The duchess confided to Lady Anne that it was the Pope’s wish that no English travellers should speak to the prince and thus wreck the Vatican’s tentative opening to the Court of St James. Lady Miller rightly decided that this was a fatuous interdiction. She made conversation with Charles, he asked her to speak in English, got to his feet when she left, and wished her goodnight.
A few nights later the two of them met at Princess Palestrina’s, where the prince taught Lady Miller the card game tarocchi. Charles was evidently in good form that night, even finding time to make a joke at his own expense while he burlesqued Hanoverian clichés. Showing Lady Miller the tarocchi cards, he pointed to one and identified the figure as the Pope; then a second as the devil. With a laugh he turned to her. ‘There is only one of the trio missing now and you know who that should be.’92 The famous wit and charm could still be exercised when Charles wanted to turn it on.
Since we are now about to accompany the prince on a decade of steep decline, Lady Anne’s description can serve as a fitting coda to his bachelor years. At the age of fifty, this is the physical picture the prince presented:
He is naturally above the middle size but stoops excessively; he appears bloated and red in the face, his countenance heavy and sleepy, which is attributed to his having given into excess of drinking; but when a young man he must have been esteemed handsome. His complexion is of the fair tint, his eyes blue, his hair light brown, and the contour of his face a long oval; he is by no means thin, has a noble presence and a graceful manner; … upon the whole he has a melancholic, mortified appearance.93
He was soon to have even more reason for his melancholia.
35
A Royal Marriage
(1771–4)
FROM THE MOMENT of his return to Rome in late 1770, the prince was actively planning his marriage. He sent Lord Caryll to Paris to begin negotiations with the French.1 The prince’s strategy was twofold. In the first place, he wanted a satisfactory financial settlement to arrest the pecuniary disorder in his own household. Dunbar’s confused will (he died in 1770), leaving a legacy to Henry and the reversion of certain salt-mine revenues to Charles Edward, further compounded the chaos caused by the continuing squabbles over the Sobieski fortune and (later) the confusion resultant on the death of the banker Waters.2 What the prince wanted from France, therefore, was a large, guaranteed annual subsidy.3 Married with the encouragement of Louis XV, he then hoped to return to Rome with an unanswerable demand that the Vatican give him all the titles and honours granted to his father. Papal recognition was thus the second aim of his marriage.4
The first stage in the negotiations was entrusted to Lord Caryll. Born in 1716, Caryll first met Charles Edward at Gravelines in 1744 during the abortive invasion of England. An enthusiast ever since, in 1772 he was formally appointed to the position of secretary left vacant by Andrew Lumisden.5
Caryll began by talking to the duc de Noailles. Louis XV, smarting under the signal reverses of the Seven Years’ War, still saw some advantages in maintaining the Stuarts as a gadfly on the English flank. If the Stuart prince produced heirs, the dynastic issue could be prolonged into the nineteenth century.
Before 1770 there had been a major snag. Choiseul, Britain’s archenemy, who plotted tirelessly to redress the humiliations of the Seven Years’ War, was also the prince’s greatest critic at Versailles. His dismissal in 1770 cleared the way for French support for a Stuart marriage. Unfortunately, in the short-term his removal after eleven years at the helm increased political uncertainty, so that no firm decisions on great policy issues were being taken.6
After speaking to Noailles, Caryll enlisted the help of the duc de Fitzjames to get a passport for the prince. Fitzjames applied for one to the duc d’Aiguillon in the name of Douglas. After consulting Louis XV, d’Aiguillon replied that none was necessary. In their common interest, however, the prince should come to Paris in the greatest incognito.7
Meanwhile Fitzjames went ahead with the by no means subsidiary task of finding a suitable bride for Charles Edward. The prince had specified a German princess. This was designed as a means of keeping open the line to Protestantism which his residence in Rome might seem to have severed.8
Before his journey to Paris had been cleared with Versailles, the prince set out for Tuscany. His object was to disarm the suspicion that might arise if he left Rome suddenly. He gave out that he was travelling north to take the waters at Pisa.9
He left Rome in May 1771 and stayed two months in Pisa.10 At the beginning of August he transferred to Siena.11 It was there that Fitzjames’s ‘no passport needed’ message reached him. On 17 August at 3 p.m., he suddenly left Siena, using the name of Stonor, Henry’s private secretary.12 Just outside the city walls a two-wheeled Italian post-chaise was waiting for him. Quickly the prince changed his clothes and put on a light round wig. To increase the confusion, when the post-chaise passed the Roman gate at Florence at midnight, he gave his name as Smith.13
By now Horace Mann’s spies were on his trail. They followed him to Bologna, where they reported him keeping a handkerchief over his mouth to avoid recognition while the horses were changed. Then they tracked him to Modena. But at the foot of the Alps Mann’s agents lost sight of him.14
The consternation aroused by the prince’s disappearance in northern Italy testifies to the continuing power of his reputation and the morbid fear of him still entertained by the English government. Twenty-five years on the memory of Derby had still not evaporated. Those who had lived through Black Friday never really recovered from the shock. A drunkard the prince might be, but he was still considered a more dangerous enemy than a dozen sober Jameses.15
Speculation about the prince’s destination became intense. The Pope himself was so anxious to know where Charles Edward was headed that he sent Secretary of State Cardinal Pallavicini to Henry, as if on a casual visit, to find out.16 The more jittery English observers thought that his secret departure from Siena perhaps presaged a second coming in the Highlands.17
More sober analysts plumped for Poland. In 1771 the Polish confederation of Lithuania, Great Poland and Bar was opposing Stanislas II and was being secretly encouraged by France to declare the Polish throne vacant and expel the Russians. This ‘confederacy of Bar’ also had a religious dimension: it opposed the attempts of the ‘dissidents’ (Orthodox Christians and Protestants) to secure religious toleration in Poland.18 The consensus of opinion was that Charles Edward was going to Poland to head the Confederates; less plausibly, it was also rumoured that he would join the dissidents.19 Events that had a purely personal significance – such as Charles Edward’s conferences with Princess Jablonowska in 1770 about the Sobieski money – were now reinterpreted sinisterly, as some grand Polish design.20 Madame du Deffand’s theory was that all the to-ing and fro-ing between d’Aiguillon and the Fitzjameses was to do with securing for the prince a Polish commission from Louis XV.21 The Polish story became so well entrenched that the Polish minister at Rome (marquis Tommaso Antici) actually sent an express to Warsaw to warn the government that ‘the Pretender’ was on his way there.22
Reality soon broke through to smother all these fantasies. On the first day of September 1771 the prince arrived in Paris. He lodged at the Hôtel de Brunswick, rue des Prouvaines, near the rue St Honoré, under the name of Mr Douglas.23 His arrival caught the Fitzjameses by surprise. The duke and marquis had been at Versailles and were obliged to ‘wait on’ the prince still in their country dress – a sufficiently serious breach of etiquette under the Ancien Régime for apologies to be necessary.24
Protocol also came to the fore in another sense. Since the prince was incognito, he could see no one but the Fitzjameses. All his negotiations with Louis XV were through the medium of the duc de Fitzjames (on his side) and the duc d’Aiguillon (representing the French king).25
The prince explained that he wanted French sanction for his marriage. It was imperative that the subsidies paid to James by Versailles, and discontinued on his dea
th, be revived, so that he could make a credible marriage. In connection with the marriage itself, he asked Louis’s permission to use the good offices of an Irish colonel in the French service.26
Louis XV replied that the marriage was agreeable to him, that he would settle all questions relating to passports and the furlough of the Irish officer concerned, and that he would settle the financial question with the duc de Fitzjames. The French king added that he would like to see similar subsidies forthcoming from Spain and the Vatican.27
Well satisfied, the prince employed Colonel Edmund Ryan of Berwick’s foot regiment to make personal appearances at the various German courts to press his marriage suit.28 The duc de Fitzjames would remain as the anchor in Paris while Charles Edward would take his son the marquis with him to Rome as liaison officer. The prince was pleased with himself. He wrote to his brother and to his great ally Cardinal Marefoschi of Macerata that he had secured all his aims in France. Then he gave Ryan a written power in his name to treat for the hand of the seventeen-year-old Marie-Louise Ferdinand, daughter of the Prince of Salm-Kyrbourg.29
In mid-September the prince left Paris for Italy, but not before he had revealed the other half of his strategy. He wanted to be treated like his father and have the incognito of Baron Renfrew discarded. Accordingly, he wanted Versailles to bring pressure on the Vatican, stressing French approval of the marriage and their renewal of a financial subsidy to the Stuarts.30
The prince returned to Rome with Caryll and Fitzjames. On the way back he ran into the black sheep of the Hanoverian family on the streets of Genoa. The duke of Gloucester had been virtually banished from England for his marriage to the dowager countess Waldegrave. He now spent much of his time wandering around Italy. The two men bowed graciously to each other and passed on.31
The prince spent four days with Caryll and Fitzjames at Pisa, taking the waters.32 The rest of the journey was uneventful, except for a difficult passage of the flooded river Serchio near Pisa.33 Charles Edward and party entered Rome on 12 October.34
The news he received there was a severe disappointment. His parting shot in Paris had been a bad miscalculation. Once the French realised that the prince intended to inveigle them into a wrangle with the Pope about recognising him as ‘Charles III’, they started to backpedal on the question of a subsidy for the marriage.35 The record is cloudy at this point, but the inference is that the prince, in a drunken rage, railed at the marquis de Fitzjames for having misled him.36 Not wishing to stay any longer in the alcoholic miasma of the Palazzo Muti, the marquis offered to return to Paris to sort out the confusion.37 But if the prince hoped for anything from his kinsman, it was a forlorn hope. Almost the first letter Fitzjames wrote on his return to Paris was to inform Charles that the negotiations for the hand of the Princess of Salm-Kyrbourg had foundered.38 This was a particular humiliation for the prince since, ever one to jump the gun, he had already announced his coming nuptials with this lady to the kings of France and Spain.39
Attention now switched to the Princess of Salm’s first cousin Louise of Stolberg.40 This was something of a soft option. So many marriage proposals had aborted that this time Ryan and Fitzjames were determined to net their catch. Louise’s father was dead and she was one of four daughters in a family of reduced and, by aristocratic standards, straitened circumstances. The obstacles hitherto encountered with prima donna princesses were not likely to obtain this time.41
At this point the duc de Fitzjames took one of his convenient holidays. This was his invariable practice when under any kind of pressure. The prince’s affairs were left to his son and Colonel Ryan. At the end of December 1771 Ryan arrived in Paris from Brussels with the news that his suit for the eldest Stolberg daughter had been successful.42
The duc de Fitzjames had shrewdly chosen his moment to exit. It fell to his son to write to Rome with exhaustive details of the Ryan negotiations. The Princess of Stolberg, senior, it turned out, had been so keen to marry off her girls that she offered the prince a choice of two: Louise, the eldest; and the third daughter, aged fifteen, described as ‘big with a pleasant face’. The second girl was already married, and the fourth, of delicate health, was completing her education in a convent. Both on grounds of pulchritude and good sense Ryan and Fitzjames opted for Louise. She accepted the proposal without any hesitation or equivocation. After the vacillations and tergiversations experienced with other princesses, this matter-of-factness surprised Fitzjames.43 Neither he nor the prince had any idea that they were dealing with a young woman of ruthless determination, shrewd and cunning beyond her eighteen years. The prospect of being ‘a queen without a crown’ did not disturb her. She was mature beyond her years, already a circumspect pragmatist.44
It remained to tie up the loose ends. Fitzjames sent on a genealogy of the Stolberg family. In return he requested a papal dispensation for the wedding and a marriage contract from Charles, plus a proxy for the actual ceremony. The prince got Caryll to write back, adding a few words in his own hand. He gave Ryan a proxy power to contract the marriage. The marriage portion to be settled on the princess was 40,000 livres a year, plus 10,000 livres pin money. The prince wrote to Fitzjames to specify the itinerary to be followed when bringing his bride to Italy. In a fateful decision he added: ‘I have already informed you that I have chosen the eldest of the sisters. Her age is the most suitable for me, and what you have told me about the health of the younger confirms me in my resolution.’45
The preparations for the marriage show clearly that Charles Edward was a poor administrator. Ryan wrote back to query his instructions.46 These spoke only of the financial settlement, allowances and jewels. But was the marriage contract to be governed by the laws of Flanders, France, Italy or even England?47 Moreover, nothing had been said about an actual marriage ceremony in Paris. Was it the prince’s intention that this should not take place?48
Ryan wanted no embarrassing scenes with the princess’s family. Charles Edward was pressing for Louise to be sent to Italy as soon as possible.49 But he did not seem to appreciate the delicacy of the steps Ryan and Fitzjames had to tread. So far the Stolberg family had co-operated admirably. They had seen the point of a private ceremony without notaries – since English spies could bribe notaries to let them have sight of the contract.50 And the first instalment of money (36,000 livres) had been squeezed out of Versailles.51 It was pointless, therefore, not to accommodate the wishes of the Stolbergs as far as possible. After all, without a formal laissez partir signed by the mother, technically the family could later plead duress or marriage by procuring.52
Charles Edward’s inattention to detail may have been caused by the elaborate web he was now spinning to ensnare the Pope. His friend Cardinal Marefoschi had earlier advised him not to alienate Clement by trying to keep the marriage a secret.53 Now Charles commissioned Marefoschi to insinuate the argument that his coming marriage changed everything. He therefore hoped that the Pope would receive him as his father had been received; even more, that his bride would be shown the same consideration as Clementina Sobieska. Marefoschi should stress to Clement that various cardinals (Calini, Canale, Corsini, Borghese, Orsini) already called him king. The coming nuptials gave the Vatican a chance to regularise the situation. A good outward symbol of the new relationship might be the restoration of the guard at the Palazzo Muti, and the provision of furniture for his wife, as in James’s day.54
If these gentle persuasions failed, Marefoschi should bring pressure to bear on Cardinal Bernis. The argument should then be that France had insisted on Charles’s marriage, but that the prince had only been able to find a suitable bride by promising her that the two of them would be on the same footing with the Pope as James and Clementina had been. Not to recognise him as king, then, meant that Louise could allege false pretences. Besides, Louis XV was just waiting for papal recognition of ‘Charles III’ before following suit himself.55
As a crowning touch, Charles Edward decided to time his overtures to the Pope so that he would be out of R
ome when the hour of decision came. The Pope would probably wait until his return if he was going to reply in the negative. It would then be open for the prince to say that he naturally assumed the ‘long silence’ meant consent.56 Just before he left Rome at the end of March 1772, the prince notified the Cardinal Secretary of State that he would no longer be known as Baron Renfrew, but expected henceforth to be addressed by the same title as his father.57
There was much cunning in this procedure, but, as so often with the prince, insufficient awareness of hard political realities. The truth was that Clement XIV had been engaged in secret negotiations with the roving duke of Gloucester. His aim was to better the conditions of English and Irish Catholics.58 He did not intend to allow Stuart pretensions to stand in his way. Clement sent an invitation to the duke of Gloucester to visit Rome.59 Gloucester arrived in the Eternal City on 25 February 1772, at the very time Charles Edward was bombarding the Vatican with his requests for recognition.60
Whether genuinely confident of a change of heart from Clement XIV, or merely self-deluded, Charles Edward pressed on with the preparations for his marriage. For months he had fretted impatiently. The prince was a man who wanted instant results. It seemed to him that Fitzjames and Ryan had been an unconscionable time finalising matters in Paris.61 He was irritated and frustrated by the delays: ‘moments are more precious than one can imagine in this affair.’ He was especially infuriated by what he saw as legalistic nitpicking about the contract: the papers he had sent ‘were as binding as words could make, both opposite to God and to man … approved by three people of logical mind, two of them cardinals’.62
But Ryan had run into fresh problems. The young lady earmarked as Louise’s companion dropped out; a suitable replacement at short notice was not easy.63 No sooner was this hiccup overcome than fresh problems presented themselves. The Stolberg party was due in Paris on 17–18 March to contract the marriage by proxy.64 In the event, the princess and her mother did not arrive until the evening of the 19th. Immediately the princess, senior, gave clear signs of being the troublemaker she was. Not only did she object to the replacement companion found for Louise, but she and her relations insisted on inserting a written inventory of the wedding presents in the contract, even though Ryan pointed out that such insertions had no validity in law.65
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