Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  There is, moreover, a disturbing hint of ‘I told you so’ gloating in James’s response to the news that his son had fallen mildly ill at Naples at the end of August.46 Nor did the tension end there, but carried on into the period of what should have been the triumphal homecoming. Dunbar planned to set out on 12 September, resting a night at Mola before putting in a bruising day’s travel from 2 a.m. on the 13th until nightfall so as to get to Albano on the third night out from Naples.47 The original intention was that Liria would accompany them; he was now the 2nd duke of Berwick, following his father the marshal-duke’s death on campaign at Phillipsburg. Accordingly James went out to Albano on 14 September and pushed on to Genzano to meet the returning party.48 But there was no Berwick with them. The 2nd duke lay ill at Naples, in the first stages of the consumption that would carry him off four years later. This was unfortunate for Charles Edward, since Berwick was one man capable of getting James to see sense. Dunbar and Sheridan were both too far in the king’s debt to be capable of pointing out his insensitivity.

  The upshot was a pointed contrast between the prince as the idol of Naples and the delinquent son of James’s perception. Charles Edward returned home after being fêted and lionised in Naples, loaded down with honours. He brought back two fine horses, magnificently equipped, as a present from Don Carlos, plus gifts of diamonds and precious jewels.49 He was already both rich and famous. The Pope was so pleased with his protégé that there was talk of making the prince a cardinal.50 On the return from Gaeta the Pontiff provided a papal honour guard of fifty men to escort him.51 All James could see, however, was an unruly and competitive son who had failed to live by the rules his father had inculcated in him for so many years. The stress caused by the chasm between these two views of him was almost bound to cause the prince to erupt. It is therefore not surprising to read in a letter from James to Clementina who had dragged her pathetic invalid body out to Albano on 16 September to see her beloved son,52 very soon after the prince’s return, that their son had twice been ‘in penance’.53

  James continued his sniping campaign against his son in correspondence with O’Brien, pointedly contrasting him with Henry to the latter’s advantage.54 Nor did Henry help his own cause with his brother. To add to the wound caused by James’s obvious partiality for his second son, Henry rubbed salt in the wound himself. It seems that both princes had designs on a puppy that secretary Edgar had been given. Henry outwitted his brother by waiting in the inner room next to the chamber where Edgar was closeted with James, then waylaying the secretary and extracting a solemn promise from him that the puppy would be Henry’s.55

  Yet sibling rivalry and James’s insensitivity faded into insignificance alongside the crushing blow that fell next. The queen’s health had long given cause for concern. The first indication that she might be entering a critical new stage was the alarm sounded by James at the end of October, when he reported a cough, ominously at the start of winter.56 By the first week in November Clementina was already seriously ill.57 On the advice of her physicians, the queen stayed indoors for a month. It was now suspected that she was suffering from acute scurvy, but as ever Clementina would take no medical advice nor any preventive action.58 She was very weak and skeletal in appearance, but persisted in regarding her sickness as the judgment of God.59 It was in some anguish that James wrote on 20 December 1734:

  Her distemper is the scurvy, which affects one of her legs and her mouth and which she has been subject to these several years, but by neglecting of it is grown to a great height now, though she has no fever, but yet I reckon the doctors think her in a dangerous state and I know not well what remedies to apply, because she endeavours to conceal the ails and what she suffers, which is certainly a great deal.60

  At the beginning of January 1735 the queen contracted a fever.61 During the next week her state of health plummeted alarmingly. By 12 January she was described as ‘at the last extremity, though in all her senses’.62 The last rites were administered. Death was now regarded as inevitable. James spoke with resignation of seeing her for the last time.63 On 13 January Clementina said farewell to her children, exhorting them piteously never to desert the Catholic faith, not for all the kingdoms of the world. On the 14th she saw them again to repeat the same exhortation.64 After 15 January she was only intermittently conscious.65 Death came at 5 p.m. on 18 January 1735.66

  The Pope gave Clementina a royal funeral with full honours. Her body was first exposed in the royal robes in the parish church then carried in state to be buried at St Peter’s. Public prayers were said in Rome. The city mourned her passing. The lamentation was said to be as great as if the Pope himself had died.67 At St Peter’s the royal robes were taken off and the body put into the coffin in a Dominican habit. On Monday morning, 24 January 1735, a solemn Mass was sung. The body was then taken down and walled up in one of the vaults.68 On Wednesday the 26th a requiem was sung in SS Apostoli, attended by James and the two princes.

  There is no direct documentary evidence that enables us to gauge the impact on the prince of his mother’s death. Yet the absence of any reference to the behaviour problems James had been so exercised with before the queen’s death is in itself significant. It suggests that the prince’s grief was so profound that it could not manifest itself in normal lamentations or temper tantrums but had burrowed deep, waiting to surface as volcanic rage at a later date. A superficial reading of the Stuart papers would suggest that Charles Edward was unaffected by his mother’s death, that if anything his behaviour and attitude improved.69 Yet all indirect inferences suggest that it was a terrible blow, as might naturally be expected.

  If Charles Edward’s personality was warped by his relationship with his mother, so that he was ever afterwards consumed by guilt and depression, this was unfortunately not the only crippling legacy of his mother’s early death. There are strong grounds for thinking that the prince’s later notorious difficulties in forming satisfactory lasting relationships with women can also be traced to the ‘disaster’ of his mother’s death. Modern psychoanalytical studies show Oedipal conflicts reaching a peak at two points: the age of five and at adolescence, when there is a renewed surge of genital desire, and when the original choice of mother as sex object threatens to become conscious once more.70 In other words, the key moments for Charles Edward’s heterosexual development were also the ones of greatest trauma. On his fifth birthday his mother had just fled to the Convent of St Cecilia. Immediately following his fourteenth birthday she died. One does not need to labour the point.

  Yet another consequence of his mother’s death might have been the prince’s later contempt for religion. It would not be altogether surprising if Charles Edward had developed an aversion to Christianity. Not only did it hold in thrall his father and brother (accounting in the prince’s eyes for much of what was wrong with them), the near-psychotic mania induced by the saints of the Catholic Church (especially Francis de Sales) had also been instrumental in sending his mother to the tomb. The association of ideas would not have been helped, either, by James’s insistence, immediately after Clementina’s death, that the prince should undergo the full rigour of the Lenten fasts once more.71

  In the years 1735–6 these were psychological potentialities insidiously dormant. At the superficial level the prince was doing well in both the mental and physical spheres. He continued to impress visitors to Rome, such as the Scottish Jacobite poet Allan Ramsay who saw him in the Villa Ludovici in 1736.72 Dunbar’s hopes that his charge’s talent for design might lead him on to geometry and mathematics seem to have been fulfilled. During 1735 the prince made great strides in this area.73 An order for a whole new set of mathematical instruments went out from the Palazzo Muti in March 1736.74 In September 1735 Dunbar reported that in nine lessons the prince had mastered the first book of Euclid.75 Yet Dunbar’s continuing ill-health itself posed a question mark against the prince’s future. His geometry lessons were assigned to a monk called Father Rovillas. There was talk of the prince’s being
placed in the Clementi college to study under the Abbé Severa, a protégé of the duke of Berwick.76

  Even more spectacular progress was made in the sphere of physical endeavour. The prince was consciously trying to turn himself into a warrior, taking constant exercise and revealing remarkable stamina.77 His horsemanship and eye for a horse were admired even by his enemies. As part of his warrior’s training he went to particular lengths to get his steeds used to the sound of gunfire.78 He was already by common consent a crack shot and a mighty hunter, absenting himself from home for days on end on the track of quail and other small game.79 He was visibly growing stonger and taller. Whatever misgivings there might be about his intellectual progress, there were no worries on the score of health and physique.80 His appetite for the chase was insatiable: the tallies of hares, partridges and other birds he bagged seemed to increase in geometrical progression.81

  Yet neither the physical nor intellectual development satisfied James, who continued to carp at his son.82 Even Edgar, usually an admirer of the prince, appears to have caught the bug from his master on occasions, denying him even some of the attributes the king grudgingly conceded him. After describing Henry as more composed and thoughtful than his brother, he comments: ‘The Prince is very strong and healthful, has a fine presence and countenance, but is not tall for his age.’83

  To offset these disadvantages, the prince was still Berwick’s cynosure and the favourite son of the Pope, whose financial generosity to him attracted widespread comment.84 Berwick’s main concern now was to find another campaign in which his beloved protégé could shine again as brightly as at Gaeta. Much of Jacobite diplomatic correspondence after Gaeta and until 1737 is concerned with finding a venue where the prince could give another illustrious performance. At first James was determined that his son would campaign again in 1735.85 All Europe had been mightily impressed by the prince’s exploits. Without doubt Gaeta had been a great propaganda coup, so successful indeed that the Hanoverians were said to be sending the duke of Cumberland (a few months younger than Charles Edward) on a voyage by warship so that he could emulate at sea what his Stuart rival had achieved on land.86 James imagined the next step might be a French campaign, possibly again under Berwick’s tutelage. But France quickly showed the way the wind was blowing in Versailles by forbidding any signs of mourning by French Jacobites on Clementina’s death.87 If any doubt remained of French hostility, the ministers made the point explicit to O’Brien the following month.88

  Even Spain was drawing in its horns. Here the problem was not just the rapport being built up between Foreign Minister Patiño and British envoy Keene, but a personal feud between Patiño and Berwick.89 Despite James’s confident assurances that Spain would soon agree to another campaign for his son, Patiño delayed unconscionably in replying to his overtures.90 After stalling shamelessly for nearly a year – and after James had made a second formal application for his son to accompany Spanish troops on their projected conquest of Lombardy – Patiño flatly turned down the request.91

  Yet James was determined that the memory of Gaeta should not be allowed to fade. This was not easy to accomplish. Berwick’s overtures in Spain on behalf of the Stuarts came to nothing.

  James turned his attention to the Imperial domains and beyond. He had long been brooding on the need to get his sons naturalised as Polish citizens, so that they could inherit without let or hindrance the considerable wealth of the Sobieskis from their grandfather who now hovered near death.92 James therefore instructed O’Rourke, his agent at Vienna, to secure the Emperor’s permission for a visit incognito by Charles Edward to his ailing grandfather.93 O’Rourke advised him that because of pressure from the English, it was most unlikely that the Emperor would give written permission for such a visit, but would turn a blind eye if the prince came into his dominions incognito. However, he advised James to get the French to permit the prince to travel through their country to Flanders. If the French agreed, this would set a valuable precedent. Charles Edward could then go ‘island hopping’ through the Electorates of Bavaria, Cologne and the Palatine on his way to the Empire, increasing his prestige as he went.94 But, as James accurately saw, this whole ambitious scheme depended on Charles Edward’s being allowed into Austrian Flanders openly. This was even less likely than a permit for a visit to Vienna, since the Netherlands were traditionally an area of the greatest military sensitivity in English eyes.95

  While O’Rourke negotiated at Vienna, James proposed sending his son on a tour of northern Italy. If Austrian permission was given, Charles would then proceed to Poland. But there was something essentially negative in the way he spoke about his son that, once again, hints at the tension between them:

  It is certain parents cannot take too much care to preserve their children from all vice and ill company, but with those I should propose to send with him, and his being to remain but a very short time anywhere except with his grandfather, I own I think I may be as easy in that respect during the few months he may be away as if he were actually under my eye. Besides that, he is, I believe, hitherto very innocent and extreme backwards in some respects for his age, though otherwise strong and healthy and very lively. He does not want either good natural parts necessary for his improvement, but has a great reluctancy to application and is a little childish, as sometimes happens at his age, so that a little motion and travelling will be of little inconvenience by way of interrupting his studies and will, I hope, wean him from little childish amusements and help to make him more manly.96

  Yet even before Charles Edward set out on his Italian trip, it was obvious that neither France nor the Emperor would allow him on their territory.97 Given that the tour was now actually of minimal practical importance, it was vital to extract the last ounce of propaganda value from it. James intended to prove that the House of Stuart was no broken reed and that in Charles Edward it had its most formidable champion yet.

  4

  ‘The breath of kings’

  (1737–41)

  THE STUART ENTOURAGE cut a dash on the road to Loreto, which surprised those who imagined the Jacobite court to be decrepit and impoverished.1 The truth was that the prince had received money for his journey from two sources. The first was the Pope. At an audience with his protégé on 24 April 1737 Clement XII gave him a sufficient sum to cover the expenses of his trip.2 The second was from James’s emergency store of 50,000 crowns (£12,500 approx.) on deposit with Belloni the banker.3 This was a sum sufficient to cover pay and expenses (including horses, livery, bedding, linen and plate) in the event the prince was permitted to make a campaign against the Turks in Hungary.4 James still obstinately clung to the belief that the Emperor would relent and receive Charles Edward in his dominions; in which case he would go straight on from Venice to Vienna.

  The prince’s party crossed the Appennines, still within the papal states, and arrived at Loreto shortly after three o’clock on the afternoon of 1 May. Cardinal Massei had invited the prince to dine with him next day; but his palace was three hours’ ride out of town, so that Thursday 2 May was wholly taken up with that excursion.5 They started early on the 3rd, hoping to get to Pesaro by dinner (i.e. lunch) time. They succeeded and were given dinner by Monsignor Lanti. That evening there was a poetry-reading contest or accademia at which various poetasters recited their compositions in praise of the prince.6 There followed the performance of a tragedy, which lasted until 1 a.m., followed by a lavish supper (‘a table with forty covers in the form of a St Andrew’s cross’). At this supper the prince sat alone, surrounded by the fashionable ladies of the town.7

  The 4th of May saw another hard day’s travel. They had hoped to get to Bologna by 11 p.m. that night, but delays on the road meant that they did not get in before 1 a.m. on the 5th. The whole of the next day was spent in Bologna. In the evening the prince attended a ball at the Palazzo Fibbia and danced until 11 p.m. Dunbar was able to score points off the Catholic clergy who had given him so much trouble in the past by pointing out to James that neith
er of the Bolognese cardinals called on the prince. When the more well-disposed of the two, Prospero Lambertini (the future Pope Benedict. XIV) tried to attend the ball in order to have an informal word with Charles, Dunbar managed to head him off (he was not, he claimed, going to allow Lambertini to apply by the back door for what he had been refused at the front).8

  The late-night frolicking at the ball delayed the party’s departure next morning. In addition, the prince insisted on making a tour of the walls of Modena, to show his appreciation of a compliment sent him by the Princess of Modena.9 After sixteen hours on the road in driving rain, they arrived (again at 1 a.m.) at Parma, where the duchess had left the town gates open for him. One of her men was on hand to convey the prince by coach to the same convent where his father had stayed nine years before.