Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (92 page)

What do we know about Louise at this time? Contemporary
descriptions
agree in finding her physically attractive without in any sense being beautiful. The marquis de Fitzjames spoke of her medium height and pleasant face.
⁸⁹
Ryan drew attention to her good figure, pretty face and good teeth.
⁹⁰
The duke of Fitzjames found her on the big side and a little thin, yet well-made with a good neck, outstanding skin, vermilion-red lips, beautiful teeth and a pleasant face.
⁹¹
The fourth of Charles Edward’s quartet of negotiators (Caryll) agreed about the remarkably fine teeth, the good complexion and trim figure, and added some more closely-observed details: her eyes were dark, her hair a fine light-brown and her nose well shaped.
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All this was confirmed by her admirer Bonstetten three years later. He spoke of her deep blue eyes, retroussé nose and sensible expression that was at once sparkling and guileful.
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The inner woman is more elusive. Her formal convent education – which she claimed left her knowing nothing except how to pray – had given her a strong distaste for organised religion.
⁹⁴
She was drawn to free-thinking and Voltairean modes of thought. This should have provided some common ground with Charles Edward. There is considerable dramatic irony here. Her uncomplimentary remarks about convents would have chimed in well with his detestation of such places following the Clementina Walkinshaw dêbâcle. Yet it was a nunnery that was to play a key role in severing the links between the prince and Louise.

Something of Louise’s personality and character will emerge later. In the first nine months of their married life, Charles Edward found little to complain about. He confessed himself more than happy with the charms of his young wife.
⁹⁵
His problem in 1772 was not marital but financial.

There was a three-way tangle involved here. First, there was a running dispute with France about the promised but unpaid pension.
⁹⁶
Then there was a veritable mare’s nest over Dunbar’s will, especially the salt revenues which he had enjoyed in usufruct but which passed to the prince on his death in accordance with James’s will.
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Finally, there was confusion over the French revenues from the Hôtel de Ville, a confusion compounded by the death of John Waters.
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As for the Sobieski money from the ‘Fund of Ohlau’, that remained as distant a prospect as ever.
⁹⁹

It was as well that the prince had Louise for company, for apart from her in 1772 there was only Albano, the Argentina theatre, and wine to distract his attentions from ‘malice domestic’ (the Vatican) and ‘foreign levy’ (the French).
¹⁰⁰

The year 1773 brought an echo of the past. News of the marriage
summoned
Clementina Walkinshaw and the prince’s daughter to Rome in hopes of a more favourable financial settlement. The two women had not completely vanished from Charles’s ken. In August 1764 Clementina wrote with a progress report on Charlotte: she was tall, devout and good at music. Charlotte wrote her first letter to her father at this time.
¹⁰¹
Further letters followed in 1768. The burden of the correspondence was always the same: a plea for Charlotte’s recognition.
¹⁰²
This was backed by long screeds from Clementina herself.
¹⁰³

In October 1769 the two women wrote again, Clementina to explain her daughter’s grave illness, an incipient form of the cancer of the liver that was eventually to kill her at the age of thirty-five.
¹⁰⁴
The prince’s answer to all these letters was the same: silence.

When news of Charles Edward’s marriage reached the convent at Meaux where the two women resided, their different reactions were significant. Clementina recoiled with shock.
¹⁰⁵
Charlotte redoubled her efforts. She showed every sign of having inherited her father’s indomitable will, hammering away at the inalienable right owed to her by natural justice, whether she was deemed illegitimate or not.
¹⁰⁶

Lord Caryll took her side. He advised her that he could probably secure her a place in the ‘king’s’ household, provided she broke with her mother. The greatest calamity of all would be if Clementina Walkinshaw were to show her face in Italy.
¹⁰⁷
Charlotte now showed herself to be her father’s daughter in more ways than one. After repudiating Caryll’s advice to wait patiently for a more favourable moment, since her father was ill, Charlotte stepped up the pressure at the end of 1772, writing both to her father and to Cardinal York.
¹⁰⁸
She also lobbied the French court intensely, painting a piteous picture of the plight she and her mother found themselves in.
¹⁰⁹
When neither of these letters produced a response, she decided on a frontal attack. In May 1773 she and her mother travelled to Rome to press their claims. This was extraordinarily self-destructive behaviour.

The unwelcome duo arrived at a moment of maximum embarrassment for Charles Edward. By addressing themselves to the Vatican, Charlotte and her mother seemed to be increasing the possibility of further humiliation for the prince from Clement XIV. Caryll acted swiftly. Clementina Walkinshaw was ordered to leave Rome. At first, doubtless encouraged by Charlotte, she dug in her heels and refused to go.
¹¹⁰

The Cardinal Secretary of State then issued a sombre warning of the possible consequences.
¹¹¹
The unfortunate women were forced to retrace their steps: Genoa–Antibes–Aix–Avignon–Lyons, following
almost
the exact route taken by their oppressor in January 1744.
¹¹²
The sole concession Charlotte wrested from this ill-advised raid on Rome was permission to move convents, from Meaux to Paris.
¹¹³
It was to be another ten years before this indomitable young woman achieved her ends. But, like her father, she preferred constant action, even if it were self-destructive, to defeatist inertia. For the rest of the prince’s marriage his natural daughter continued to be a thorn in his side.

The prince’s attitude to his only daughter is at first sight bizarre. How could he act so coldly and callously to one whose loss had precipitated a nervous breakdown in 1760? The clue lies in his treatment of Louise de Montbazon a quarter of a century earlier. The prince habitually reacted to loss, especially loss for which he felt in some degree responsible, by pretending that there had been no loss. In other words, he dealt with guilt by a show of coldness that shocked and disturbed those (and in the eighteenth century that meant everybody) who could not fathom the deep unconscious springs of his actions.

By the end of 1773 it was apparent that Charlotte was not the only young woman destined to give the prince trouble. Louise found the restrictions of life in Rome as ‘Baroness Renfrew’ instead of the expected ‘Queen of England’ peculiarly irksome; even the newspapers from northern Europe arrived late.
¹¹⁴
For the first nine months of the marriage, by common consent, the prince behaved himself and kept off the bottle. Proudly he drove around Rome in an open carriage, showing off his young wife.
¹¹⁵
But when it became increasingly obvious that for Louise conception was going to be, at the very least, a difficult matter – it later transpired she was barren – the prince resumed his full quota of Cyprus wine.
¹¹⁶

Seeing the storm clouds gathering, Lord Caryll determined to leave the Palazzo Muti at the earliest possible moment. Louise increasingly turned to books for comfort, and to the company of handsome young travellers. She was already being indiscreet, but had not yet got to the point of outright infidelity. The prince trusted her. When information was laid before him that Louise was physically attracted to his lackey Bernardo Rotolo and had confessed the attraction, he dismissed the report as idle rumour.
¹¹⁷
Provided his wife’s admirers did not actually try to cuckold him, and provided they made themselves agreeable to him, Charles was prepared to tolerate Louise’s flirtations. That she quickly became an accomplished coquette is clear from the soubriquet ‘Queen of Hearts’ very soon conferred on her by her suitors.
¹¹⁸

Her first calf-love conquest was Thomas Coke, a young English Whig grandee on the Grand Tour. The culmination of this flirtation was a commission from the princess to the well-known portrait painter Pompeo Batoni to paint the youth and herself in the guise of Theseus and Ariadne on Naxos.
¹¹⁹
Coke returned to England from his travels besotted with the ‘Queen of Hearts’; other young English travellers, too, returned glowing with her memory.
¹²⁰

But it was not Englishmen alone who were lured into Louise’s tender trap. The Swiss Charles-Victor Bonstetten, later a well-known belle-lettriste, carried on a literary flirtation with her for two years, though this was a little later, in the Florence period.
¹²¹
Yet a remark made to Bonstetten by Louise early in 1775 shows the way her mind was working even during the dull days at the Palazzo Muti. She told him she approved of the basically polygamous instincts of men and felt the same principle should hold good for women: they should be allowed an intellectual companion by day and a carnal one by night.
¹²²

By early 1774, it seems unlikely that the prince was satisfying either the diurnal or nocturnal requirement. Even before the move to Florence, the danger signals were there for anyone who cared to read them. On the one hand, there was an angry, bibulous fifty-three-year-old, now disappointed even of the heir that would have perpetuated the Stuart line. Taken together with papal failure to recognise him as king, and French perfidy over the money, Louise’s inability to become pregnant seemed to reduce the marriage to new levels of meaninglessness. For her part, Louise had to assuage her disappointed ambitions with physically unconsummated relationships with young men, and with incipient bibliophilia. Being Queen of Hearts was a poor substitute for the Queen of England she had hoped to be.
¹²³

The ‘contradictions’ in the marriage were already acute. Whether a change of locale could resolve them was doubtful. It was not long before the question marks against the marriage’s viability became underscorings of the certainty of its failure.

(1774–80)

AFTER A TWO-YEAR
lacuna since his disappointed entry into Rome with his ‘queen’, Charles Edward suddenly found his hands full both with pressing domestic issues and matters of high politics.

The year 1774 came in like a lion. The first piece of drama was Louis XV’s sudden illness and death.
¹
This aroused hopes of new bearings in French policy. The focus of attention again switched to Versailles.

Immediately Charles Edward ordered Lord Caryll to write to the duc d’Orléans, in tandem with the prince’s formal condolences to the new king, twenty-year-old Louis XVI.
²
Under the pretext of welcoming the new reign, Caryll’s letter protested at the non-payment of the pension promised by France on the occasion of the marriage with Louise of Stolberg. The prince’s intention was to lobby Louis XVI on a twin-track basis. Along with the existing negotiations between the tardy duc de Fitzjames and the duc d’Aiguillon, the prince designed his fresh overtures as the opening of a second front.
³

The forced resignation of d’Aiguillon in any case brought the first set of negotiations to a sudden halt, much to the relief of the Polonius-like duc de Fitzjames.
⁴
The prince pressed ahead through the supposed new channel. His arguments were threefold: kings by divine right owed a duty to each other; the French had done amazingly well out of the ’45; and finally, the French had actually
promised
a subsidy when Charles was in Paris in September 1771.

But now the prince muddied his own waters. After putting out an initial feeler to the duc d’Orléans, he switched to lobbying Maurepas.
⁵
Charles Edward’s old adversary from the days of the arrest and expulsion had been recalled by Louis XVI after twenty-five years in the political wilderness. Maurepas was now in his early seventies.
Louis
installed him in rooms directly above his own at Versailles. Every morning, when the king heard his minister stirring, Louis would visit him to talk over the problems of the day.

On the face of it, then, Maurepas was uniquely well placed to promote the prince’s cause at the French court. Yet the prince had discounted three factors. In the first place, it had been a serious blunder to contact Orléans, a known enemy of Maurepas.
⁶
If the prince wanted favours from Orléans, he should not have approached Maurepas, and
vice versa
. Second, Maurepas was retained by Louis XVI as Minister without Portfolio, so had no departmental resources to command, whatever his feelings for the prince. Third, and most importantly, the new king himself wanted to sever the French connection with the Stuarts. He regarded them as an unlucky, even accursed family, and felt they were an anachronistic impediment to proper relations with England, an unacceptable joker in the international pack.

Maurepas demonstrated that he had lost none of his old cunning. In his reply (indirect, using the excuse of protocol) to the prince, Maurepas expressed himself keen to help but unable to do anything: the spirit of divine right solidarity was willing but the ministerial flesh was weak (or non-existent). He suggested an approach to the new Foreign Minister comte de Vergennes.
⁷

After another few ineffectual stabs in Maurepas’s direction, the prince decided to take his advice.
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By this time even Abbé Gordon, who had fancied himself as having the ear of the duc d’Orléans, regretted opening that channel.
⁹
Finding it quite useless for their purposes, the Jacobites shut it down and threw all their efforts into lobbying Vergennes.