Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (94 page)

Louise’s spirits were farther cast down by having to share a bedroom with a man who snored excessively and whose health was already giving cause for concern. At the beginning of 1775, one of Glenbucket’s descendants was granted a morning audience and found the prince looking ‘old in complexion and pretty stout in person’.
⁶¹

This was not the worst of it. Gluttony and excessive drinking were bringing even Charles’s iron constitution close to the point of collapse. His body was attacked in two main areas. He developed asthma and heavy catarrh, which his Italian physicians diagnosed as apoplexy and treated with emetics and leeches.
⁶²
At the same time the sore leg that had troubled him for the past few years began to discharge pus. When the doctors closed up the suppurating leg, this produced a slow fever with other complications. The pent-up purulence then threatened to break out in the other leg.
⁶³

The prince consulted an eminent physician in Paris. His expianation
of
the illness was piteous. He explained that his brain was being affected, that there were times when he could barely sign his own name. He could not remember proper names, wrote Gordon when he meant Caryll, and so on. The doctor poured scorn on blood-letting and recommended instead alkalines and a light, healthy diet. The prince should take exercise, use no drugs and abstain from all alcohol except a mere sip of the very finest vintages.
⁶⁴
Since the prince was already in the habit of drinking six bottles of Cyprus wine a day, sleeping off one drinking bout and then getting drunk again, it can be imagined that this advice was not what he wanted to hear. Nevertheless, his frequent consultations with outside physicians effectively turned him into a hypochondriac and amateur dabbler in medicines.
⁶⁵

For Charles Edward’s medical progress we are largely indebted to Mann’s spies. By September 1775, it was reported that the discharge from the leg had stopped, but that he now experienced violent stomach cramps after eating.
⁶⁶
It gradually became clear that Charles Edward was suffering from aggravated dropsy. The suppurating leg acted as a conduit for the excess liquid he was retaining. He had two choices. He could either endure great pain from his swollen legs and thighs, which in turn produced severe fits of colic. Or he could have the opening in his leg sealed up, in which case he experienced general breathlessness and a panicky feeling of suffocation around his chest.
⁶⁷
The severe stomach pains and indigestion gradually turned him against food, but he would never give up drink.
⁶⁸
All in all, he preferred to suffer the pain of the discharging leg rather than the feeling of suffocation.

Absurdly, while resolutely refusing to abstain from alcohol, Charles Edward tried to put into practice the rest of the Parisian physician’s prescriptions. He went out every day in his coach to take the air.
⁶⁹
And he was an habitual frequenter of the theatre, where his normal mode was semi-somnolence. Gradually the drowsiness would turn to outright slumber. A bed was moved into his box at the theatre. When he had one of his bad attacks of stomach pain, he had to dash for the public passageway, where he was violently sick.
⁷⁰

This was a state of affairs that would have taxed the powers of an older woman, genuinely in love with her husband, who had the memory of better days to live on. Louise had none of these attributes to sustain her. She had problems of her own, quite apart from a drunken husband. Louise had long argued for residence in Florence, in preference to Siena, on the grounds that the latter city had not received her and her husband with proper respect.
⁷¹
But Florence
soon
showed itself no more willing than the other Italian city-states to offend the mighty English.

Louise began her stay in Florence by visiting all the great ladies of Tuscany. She was stupefied and appalled when the visits of the Florentine nobility to the Casino Corsini tailed off and then stopped altogether. Each side blamed the other.
⁷²
But the net effect was a further narrowing in the social circle of the Queen of Hearts. Soon Bonstetten departed. Louise carried on a long-range flirtation with him by letter, but this was no substitute for the presence of the besotted Swiss.
⁷³

More and more Louise turned to books for consolation. This was her great bibliophile period. Her favourite pastime was reading a chapter of Montaigne in bed every morning. She announced that she would like to forget all pomp and be a republican. ‘I measure the man and not his pedestal,’ she said, ‘and I prefer a loveable man, one I could love, to the greatest lord who bores me.’
⁷⁴
It is not difficult to guess whom she had in mind!

The other great sadness in the princess’s life was her increasingly obvious infertility. The Jacobite duke of Melfort’s euphuistic message of June 1772, asking her to produce a son and heir,
⁷⁵
now seemed like ironical mockery. In compensation Louise turned, as so many involuntarily childless women do, to the love of animals. She kept rabbits and quickly turned herself into something of an expert in their care and breeding.
⁷⁶

Such social interludes as there were had the appearance of snatched and furtive occasions. When they attended the same balls as the Grand Duke and Duchess, the Queen of Hearts and her consort were politely ostracised. Such snubs turned the prince even more in on himself. During the carnival he went everywhere in a mask; Louise chose always to appear
in propria persona
.
⁷⁷

It was a relief when one of the nobility broke the taboo and dined with them incognito, as the duke of Ostrogothia did in September 1776, using the pseudonym comte d’Oeland. Charles Edward was visibly touched. At the dinner table he remarked: ‘
Ah, M. le Comte, quelle consolation pour moi diner avec un de mes egaux!
’
⁷⁸
(‘Ah, count, it is such a consolation to me to dine with one of my equals!’)

The prince’s wounded sensitivity was such that he would go to extraordinary lengths to avenge insults, real or imaginary. When senator Guadagni’s son (the Guadagnis were later to loom large in the prince’s life) turned down a lunch (dinner) invitation with him and then appeared for a post-prandial coffee after lunching instead with the duchess of Chartres, the prince was so incensed that he
planned
an elaborate retaliation. He invited Guadagni to dinner again. Deliberately abstaining from drink so as to keep his head clear, he waited for the young man to appear, then hid himself behind the door. When Guadagni entered, the prince delivered a powerful kick on his behind. As Guadagni sprawled on the floor, Charles railed at him: ‘That will show you I’m as good as the Duchess of Chartres. It will also teach you how to treat people of my rank. Notice, too, that I have not touched a drop of wine.’
⁷⁹

Charles Edward’s one-man battle with the Papacy meanwhile came to an inevitable and ignominious end. His last fling was to attempt to get the Catholic bishops of England and Ireland to sign a document recognising him as Charles III. The Holy Roman Catholic Church would then have to confront the absurdity of a British flock who recognised Charles III as king while the Pope recognised George III. Fortunately, this hair-brained scheme was scotched by the prince’s advisers as soon as mooted.
⁸⁰

Yet Charles Edward’s humiliating climb-down before Pius VI did have one definite result. Since the prince had vowed never to return to Rome until accorded his titles, he now had to find a permanent home in Florence. To this end he energised his contacts in the city, the most important of whom was the marquis of Barbantane, French plenipotentiary at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
⁸¹

Barbantane began by taking discreet soundings from Mann, to make sure the prince would not be embarrassed by a curt refusal if he attempted to rent an English house. Mann raised no objection, but Louise and the prince found fault with Barbantane’s proposed accommodation themselves.
⁸²

In the spring of 1776 Louise found what she was looking for. In July 1776 the Stuart household moved from the Casino Corsini to the Palazzo Guadagni in the via San Sebastiano (now Palazzo San Clemente, via Gino Capponi).
⁸³
The Palazzo Guadagni was a gem of late Renaissance architecture, with an enclosed portico for carriages, a spacious entrance hall, and suites of sumptuously decorated rooms on the first floor. There was a large garden, studded with cypress and ilex trees. Louise thought she had found her perfect haven.
⁸⁴

But almost immediately a rancorous law-suit developed. The Guadagni family had rented the palazzo to Charles Edward on an indefinite lease. Shortly after the Stuarts moved in, Lord and Lady Cowper came to Florence, took one look at the house, and decided it was for them. They agreed to the extravagant rental terms proposed by the Guadagni family; it seemed as though money was no object.
⁸⁵

But how to remove the Stuarts? Charles and Louise had found safe anchorage. They refused to budge. The matter was taken to a tribunal. There was frantic behind-the-scenes lobbying. The Grand Duke himself favoured the Cowpers, but most of the nobility felt sympathy for the prince. The dispute became the talk of Florence. Eventually the tribunal found in favour of the prince, much to the Grand Duke’s irritation.
⁸⁶
Lord Cowper considered appealing to a higher court, but was discreetly dissuaded.

Publicly Charles Edward fulminated against the ‘rebellious opposition’ of one of his ‘subjects’. Privately, he conceded that the affair had taught him a lesson. The only way to achieve the security and peace of mind he needed was to buy the house outright. Purchase was beyond the Cowpers, whose assets were in England. Given that the price of the Palazzo Guadagni had shot up as a result of the litigation and resultant publicity, it seemed to be beyond Charles Edward’s too. He took a brave decision. He would wind up all his affairs in Rome and withdraw every last Roman crown from the Stuart monies in the Monte di Pietà.

The years 1776–7 saw the prince obsessed with money. The reason was that he was scraping together all his finance to purchase the Palazzo Guadagni. All his best furniture and effects were brought to Florence from the Palazzo Muti.
⁸⁷
The prince did not quite burn all his boats. He left a nominal retinue of servants in the house of his birth and refused all offers to rent it.
⁸⁸

At last, in December 1777, the prince had amassed sufficient funds to buy the Florentine palazzo. The sale was completed. For the last three years of their marriage, he and Louise enjoyed the security of being property-owners.
⁸⁹
Ironically, the move into Louise’s dream house took her into the darkest period of the marriage.

The first open quarrel, overheard by the servants, took place in the Palazzo Guadagni.
⁹⁰
So did the first physical beating. Charles Edward was running true to form. Sooner or later, with all his women, when the first flush of excitement had gone, he would turn on them and use physical violence. So it had been with the Princesse de Talmont and Clementina Walkinshaw. So it was now with his wife.

What triggered the violence seems to have been increasing jealousy of Louise’s admirers, compounded by his own flagging physical powers. He no longer trusted her. He had the approaches to her bedroom barricaded by a pile of tables and chairs to which were attached bells, whose tinkling would alert him to the approach of interlopers. Anyone wishing to get to Louise’s bedroom would have
to
go through his room. To his advisers who remonstrated, he justified his actions as concern for the absolute legitimacy of any heir born in the palazzo.
⁹¹

Yet, as so often with the prince, his delusions had a basis in reality. The fire behind the smoke this time was a twenty-seven-year-old poet and dramatist from Turin. When he first met Louise in 1776, count Vittorio Alfieri had a long career of lubricious libertinism behind him.
⁹²
At the age of twenty-three, in Cadiz, he had contracted venereal disease. Though idle and dissolute, he was rich and strikingly handsome, with an undisputed literary talent. Alfieri had all the qualities Louise had sought in vain in her earlier admirers. Bonstetten was a pale foreshadowing of this answer to the Queen of Heart’s dreams.

Alfieri and Louise later tried to turn their liaison into a story-book romance. The story of the
coup de foudre
when Alfieri first saw Louise looking at a painting of Charles XII in the Uffizi gallery has all the hallmarks of poetic licence.
⁹³
But whatever the facts of their first meeting, by late 1776 Alfieri was a frequent visitor at the Palazzo Guadagni.

It was not easy for the lovers to achieve physical consummation in the confines of the palazzo, with the watchful prince ever at their shoulders. For the first two years of their relationship, they snatched kisses and held hands secretly while the prince dozed in the next room. In the evenings Alfieri would gaze, rapt and adoring, while Louise strummed on her guitar. In the daytime he devoted himself to the writing of the hagiographical
Maria Stuarda
, which he later repudiated.
⁹⁴

Increasingly Louise’s reading reflected her new passion. It is surely significant that among the books she ordered from her favourite bookseller in Paris was an edition of Catullus.
⁹⁵
At last, almost certainly some time in 1778, Alfieri and Louise became lovers in the full sense. The circumstantial evidence for this is fairly strong. It was in 1778 that Alfieri disavowed his Piedmontese nationality. The burdens of being a subject of the king of Sardinia were heavy. To travel abroad or to publish required the sovereign’s permission. So did the transfer of capital out of Piedmont. Alfieri’s most significant action in 1778 was to give up the rights to his property in Piedmont so as to be near his beloved and, as he put it, to make her free and independent as soon as possible.
⁹⁶