Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (39 page)

Now, if ever, would have been the time for Charles to reconcile himself to his advancing age and physical limitations, and relax into domesticity. Had he been able to face the truth about his life—that despite his early promise, his charisma, his semi-miraculous endurance and leadership abilities, he was destined never to attain the virtually unattainable British throne—he might have spent his last decades in relative contentment. He might have written his memoirs, or become a musical or artistic dilettante (he had shown a talent for drawing in his youth), or devoted himself to raising a new generation of Stuart Pretenders. He might, in short, have made peace with his fate.

Instead, after a year or so of sobriety and uneventful living, his self-destructive side broke out with a vengeance.

He drank, steadily and heavily, morning and night. "No streetporter could equal him" in his Gargantuan thirst, one of his servants remarked. He drank "like one absent in mind," compulsively, in response to an inner darkness that drew him toward its own black void. Any slight, any vexing irritation, sent him reeling off to drink still more, until he was so drunk that he vomited on himself, on the brocaded and velvet-covered furnishings of the Muti Palace, on the upholstered chairs of his theater box. He drank until he could not control his bowels, and had to have his longsuffering servants clean up after him, both at home and in public.

When not helpless with drink, he raged, lashing out at his servants with a stick, shouting incoherently, his bloodshot eyes bulging, spitting out curses and obscenities in all directions and staggering painfully on his thick legs until he fell and had to be helped to his feet, still snarling menacingly. He lashed out at Louise as well, ranting on at her, accusing her of betraying him, of conspiring against him, of cuckolding him. She was a young and pretty woman, the household was full of men; in the second year of their marriage, Charles heard secretly from a paid informer that Louise had professed her love for one of his lackeys.
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Louise, not yet twenty-one and finding herself yoked to a drunken wild man, was intensely frustrated and unhappy. She was much too young and much too full of life and hope for the future to take any pleasure in the company of the elderly Jacobites who drifted in and out of the palace, and yet she was cut off from the vital younger society of the city because Charles refused to enter any Roman drawing room where he was not received as King Charles III. When she went out, it was to accompany her inebriated husband to the theater, where she sat beside him in his box and observed from a distance the people she could not meet face to face.

Things got worse when Charles decided that they should leave Rome and settle permanently in Florence, where, he imagined, he would be accorded at least a measure of royal dignity. Once there, however, the grand duke pointedly denied him the honor of having a royal canopy added to his theater box, and he and his duchess snubbed the Count and Countess of Albany when they found themselves at the same parties. Still, Charles and Louise had some companionship at last. Members of the ducal court and even foreign ministers came to visit the newcomers in their rented sixteenth-century palazzo, and Louise liked to entertain visitors of her own, particularly artists and writers.

But Charles inevitably bored guests with his endless reminiscences or was rude to them after taking offense at imagined insults. One evening at the opera, he insulted a stranger, a French military officer; when the indignant man protested that Charles did not even know who he was, the latter answered, "I know you are French— and that is enough!" At the casino, his loud remarks often caused disturbances. He told everyone who would listen that he was only planning to stay in Florence until his brother was elected pope. Then he would return to Rome in triumph. Nor was he embarrassed when Henry lost the current papal election and Cardinal Braschi won, taking the title Pope Pius VI. Charles's response to this was to draw up a protest which he hoped to persuade the Catholic bishops of England and Ireland to sign, saying that unless Pope Pius acknowledged Charles Stuart as Charles HI, they would not acknowledge his title or authority.
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Charles's wild talk was accompanied by equally unrestrained behavior. Although by the mid-1770s he was a hopeless valetudinarian, suffering from severe varicose ulcers, violent stomach pains, and a racking cough, nevertheless he drove his febrile body mercilessly. When he could not go out walking, he went out in his carriage, with his increasingly embittered wife beside him, telling his coachman to go very slowly and to drive up and down the same streets again and again. His appetite was gone, and even the sight of food made him ill, yet he continued to preside at table every day and to entertain guests in pseudo-regal fashion. Every night he had himself driven to the theater, even when his legs and thighs were so grotesquely swollen and so painful that he could not walk at all; grimacing with pain, he had himself carried into his box, where he lay on a couch and slept through the performance, except when his severe indigestion wakened him and he was "obliged to retire in a hurry into the public passage, where two of his servants attended to give him assistance."
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It was as if, by clinging to a regimen of ceaseless activity, he could cling to life itself, and even prolong it. He dared not give in to bedridden immobility, for to give in would be to become a permanent invalid. There was a hideous courage in this bizarre behavior, it bespoke an unconquerable will. Just as Charles had never given up his determination to continue seeking his grandfather's throne by every means in his power, so now he directed that determination to staying active, even if it meant terrible pain for him and provoked loathing or, at best, ridicule in others.

It had long since begun to provoke rebellion in Louise. She saw nothing courageous in her husband's freakish spasms of activity, as when, at a masked ball, he attempted to dance a drunken minuet with a young girl, jerking clumsily along like a marionette, held up by Count Spada while the other guests crowded around to laugh at him.
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Nor could Louise see anything but foolishness in Charles's self-delusion about his longevity. Though he was several times at death's door, his physicians having given up on him, convinced that he could not last long, still he insisted on taking out a lease on an expensive new residence—the grand and imposing Palazzo Guadagni, with its heavily ornamented interior and vast gardens. She knew that, when her husband died, there would be no money to pay for such a costly palace, as he had not made a will leaving her any security and she had no adequate income of her own.

Louise was rebellious, and she found an outlet for her rebellion in infidelity.

She flirted with a handsome young Englishman, Thomas Coke, who was on a tour of Italy, and encouraged him to fall in love with her. ("The young Mr. Coke is returned from his travels in love with the Pretender's Queen, who has permitted him to have her picture," Horace Walpole noted wickedly in a letter to a friend.)
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She lost her head over an energetic Swiss, Karl Victor von Bonstetten, who was touring Europe visiting famous men and came to see Charles. Bonstetten was charmed by Louise, who, he said, "turned all heads" with her gamine looks and alert, piquant expression. He was less enraptured with her husband, who did not compare favorably with other celebrities he had visited, droning on about his past glories and repeating himself in an irritating way. When Bonstetten returned to Switzerland Louise wrote to him, telling him how he had "captured her heart, soul and spirit" and how she longed to go away with him to some hidden corner of the globe where they could be free to "follow their whim."

Bonstetten was hardly gone before Louise found another object for her awakening ardor. He was Count Vittorio Alfieri, a tall, wraithlike, red-haired poet with sharp features and a brooding expression. Alfieri came from his native Piedmont to Florence to improve his command of Italian and there he found, as he wrote later, the "beautiful, amiable and very distinguished" Louise. He was immediately attracted to her, drawn by the "outstanding beauty" of her pale complexion, fair hair and dark eyes with their "subdued fire." She was only twenty-five when he met her, yet already she had developed a love of painting and poetry, an affinity with works of art. Beyond this, she had "a golden nature."

For Louise, the passionate Alfieri became the sole ray of light in an increasingly dim world. He was everything her sodden, repugnant husband was not; he lived for his art, he believed in radical ideas, he embodied self-fulfillment. That he was reckless and temperamental only heightened his appeal. Alfieri was, in fact, a full-blown pre-Romantic given to monstrous narcissism and unwarranted self-aggrandizement, but to Louise, trapped in her splendid palace with her wreck of a husband, he seemed a demigod. They became lovers, and prayed that Charles would die.

But he clung stubbornly to life—and to Louise, seldom letting her out of his sight, reviling her to her face and to others behind her back. He accused her of taking a bribe from the Hanoverian government in return for administering a potion to make him impotent. He accused her of infidelity, and rigged up an ingenious if crude alarm system at her bedroom doors, involving tables and chairs and little bells, to give warning if an intruder tried to visit her at night. Worst of all, he made her sleep next to him, though the weeping sores on his legs gave off a terrible stench and fouled the bedclothes, and though his drunken gropings humiliated her cruelly and turned her stomach.

One night in December of 1780, things came to a head. Charles was even more "heated with wine and stronger liquors" than usual, for he had been celebrating St. Andrew's Day with debauched abandon. His servants were worried, as he had recently been more "indecent and cruel" to Louise than usual. On this night he "ill-treated her in the most outrageous manner, by the most abusive language and beating her, and at night by committing the greatest indecencies upon her, in bed, and attempting to choke her." Her screams woke the household and the servants rushed in to save their mistress.
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Horace Mann, who learned of this incident from his informers among the servants at the Guadagni Palace, privately thought that Louise then and there made up her mind to leave Charles as soon as she could find a way to do so safely. She knew that she would need a powerful protector, and Alfieri, much as she loved him, was only a dispossessed nobleman. (In a burst of republican fervor he had surrendered his patrimony.) He would not do. Louise first appealed to Henry, who was sympathetic but did not offer her any practical help. The Duke and Duchess of Tuscany were much more forthcoming. With their assistance Louise found a refuge: the Convent of the Bianchette, not far from the Guadagni. There, behind the stone walls and locked gates, Louise would be safe from her husband's violent revenge.

A few days after the nightmarish attack on the feast of St. Andrew, Louise and a companion, Signora Orlandini, managed to persuade the ever-suspicious Charles to take them out riding in his coach. With them went the Signora's Irish lover, one Captain Gehegan, as a sort of bodyguard; Louise was afraid that Charles, who always carried loaded pistols with him, might attack her once he realized she was determined to escape.

Louise asked if she and Signora Orlandini might visit the Convent of the Bianchette to see the nuns' embroidery. Charles did not object. But when the two women rushed into the sanctuary and he tried to follow them, hobbling painfully as usual, he found that he was too late. The iron gates were shut to him, and he was informed by an official of the place that Louise, Countess of Albany, had "placed herself under the protection of the Great Duke, and that being in danger of her life, had resolutely determined never to cohabit with him anymore.
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Charles's fury was monumental. He threatened to shoot Gehegan, or to pay someone else to shoot him. He threatened revenge against the vile seducer Alfieri, though he had never before objected to the poet's near-constant presence in his house. He sent a formal protest to the grand duke. He slandered Louise more viciously than ever. And then, having done all he could (which was very little) to punish those who had conspired against him, he took revenge on the nearest inanimate objects, smashing chairs and tables while the servants cowered and waited for his rage to spend itself.

Several weeks later Louise was on her way to Rome, where she had been offered lodgings at the Ursuline convent, in the very suite where, fifty-five years earlier, James's wife Clementina had taken refuge from her far less dangerous husband. Alfieri quietly followed Louise, and soon ingratiated himself with the Romans. Charles stood alone. No one took his side or came to his aid, even though Louise's indiscretions, however justifiable, made her an adulteress and entitled him to feel aggrieved. His anger gradually cooled to indignation, and then turned to a perpetual caustic melancholy.

Yet another defeat, yet another humiliation. Calling for yet another bottle, he announced that he had had enough of Florence, and intended to go to Venice for the Carnival. Or possibly Genoa. He would go somewhere, but precisely where no one could say. ''He seems too much confused as yet," Mann's informers at the palace confided, "to take any fixed resolution."

Chapter 25

“I am so bothered in the head,” Charles wrote toward the end of his life. At times his wits were fuddled, even though he no longer drank immoderately and many of the strains that had long plagued him were now eased. He suffered from an old man's forgetfulness and could no longer focus his thoughts. At the same time memories, many of them painful, surged unbidden into his mind and made him sad. His eyes were often mournful, though they lit with satisfaction when they rested on his tall, strapping daughter Charlotte, who had become his guardian and lifeline in his old age.

Charlotte was kind to him. She nursed him, she accompanied him to the theater at night, bedecked with the magnificent Sobieski jewels, she made certain he did not exceed his allotted ration of Cyprus wine. Now in her thirties, Charlotte looked strikingly like her father had in his youth, "a tall, robust woman of a very dark complexion and a coarse-grained skin," as one who saw her wrote, "with more of a masculine boldness than feminine modesty or elegance, but easy and unassuming in her manners." Besides being husky and bold, she had a "voluble tongue," and firmness of will, which helped her to keep her ailing father in line.