It may well have been the receipt of the shocking missive above, showing the extent of the prince’s degeneration, that impelled Henry to try to patch up relations between his brother and the Pope. After conferring with Charles at Frascati in April, Henry implemented his plan.31 In May 1767 Clement XIII and Charles Edward at last came face to face. On the evening of Saturday 9 May the Pope received the prince in private audience. Charles was supposed to be a private nobleman but went to the meeting quite openly, making no attempt at disguise.32
Clement had his own devices for putting the prince in his place. While Henry, as Cardinal York, was admitted at once to the papal chambers, Charles was kept waiting and then called for as ‘the brother of Cardinal York’.33 On entering the chamber, the prince was obliged to kneel and kiss the Pope’s foot and to remain kneeling until the Pontiff commanded him to rise.34 Recalling his mirth about the Pope’s toe in the ’45, we can see how low (literally) the prince had now come. This was reality. What he had refused a Pope as child was now forced from him as a middle-aged man.
An audience of a quarter of an hour ensued, with Henry working hard as go-between. The prince repeated his claims; the Pope reiterated that he could live in Rome on a proper footing only if he relinquished them. The prince in reply tried bluster. He said that Culloden had done him the sort of damage alongside which papal injustices were a mere trifle.35 Both the Pope and the prince expressed themselves satisfied with the interview. Henry, however, complained privately of his brother’s ‘indocility and most singular way of thinking and arguing’.36
Henry no more understood his brother than James had. He could not cope with the violent mood swings, the rapid oscillation between charm and anger. It was characteristic of the prince to be angry with someone, then be charming and courteous to their face, then revert to rage. This was not insincerity or hypocrisy. The prince was a hopeless diplomat. He could not be firm with people while not alienating them. He had two modes: wit and charm, designed to cajole the opposition; and violent anger if such cajolery failed.
In July Henry offered to keep Charles Edward a place in St Peter’s at his side, to watch the Pope’s canonisation ceremonies. The prince declined; ‘I think it improper for me to be present at any of the Pope’s ceremonies until His Holiness shall do me the justice to receive me with all these distinctions that are due to me.’37
He proceeded to lay claim again to his father’s prerogative of nominating cardinals.38 Since 1767 was the year of the expulsion of the Jesuits from their utopia in the Paraguayan reductions, the Society of Jesus, with its own scores to settle with Clement XIII, were happy to support the prince. So too were the Benedictines. Their procurator in Rome castigated the head of the order for failing to give Charles Edward his proper title of Charles III.39
The ordeal continued. The prince spent a dreadful autumn at Albano in alcoholic despair, and with a protracted cold.40 Henry wrung his hands over his brother’s drinking but could see no light on the horizon until Clement XIII was dead.41
The year 1768 saw a further decline in the prince’s fortunes. This time the occasion was the collapse of the miniature court he had installed around him. Andrew Lumisden had long been seeking an honourable exit from the prince’s service. Under James he had been able to provide relief for many distressed Scottish Jacobites. Under Charles, the parlous state of finances at the Palazzo Muti made this impossible and removed Lumisden’s principal motive for staying on.42 But it was difficult to resign without seeming to abandon the prince – he had few enough ‘gentlemen’ around him as it was.43
So for three years Lumisden soldiered on beneath a crushing burden of duties. A letter to his sister in late 1766 reveals both his own despair and the futility of the prince’s existence:
Almost from break of day to midnight I am employed about the king [sic]. Besides serving him as his secretary, I am obliged to attend him as a gentleman of the bedchamber when he goes abroad, both morning and evening, and after dinner and supper I retire with him into his closet. Add to this the time we sit at the table, and you will see I have not a moment to myself. I am never in my apartment but either to sleep or write. But this is not all. We have been five of the nine months since the king’s coming into Italy either at Albano or other parts of the country, a’ shooting, and which kind of wandering life is more likely to increase than diminish.… I have lived for many years in a sort of bondage; but I may name these past months a mere slavery. Yet I readily submit to every inconvenience, when honour and duty call on me to do so.44
The interdiction on polite company at the Palazzo Muti added to the strain. Moreover, it was not unknown for the prince to threaten his staff with physical violence when drunk.45 All this for just twenty crowns (five pounds) a month plus board and lodging for Lumisden and the other ‘gentlemen’. It was very quickly too much for Lachlan Mackintosh. But his fate showed what could happen to those who crossed the prince. Mackintosh threw up his post in 1767 but the prince promptly stopped his pension. Unable to eke out a living in France, Mackintosh crawled meekly back to Rome, cap in hand. The prince refused to readmit him to his service.46
The strains in the Palazzo Muti came to a head in December 1768. Apart from a visit to Viterbo early that year, the prince had done little but drink.47 His supporters vainly tried to justify his alcoholism. Bishop Gordon in Scotland put it like this:
It was true indeed that the king had been in use for some time past to call frequently for t’other glass of wine at dinner and supper, not from any liking to liquor, but like one absent in mind when he met things that vexed him, as was too often the case.48
But Lumisden and the others close to him knew that this was a facile description of a very serious problem.
The prince was also bothered with an ominous swelling on the neck.49 His drunken rages increased in intensity. Finally, on 14 December 1768, in a state of advanced intoxication, he ordered Lumisden and the other courtiers to accompany him to the theatre to hear an oratorio. To a man they refused. Almost expiring with fury, the prince dismissed them on the spot.50
Next morning he had sobered up and he regretted his hasty action. But it was already too late. He had provided Lumisden and the others with the pretext they had been looking for. In vain the prince called on Henry to get them to change their minds. Henry agreed with Lumisden that the prince was now impossible. Privately, he urged the dismissed gentlemen not to return to the prince’s service. He even urged the valet John Stewart and the Rev. Mr Wagstaffe, who were not involved in the disgraceful dismissal scene, to quit his brother’s employ. They, however, declined, for reasons that remain obscure. The places of Lumisden, Urquhart and Hay were taken by Italians.51
The prince retaliated for the ‘insolence’ of the dismissed trio by calling for their mail at the Roman post office, opening it and reading it. Henry was deeply shocked at this behaviour.52 Lesser men might have been tempted to reveal all they knew to Hanoverian spymasters, but Lumisden refused even to censure the prince to the Jacobite inner circle. He accepted his sister’s argument that excessive stress provided a reason, if not a justification, for the prince’s behaviour. Lumisden refused to discuss his master’s outrageous conduct even with Jacobite intimates.53 Those who claim that the allegedly great and good Lord Marischal had no option but to respond to Charles Edward the way he did should ponder the example of the genuinely magnanimous Andrew Lumisden.
One beneficial, albeit short-term, consequence of the Lumisden débâcle was that the prince made an effort to give up drinking. Doubtless this accounted for the physical description the Scottish non-juring bishop Gordon was able to give of him in 1769:
Not a blot, not so much as a pimple was in his face, though maliciously given out by some as if it were all over blotted; but he is jolly and plump, though not to excess, being still agile and fit for undergoing toil.54
But the received opinion was that the loss of his Scottish courtiers and their replacement by Italians was bad propaganda for the prince, as it seemed t
o suggest he was embroiled even more tightly in the coils of Rome. In 1771 Edmund Burke, while denying his own Jacobitism, pointed to the absurdity of being attached to a person ‘when he is deserted by the whole world and by himself, when he has, as I am told, not so much as a single Scotch, English or Irish footman about him’.55
At long last, some relief was promised in 1769. The much-hoped for event transpired. Clement XIII, scourge of Charles Edward, died in April. The prince nervously awaited the election of his successor, knowing that this was probably his last chance of settling in Rome on anything like a civilised basis.56 His hopes were pinned on Cardinal Stoppani, the man who had spoken out for him in the 1766 conclave.57 But his strategy was unusually cautious. He advised Henry not to push the new Pope, whoever he was, to decide immediately on acknowledging him as Charles III; the best policy was to lead up to it gradually. The new Pontiff should be asked whether in all conscience he could recognise a usurper and whether Clement XIII’s actions had not brought Catholicism into dispute. Most of all, Henry should stress that it was only the prince’s steadfast embrace of Catholicism that had lost him the throne in 1745–6.58 It is difficult to know whether the last point was conscious humbug or self-delusion.
All the prince’s hopes for recognition were soon dashed. The new Pope, ex-cardinal Ganganelli, a Franciscan and the only member of the regular clergy in the Sacred College, had his hands full with the Jesuit crisis. He had no wish to introduce further complications into the international diplomacy of the Vatican by recognising a Stuart pretender.59 Henry promised to do what he could, while stressing to his brother the almost insuperable obstacle posed by the (now anti-Stuart) representations of France and Spain. His advice to Charles was to stay out of Rome in the strictest incognito until the dust had settled.60
The prince reacted with a mixture of incredulity and self-pity.61 The one positive statement he made was to ask for the earliest possible audience with the new Pope. The request was granted in mid-June 1769. The contrast with his previous papal audience was marked. Although certain Jacobites had affected to despise this jumped-up Franciscan who now bore St Peter’s keys,62 the prince found himself treated with every courtesy by Clement XIV. The Pope received him standing and would not permit Charles to kiss his foot.63 After embracing him with affection, Clement reminded him of the time when he had served James as chaplain.
The Pope remained standing while he explained his position. He personally would like nothing more than to restore the prince to the titles and dignities formerly enjoyed by his father. But in matters of high politics, collegiate rule was the norm. There was the continuing crisis with the Jesuits, pressure from France and Spain, and the position of Catholics in England to consider.64
For once the tables were turned. The charmer was himself charmed. The prince agreed to Clement’s suggestion that he appear freely in Roman society under an assumed name. After three years of banging his head against a wall, and after the sincere blandishments of the new Pope, Charles accepted that this was one struggle he could never win. It was agreed that the prince would appear openly in Rome as Baron Renfrew; the Vatican would attempt to make straight the social ways.65
But the prince soon found the taste of his new-found liberty turning to ashes. After a long period as a recluse, he found social engagements taxing. For the past three years he had leaned heavily on Henry, but now pastoral duties increasingly called Cardinal York out of Rome to his seat at Frascati. The prince decided to leave Rome for a while. In August 1769 he set out for Viterbo to take the waters.
At Viterbo he bathed, relaxed, ate a sensible diet and generally followed the directions of his surgeon Dr Martelli: ‘I find him to be a sensible man and not a sophistical [sic] Aesculapius.’66 In addition, the nobility of Viterbo treated him hospitably and there was a good opera season in progress. The prince stayed on through the autumn. He informed Abbé Gordon that he had taken a fixed and unalterable resolution not to answer letters from his old contacts, even those he had a high regard for.67 It was in vain that John Holker and others wrote to him about the agitated state of England after the Wilkes disturbances, which they somehow, dimly, thought might help the Stuart cause. The prince was now devoting himself to pleasure. If anyone impaired this pleasure by their insolence – like the Sgr Carletti who sat beside him unbidden at the duchess of Lanti’s assembly – he had powerful friends like Cardinal Marefoschi to whom he could appeal.68
The sojourn at Viterbo seemed to reanimate the prince. There was a temporary return of his old energies, and 1770 saw him pushing forward a number of projects. As his fiftieth birthday approached, he began seriously to think about marriage. His concern was neither dynastic nor prudential. More mundane considerations weighed: the prince was once again short of money.69
Wanting a moneyed wife was one thing; obtaining the right kind of match quite another. Charles Edward’s first choice, the daughter of the duc d’Orléans, turned out to be already engaged to the duc de Bourbon.70 The prince instructed his contact in Paris, the duc de Fitzjames, to take discreet soundings concerning Marie-Anne, daughter of the late Prince Frédéric de Deux Parts, who was now approaching her seventeenth birthday.71 After securing French backing for the match, Fitzjames sent his agent to Germany to ask for the princess’s hand. The agent was left dangling, and eventually the suit died of inanition.72 The prince began to regret that he had not been able to compass a marriage with the daughter of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, back in 1749.73
At the same time as his marriage overtures (and not unconnected with them) the prince looked around for fresh sources of income. A composition of the so-called ‘Fund of Ohlau’ had never been arrived at, largely because of the Byzantine complexities arising from negotiations with the Austrian and Polish courts and the counter-claims of the Bouillon family. Now, in a fresh attempt to cut the Gordian knot, the prince sent his kinswoman Princess Jablonowska to treat with the Bouillons in Paris. Since the princess was sister-in-law to the duchess of Bouillon, she seemed an entirely suitable mediatrix.74
The new sense of momentum the prince was generating also found a physical expression. On his return to Rome from Viterbo he found he could not settle. Accordingly, in July 1770 he set out for a prolonged tour of Tuscany, intending to take in the baths at Pisa en route.75
The trip started badly. Though a papal state, Bologna failed to welcome the prince. Instead, the Bolognese senate sent him an insulting brush-off, described by Henry as ‘preposterous and, as Your Majesty justly observes, very Hibernian’.76
Charles Edward could not wait to shake the dust of Bologna off his feet. He proceeded to Florence, calling first at Arezzo and the fair at Sinigaglia. At Sinigaglia he was said to have lurched about the thronged streets, roaring drunk in broad daylight.77
Florence was the home of Sir Horace Mann. The elderly diplomat vainly tried to browbeat the authorities into refusing to receive the prince.78 Yet Florentine reception of Charles Edward was cool. He cut a figure at the casino and the theatre, wearing the Garter and with the Cross of St Andrew at his buttonhole. As usual he was a hit with the ladies.79 But his arrival did at least give Mann the opportunity to take detailed notes on the Italian staff that had replaced Lumisden, Hay and Urquhart in 1768. The two principals were the count Spada and the count Vegha, who were accompanied by two Roman gentlemen, one of them styled ‘master of horse’.80
The prince made a point of finding out whether Horace Mann was to be present before attending a concert at the house of the ambassador from Lucca.81 Then he went on to Leghorn before settling at Pisa for the waters. In Pisa he astonished onlookers by touching for the King’s Evil.82 The waters agreed with him. He reported on 27 August that the spa had produced an amazing effect in such a short time.83
From Pisa he proceeded to Lucca and Gricciano.84 On his return to Florence, Mann scored a petty triumph when Charles Hadfield’s English Inn refused to take Charles Edward’s party in for fear of embarrassing the English guests. ‘Foxes have holes and the birds o
f the air have nests, but I find the son of the Pretender could not find a place to lay his head in Florence,’ jeered Mann’s agent.85 Never one to minimise his imagined achievements, Mann invented a story that the crowds surrounding the prince in Florence were less on his return visit. Not even the obvious rejoinder that there was no visible sign of this floored Mann; the Pretender, he claimed, was so thick-skinned that it was impossible to snub him.86
What Mann did not report to his superiors in London was that his diplomacy in Florence had largely been a failure. The chief Florentine minister Count Neri had shown Charles Edward such lavish courtesy that he was reprimanded by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in consequence.87
The prince remained in Florence until mid-October 1770. He then made a leisurely journey back to Rome, stopping again at the waters of Viterbo.88 He arrived back in the Eternal City at the end of November.89
The six-month period from November 1770 is another ‘black hole’ in the prince’s biography, or at least nearly so. All the evidence in this period points to an overall pattern of reclusive depression.90 Yet it is evident that, with the new papal deal, the prince had already made some useful social contacts. In January 1771 the English traveller Lady Anne Miller was at the duchess of Bracciano’s salon when ‘Il Re’ was announced.91 Charles Edward then appeared, dressed in a scarlet coat, laced with broad gold lace. From his coat hung the blue riband, from which in turn was suspended an antique cameo as large as a woman’s hand. To make his status as ‘king’ unmistakable to the English present, he wore the same garter, with the same motto, as that used by the ‘true’ order of St George in England.
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Page 64
