Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (95 page)

Alfieri was thus cutting himself off from his cultural and financial roots in a very important sense. That the relationship was taking a much more serious turn by 1778 is also shown by Alfieri’s sustained
efforts
as a tutor that year, when he taught Louise to read and speak Italian.
⁹⁷

The years 1776–80 were a limbo period in Charles Edward’s marriage. By now he and Louise were barely on speaking terms. The marital breakdown was attracting wide attention. In May 1777 a most extraordinary letter, written in London, reached the prince. It contained a vitriolic attack on him for his treatment of his wife, referring to his use of physical violence and his ‘excess of wine’. The failure of Louise to produce an heir was laid squarely at the prince’s door, being blamed on his doubtful health. Most of all he was taken to task for his tyranny towards his wife: ‘a princess who is in every way your equal, descended from our ancient kings of Scotland and allied to all the great families of Europe. From these claims you derive your pride and fancy they give you authority to be wicked unpunished.’
⁹⁸

The provenance of this letter must have been the complaints Louise circulated to her friends. If so, the blundering intervention from England was counter-productive. It put the prince ever more on the alert
vis-à-vis
his wife and may have been instrumental in preventing her and Alfieri from becoming lovers until 1778.

While Alfieri and the Queen of Hearts were enjoying the raptures of true love, what of the prince? In his more lucid moments, in the interval between drinking bouts and slumber, he had but two interests: international affairs and his books.

By the 1770s it was apparent that a new era was dawning. In backward, deeply conservative Rome the new winds were blowing away some of the cobwebs. Even the Borgia family, quintessence of the old order, was raising its sights beyond the Eternal City. Captain Cook’s voyage to the Pacific and Australasia in the
Endeavour
had fired the imagination of cardinals and prefects of the Congregation of the Faith.
⁹⁹
Yet the most compelling focus for international attention was north America, where the colonists were locked in a life-and-death struggle with the mother country.

The Jacobites reacted with fascinated ambivalence. On the one hand here were the hated republicans of ‘mob rule’ seeking to overthrow monarchy. On the other, the detested Hanoverian regime was being stretched on the rack. The prince himself was always much more sympathetic to the latter view. The revolt of the American colonies was peculiarly fascinating to him, for in many ways the struggle seemed a rerun of his own battle with the House of Hanover in the ’45. Many observers facilely extrapolated from the events of 1745–6 to the north American revolt: since the Jacobites had been
worn
down after some early successes, surely the same thing would happen to the rebels in north America? Charles Edward knew better. He was well aware how close to success he had been at Derby. Perhaps the American leaders would be made of sterner stuff than Lord George Murray and the clan chieftains.

There was another reason for the prince’s interest in the war for America. Almost certainly, some kind of invitation was made by the Bostonians in 1775 that he should be the figurehead of a provisional American government. No clear documentary evidence remains, but Dutens, who was a reliable reporter, confirms the story, as do English sources.
¹⁰⁰
In one version, the prince came secretly to Milford Haven in Wales to take ship for the New World.
¹⁰¹
Certainly this was the origin of the rumour that Charles was on the move in 1775, that he had been seen in Paris and England.
¹⁰²

What is beyond question is that the prince took an intense interest in the American war. In June 1775 there is a transcript in the prince’s hand of a Salem newspaper report describing the battle of Lexington.
¹⁰³
Another extract, again in his own hand, is a paraphrase of an article in the
New York Gazette
for 18 May 1775, dealing with the taking of Ticonderoga and Crown Point.
¹⁰⁴
Another document details General Burgoyne’s surrender to Gates at Albany in October 1777.
¹⁰⁵
In 1781 the prince asked his agent Father Cowley of the Benedictines for a detailed map of north America so that he could follow the military operations, and also for maps and a historical précis of the whole American continent north of Panama.
¹⁰⁶

When France entered the war on the colonists’ side, the prince made a copy of the relevant treaty.
¹⁰⁷
By this time he was wholeheartedly behind the Americans, almost gloating over British reverses in the face of joint action by France, Spain, America and the Dutch (who joined in in December 1780).
¹⁰⁸
French participation also conjured fleeting visions among the prince’s followers of another pro-Jacobite descent on England.
¹⁰⁹
In fact the French
did
attempt an invasion of England in 1779, in concert with Spain, but neither Jacobite personnel nor ambitions played any part in it.

Apart from international affairs, the prince’s main distraction during the dark years of estrangement from his wife was his library. From the time of his ‘obscure years’ thirty years before, the prince had shown a great interest in books. In 1749–50 Charles Edward asked Mme Vassé to send him copies of Fielding’s
Joseph Andrews
and of Montesquieu’s
L’Esprit des Lois
.
¹¹⁰
Late 1750 was another rich period for reading in the prince’s life.
¹¹¹
It is true that at this stage reading tended to denote depression, an escape from an insupportable
world
. But as the years went on, Charles developed a taste for knowledge, especially philosophy and history. He had all the virtues and all the faults of the self-taught: omnivorous, eclectic but rather unfocused reading. At one time Leonardo da Vinci was a major interest.
¹¹²
This led him on to astronomy; there was a link here too with the prince of the Lunéville days, the prince who had meticulously recorded the Aurora Borealis in September 1749. Again, linking with the past, it seems that Charles sometimes kept up his cello playing and other musical interests. There exists a Florentine orchestra list in which Charles Edward, named as the count of Albany, is mentioned as the virtuoso on the
cimbalo
.
¹¹³

If the prince’s reading was sporadic and eclectic, the library he had built up in Florence by the late 1770s was impressive. There were works of political theory, history, military strategy, volumes of memoirs and travel diaries, scientific tomes, satirical pamphlets, and much else. Rousseau (especially
Emile
and
Du Contrat Social
), Voltaire, Montesquieu, Helvétius and Blackstone adorned the shelves. Caesar’s
Commentaries
was a well-thumbed volume. Literature was represented by Swift, Milton, Pope and Fielding,
The Tale of a Tub, Paradise Lost, The Dunciad
and
Tom Jones
, in which the prince himself featured, being respectively particular favourites.
¹¹⁴
The prince often spoke of literature as a special interest.
¹¹⁵

The effect of all this erudition was to make the prince a witty and urbane conversationalist. The notion of Charles Edward as blockhead dies hard, but it has no foundation in fact. Dutens relates that he once had a two-hour conversation with the prince during which Charles ranged effortlessly over a wide span of subjects, displayed a knowledge of several languages and showed himself expertly informed on European politics.
¹¹⁶

Yet there was another side to Charles’s interest in books. It was perhaps this other aspect that prevented him and his wife from finding a common interest in intellectual matters – apart from the fact that his taste ran to Enlightenment thought, while she preferred the ancient classics and their Renaissance counterparts like Montaigne. Even a cursory examination of the Stuart papers shows the prince’s bibliophilia mounting in intensity as the 1770s wore on.
¹¹⁷
This suggests that a psychological motivation apart from intellectual curiosity was at work. We are irresistibly reminded of the neurotic fuss over Julien Le Roy’s watch in the 1750s. Obsessive collecting can be a sign of a fundamentally authoritarian personality. In the case of the depressive, it is more likely to be a kind of
cri de coeur
against
powerlessness. Amid his trophies, the collector can impose his own order and achieve the omnipotence the world denies him.
¹¹⁸

But nothing the prince learned from his books kept him away from the bottle. Rather, the two streams started to feed into each other; he began to collect books on Burgundy and other wines.
¹¹⁹
The pain in his chest and his retention of water proved beyond doubt that he was a chronic sufferer from dropsy. Yet the prince refused to alter his routine. He insisted on going out every day in his coach and visiting the theatre every night, ‘though of late [1779] with a strong fever upon him and so weak that he has to be supported by two servants from his coach to his box, where as usual, he laid [sic] on a couch’.
¹²⁰
The excessive liquid on his chest caused him to cough continually. He lay awake most of the night, alternately coughing and puking, yet still insisting that Louise share his bed.
¹²¹
This was how she knew that he kept under his bed a strong box containing 12,000 sequins, against the day the call for action in England might come.
¹²²
By this time, too, he was all but impotent; he later accused Louise of having accepted a drug from Sir Horace Mann that would drain his sexual vigour.
¹²³

No amount of remonstration from physicians made any impact on the prince. He redoubled his alcoholic frenzy. When he went to the theatre, he took a little bottle of Cyprus wine in his pocket. His inebriation led to minor scandals. On one occasion, at a masked ball, he insisted on dancing a minuet with a young lady, but came close to collapse on the ballroom floor and had to be supported by count Spada.
¹²⁴
Such incidents further increased the contempt in which the prince was held by Florentine society.

By 1779, even allowing for the likely exaggerations by Horace Mann and his agents, it is clear that the prince was in a deplorable state of physical and mental health. Mann summed it up as follows: a declared ulcer, great sores in his legs, insupportable in stench and temperature. The piles from which he had suffered for years now became augmented to the point where he had almost permanent pain in his bowels.
¹²⁵

The strain on Louise, already considerable from carrying on a clandestine love affair with Alfieri, was close to breaking point. It is doubtful whether she had ever loved her husband, but now she hated him. The hatred was reciprocated. About this time Charles Edward penned his most revealing comments on women, proving beyond doubt that a true relationship with them had always been beyond him. He told a story of a man whose mistress had been unfaithful in order to get revenge. Was that revenge on the man because he had
loved
too much or too little, the prince queried; in other words, there was no pleasing women. The prince reckoned himself a reasonable judge of men (which he was not); but as for women, he went on: ‘I have always thought a study of their sex useless, as they are much more wicked and impenetrable.’
¹²⁶
Written at a time when he was almost certainly impotent, the last word must suggest a classic Freudian slip.

(1780–4)

EVENTS NOW MOVED
rapidly towards the collapse of Charles Edward’s marriage. Tired of the drunkenness, the beatings and the demand for sexual variations,
¹
Louise laid contingency plans for absconding. She had some powerful allies. Her chief help was her lady-in-waiting and confidante Mlle de Maltzam.
²
She had the secret assistance of count Spada, who carried messages from Louise to Alfieri at the poet’s home, and enjoyed sitting with her lover and denigrating the prince. Yet Spada covered his tracks well. It was a full year after Louise’s departure before Charles Edward discovered his treachery. Even then, it came to light only after a heated altercation when Spada refused to accompany his master to the theatre.
³

The other allies who played a key role in Louise’s flight were Madame Orlandini and Mr Geoghan. Madame Orlandini was a scion of the Ormonde family; she was the daughter of a Jacobite general in the service of Austria and had made a military marriage to a Florentine general. Now widowed, Madame Orlandini lived secretly with an Irishman, Charles Geoghan.

Geoghan was typical of the adventurers attracted to the exiled Stuart court. After offending his father and being cut off without a penny he came to Italy in search of easy pickings. His handsome face enabled him to live well as a gigolo; it was in this capacity that he snared the wealthy widow Orlandini. The couple even went through a form of marriage, which could not be publicly divulged, lest Madame Orlandini forfeit her rights to her late husband’s fortune according to the terms of his will.
⁴

This, then, was the unsavoury quartet that plotted Louise’s deliverance and the prince’s downfall; a supposed Jacobite widow, an Irish gigolo, a treacherous private secretary and a woman (Mlle de
Maltzam
) who seems to have been animated by a quite singular hatred of the prince.
⁵
They took soundings from the Grand Duke of Tuscany as to his attitude in the event of a separation in the Stuart household. The duke, who had never liked the prince, intimated broadly that Louise would have his tacit support.
⁶