725:

  It has been talked in town as if the Pope might take from me the pension he gave me, but neither threats of this kind, nor any want of regard the Pope might show me will induce me to alter my conduct and will only serve to afford me an opportunity of showing my subjects that nothing can make me alter a conduct which I think right or just.82

  It has to be remembered that this was the selfsame Pope who paid the Stuarts the signal honour of christening Henry and then rebaptising Charles Edward earlier the same year.83

  But for all his bluster, James was in an extremely precarious position. Not only had the Jacobites been turned into the laughing-stock of Europe and all their political hopes shattered; James could also count on no reliable allies in his struggle with Clementina. The queen was backed by the Pope, Alberoni and most of the cardinals. James had no one of countervailing weight. The problem was that even the Protestant Jacobites who might have supported him in a struggle against fanatical Catholicism had no time for Dunbar and the Hays. The ‘old Jacobites’ – Bishop Atterbury, the duke of Ormonde, Earl Marischal Keith – loathed and detested the Dunbar/Hay clique. While they supported the idea of a liberal and even Protestant education for the prince, they drew the line at entrusting it to Dunbar.

  There was therefore a lot of covert suppor
t among the Jacobites for Clementina. It was felt that although she had not necessarily chosen the right issue to fight on, her political antennae were sharp, and at bottom her instinct of distaste for Dunbar and the Hays was correct. The only comfort Atterbury could offer James was to assure him that in the event of his sudden death, while Charles Edward was still a minor, Clementina would have no rights to the Regency. While advising him not to put anything in legal form, he assured him that the laws of England allowed him absolute prerogative of declaring who the Regent should be. Nor could Clementina have any say in the prince’s education; that was a matter for the Council of Regents.84

  For the moment that was the only solace James could derive. What of his son and heir during the protracted crisis? We can only infer the nature of the trauma he must have suffered at the sudden departure of his mother, but it was sufficiently manifest even for James to worry about the effect the loss of his mother might be having on the boy85 – and this in an era when such insights would not be automatic.

  Certainly one result of his mother’s departure was a drastic change in the prince’s daily routine. The frequent audiences with the Pope came to an abrupt end.86 James still kept up appearances, attending the ceremony of the closing of the holy gates on Christmas Eve 1725 with his elder son,87 but the break with the Pope was now complete. In the Vatican fears about the anti-Catholic impact of Dunbar had already reached paranoid proportions. It was alleged that Dunbar had taught Charles Edward to laugh at the Angelus bell as an absurd superstition.88 Cardinal Gualterio went so far as to charge Dunbar with having taught the young prince by heart certain anti-Catholic incantations: ‘I’m sick of priests; monks are great buffoons; the Mass cost my grandfather three kingdoms’ was one alleged litany.89