Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (88 page)

But Clement XIII was not the sort of man to be trifled with. He struck back vigorously. Another congregation of cardinals was held. It was decided that Secretary of State Torregiani should command the Cardinal Dean of the Sacred College, in charge of protocol, to require all cardinals to follow the line towards the Stuarts laid down by the Pope.
¹¹²
Recognition of the prince as Charles III became almost as much a treasonable matter in Rome as in England. The rectors of the Scots and Irish colleges were expelled from Rome together with the superiors of two Irish convents.
¹¹³
To cap all, while Charles Edward was away with Henry at Albano, the coat of arms of England was taken down from the door of the Palazzo Muti.
¹¹⁴
All signs of the Stuarts as a royal house were expunged from Rome.

It seemed that the prince had reached the nadir of his fortunes. He had now suffered the ultimate humiliation. He had returned to the city he swore never to see again only to find himself worse off than at Bouillon.

(1766–70)

THERE WAS JUST
one small consolation for the prince as he settled in at the Palazzo Muti. His days of living from hand to mouth, one jump ahead of his creditors, seemed to be over, for in James’s will considerable monies had been left to Charles.
¹
In France James had income from town houses, investments in the Hôtel de Ville, and certain other real estate revenues which Dunbar and the dowager countess Inverness were enjoying in usufruct, but which would revert to the prince on their death. As a result of a series of trade-offs with Henry, the prince was the beneficiary of all Stuart income in France (apart from ecclesiastical benefices). In addition he owned the 100,000 Roman crowns (about £25,000) deposited in the Monte di Pietà, plus all the jewels and precious pieces held there.

On the other hand, James required his elder son to keep up all the pensions and payments to his vast army of dependants and clients.
²
And, now that the prince had inherited the so-called wealth of the Stuarts, Jacobite hangers-on who had not been heard of for a decade or more came forward with hard-luck stories, asking for money.
³
Mann waxed lyrically incredulous at the wealth of the Stuarts but, as Lumisden soon found out, the account books in the Palazzo Muti told a story not nearly so rosy.
⁴

The prince set about regularising his household. Andrew Lumisden, who had been royal secretary since Edgar’s death in 1762, intended to quit the service after the transfer of power, but Charles persuaded him to stay on.
⁵
Chief among the prince’s other ‘gentlemen’ was John Hay of Restalrig, principally known for his disastrous failure over the commissariat just before Culloden. The prince appointed him major-domo and created him a baronet of Scotland on 31 December 1766.
⁶
There was the faithful John Stewart,
who
had accompanied the prince from Scotland, was imprisoned with him, sacked, restored to favour, and then led the private search for Clementina Walkinshaw in 1760. Stewart had sailed close to the wind with Charles Edward before, but had always remained just inside his master’s favour. Two other veterans of the ’45 completed the ‘court’ at the Palazzo Muti: Captain Adam Urquhart and Lachlan Mackintosh, who had actually commanded a clan regiment.
⁷

There was one other of James’s old retainers that Charles Edward thought worth keeping on. The Welsh clergyman, Rev. Mr Wagstaffe, formerly the Protestant chaplain, was retained by the prince as a wink and a nod to the English Jacobites that the Stuart heart was still really Anglican. The prince was always a trimmer when it came to organised religion. He did not oppose it with Voltairean intensity, merely despised it utterly.

Rather than bow the knee to the Pope, the prince preferred to remain incognito. This meant that he could not be received by polite society.
⁸
On the other hand, despite the attitude of their governments, he was frequently visited by the ambassadors of Spain, France and Malta.
⁹
At first Charles was content to be quietly defiant. He treated the Pope’s absurd offer to recognise him as the Prince of Wales with the contempt its logic deserved.
¹⁰

Once his legs were free of their dropsical swelling, he was out and about in Rome, now masked in the Corso, now at the opera in the French ambassador’s box.
¹¹
But he chafed at not being able to go hunting.
¹²
His attitude, as expressed to his brother at the end of March, was surely tongue-in-cheek: ‘My health is, thank God, good, though my heart is not content, but my trust in the Being of Beings is my consolation.’
¹³

The question remained: how long would he remain in Rome with such an uncertain and unsatisfactory status? Bologna was raised as a possible permanent residence. Aubeterre advised him to stay in the papal states until he had exhausted all possible diplomatic pressure on the European courts.
¹⁴
This meant keeping on in the Palazzo Muti pending further developments. Caprasola and San Marino remained as last-ditch sanctuaries. In the meantime Louis XV and Charles III of Spain would have to be pressurised to find him somewhere to live that afforded the same dignity James had enjoyed.

The chief problem here was that there was no hope for the prince as long as Choiseul remained at the helm in Versailles. Choiseul’s anti-prince attitudes had, if anything, hardened since 1759.
¹⁵
Charles Edward’s heavy drinking was well known to provide Choiseul with all the ammunition he needed to shoot down any overtures on behalf
of
the prince. Pointing out that massive consumption of wine was a slow but sure poison, Choiseul argued that it was senseless for France to lobby the Vatican for the Stuart cause, since the prince would soon die from drink anyway.
¹⁶
Choiseul added caustically that it was James’s abstention from hard liquor that had contributed to his high reputation throughout Europe.

Frustrated at every turn, Charles took to spending as much time as possible outside Rome. After hunting at Palidoro in April, he paid a fleeting visit to the Palazzo Muti before departing for a long spell at Frascati.
¹⁷
In May he was at Albano for the
villegiatura
. There were many dinners with Henry, when Charles would try to broach his schemes for nominating cardinals off his own bat ‘
pour épater le Vaticane
’.
¹⁸
He complained to Thibault that the Italian hunting was not a patch on the shoots he had enjoyed in the Ardennes.
¹⁹
Most of all, there was the ever-increasing fondness for Cyprus wine.
²⁰

As 1766 entered its last months, Charles Edward’s bitterness about the Pope remained unabated. The last straw was when Clement confiscated his carriage and horses for displaying royal colours. The prince acidly remarked that he thought he would go to Venice, where there were no horses but only boats.
²¹

From the beginning of September until the end of November, Charles brooded at Albano.
²²
He still sent no definite orders for the dispatch of the residue of his effects from Avignon and Bouillon.
²³
He toyed with the idea of making a home in various localities, but as quickly discarded the notions. Valmonte, Cisterna, Venice, Avignon, Paris: the prince had only to think of them to find some compelling reason why he could not bear a permanent domicile in any of them.
²⁴
In the end he admitted that the problem was insoluble and ordered Stafford to remove from Avignon, lock, stock and barrel.
²⁵

The prince remained at Albano, taking what consolation he could from playing the cello. But music and the chase did not compensate for the lack of good conversation and cultivated society, especially since the scarcity of game at Albano diminished the returns from hunting.
²⁶
And always there was the constant throb of pain from his humiliation by Choiseul and the Madrid court.
²⁷

Rome, when he returned there in the New Year, was no better. There were visits to the Argentina and Aliberti theatres, but Clement XIII had cut back on Roman spectacles and the 1767 carnival was cancelled.
²⁸
Charles Edward’s depression and inebriation became acute. There exists a rambling, sprawling letter the prince wrote to Henry in February 1767, obviously written in a drunken state, in
which
Charles pours out his woes and frustrations while muttering darkly about his duty before God and men.
²⁹
The prince’s declining mental condition is also evinced by a maniacal insistence on secrecy in the matter of conveying his effects from Avignon to Rome, as if he were still the hero of the ’45 and not a paper tiger and plaything of Mann.
³⁰

It may well have been the receipt of the shocking missive above, showing the extent of the prince’s degeneration, that impelled Henry to try to patch up relations between his brother and the Pope. After conferring with Charles at Frascati in April, Henry implemented his plan.
³¹
In May 1767 Clement XIII and Charles Edward at last came face to face. On the evening of Saturday 9 May the Pope received the prince in private audience. Charles was supposed to be a private nobleman but went to the meeting quite openly, making no attempt at disguise.
³²

Clement had his own devices for putting the prince in his place. While Henry, as Cardinal York, was admitted at once to the papal chambers, Charles was kept waiting and then called for as ‘the brother of Cardinal York’.
³³
On entering the chamber, the prince was obliged to kneel and kiss the Pope’s foot and to remain kneeling until the Pontiff commanded him to rise.
³⁴
Recalling his mirth about the Pope’s toe in the ’45, we can see how low (literally) the prince had now come. This was reality. What he had refused a Pope as child was now forced from him as a middle-aged man.

An audience of a quarter of an hour ensued, with Henry working hard as go-between. The prince repeated his claims; the Pope reiterated that he could live in Rome on a proper footing only if he relinquished them. The prince in reply tried bluster. He said that Culloden had done him the sort of damage alongside which papal injustices were a mere trifle.
³⁵
Both the Pope and the prince expressed themselves satisfied with the interview. Henry, however, complained privately of his brother’s ‘indocility and most singular way of thinking and arguing’.
³⁶

Henry no more understood his brother than James had. He could not cope with the violent mood swings, the rapid oscillation between charm and anger. It was characteristic of the prince to be angry with someone, then be charming and courteous to their face, then revert to rage. This was not insincerity or hypocrisy. The prince was a hopeless diplomat. He could not be firm with people while not alienating them. He had two modes: wit and charm, designed to cajole the opposition; and violent anger if such cajolery failed.

In July Henry offered to keep Charles Edward a place in St Peter’s
at
his side, to watch the Pope’s canonisation ceremonies. The prince declined; ‘I think it improper for me to be present at any of the Pope’s ceremonies until His Holiness shall do me the justice to receive me with all these distinctions that are due to me.’
³⁷

He proceeded to lay claim again to his father’s prerogative of nominating cardinals.
³⁸
Since 1767 was the year of the expulsion of the Jesuits from their utopia in the Paraguayan reductions, the Society of Jesus, with its own scores to settle with Clement XIII, were happy to support the prince. So too were the Benedictines. Their procurator in Rome castigated the head of the order for failing to give Charles Edward his proper title of Charles III.
³⁹

The ordeal continued. The prince spent a dreadful autumn at Albano in alcoholic despair, and with a protracted cold.
⁴⁰
Henry wrung his hands over his brother’s drinking but could see no light on the horizon until Clement XIII was dead.
⁴¹

The year 1768 saw a further decline in the prince’s fortunes. This time the occasion was the collapse of the miniature court he had installed around him. Andrew Lumisden had long been seeking an honourable exit from the prince’s service. Under James he had been able to provide relief for many distressed Scottish Jacobites. Under Charles, the parlous state of finances at the Palazzo Muti made this impossible and removed Lumisden’s principal motive for staying on.
⁴²
But it was difficult to resign without seeming to abandon the prince – he had few enough ‘gentlemen’ around him as it was.
⁴³

So for three years Lumisden soldiered on beneath a crushing burden of duties. A letter to his sister in late 1766 reveals both his own despair and the futility of the prince’s existence:

Almost from break of day to midnight I am employed about the king [sic]. Besides serving him as his secretary, I am obliged to attend him as a gentleman of the bedchamber when he goes abroad, both morning and evening, and after dinner and supper I retire with him into his closet. Add to this the time we sit at the table, and you will see I have not a moment to myself. I am never in my apartment but either to sleep or write. But this is not all. We have been five of the nine months since the king’s coming into Italy either at Albano or other parts of the country, a’ shooting, and which kind of wandering life is more likely to increase than diminish.… I have lived for many years in a sort of bondage; but I may name these past months a mere slavery. Yet I readily submit to every inconvenience, when honour and duty call on me to do so.
⁴⁴