Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (3 page)

Certainly Berwick impressed James, and was not at all hesitant about giving him advice. In Berwick's view, James ought to make a bold, all-out bid for the throne, ignoring the risk and gambling everything on a successful outcome. James was too timid, his half-brother maintained. He held back when he ought to press forward. He held back in his personal affairs too, Berwick insisted; he ought to get married, and above all he ought to ingratiate himself with influential people who could be helpful to his cause.

Some of Berwick's brotherly advice was useful, even though the implied criticism it contained irked James. The older he got the more it irked him, until in 1715 there occurred a serious rupture between the brothers. James expected Berwick to command the Jacobite forces, and was mortified when Berwick refused—citing his primary allegiance to Orleans as his reason. James was furious at Berwick's disloyalty, and on his return from Scotland the breach did not heal.

Berwick had let James down, but Bolingbroke, James's erstwhile secretary of state, was guilty of treason. Viscount Bolingbroke, the most colorful personality and the most able professional politician in James's entourage, had carelessly—or perhaps deliberately— revealed James's invasion plans to a Parisian courtesan, who had sold the information to the British government. James dismissed Bolingbroke, who insulted him and called him a poor judge of men—an accusation that may have stung, as it was quite near the mark. In truth, without Berwick and Bolingbroke James was much the poorer in astute advisers. Those he trusted, principally the ever optimistic Earl of Mar and the rather prosaic Duke of Ormonde, were well-meaning but lacked superior intelligence and personal force—as James himself did.

Sound, experienced advice was what James needed most if he was ever to hold his own amid the intricacies of politics and at the same time prepare to make himself master of Britain. From a military standpoint the challenge was great enough, but from a political standpoint it was even greater. James had somehow to learn the interests of each of the European sovereigns—interests that shifted constantly—and then to calculate how he might turn these interests to his advantage. He needed informants at each of the principal courts, a reliable way of getting and sending messages, seasoned diplomats to persuade and cajole and apply the right pressure at the right moment. He had none of these things, only haphazard information supplied with difficulty by mediocre agents. Still, the intriguing went on.

In the autumn of 1716 Jacobite hopes rose when Charles XH of Sweden renewed his offer of twelve thousand troops to help James conquer England, and Philip V of Spain guaranteed a large subsidy to finance and equip the army. For the moment, Sweden and Spain had a common interest in crippling England, and a full-scale Jacobite invasion seemed opportune. During the months that it took to organize the expedition, however, the British government became suspicious, and when in April of 1717 the residence of the Swedish minister in London was ransacked, the secret plot came to light and had to be abandoned.

By this time James was in Pesaro, even farther away from the center of continental affairs and too far from England to foment rebellion. King George had brought pressure to bear on Orleans, who in turn had forced James out of Avignon. Pope Clement XI had offered him asylum in Rome, and he had begun making his way there by stages, stopping for a time at Piacenza, Modena, Pesaro and several other towns along the way.

Italy agreed with James, and Modena, his mother's original home and where her great-uncle, Duke Rinaldo d'Este, still ruled charmed him utterly. For once the corners of his mouth turned upward. His cousin Benedetta, Duke Rinaldo's pale, dark-haired daughter, reminded James of his mother. He fell in love with her, with all the intensity of a man of twenty-nine who had never been in love before. His advisers had been urging him to marry. He would marry Benedetta, he decided, and hope that the Roman Catholic church, which under ordinary circumstances forbade marriage between cousins, would make an exception in this case. Perhaps, with Benedetta as his wife, his luck would change. King James III and Queen Benedetta—an attractive combination, he thought. He wrote to his mother at St.-Germain, stressing the fact that his intended bride resembled her and asking for her blessing.

But for once James was overly optimistic. Whatever Benedetta may have thought of him, Duke Rinaldo was wary of allying himself with an outcast Stuart princeling. James might dream of becoming King of England one day, but the reigning king, George I, was the genuine power to be reckoned with. And King George was accumulating powerful allies. Within the last year or so England had become allied with the emperor Charles VI, with the French regent Orleans, and with the Dutch. Her navy made Britain a sought-after partner in continental affairs, and King George, who seemed to take the concerns of Hanover more seriously than those of England, was spending a great deal of his time on the continent.

Duke Rinaldo gave a gracious but inconclusive reply when James asked his permission to marry Benedetta, and eventually, some months later, he said a final no. It was with a broken heart that James went on to Rome, where he was received with elaborate formality as "King of Great Britain and Ireland." The deference and ceremony pleased him, and Rome itself overwhelmed him with the grandeur of its baroque churches and palaces and its noble ruins, but he continued to pine for his beloved.

Things were little better in Urbino, where James spent the next fifteen months or so. He liked the town itself, and the people, who referred to him respectfully as
il Re
, "the King," whenever he rode out in his coach or appeared at public functions. The pension of twelve thousand scudi which the pope bestowed on him took care of his immediate financial needs—though not the cost of his carefully nurtured invasion plans—and the citizens of Urbino gave concerts and put on plays to entertain him.

He accepted it all with wan smiles and bland murmurs of thanks, his dignity and correctness never failing him. But the canker of failure gnawed at him. He had been unsuccessful in two attempts to invade Britain, and his most recent scheme to invade once again with Swedish and Spanish help had been a fiasco. He had failed in his attempt to wed Benedetta d'Este. He was thirty years old, neither old nor young; but time was passing and he was being left behind, playing at being king in a tiny, remote mountaintop town in Italy, while life and opportunity passed him by.

One thing he could do: marry and beget an heir to continue the Stuart line. It was, some thought, his most pressing obligation, more pressing than raising funds and finding soldiers for another invasion attempt.

The choice of a wife was important, not only because she might be Queen of England one day but because her parentage, nationality and religion would influence the world's view of her husband. There was also the fundamental question of her appeal to James, of course, for if he disliked her there might be no heir.

Jacobite agents throughout Europe were asked to propose potential brides and to comment on their appearance and personality. The responses came in. Emperor Charles VI had a sister young enough for James, and several nieces, but either they were already spoken for or their dowries were small or the emperor would be likely to withhold his consent until James secured the English throne. The Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, had a twelve-year-old daughter who might do, but she might offend James, it was thought, as Russians were (in the view of the English) uncouth and barbaric in their personal habits. The search went on. James wrote to his agents giving them wide latitude. He didn't insist on a beautiful woman, or an intelligent one; as long as she was fit for childbearing, "not horrible" to look at, and did not have "stinking breath," he would approve.

But every candidate he heard of seemed to have some drawback. The Princess of Hesse had rotten teeth. The Princess of Baden was a dwarf. Of the two Princesses of Fürstenberg, one was too thin in the hips and the other pockmarked and pimply. Then James heard from one of his scouts about the eldest daughter of Prince John Sobieski of Poland. Clementina Sobieski was sixteen, reasonably pretty, "sweet, amiable, of an even temper, gay only in season." Her teeth and breath were entirely acceptable. Clementina stood out in admirable contrast to her two sisters, one of whom frowned and "bristled with etiquette" while the other was giddy and lacking in dignity. Clementina was slight and delicate, with dark eyes and long light brown hair that fell far below her waist. Her portraits show a placid, almost bovine girl with a large, long face, wide-set eyes and heavy brows. Her features were strong, her nose large and her lips wide and well-shaped. She seemed ideally suited for James, for if she lacked beauty she had grace and an aristocratic appearance. She was said to be fluent in five languages—Polish, German, French, Italian and English—and to be "imbued with such deep piety that her life is truly that of a saint." What was more, her lineage was impeccable, for she was the granddaughter of King John III of Poland, heroic defender of Europe who had held Vienna against the Turks in 1683.

There were two drawbacks to a union between James and Clementina, one immediate, the other long-term. The immediate difficulty was that the Sobieskis were subjects of Emperor Charles VI, whose obligations to his ally King George of England might lead him to interfere and to try to prevent the marriage. The other difficulty concerned religion.

James was Catholic, but there were those who thought that, to enhance his chances of ruling the English, he ought to become a Protestant. His father's intolerant Catholicism had after all led to his removal from the throne. Most of the English were Protestant, with a deep-seated horror of "popery" and everything it implied; they would accept James much more readily if he joined the Church of England. So far James had refused to do this, but he could indicate his religious tolerance by marrying a Protestant. Clementina, whatever her virtues, had the disadvantage of coming from a family with an exceptionally close and longstanding association with the papacy. She was herself the godchild and namesake of Pope Clement, named after him at his request. Her grandmother, Maria Casimir, had come to Rome to live after the death of her husband King John, and the monuments she erected in the city's churches were prominent and conspicuous. Earlier generations of Sobieskis had lived in Rome from time to time, and were all but clients of the popes.

So in marrying Clementina James would be making a calculated political statement—or political blunder, depending on one's point of view. He would be underscoring both his Catholicism and his already strong ties to the pope, who was providing him with money, housing and protection. The fact that James sent one of his Protestant supporters, James Murray, to make a formal proposal of marriage to Clementina's father did not alter the case. In choosing Clementina as his preferred bride James was doing just what King George and the British government wanted him to do—making himself look more and more like a tool of the pope and of Catholic interests and less and less like a suitable king for Protestant England.

James was unable to be there to meet Clementina when she entered Rome in May of 1719, but a huge concourse of people turned out to cheer her and to watch her cavalcade pass. The liveried soldiers of the papal guard, the grand coaches of the Roman nobles and the cardinals, horsemen and mounted servants all formed a spontaneous procession to escort the Polish princess to the convent of Ursuline nuns in the Via Vittoria where she was to stay until James was able to join her. Cardinals Aquaviva and Gualtieri took her to the convent door and announced that "Mme. de St. Georges" had arrived, and the sisters took her inside. Clementina was no sooner across the threshold of the convent than she caught sight of a chapel dedicated to the Madonna of Loreto. At once she went in and "threw herself on her knees to worship the Holy Mary," causing the nuns to smile and nod to one another and remark how devout she was.
¹

The next day the pope sent an envoy to the convent to welcome Clementina—who brought with him a hundred baskets of sweets for her to distribute—and soon all the principal figures in the city were sending her messages of welcome and paying calls on her. The charming sixteen-year-old princess who had come such a long way to become the bride of the unfortunate James Stuart became the darling of fashionable Roman society. The Ursuline sisters had to keep the convent doors open until midnight each night to accommodate her visitors, and she was talked of in every street and at every social gathering.

What absorbed Clementina's attention, however, was not her hordes of visitors but Rome's churches and the brilliant pageantry of worship in the papal city. With her entourage she went to Santa Maria Maggiore to adore the relics there, which included, so the devout believed, Christ's cradle. She went to St. Peter's and immediately took off her shoes and stockings so that she could walk around the church as a barefoot pilgrim—until her father confessor dissuaded her from this and made her put them on again. She prayed in dozens of churches, sometimes spending all day and evening in her tireless peregrinations and forgetting to eat until past midnight. On the feast of Corpus Christi she watched the candlelit procession of two thousand wind past her window, the children singing motets, the patriarchs, bishops and cardinals in their variety of precious vestments, the pope in his triple crown and miter. At the climax of the ceremony she knelt and wept, moved by the glory and majesty of it all, her devotion heartfelt and, so those who witnessed it said, quite indescribable.

Pope Clement was gratified by his goddaughter's piety, and impressed too with her quick mind and understanding. When she visited him at the Quirinal Palace, she "surprised him with her intelligence, which he considered superior to that of her sex in general, and remarkable owing to her extreme youth."
²
He encouraged her to seek audiences as often as she liked, and insisted on treating her as a queen despite her preference for the modest title Mme. de St. Georges.