The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (47 page)

Eventually two French ships evaded the Royal Navy, cast anchor in Loch nan Uamh, and Charles, with a number of followers, including Lochiel, boarded one, and escaped to France. The Prince’s Year, as it came to be known in the Highlands, was over, but the Prince himself had another four decades to endure. He had failed in the great ambition of his life, and in the years that followed he found nothing to replace it.

Hope did not die immediately, but withered slowly. When the War of the Austrian Succession ended with a peace treaty signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, Charles was required to leave France. Refusing, he was briefly imprisoned, before being expelled. He reputedly made a visit, in disguise, to London in 1750, to consult with the surviving members of his party, and expressed his willingness to be received into the Church of England. But it was too late, and futile. He lived some years with a mistress, Clementina Walkinshaw, whom he had met first after the Battle of Falkirk. Many thought her a Hanoverian spy, and she may well have been one. They had, however, a daughter, Charlotte, who would care for her father in old age.

After the failure of the ’45, Charles was estranged from his father, whom indeed he never saw again. Blaming Lord George Murray for the decision taken at Derby, and still believing in near paranoid fashion that Murray had betrayed him, he resented James’s support for Lord George and his willingness to receive him at the Muti in 1747. He was still more angered by his father’s approval of his younger son Henry’s decision to enter the Church and accept the Pope’s offer to make him a cardinal. Henry had in fact been in France in 1745 and made efforts to join his brother, but now, like James himself, he accepted that the failure of the rising had extinguished all hope of a Stuart restoration. Charles’s obstinate persistence in hope seemed senseless to his father and brother. In any case, Henry’s was a softer character: he had the same Stuart charm, but he was more intelligent and dutiful, with a high sense of his position. By inclination homosexual, his only quarrel with his father arose from his intimacy with his ‘
maestro di camera
’, which offended James’s sense of dignity and (one assumes) morality. But neither the affair nor the quarrel lasted long. No other scandal would touch the Cardinal, though some remarked on the numbers of pretty young men in his household. Made Bishop of Frascati, he resided principally there or at his palace in La Rocca. He became a great collector of books, manuscripts and musical scores – he was himself a competent violinist. As a boy he had been described by Alexander Cunyngham, a Scots physician visiting Rome, as ‘very grave and behaved like a little philosopher, I could not help thinking he had some resemblance to his great grd father, Charles the Ist’.
¹⁷
This was perceptive: Henry would grow up to be an aesthete like Charles I, though not a philosopher, and in his devotion to his religion and his reserved and dignified manner, he might indeed recall the martyred king.

James died on 1 January 1766. Learning of his illness, Charles Edward had hurried to Rome, perhaps in the hope of being reconciled with the father he had not seen for more than twenty years. But he arrived too late. The Pope granted James a state funeral, but he declined to recognise Charles as the rightful king, addressing him only as the Count of Albany, and requiring the royal coat of arms to be removed from the Muti palace. For some time Charles nevertheless remained in Rome, and enjoyed Roman society. But he soon fell victim again to the alcoholism he had shared with his mistress, or – as the Cardinal put it – to ‘the nasty bottle’.

In 1772 he was persuaded it was his duty to marry, so that he might perpetuate the Stuart line. A bride was found in a nineteen-year-old German princess, Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. For a while he stopped drinking, or at least moderated his consumption, and tried to perform his marital duty. But his wife soon found him ‘the most insupportable man who ever existed, a man who combined the defects and failings of all classes, as well as the vice common to lackeys, that of drink’.
¹⁸
In 1773 the English ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton, reported that Charles was ‘universally looked upon as in a great degree out of his Senses and would be deserted if a few people did not go to him out of compassion for his Wife, whom he never quits a moment’.
¹⁹
Two years later, refused an audience by Pope Clement XIV, the couple removed to Florence, and there the marriage came effectively to an end after Charles drunkenly assaulted his wife and she left him for the poet Vittorio Alfieri, with whom she had been having an affair.

Charles followed them back to Rome, and was reconciled with the Cardinal, who had never ceased to care for him, and joined by his daughter, whom he created Duchess of Albany. ‘The poor old man is almost always asleep,’ reported one English observer, ‘& has I believe but very little sense of his Misfortunes.’ The observer, Charles Parker, was mistaken. Far from having little sense of his misfortunes, Charles was obsessed by them. Charlotte warned visitors not to speak of the rising or ‘his Highlanders’; such talk reduced the King to tears.

As he lay dying in the Muti, a piper played ‘Lochaber No More’. Death came in the early morning of 30 January 1788, but was officially dated a day later, because the thirtieth was the anniversary of the execution of Charles I.

The King’s body was carried to the cathedral of Frascati, where he lay in state dressed in royal robes and with a replica of the English crown on his head. The Cardinal said a Requiem Mass, and declared himself Henry IX. He struck a coronation medal that pronounced him king ‘
non desideris hominum, sed voluntate dei
’ – ‘not by the wish of men, but by the will of God’.

Charlotte survived her father by little more than a year, dying of a liver complaint.

In 1796 the Cardinal fled from Frascati when the armies of the French Revolution invaded Italy and seized his property. He had already sold much of his private treasure to support the Pope, whose revenues had been appropriated by the French, and lived for some time in penury in Venice. In 1800, however, this was relieved when his very distant cousin, George III, granted him a pension, and he was able to return to Frascati, where two years later he entertained the Pope with some of his old splendour. In 1804 he refused an invitation to accompany His Holiness to Paris for the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of the French. To have done so would have been a denial of all that the Stuarts had represented; the King of France, his slightly less distant cousin Louis XVIII, might be in exile, but he was still the rightful king, and Napoleon was a usurper.

Henry died in 1807, at the age of eighty-two. He was buried in St Peter’s, where Canova’s white marble monument commemorates James VIII and III, Charles III, and Henry IX, kings who never reigned. It was commissioned by the Pope, and George IV, as Prince Regent, contributed to the cost.

But there was still one survivor: Charles’s wife Louise. With her lover Alfieri she had visited England in 1790 and been introduced to George III’s wife, Queen Charlotte. They then established themselves in Paris, and after Alfieri’s death in 1803, Louise removed to Florence, where she had lived so unhappily with her husband. She insisted that her servants address her as ‘Your Majesty’, and that they should walk backwards when leaving her presence. She dined off plates decorated with the royal coat of arms: play-acting to the last, which didn’t arrive till 1824, seventy-nine years since Charles Edward had embarked on the disastrous romance that, for all its failure and futility, has ensured that he remains, along with his great-great-great grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, the best remembered of his glittering and so often unfortunate family.

Envoi

‘It cam wi’a lass and it’ll gang wi’a lass.’ James V’s doleful prophecy was not fulfilled. The second lass, his infant daughter Mary, married her Stuart cousin, Darnley, and the male line was perpetuated. It had indeed come by way of a lass, Marjorie Bruce, but it went with a cardinal. Appropriately enough, for it was the Stuarts’ obstinate attachment to the Roman Church that cost them the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, and made it impossible to regain them.

It had been a long adventure. If the story of a descent from Banquo was a myth invented to elevate the consequence of this family that had its earliest known origins in the salt-marshes of Brittany, nevertheless by that marriage of Walter Stewart to Marjorie Bruce, the Stuart kings were descended by way of David I of Scotland from Kenneth MacAlpine – who had first in 843 united the little Scottish kingdom of Dalriada with Pictland – and, through his marriage, from the Pictish monarchs whose line stretched back to the mists of Caledonian antiquity. Through David’s mother, Margaret, they could boast of descent from Alfred the Great and the old royal line of Saxon Wessex.

James I’s marriage to Joan Beaufort, granddaughter of Edward III of England, gave his children a descent from the first Plantagenet King of England, Henry of Anjou, and also, by way of Henry’s mother Matilda, from William the Conqueror. Subsequent marriages enriched the royal ancestry of the later Stuarts. James IV was the son of a Danish princess; James V on his mother’s side a grandson of the first Tudor king of England, Henry VII. The marriage of James VI to Anne of Denmark brought more Danish royal blood into the Stuart line. Charles I’s wife, Henrietta Maria, was the daughter of the first Bourbon King of France, Henry of Navarre – himself descended from the long line of Valois and Capetian kings that stretched back in the female line to Charlemagne and Charles Martel – and of Marie de Medici, from the great Florentine family of merchant-princes. James VIII and III had an Italian mother, Mary of Modena, and his sons, Charles Edward and the Cardinal of York, could boast of the Polish hero-king John Sobieski as their maternal grandfather.

Moreover, if the legitimate male line expired with the Cardinal, the Stuarts themselves were not altogether extinct.

In 1873 Queen Victoria recorded in her journal a voyage she had made on a little steamer up the west coast of Scotland. Among her companions was Cameron of Lochiel, and as they sailed into Loch Arkaig, her private secretary, General Ponsonby, remarked on the significance of the occasion and setting. It was, Victoria wrote,

a striking scene. There was Lochiel, as he [Ponsonby] said, ‘whose great-grand-uncle had been the real moving cause of the rising of 1745 – for without him Prince Charles would not have made the attempt – showing your Majesty (whose great-great-grandfather he had striven to dethrone) the scenes made historical by Prince Charlie’s wanderings. It was a scene one could not look on unmoved.’ Yes, and I feel a sort of reverence in going over these scenes in this most beautiful country, which I am proud to call my own, where there was such devoted loyalty to the family of my ancestors – for Stewart blood is in my veins, and I am now their representative, and the people are as loyal and devoted to me as they were to that unhappy race.
¹

Victoria was deeply attached to the idea of her Stewart ancestry. If she owed her throne to the Act of Settlement of 1701 that had bestowed the crown on her great-great-great grandfather, George, Elector of Hanover, his own hereditary claim derived from his grandmother, Elizabeth, the Winter Queen of Bohemia, daughter of James VI and I. Victoria may have been a Hanoverian, child of half a dozen generations of German kings, princes, and princesses, but she felt herself to be Stuart, Stuart certainly rather than Tudor, and indeed declared that she could never forgive Elizabeth of England for ‘her cruelty to my ancestress Mary Queen of Scots’.

There are frequent calls for the repeal of the Act of Settlement in order to end its discrimination against Roman Catholics, and on these occasions journalists are required by their editors to write articles suggesting that there are people with a better right to the throne than Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The leading or favoured candidate is the claimant to the throne of Bavaria, being the senior legitimate descendant of Charles I’s youngest child Henriette-Anne (Minette). It is all nonsense, of course, a mere game. The British monarchy is a parliamentary one, and has been so since 1688. Arguably long before the revolution of that year, both the English and Scottish monarchies depended as much on consent, as expressed in Parliament or the Council of the Realm, as on strict hereditary right. Indeed, though Charles I at his trial declared that the English monarchy had never been elective, the pre-Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxon monarchy had had at least an elective element, as had the tribal monarchies of Germany, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Nevertheless, ever since the Stuart cause was dead, there have been sentimental Jacobites forming societies to honour the exiled family and talk wistfully of a restoration. They have mostly been silly and futile. Compton Mackenzie, though himself inclined to a sentimental attachment to the Jacobite idea, offers a comic picture of the West London Legitimist League in the first volume of his long novel
The Four Winds of Love
. The League’s only sensible member is an elderly French aristocrat who, when asked by the young hero whether Jacobitism can ever again become a vital issue, replies: ‘If by Jacobitism you mean the restoration of the present Queen of Bavaria to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, Jacobitism is dead. There are at the present moment over seven hundred people with more right to the throne than Victoria, but there is not a practical claimant among them. Indeed I am quite sure that the large majority are unaware that they have any claim at all. Moreover, the present dynasty of the country is essentially popular…’
²

Seven hundred? There may be more than that number now, but it is of no significance.

Yet if the male line of legitimate descent from Mary, Queen of Scots ended with the Cardinal of York, the number of people with, in Queen Victoria’s phrase, Stewart blood in their veins is legion. In Scotland, for instance, the Duke of Hamilton is a descendant of James II (of Scotland), the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry a descendant of Charles II, by way of Monmouth’s marriage to Anne Scott, Lady of Buccleuch. The Duke of Argyll is descended from the early Stewarts through the Douglas mother of the first Marquis, Montrose’s antagonist. The Earl of Moray descends from Mary, Queen of Scots’ illegitimate half-brother, Lord James Stewart. The Stuart connection of the Duke of Atholl goes still further back, well into the Middle Ages; and Murrays of Atholl were, as we have seen, engaged in every Jacobite rising. Indeed there is scarcely a single Scottish hereditary peer whose title dates from before the nineteenth century without a Stuart ancestor somewhere in his family tree.