Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (91 page)

It remained to tie up the loose ends. Fitzjames sent on a genealogy of the Stolberg family. In return he requested a papal dispensation for the wedding and a marriage contract from Charles, plus a proxy for the actual ceremony. The prince got Caryll to write back, adding a few words in his own hand. He gave Ryan a proxy power to contract the marriage. The marriage portion to be settled on the princess was 40,000 livres a year, plus 10,000 livres pin money. The prince wrote to Fitzjames to specify the itinerary to be followed when
bringing
his bride to Italy. In a fateful decision he added: ‘I have already informed you that I have chosen the eldest of the sisters. Her age is the most suitable for me, and what you have told me about the health of the younger confirms me in my resolution.’
⁴⁵

The preparations for the marriage show clearly that Charles Edward was a poor administrator. Ryan wrote back to query his instructions.
⁴⁶
These spoke only of the financial settlement, allowances and jewels. But was the marriage contract to be governed by the laws of Flanders, France, Italy or even England?
⁴⁷
Moreover, nothing had been said about an actual marriage ceremony in Paris. Was it the prince’s intention that this should not take place?
⁴⁸

Ryan wanted no embarrassing scenes with the princess’s family. Charles Edward was pressing for Louise to be sent to Italy as soon as possible.
⁴⁹
But he did not seem to appreciate the delicacy of the steps Ryan and Fitzjames had to tread. So far the Stolberg family had co-operated admirably. They had seen the point of a private ceremony without notaries – since English spies could bribe notaries to let them have sight of the contract.
⁵⁰
And the first instalment of money (36,000 livres) had been squeezed out of Versailles.
⁵¹
It was pointless, therefore, not to accommodate the wishes of the Stolbergs as far as possible. After all, without a formal
laissez partir
signed by the mother, technically the family could later plead duress or marriage by procuring.
⁵²

Charles Edward’s inattention to detail may have been caused by the elaborate web he was now spinning to ensnare the Pope. His friend Cardinal Marefoschi had earlier advised him not to alienate Clement by trying to keep the marriage a secret.
⁵³
Now Charles commissioned Marefoschi to insinuate the argument that his coming marriage changed everything. He therefore hoped that the Pope would receive him as his father had been received; even more, that his bride would be shown the same consideration as Clementina Sobieska. Marefoschi should stress to Clement that various cardinals (Calini, Canale, Corsini, Borghese, Orsini) already called him king. The coming nuptials gave the Vatican a chance to regularise the situation. A good outward symbol of the new relationship might be the restoration of the guard at the Palazzo Muti, and the provision of furniture for his wife, as in James’s day.
⁵⁴

If these gentle persuasions failed, Marefoschi should bring pressure to bear on Cardinal Bernis. The argument should then be that France had insisted on Charles’s marriage, but that the prince had only been able to find a suitable bride by promising her that the two of them would be on the same footing with the Pope as James and Clementina
had
been. Not to recognise him as king, then, meant that Louise could allege false pretences. Besides, Louis XV was just waiting for papal recognition of ‘Charles III’ before following suit himself.
⁵⁵

As a crowning touch, Charles Edward decided to time his overtures to the Pope so that he would be out of Rome when the hour of decision came. The Pope would probably wait until his return if he was going to reply in the negative. It would then be open for the prince to say that he naturally assumed the ‘long silence’ meant consent.
⁵⁶
Just before he left Rome at the end of March 1772, the prince notified the Cardinal Secretary of State that he would no longer be known as Baron Renfrew, but expected henceforth to be addressed by the same title as his father.
⁵⁷

There was much cunning in this procedure, but, as so often with the prince, insufficient awareness of hard political realities. The truth was that Clement XIV had been engaged in secret negotiations with the roving duke of Gloucester. His aim was to better the conditions of English and Irish Catholics.
⁵⁸
He did not intend to allow Stuart pretensions to stand in his way. Clement sent an invitation to the duke of Gloucester to visit Rome.
⁵⁹
Gloucester arrived in the Eternal City on 25 February 1772, at the very time Charles Edward was bombarding the Vatican with his requests for recognition.
⁶⁰

Whether genuinely confident of a change of heart from Clement XIV, or merely self-deluded, Charles Edward pressed on with the preparations for his marriage. For months he had fretted impatiently. The prince was a man who wanted instant results. It seemed to him that Fitzjames and Ryan had been an unconscionable time finalising matters in Paris.
⁶¹
He was irritated and frustrated by the delays: ‘moments are more precious than one can imagine in this affair.’ He was especially infuriated by what he saw as legalistic nitpicking about the contract: the papers he had sent ‘were as binding as words could make, both opposite to God and to man … approved by three people of logical mind, two of them cardinals’.
⁶²

But Ryan had run into fresh problems. The young lady earmarked as Louise’s companion dropped out; a suitable replacement at short notice was not easy.
⁶³
No sooner was this hiccup overcome than fresh problems presented themselves. The Stolberg party was due in Paris on 17–18 March to contract the marriage by proxy.
⁶⁴
In the event, the princess and her mother did not arrive until the evening of the 19th. Immediately the princess, senior, gave clear signs of being the troublemaker she was. Not only did she object to the replacement companion found for Louise, but she and her relations insisted on inserting a written inventory of the wedding presents in the contract,
even
though Ryan pointed out that such insertions had no validity in law.
⁶⁵

Finally, on 22 March, the objections of the Stolberg matriarch were assuaged and the proxy marriage ceremony took place. Ryan and a M. de Betargh signed as proxies in the presence of the two Fitzjameses.
⁶⁶
At long last, on Friday 27 March at 6 p.m., the proxy bride and her escort left the French capital. At the last minute one Mlle Power had been found to act as Louise’s companion.
⁶⁷

The itinerary to Italy had been specified by Charles Edward with meticulous accuracy: Brussels, the Tyrol, Trentano, Bologna, Ancona, Macerata to Viterbo, where the marriage would be solemnised.
⁶⁸
At some stage these arrangements were altered. It seems likely that Marefoschi, in compensation for the disappointment with the Pope that he saw looming, offered to marry the couple in Macerata, his own fief.
⁶⁹

But the prince’s cup of frustration was not yet full. Ryan’s party made slow progress after Strasbourg, mainly because the German roadmasters would allow only four-wheeled carriages on their highways.
⁷⁰
The roads were in any case execrable. It took Ryan and his party until 6 April to get as far as Innsbruck.
⁷¹

By the 11th they were in Bologna. Here the Stolberg family sent on a request that the marriage be solemnised on the day that the couple first met.
⁷²
Macerata more than ever looked like the perfect venue.

Edmund Ryan’s role in the entire affair is significant. The selection of an Irishman was a deliberate harking back to the bold Chevalier Wogan who accompanied the prince’s mother, also from Innsbruck. Charles Edward might have thought the mimesis less appealing if he had reflected that Clementina Sobieska took no more than six years to seek refuge from his father in a convent, just as Clementina the less (Walkinshaw) did from him. It would have been stretching credibility too far at this stage if someone had suggested that a further flight and a further convent might lie ahead.

On 13 April the prince left Rome for Macerata.
⁷³
On arrival there, he was informed that the Pope had granted him a dispensation to marry Louise and had allowed a nuptial benediction. He rode down to Loreto to meet his bride, then accompanied her back to Macerata. Louise was tired after being nineteen hours in the coach on Wednesday the 15th, but, two hours after reaching Macerata, she went through with the ceremony. At 2 p.m. on Good Friday, 17 April 1772, Cardinal Marefoschi solemnised the marriage in the private chapel of the palace of the Compagnoni Marefoschi.
⁷⁴
Both bride and
groom
were sartorially resplendent; the prince wore a yellow-metalled sword specially for the occasion. The couple then spent their honeymoon in the Palazzo. Caryll’s preparation of the bridal suite had been every bit as thorough as his arrangements in the chapel; Louise even had her own French-speaking maid.
⁷⁵

There is no doubt that the prince’s first impressions of his bride were extremely favourable. On seeing her, he increased her pin money to 15,000 livres a year, 5,000 more than specified in the contract.
⁷⁶
And that night he composed for her one of his couplets of doggerel:

This crown is due to you by me

And none shall love you more than me.
⁷⁷

The prince’s reception in Macerata had echoes of that in Avignon nearly twenty-five years before. ‘
Viva Il Re!
’, the crowds shouted. The governor of Macerata danced attendance on the newly-weds. An assembly of the local nobility in honour of the royal couple did not end until three in the morning. On Easter Sunday there was further lavish entertainment before Charles and his queen set out for Rome with eighteen post horses.
⁷⁸

The prince’s wedding created a minor sensation in Europe, showing that he was still newsworthy. By the time of the solemnisation at Macerata, the news of the proxy marriage in Paris had already caused a ripple of excitement to run through Europe.
⁷⁹
Frederick the Great saw the union as a significant development in the deepening Anglo-French hostility. It was quite clear to him that French desire to prolong the life of the Stuart scarecrow meant that a day of reckoning was not far off, when France would attempt to undo the 1763 Treaty of Paris.
⁸⁰

Yet those in the know realised how insignificant the match was in political terms. It was a matter of weeks rather than months before Charles Edward realised that neither of his hopes from the marriage was going to materialise. France intended to renege on its pension commitment; the Papacy would still not recognise him as Charles III.

It was the papal issue that impinged first on the prince’s consciousness. Charles had never relaxed his pressure on the Vatican. He informed Marefoschi that he was bringing a queen back to Rome and the said queen would be mortified not to find a papal guard on duty at the gate of their palazzo.
⁸¹
But Clement XIV dealt with the prince’s overtures by ignoring them. The only conciliatory step he took was to suggest to the duke of Gloucester that it might be politic for him to avoid ‘Charles III’s’ triumphal entry. Gloucester took the
hint
and left Rome two days before Charles Edward’s return on 22 April.
⁸²
Clement had already secured the concessions he wanted from the English. One early result was that in 1774 George III proclaimed religious toleration for Catholics in Canada.
⁸³

On the prince’s arrival in Rome, he decided to push matters to a conclusion. He called to see the Cardinal Secretary of State and announced the new era of king Charles III and his queen; this key event, he claimed, merited an immediate papal audience. The Secretary of State passed on the message. The Pope replied pointedly that he was glad to hear of the arrival of ‘Baron Renfrew and his wife’ and hoped soon to grant them an interview; this could not be in the near future, however, because of pressure of work.
⁸⁴

When he read the Pope’s letter, the prince was thunderstruck. Reeling with shock, he ordered Caryll to return it to Marefoschi with the message that Charles declined to receive it. He then dashed off an angry letter to Marefoschi, full of the old 1766 arguments about scandalising European Catholics and truckling to the Elector of Hanover.
⁸⁵

There was no mistaking the Pope’s negative intentions. For the third time, a determined bid to secure papal recognition for ‘Charles III’ had failed. The other prong of Charles Edward’s strategy was also a lamentable failure. Despite their promises, the French made no further payments of the agreed pension.
⁸⁶
At a political level, then, the marriage with Louise of Stolberg was already manifestly a failure, within months of the solemnisation at Macerata. What of the marriage at a personal level?

Here we have to deal with the difficult problem of Louise’s personality and motivation. The swiftness of her acceptance of Ryan’s proposals argues for an unsentimental woman of uncertain prospects with an eye to the main chance.
⁸⁷
The alacrity with which she accepted the prince’s offer was doubtless quickened by the consideration that her younger sister Karoline Auguste (the second daughter) had already married, at the age of sixteen, the marquis of Jamaica (later, in 1785, 4th duke of Berwick). There is no doubt that Louise found it a severe disappointment not, after all, to be received in Rome as queen of England. In her mind, this removed much of the point of the marriage.
⁸⁸
Since Charles Edward’s expedient reasons for marrying her had also come to nothing, the couple were thrown back on their own resources to make the match work. With an age gap of thirty-one years to bridge, this would have been a tall order for any relationship.