Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (6 page)

Part of Rome's drama lay in her climate, the heat, dust and flies of summer alternating with the frigid winter when the marshes froze and the wind swept cruelly down the wide avenues. Mortality from malaria and plague was always high in the hot season, and in the cold, beggars died of exposure and the weak, the very old and the very young succumbed to chills and tuberculosis. Pilgrims avoided the city in the pestilence-ridden summer months, and residents who could afford it left for the countryside until cooler weather set in.

The ever-present risk of disease was made worse by the filth which was piled up against the houses and then left to rot there in malodorous mounds. Streets were never swept, and the narrow alleys of the poor quarters reeked with the mingled scents of garbage, sewage and garlic. Street vendors who offered fish, chicken and vegetables threw their scraps on the ground wherever they happened to be; housewives and servants too threw every sort of waste into the gutter. Fastidious visitors to Rome were appalled at the casual way the Romans relieved themselves against the venerable arches and columns that adorned their city, and did not hesitate to turn courtyards and hotel porches into public conveniences. It was no wonder, the visitors remarked, that the richer residents avoided going about on foot and used sedan chairs or carriages even when traveling very short distances.

Such squalor was not unique to Rome among eighteenth-century European cities, but the sharpness of the contrast between rich and poor, grandeur and wretchedness was unusually marked there. Hovels straggled in untidy rows alongside marble palaces. Ragged children howled and held out their dirty hands to beg coins from passing gentlemen in black silk stockings, silken capes and perfectly powdered wigs. Goatherds jostled aristocrats in embroidered waistcoats flashing with diamond buttons. Except in the worst weather the poor gathered, bedraggled and unwashed, in the piazzas, where they enjoyed the spectacle provided by the prosperous riding by in their painted and gilded litters or on their beautifully groomed horses, gleaming with silver bits and harness and gold saddlecloths. Most impressive of all were the carriages of the princes of the Church, carved and ornamented works of art inlaid with jewels.

If the contrast between wealth and poverty was unusually evident, that between spiritual and sensual was even more so. Rome was a city of clergy, their numbers so great that at times they appeared to form the largest element in the population. Yet in some quarters, streetwalkers and courtesans seemed to be even more numerous, parading aggressively along streets where religious processions were an equally common sight. And the greatest clerics were not infrequently the most worldly, using their vast wealth to subsidize very earthy recreations. The city's shrines to the Virgin and the saints, her chapels and oratories, her magnificent churches all invited the contemplation of divine mysteries. At the same time, the ruins of Rome's secular glory, the rich and pungent odors of her cuisine, even the fragrance of orange blossom and narcissus and jasmine rising from her gardens tugged visitors in the opposite direction, toward the voluptuous enjoyment of earthly pleasures.

The contrast between spiritual and sensual was at its most inescapable during the eight days of the Roman Carnival, just before the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, when in a noisy outburst of exuberance the populace surged en masse up and down the Corso, disguised as Harlequins, Punchinellos, pirates, gods and goddesses, sultans, artists and buffoons. Their disguises making them daring, they danced and shouted their way along, throwing confetti and paper streamers and handfuls of flour at one another and at the spectators who sat in benches along the periphery of the avenue. The maskers wove in and out between carriages filled with more revelers, among them the city authorities and other prominent notables, and escorted large triumphal floats on which oriental potentates and exotic horsemen and mythological figures posed amid antique pillars and woodland scenes and artificial hills.

The spectacle went on throughout the day and evening, becoming wilder, more violent and lascivious as the day wore on. Toward the end of the afternoon the centerpiece of the Carnival day, the race of the Barbary horses, was staged. Soldiers rode down the length of the Corso, clearing it of carriages and merrymakers. A layer of sand was laid down over the paving stones to prevent the horses from losing their footing, and the crowd, pressed back against the walls of the buildings, waited for the race to begin. The horses, bred from Berber stock, were swift and high-strung, and were goaded to a bleeding frenzy by sharp barbs that cut into their backs and made them run crazily through the street as the crowd roared and cheered. The brutality of the spectacle only added to the pleasure it gave, and the owner of the winning horse became a local hero.

Every night there were comedies and dances in the great houses, and on Sundays the Carnival was brought into the churches. Musicians played, worshipers sang and the holy statues were garlanded with flowers. For eight days restraint and inhibition were forgotten, excess ruled. Then suddenly, when a signal was given signifying the beginning of Ash Wednesday, the tumult came to an end, and for the forty days of Lent Rome was quiet. Easter brought a return to noise and celebration, however, with the dancing, shouting and merrymaking resumed.

Rome was, in fact, in a near-constant state of celebration. There were some one hundred and fifty holidays during the year—church feasts, saints' days and other festivals. Beyond this, individual neighborhoods had their own celebrations and fairs, whose disruptive jollity discouraged people in adjacent neighborhoods from working. Seasonal celebrations too were observed, some of them pre-Christian in origin. And on days when there was no official holiday, the Romans looked forward to the constant entertainment offered by the pageantry of the papal court.

Every time a new pope was installed, he went through the streets in a gorgeous procession, escorted by a glittering retinue of prelates, nobles, papal troops on foot and on horseback. Ceremonies hundreds of years old were periodically reenacted by the pope and cardinals, or by other high-ranking members of the court. Foreign ambassadors on their way to and from the papal palace were accompanied by soldiers, guardsmen and escorts of pages and valets, and because the spectacle was too elaborate to miss the populace customarily turned out to watch. Splendid religious processions added to the list of public events. And on the greatest occasions, the palaces of the aristocracy might be opened to the public, along with their spacious gardens, and for several hours the denizens of the street could wander through the grand rooms, lit with brilliant candelabra, tasting delicate morsels offered them on silver trays by liveried servants.

Grand, dramatic, ultimately artificial, Rome provided the showy backdrop to Prince Charles's childhood. It was an environment which fostered fantasies and grandiose dreams of glory, extravagant living and bold bids for acclaim. Everything was theatrical, nothing mundane. Realism, intellectual rigor, even common sense were assaulted on every side by imagination and illusion, by the sense of timelessness and limitlessness. Such was the vivid, flamboyant urban stage which formed the young prince's conception of the grander stage of the world.

Chapter 4

In the portraits painted during his boyhood, Charles Stuart holds his head at a proud, confident angle, and his eyes—variously painted as warm brown or hazel— are alert and full of spirit. He looks like a healthy young animal, brimming over with vitality, bright and eager. To judge from these portraits, he possessed what his older contemporary Lord Chesterfield called "that living force of soul which spurs and excites young men to please, to shine, to excel." In his heavily embroidered velvet jacket, the Star and blue ribbon of the Garter across his chest, his curling bag-wig perfectly coiffed and powdered, he looks supremely self-assured—and without a trace of hauteur or arrogance.

Charles resembled his mother more than he did his father, and the similarity extended to personality as well as physiognomy. Clementina was mercurial and charming, though in the years following her formal reconciliation with James her mercurial charm was gradually transmuted into an eccentricity so pronounced that it must have left its mark on both her sons. She was by all accounts the sort of woman who compelled attention and attracted either intense love—as she seems to have done in her children and, overall, in her husband—or intense dislike. The pious poor of Rome, who were the frequent objects of her charity, looked on her as a living saint, and only the most irreverent of them suggested that her close relationship to the pope had anything other than religious devotion behind it.

Both his brooding, self-absorbed father and his increasingly reclusive, increasingly religious mother were proud of their elder son, but his radiant normality was out of key with their troubled psyches. James called him "Carluccio," Clementina's name for him was "Carlusu." Others in the household referred to him as the Prince of Wales, and visitors knelt when they met him and kissed his hand. He was accustomed to receiving deference wherever he went, even being granted the extraordinary privilege of sitting in an armchair during his audiences with the pope.

His brother Henry, who was just over four years his junior, was no real rival for Charles, though he too was a fair, good-looking child, lively and personable. The Italians called him "the little Duke of York," and his father was especially delighted with him, recording with pleasure how at the age of six Henry was a good shot and sometimes ''took the air on horseback at night after a day's strong fatigue."
¹

“I am really in love with the little duke," he confided, "for he is the finest child that can be seen."

A second son was essential to ensure the continuity of the Stuart line in case something should happen to Charles, and no doubt more children would have been welcome. But Clementina, who weakened herself by excessive fasting and whose health was deteriorating year by year, produced no more sons. So the two boys kept one another company, Henry no doubt admiring and emulating Charles, dressed like his brother in velvet jacket and small curling wig, though accorded less reverence and involved in less ritual.

As heir to the English throne—which all true Jacobites believed him to be—Charles required an exceptional education. Surprisingly, he did not receive one. His principal teachers were the Scot Andrew Ramsay, a man of letters; the aging Irishman Thomas Sheridan, a relative of the Stuarts (he was James's half-nephew), and the Abbé Legoux, a French cleric from the University of Paris. All were Catholics, and were under the supervision of the Protestant chief tutor, or "Governor," James Murray, Earl of Dunbar. None was able to instill discipline or develop concentration in the lively Charles, and Baron von Stosch, always on the lookout for stories of turmoil and conflict within the Stuart household, wrote to London that Charles was so unruly he threatened to kill Murray and had to be locked in his room—with his weapons taken away.

The boy had a quick mind, but a short attention span, and as a result he reached adolescence without acquiring that familiarity with the Greek and Latin classics which marked a cultivated man, without any apparent knowledge of mathematics—essential to soldiering—and without any knowledge of the history or governance of England. His heavily accented English did not improve as he grew older, and given his father's assiduous efforts to make himself appear to be an Englishman, Charles's deficiency in English speech and culture is remarkable. It is all the more remarkable in that he was exposed to the company of the English Jacobite exiles, and of the English tourists sojourning in Rome.

When Charles was nine years old, in the spring of 1729, Clementina wrote several letters to her "dear Carlusu," telling him she hoped he would continue to be "civil and good" and urging him to "remember well my lessons, which you know is the only proof you can give me of your love."
²
"Be certain of my constant and just love I always will have for my dear Carlusu," she went on, "for whom I have prayed with all my heart to day, and put you [
sic
] under the protection of the Blessed Virgin."
³

James wrote Clementina that "Carluccio was mightily pleased with your Letter and to Sir Thomas's and my great surprise, read it almost current [i.e., almost without hesitation] without much help." That the reading of a relatively simple letter should surprise both James and Sheridan implies that Charles was no prodigy, but at least he could read reasonably well, and his own surviving letters show that, with the help of his tutors, he could compose a well-turned brief letter in either English or French.
⁴
Outdoor activity continued to be his forte, however. As James told Clementina, "I saw him ride yesterday much to my satisfaction, and on the whole I am very much pleased with him." Riding, hunting, playing games: these were what mattered to Charles. He had taken to setting harder challenges for himself, such as staying out after dark with a shotgun, taking aim at flying bats.

The cultivation of Charles's mind and physique were one thing, the cultivation of his manners another. The training of a young aristocrat in the arts of civility required many hours of sophisticated instruction, and one wonders which of the four tutors was responsible for this dimension of Charles's education. There were music teachers to teach him to play the viol—precursor of the cello—and dancing masters to teach him the steps of the current courtly dances, at the same time showing him how to walk with elegance, how to stand and sit gracefully, how to carry himself with regal distinction in any situation. But the subtler lessons of good breeding and gentility must have been left to Murray and his colleagues—and perhaps to Clementina and James as well.

There is no better guide to these principles of aristocratic civility in the earlier eighteenth century than the letters Lord Chesterfield wrote to his errant son. Chesterfield was an English peer, active in politics from the 1720s on and an astute observer of court life. His models of polished manners and wise conduct were the French, and his instruction was as applicable to continental society as to that of England. His purpose in writing letters of advice to his son Philip was to make the young man capable of holding his own in the most urbane company anywhere in Europe, and to prepare him to enter the world of politics and to succeed in it.