Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)
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Louise began her stay in Florence by visiting all the great ladies of Tuscany. She was stupefied and appalled when the visits of the Florentine nobility to the Casino Corsini tailed off and then stopped altogether. Each side blamed the other.72 But the net effect was a further narrowing in the social circle of the Queen of Hearts. Soon Bonstetten departed. Louise carried on a long-range flirtation with him by letter, but this was no substitute for the presence of the besotted Swiss.73
More and more Louise turned to books for consolation. This was her great bibliophile period. Her favourite pastime was reading a chapter of Montaigne in bed every morning. She announced that she would like to forget all pomp and be a republican. ‘I measure the man and not his pedestal,’ she said, ‘and I prefer a loveable man, one I could love, to the greatest lord who bores me.’74 It is not difficult to guess whom she had in mind!
The other great sadness in the princess’s life was her increasingly obvious infertility. The Jacobite duke of Melfort’s euphuistic message of June 1772, asking her to produce a son and heir,75 now seemed like ironical mockery. In compensation Louise turned, as so many involuntarily childless women do, to the love of animals. She kept rabbits and quickly turned herself into something of an expert in their care and breeding.76
Such social interludes as there were had the appearance of snatched and furtive occasions. When they attended the same balls as the Grand Duke and Duchess, the Queen of Hearts and her consort were politely ostracised. Such snubs turned the prince even more in on himself. During the carnival he went everywhere in a mask; Louise chose always to appear in propria persona.77
It was a relief when one of the nobility broke the taboo and dined with them incognito, as the duke of Ostrogothia did in September 1776, using the pseudonym comte d’Oeland. Charles Edward was visibly touched. At the dinner table he remarked: ‘Ah, M. le Comte, quelle consolation pour moi diner avec un de mes egaux!’78 (‘Ah, count, it is such a consolation to me to dine with one of my equals!’)
The prince’s wounded sensitivity was such that he would go to extraordinary lengths to avenge insults, real or imaginary. When senator Guadagni’s son (the Guadagnis were later to loom large in the prince’s life) turned down a lunch (dinner) invitation with him and then appeared for a post-prandial coffee after lunching instead with the duchess of Chartres, the prince was so incensed that he planned an elaborate retaliation. He invited Guadagni to dinner again. Deliberately abstaining from drink so as to keep his head clear, he waited for the young man to appear, then hid himself behind the door. When Guadagni entered, the prince delivered a powerful kick on his behind. As Guadagni sprawled on the floor, Charles railed at him: ‘That will show you I’m as good as the Duchess of Chartres. It will also teach you how to treat people of my rank. Notice, too, that I have not touched a drop of wine.’79
Charles Edward’s one-man battle with the Papacy meanwhile came to an inevitable and ignominious end. His last fling was to attempt to get the Catholic bishops of England and Ireland to sign a document recognising him as Charles III. The Holy Roman Catholic Church would then have to confront the absurdity of a British flock who recognised Charles III as king while the Pope recognised George III. Fortunately, this hair-brained scheme was scotched by the prince’s advisers as soon as mooted.80
Yet Charles Edward’s humiliating climb-down before Pius VI did have one definite result. Since the prince had vowed never to return to Rome until accorded his titles, he now had to find a permanent home in Florence. To this end he energised his contacts in the city, the most important of whom was the marquis of Barbantane, French plenipotentiary at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.81
Barbantane began by taking discreet soundings from Mann, to make sure the prince would not be embarrassed by a curt refusal if he attempted to rent an English house. Mann raised no objection, but Louise and the prince found fault with Barbantane’s proposed accommodation themselves.82
In the spring of 1776 Louise found what she was looking for. In July 1776 the Stuart household moved from the Casino Corsini to the Palazzo Guadagni in the via San Sebastiano (now Palazzo San Clemente, via Gino Capponi).83 The Palazzo Guadagni was a gem of late Renaissance architecture, with an enclosed portico for carriages, a spacious entrance hall, and suites of sumptuously decorated rooms on the first floor. There was a large garden, studded with cypress and ilex trees. Louise thought she had found her perfect haven.84
But almost immediately a rancorous law-suit developed. The Guadagni family had rented the palazzo to Charles Edward on an indefinite lease. Shortly after the Stuarts moved in, Lord and Lady Cowper came to Florence, took one look at the house, and decided it was for them. They agreed to the extravagant rental terms proposed by the Guadagni family; it seemed as though money was no object.85
But how to remove the Stuarts? Charles and Louise had found safe anchorage. They refused to budge. The matter was taken to a tribunal. There was frantic behind-the-scenes lobbying. The Grand Duke himself favoured the Cowpers, but most of the nobility felt sympathy for the prince. The dispute became the talk of Florence. Eventually the tribunal found in favour of the prince, much to the Grand Duke’s irritation.86 Lord Cowper considered appealing to a higher court, but was discreetly dissuaded.
Publicly Charles Edward fulminated against the ‘rebellious opposition’ of one of his ‘subjects’. Privately, he conceded that the affair had taught him a lesson. The only way to achieve the security and peace of mind he needed was to buy the house outright. Purchase was beyond the Cowpers, whose assets were in England. Given that the price of the Palazzo Guadagni had shot up as a result of the litigation and resultant publicity, it seemed to be beyond Charles Edward’s too. He took a brave decision. He would wind up all his affairs in Rome and withdraw every last Roman crown from the Stuart monies in the Monte di Pietà.
The years 1776–7 saw the prince obsessed with money. The reason was that he was scraping together all his finance to purchase the Palazzo Guadagni. All his best furniture and effects were brought to Florence from the Palazzo Muti.87 The prince did not quite burn all his boats. He left a nominal retinue of servants in the house of his birth and refused all offers to rent it.88
At last, in December 1777, the prince had amassed sufficient funds to buy the Florentine palazzo. The sale was completed. For the last three years of their marriage, he and Louise enjoyed the security of being property-owners.89 Ironically, the move into Louise’s dream house took her into the darkest period of the marriage.
The first open quarrel, overheard by the servants, took place in the Palazzo Guadagni.90 So did the first physical beating. Charles Edward was running true to form. Sooner or later, with all his women, when the first flush of excitement had gone, he would turn on them and use physical violence. So it had been with the Princesse de Talmont and Clementina Walkinshaw. So it was now with his wife.
What triggered the violence seems to have been increasing jealousy of Louise’s admirers, compounded by his own flagging physical powers. He no longer trusted her. He had the approaches to her bedroom barricaded by a pile of tables and chairs to which were attached bells, whose tinkling would alert him to the approach of interlopers. Anyone wishing to get to Louise’s bedroom would have to go through his room. To his advisers who remonstrated, he justified his actions as concern for the absolute legitimacy of any heir born in the palazzo.91
Yet, as so often with the prince, his delusions had a basis in reality. The fire behind the smoke this time was a twenty-seven-year-old poet and dramatist from Turin. When he first met Louise in 1776, count Vittorio Alfieri had a long career of lubricious libertinism behind him.92 At the age of twenty-three, in Cadiz, he had contracted venereal disease. Though idle and dissolute, he was rich and strikingly handsome, with an undisputed literary talent. Alfieri had all the qualities Louise had sought in vain in her earlier admirers. Bonstetten was a pale foreshadowing of this answer to the Queen of Heart’s dreams.
Alfieri and Louise later tried to turn their liaison int
o a story-book romance. The story of the coup de foudre when Alfieri first saw Louise looking at a painting of Charles XII in the Uffizi gallery has all the hallmarks of poetic licence.93 But whatever the facts of their first meeting, by late 1776 Alfieri was a frequent visitor at the Palazzo Guadagni.
It was not easy for the lovers to achieve physical consummation in the confines of the palazzo, with the watchful prince ever at their shoulders. For the first two years of their relationship, they snatched kisses and held hands secretly while the prince dozed in the next room. In the evenings Alfieri would gaze, rapt and adoring, while Louise strummed on her guitar. In the daytime he devoted himself to the writing of the hagiographical Maria Stuarda, which he later repudiated.94
Increasingly Louise’s reading reflected her new passion. It is surely significant that among the books she ordered from her favourite bookseller in Paris was an edition of Catullus.95 At last, almost certainly some time in 1778, Alfieri and Louise became lovers in the full sense. The circumstantial evidence for this is fairly strong. It was in 1778 that Alfieri disavowed his Piedmontese nationality. The burdens of being a subject of the king of Sardinia were heavy. To travel abroad or to publish required the sovereign’s permission. So did the transfer of capital out of Piedmont. Alfieri’s most significant action in 1778 was to give up the rights to his property in Piedmont so as to be near his beloved and, as he put it, to make her free and independent as soon as possible.96
Alfieri was thus cutting himself off from his cultural and financial roots in a very important sense. That the relationship was taking a much more serious turn by 1778 is also shown by Alfieri’s sustained efforts as a tutor that year, when he taught Louise to read and speak Italian.97
The years 1776–80 were a limbo period in Charles Edward’s marriage. By now he and Louise were barely on speaking terms. The marital breakdown was attracting wide attention. In May 1777 a most extraordinary letter, written in London, reached the prince. It contained a vitriolic attack on him for his treatment of his wife, referring to his use of physical violence and his ‘excess of wine’. The failure of Louise to produce an heir was laid squarely at the prince’s door, being blamed on his doubtful health. Most of all he was taken to task for his tyranny towards his wife: ‘a princess who is in every way your equal, descended from our ancient kings of Scotland and allied to all the great families of Europe. From these claims you derive your pride and fancy they give you authority to be wicked unpunished.’98
The provenance of this letter must have been the complaints Louise circulated to her friends. If so, the blundering intervention from England was counter-productive. It put the prince ever more on the alert vis-à-vis his wife and may have been instrumental in preventing her and Alfieri from becoming lovers until 1778.
While Alfieri and the Queen of Hearts were enjoying the raptures of true love, what of the prince? In his more lucid moments, in the interval between drinking bouts and slumber, he had but two interests: international affairs and his books.
By the 1770s it was apparent that a new era was dawning. In backward, deeply conservative Rome the new winds were blowing away some of the cobwebs. Even the Borgia family, quintessence of the old order, was raising its sights beyond the Eternal City. Captain Cook’s voyage to the Pacific and Australasia in the Endeavour had fired the imagination of cardinals and prefects of the Congregation of the Faith.99 Yet the most compelling focus for international attention was north America, where the colonists were locked in a life-and-death struggle with the mother country.
The Jacobites reacted with fascinated ambivalence. On the one hand here were the hated republicans of ‘mob rule’ seeking to overthrow monarchy. On the other, the detested Hanoverian regime was being stretched on the rack. The prince himself was always much more sympathetic to the latter view. The revolt of the American colonies was peculiarly fascinating to him, for in many ways the struggle seemed a rerun of his own battle with the House of Hanover in the ’45. Many observers facilely extrapolated from the events of 1745–6 to the north American revolt: since the Jacobites had been worn down after some early successes, surely the same thing would happen to the rebels in north America? Charles Edward knew better. He was well aware how close to success he had been at Derby. Perhaps the American leaders would be made of sterner stuff than Lord George Murray and the clan chieftains.
There was another reason for the prince’s interest in the war for America. Almost certainly, some kind of invitation was made by the Bostonians in 1775 that he should be the figurehead of a provisional American government. No clear documentary evidence remains, but Dutens, who was a reliable reporter, confirms the story, as do English sources.100 In one version, the prince came secretly to Milford Haven in Wales to take ship for the New World.101 Certainly this was the origin of the rumour that Charles was on the move in 1775, that he had been seen in Paris and England.102
What is beyond question is that the prince took an intense interest in the American war. In June 1775 there is a transcript in the prince’s hand of a Salem newspaper report describing the battle of Lexington.103 Another extract, again in his own hand, is a paraphrase of an article in the New York Gazette for 18 May 1775, dealing with the taking of Ticonderoga and Crown Point.104 Another document details General Burgoyne’s surrender to Gates at Albany in October 1777.105 In 1781 the prince asked his agent Father Cowley of the Benedictines for a detailed map of north America so that he could follow the military operations, and also for maps and a historical précis of the whole American continent north of Panama.106
When France entered the war on the colonists’ side, the prince made a copy of the relevant treaty.107 By this time he was wholeheartedly behind the Americans, almost gloating over British reverses in the face of joint action by France, Spain, America and the Dutch (who joined in in December 1780).108 French participation also conjured fleeting visions among the prince’s followers of another pro-Jacobite descent on England.109 In fact the French did attempt an invasion of England in 1779, in concert with Spain, but neither Jacobite personnel nor ambitions played any part in it.
Apart from international affairs, the prince’s main distraction during the dark years of estrangement from his wife was his library. From the time of his ‘obscure years’ thirty years before, the prince had shown a great interest in books. In 1749–50 Charles Edward asked Mme Vassé to send him copies of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and of Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois.110 Late 1750 was another rich period for reading in the prince’s life.111 It is true that at this stage reading tended to denote depression, an escape from an insupportable world. But as the years went on, Charles developed a taste for knowledge, especially philosophy and history. He had all the virtues and all the faults of the self-taught: omnivorous, eclectic but rather unfocused reading. At one time Leonardo da Vinci was a major interest.112 This led him on to astronomy; there was a link here too with the prince of the Lunéville days, the prince who had meticulously recorded the Aurora Borealis in September 1749. Again, linking with the past, it seems that Charles sometimes kept up his cello playing and other musical interests. There exists a Florentine orchestra list in which Charles Edward, named as the count of Albany, is mentioned as the virtuoso on the cimbalo.113
If the prince’s reading was sporadic and eclectic, the library he had built up in Florence by the late 1770s was impressive. There were works of political theory, history, military strategy, volumes of memoirs and travel diaries, scientific tomes, satirical pamphlets, and much else. Rousseau (especially Emile and Du Contrat Social), Voltaire, Montesquieu, Helvétius and Blackstone adorned the shelves. Caesar’s Commentaries was a well-thumbed volume. Literature was represented by Swift, Milton, Pope and Fielding, The Tale of a Tub, Paradise Lost, The Dunciad and Tom Jones, in which the prince himself featured, being respectively particular favourites.114 The prince often spoke of literature as a special interest.115
The effect of all this erudition was to make the prince a witty and urbane conversationalist. The not
ion of Charles Edward as blockhead dies hard, but it has no foundation in fact. Dutens relates that he once had a two-hour conversation with the prince during which Charles ranged effortlessly over a wide span of subjects, displayed a knowledge of several languages and showed himself expertly informed on European politics.116
Yet there was another side to Charles’s interest in books. It was perhaps this other aspect that prevented him and his wife from finding a common interest in intellectual matters – apart from the fact that his taste ran to Enlightenment thought, while she preferred the ancient classics and their Renaissance counterparts like Montaigne. Even a cursory examination of the Stuart papers shows the prince’s bibliophilia mounting in intensity as the 1770s wore on.117 This suggests that a psychological motivation apart from intellectual curiosity was at work. We are irresistibly reminded of the neurotic fuss over Julien Le Roy’s watch in the 1750s. Obsessive collecting can be a sign of a fundamentally authoritarian personality. In the case of the depressive, it is more likely to be a kind of cri de coeur against powerlessness. Amid his trophies, the collector can impose his own order and achieve the omnipotence the world denies him.118
But nothing the prince learned from his books kept him away from the bottle. Rather, the two streams started to feed into each other; he began to collect books on Burgundy and other wines.119 The pain in his chest and his retention of water proved beyond doubt that he was a chronic sufferer from dropsy. Yet the prince refused to alter his routine. He insisted on going out every day in his coach and visiting the theatre every night, ‘though of late [1779] with a strong fever upon him and so weak that he has to be supported by two servants from his coach to his box, where as usual, he laid [sic] on a couch’.120 The excessive liquid on his chest caused him to cough continually. He lay awake most of the night, alternately coughing and puking, yet still insisting that Louise share his bed.121 This was how she knew that he kept under his bed a strong box containing 12,000 sequins, against the day the call for action in England might come.122 By this time, too, he was all but impotent; he later accused Louise of having accepted a drug from Sir Horace Mann that would drain his sexual vigour.123