Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (12 page)

This was telling James what he wanted to hear, since he had been nagging his son mercilessly by letter throughout the tour. James’s tone was at best patronising and at worst downright insulting, considering that the sixteen-year-old was already shaving and wearing a wig.
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Moreover, the reluctant tutor was forced to be on his mettle at Bologna. The Elector of Bavaria was in the city at the same time. Since there was no need for Charles Edward to go about incognito in the papal states, any meeting between the two would oblige the Elector to recognise Charles publicly as Prince of Wales. It had therefore been agreed that the two parties would give each other a wide berth. But by a blunder the same house and balcony had been assigned to both for watching the Corpus Christi procession. Charles Edward was at the very threshold before Dunbar spotted the contretemps and led him away.
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After a week’s rest, Charles Edward’s party moved on to Florence, arriving at night on 22 June. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had offered to provide honours in the form of coaches, but the Jacobite agent in
Florence
, Tyrell, insisted on a punctilious observance of the incognito. By now the English were so jumpy that the mere suggestion that coaches might have been offered to the Stuart party worked the British Resident Fane into a lather.
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Word of Charles Edward’s love of dancing spread like a forest fire through the towns on their projected itinerary homewards. Dunbar had at one time toyed with a route taking them to Rome through Perugia. Hearing of the atrocious state of the Siena–Perugia road, he devised instead an itinerary to take them through Lucca, Pisa, Livorno, Siena and Caprarola. Even while the prince danced the nights away in Florence, Dunbar heard to his horror that similar balls had already been arranged in Lucca, Livorno and Siena.
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Florence rivalled Venice in the warmth of its welcome and the variety of entertainments laid on. The prince was given magnificent dinners by the nuncio and the Corsinis, saw a ‘singular collection of pictures’ at the Uffizi gallery, and attended a horse-race with coaches which he viewed from the balcony of the Casino Corsini and which ‘seems to be a small remnant of the Olympic games’. There was a side visit to the Pope’s nieces, both nuns. Other lavish dinners and feasts were provided at Villa Castello, Palazzo Antinoni and Palazzo Guadagni.
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The prince’s magnetic appeal for the fine ladies was again in evidence. Nearly one hundred of them crowded in to see him at the illuminated ball at the Villa Corsini on Sunday night 30 June.
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Such was the prince’s popularity in Florence that the ordinary people were said to have lamented their inability to elect a Grand Duke – for they would certainly have chosen Charles Edward.

There could be no doubting the success of Charles Edward’s 1737 tour of northern Italy. Not only did James regard the expenditure of 5,000 crowns (£1,250 approx.) as remarkably economical, but the possibility of further such journeys was raised, especially to Spain.
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As a propaganda exercise the tour was even more efficacious than the Gaeta excursion. It was absolutely clear that Charles Edward was already a charmer of the first rank; not even the cross-grained Dunbar cared to deny it.
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As General Bulkeley later expressed it in his essay on the prince: ‘The English travellers who then most disliked his cause may remember how much they feared it too at that time from the opinion which they had conceived of that young prince.’
⁴⁵

Why, then, was James’s reaction to his son’s triumph so grudging? Although he had earlier claimed, in a rare moment of self-knowledge, ‘I should be sorry if the Prince resembled me in everything,’
⁴⁶
that is precisely what, on the most charitable view, he was demanding. There was no praise for his huge public relations success, no appreciation
of
his obvious charisma, simply endless nagging and pedantic fussing. This time the prince tried very hard to keep up his correspondence with his father, even though the constant travelling did not make this an easy thing to do.
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James began by expressing pleasure in the fact that his son was writing to him as promised.
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But before long the predictable carping tendencies returned; James began to find fault with Charles’s spelling, grammar and punctuation.
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The inevitable happened. Faced with this nitpicking response to his efforts, Charles Edward found the incentive for frequent correspondence lacking.

Soon James was returning to his original tack. All the public success in the world, he told his son, was not enough if he failed to keep up his correspondence.
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Not a word here about the things the prince had achieved, things that were clearly beyond James’s own grasp; merely a remorseless chipping away at peccadilloes.

So far James’s attitude could be considered merely narrow, blinkered and insensitive. But there soon came dramatic evidence that there was more to it than that, that James was motivated by unconscious jealousy. On 30 July, while the prince was still basking in the golden opinions he had won on the tour, James wrote to Inverness as follows: ‘I am going to cut off the Prince’s hair with which I know not whether he or Sir Thomas are best pleased.’
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The symbolism of this is glaringly obvious. James already felt (and not just from the Italian tour) that he was being eclipsed by his elder son, that most credible Jacobites were now beginning to place their best hopes on Young rather than Old Pretender. For the older man, the symbolic gelding of the warrior returning home flushed with triumph served as a reminder that he was the one who cut not the one who was cut, much as if Cronos had beaten Zeus to the sickle. Charles Edward’s reputation was now too high, and he had gained it too obviously by being unlike either James or Henry. At a symbolic level he had to be castrated and deprived of his power. The inclusion of Sir Thomas Sheridan as the other one, apart from Charles Edward, who would be hurt by the act is also instructive. It suggests that James was also unconsciously striking out at rival father figures.
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That James’s action was contentious and controversial can be seen from Edgar’s comments a week later. It was ever Edgar’s role to pour oil on troubled waters and even to rewrite history for his master’s benefit, but there is a definite air of protesting too much in his letter to Kelly on the subject.
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Why else should he have found an apparently trivial matter so troublesome?

The anticlimactic and even depressing sequel to the prince’s grand
tour
was reinforced the following year with the death from consumption of the duke of Berwick (June 1738).
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Berwick was the only Jacobite of the first rank, both socially and politically, who was a genuine admirer of the prince, who both loved and respected him. Berwick made an admirable father/authority figure for Charles Edward and his loss was incalculable. He might have filled the gap that James could never fill. The inability of the prince to form a proper relationship with his father was to have profound and disastrous consequences in the future. Because he could not ‘have it out’ with aloof and forbidding James, the prince was unable to find a middle path between anger and submission. This meant that he was later incapable, at moments of crisis, of the patient argumentation and reasoning that might have won over doubters. As Derby and Falkirk were later to show, the prince had just two gears: rage or dumb capitulation. At moments of extreme stress it was usually the former that prevailed. Yet the prince can scarcely be blamed for his father’s failure as a parent. Faced with the same sheer cliff wall of cold duty, Henry solved the problem by internalisation through religious mania.

Charles Edward continued to hone his physical faculties to a fine point against the day when he would be called on to play a great part in the world. His dedication on this point, amid the competing temptations of the Roman fleshpots, shows him at his strongest, almost the morality of strenuousness personified. According to the Jesuit Julio Cordara who knew him well, the prince disliked Rome precisely because only the arts of peace and pleasure were practised there.
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This was no place for the aspiring warrior.

So the prince steeled himself for war by the rigours of the chase. He made it a point of honour to penetrate the densest wood or the most desolate heath in all weathers. At sunset he would return, scorched by the sun or frozen by the cold. In conscious emulation of the Ancient Romans, he trained himself to endure all hardships. So skilled did the prince become in woodcraft that later, while a fugitive in Scotland, he amazed his followers by being able to lure plovers within the range of his guns by imitating the bird’s call.
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His companion on many of these expeditions was Father Vinciguerra, later Bendict XIV’s secret chaplain. Vinciguerra encouraged the prince to believe that the Christian warrior had to undergo the hardships of wind, rain, snow, poor food, sleeping on straw, etc. to gain God’s support for his mission.
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One might be tempted to call Charles Edward’s monomania a ‘Galahad complex’ but for the unwarranted connotation of virginity. Of the prince’s sexual career
during
these years, or even if there was one, we know nothing. His private life in Rome is a total blank.
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So Charles Edward’s late teens and early twenties dissolve into a succession of hunting parties: at Palo, at Lamentana, and especially on the duke of Caserta’s estates at Cisterna.
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Some of the tallies for the
caccia
make the prince seem a veritable Nimrod; certainly his ability as a marksman was never in doubt.
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The only Achilles heel in this body of physical accomplishments was that the prince never learned to swim, much to his cost later in Scotland. This was wholly a cultural matter: sea-bathing had not yet come into vogue in Italy.
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There is no question but that Charles Edward thrived on his Spartan regime. James, proud of being taller than Dunbar, noted with a mixture of pride and misgiving that his son was already as tall as his tutor and bidding fair to overtop him.
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When Lord Elcho (born 1721) came to Rome on the Grand Tour in October 1740, James made him stand back-to-back with his son; to his delight James found Charles Edward much taller.
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In view of the prince’s later problems with his health, it may be instructive to ask at this point how his constitution stood up to this rigorous testing. In April 1739 James claimed that his son had inherited his weak stomach, but it is clear that the slight disorder suffered on that occasion was the advance guard of the virus that brought him and his brother out in chickenpox the following month.
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Apart from minor ailments and a bad toothache in August 1741, the chickenpox comprised the sum total of illness in the period 1737–44.
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Given the many illnesses the prince was to suffer during the ’45, there is at least a
prima facie
case for saying that his physical constitution was naturally very robust, and that he succumbed to illness mainly in times of stress.
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But if the prince was keying himself to concert pitch in physicality, his mental life was not developing at an equal pace. After 1737 the sole reference to intellectual interests comes in the form of an order for a book of Ancient History, doubtless to read up on the heroes of antiquity he wished to emulate.
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The sole ‘civilised’ pursuit in which Charles the mighty hunter took an interest was music, both as listener and performer.
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He was an accomplished cellist. One of his favourite pieces was Corelli’s
Notte di Natale
(the Christmas Concerto, Concerto Grosso No. 8 in G Minor) which he and Henry (on violin) played for the French traveller Charles de Brosses in 1740.
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And the prince clearly enjoyed the theatre and the opera.
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His theatre-going became particularly assiduous in the period 1741–3, after his majority, when his patronage of a particular theatre would help to make it popular.
One
of his favourites (and Henry’s too) was the Teatro Aliberti. Four operas there were dedicated to the Stuart princes and enjoyed great popularity.
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More rarely, the Stuarts would commission fresh settings of an opera. This involved new arrangements and libretti, with original arias expressly written for the local singers, and the entire work adapted to fit local conditions; in extreme cases new music would be written to accommodate a famous prima donna or an idiosyncratic local conductor.
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In addition, the exiled Stuarts were alone in Rome in enjoying the privilege of having an aria repeated during the opera, a privilege they exercised in the case of their favourite pieces at the Aliberti.
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Charles Edward’s other much-loved social activity was dancing. The great reputation he had acquired on the 1737 Italian tour followed him to Rome. The early months of 1739, when the prince was eighteen, were a vintage period. Within a seven-day period Charles Edward attended two sumptuous balls, for the princes of Saxony and Poland (at the latter he danced until 6 a.m.).
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The rest of the evenings in the same week he spent at the Clementi theatre.
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In 1740 his terpsichorean skills were observed by a number of foreign visitors. On the 14th of May both Horace Walpole and the poet Thomas Gray attended an élite ball in Rome where James and his two sons were the guests of honour.
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Music was provided by the contemporary celebrities La Diamantina, Giovanni and Pasqualini.
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Two months later Gray was at the Villa Patrizi for a ball given to Prince and Princess Craon.
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Gray was impressed, rather against his will by both the Pretender’s sons: ‘They are good fine boys, especially the younger, who has the more spirit of the two, and both danced incessantly all night long.’
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