Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (98 page)

For the next three years Wachter and the prince fenced with each other.
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Predictably, without James’s papers, the German masons made no further mention of the Prussian project. The prince, too, had learned cunning. When Wachter sent an envoy to Florence to make a casual request for old Jacobite papers, Charles rebuffed him on the grounds that, since he had made no mention of freemasonry, he could not be a bona fide agent of Wachter’s!
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It was at this stage that the Swedes started to steal the Germans’ masonic thunder. Gustav III’s diplomats encouraged Charles Edward to believe that the difficulties the Germans were making over giving him the title of Grand Master were spurious. In Stockholm the prince’s right was fully accepted.
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Charles would have done well to remember these straws in the wind when Gustav appeared in Florence, but it is likely that his mental faculties had been severely affected by his near-fatal illness in the spring of 1783. It is abundantly clear that Gustav’s real purpose in visiting the prince in December that year was to secure a formal transfer of the title of Grand Master.
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Gustav was already head of Swedish masonry. What he wanted, and obtained, from Charles Edward, was a patent proclaiming him Grand Master of the entire Templar order. Even if the prince had fully realised what Gustav was up to, it is likely that he would have sold the title in return for
the
immediate advance of 4,000 rix dollars and the promise of more to come. As it was, the prince got a better deal than that. In exchange for a financial settlement, including the divorce of his wife, Charles gave Gustav a clear title as Grand Master once he died. The prince signed a document making the Swedish king coadjutor in the masons and his eventual successor.
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At the eleventh hour the German masons realised that they had been too clever by half. They sent Wachter on another urgent mission to Italy. But he did not arrive until April 1784, by which time Gustav had the transfer patent in his pocket.
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The sequence of events after Gustav’s departure from Florence at the end of December 1783 takes on an entirely different hue once we realise what his true purpose was. The fact is that Gustav III came close to securing the bargain of the century with the
quid pro quo
negotiated in the Palazzo Guadagni.

The Swedish king had been shocked by Charles’s general state of health. The prince was bent forward and decrepit and walked only with great pain. His mental faculties were deserting him. After a quarter of an hour he would repeat identical anecdotes told earlier. Clearly he was hanging by a thread during Gustav’s visit and sustaining himself with the ‘honour’ a fellow-monarch was paying him.

No sooner had Gustav departed than Charles Edward fell seriously ill again. This time the prince was thought certain to die. At first he lost all power of speech. His physicians thought he had suffered an apoplectic stroke, then changed the diagnosis to inflammation in the brain. For two days Charles lay speechless and insensible. Then for a short time he recovered consciousness but not the power of speech. Next day he had just two hours of mental lucidity, again with no speech. Just when his doctors were despairing of him, he recovered.
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Meanwhile in Rome Gustav’s mission ran into a hitch. From Louise of Stolberg and her champion Cardinal Bernis the Swedish king heard a quite different version of events. According to them, Charles Edward was a rich miser who neither needed nor deserved financial assistance.
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There is some evidence that Gustav half believed them, but he was now firmly committed out of fear that the prince might otherwise repudiate his masonic succession, especially with Wachter in Italy.

Gustav counterattacked. Calmly he agreed with Louise but pointed out certain facts of life. Did she really want to remain forever in a Roman limbo, tied to the strings of the capricious Cardinal York, when she could obtain a favourable divorce settlement, giving her the freedom to live anywhere and be with Alfieri?
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The argument
was
irresistible. With the acquiescence of Henry and the Pope, Gustav hammered out a financial agreement. Louise was to give up her 4,000 crowns of the papal pension and the 15,000 livres pin money in return for the freedom to reside wherever she liked. On formal separation she would receive a pension of 60,000 livres from France plus an annual payment of 6,000 crowns on the prince’s death. Charles Edward received the full papal pension of 10,000 crowns plus uncontested rights to the effects in the Palazzo Muti and to his share of the Sobieski jewels.
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Louise was agreeable in principle, but she wanted more binding guarantees, in particular a written statement from Charles Edward that the two of them were living apart by mutual consent. This Charles Edward duly provided: ‘We give our free and voluntary consent to this separation and agree that she should live in Rome or whatever other town seems agreeable to her.’
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The divorce settlement was a great diplomatic triumph for Gustav III. Louise wrote profuse letters of thanks to him and his minister Baron Sparre.
¹⁰⁸
By, in effect, getting France to foot the bill for the sundering of the unhappy Stuart couple, he gained his patent as Grand Master of Freemasons at an outlay of just 4,000 rix dollars. The cunning Swedish fox had instructed his Florentine banker to use the excuse of the prince’s illness not to pay the second instalment of rix dollars.
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He then ‘assumed’ that his particular financial agreement with the prince was now subsumed in the general divorce settlement. Quitting Rome in mid-April 1784, Gustav lost no time in shaking the dust of Italy from his heels.
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Only when the Swedish king was gone did it occur to Cantini and other financial managers in the prince’s household to examine the situation. On application to Gustav’s Florence banker, they learned that the king had indeed left a verbal order to pay Charles Edward 50,000 French livres a year for life, but had declined to put the order in writing! When the prince’s accountants applied to Vergennes, it transpired that Gustav had not tied up the French end of things either.
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Fortunately, perhaps, for the prince, he was too ill fully to take in the implications of Gustav’s double-dealing. He was saved by illness from knowledge of this last in a long line of betrayals.

Yet at least the knot binding Charles Edward and Louise was severed. She was free to pursue an itinerant life with Alfieri. Her ‘special relationship’ with Henry, already in abeyance after the 1783 Alfieri revelations, gradually ground to a halt. The adulterous relationship with the poet totally changed Henry’s view of her.
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She continued to write to him as if to a friend,
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but his reply was cold.
He
used his intense irritation about the divorce settlement to mask his hostility towards her. ‘It is a piece of insolence … on my brother’s part, this disposing of money which is mine, as though it were his own, and without my knowledge.’
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He ended by asking her not to write to him again, as her marital business adversely affected his health.

Louise showed her true opinion of the ‘friend’ she had flattered for years. She promoted the rumour that Henry ran a puritanical regime in his See at Frascati, which he aspired to turn into a secular monastery; ‘a comic figure’, she summed him up savagely.
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So ended the ill-starred marriage of Charles Edward Stuart. A final assessment seems in order. Louise of Stolberg claimed that in nine years the prince made her the most miserable person that ever existed and that only Christian charity stopped her hating him. Her protestations of virtue sound somewhat hollow alongside her frequent denunciations of her husband: unlivable with, repository of all the vices, possessing the sensibility of a lackey, these are merely the mild criticisms. ‘An old walking relic,’ ‘Useless people never die,’ ‘It would be a good thing to deliver the world of his weight, with which it has been overcharged too long,’
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these are some of the epistolary comments of this exemplar of Christian charity.

Louise of Stolberg presents more than usually difficult problems of biographical interpretation. Opinions on her have been wildly divergent. Proto-feminist writers have seen her as the classical emancipated woman yet condemned to be the victim of a drunken, loutish husband. Bonnie Prince Charlie hagiographers have viewed her as low, mean-minded and contemptible. The truth, as so often, lies somewhere between these two extremes. It
is
true that by the 1770s the prince was impossible. His drunken rages and physical violence fully justified Louise’s departure in 1780. But it would be a mistake to deduce from this alone that Louise was a simple avatar of sweetness and light. She was a cold, unsentimental, ruthless woman, one of those people with a much higher opinion of herself than was warranted by any wit or wisdom she produced.

She could be charming and delightful but, like most charmers, she calculated the effects to a nicety. She was a consummate coquette but, as with most coquettes, sex was not the spur. She had pretensions as a blue-stocking, but was not in the same class even as a Madame du Deffand or Lady Wortley Montagu, to say nothing of the far superior Madame de Stael. She lacked the wit and accomplishment of the Princesse de Talmont or the spontaneous sexual passion of the duchesse de Montbazon.

Moreover, the indictment against Louise must show that she systematically deceived her brother-in-law out of a mercenary desire not to suffer the financial consequences that would normally have flown from her adultery. The idea of Louise of Stolberg as a woman who would sacrifice everything for love is too wildly at variance with the facts to be taken seriously. She was an accomplished liar, cold, cynical and egotistical.

What she did have was a certain aesthetic sense that allowed her to appreciate the gifts of Bonstetten, Fabre, Alfieri and others. She was an aesthete rather than an intellectual. She was either bored or contemptuous in the company of statesmen or soldiers; a less satisfactory choice as wife for a warrior prince could scarcely be imagined. Moreover, the prince’s heavy drinking was peculiarly calculated to elicit a distaste in such a woman. No woman would have relished Charles Edward’s drunkenness, but the evidence suggests that Clementina Walkinshaw feared the violence it engendered. What seems to have hurt Louise most was the lack of ‘style’ involved; the prince behaved like a lackey.

When to the considerable difference in their ages and the basic disharmony between their temperaments is added the mutual disappointment over the marriage, with both parties feeling that in some sense it had been contracted under false pretences, one can only be surprised that the relationship lasted as long as it did. In this connection it is fascinating to observe that both Clementina and Louise of Stolberg endured a little over eight years of the prince before decamping to convents. Cohabitation with Charles Edward, it seemed, produced not so much a seven-year itch as an eight-year frenzy.

(1784–8)

APART FROM THE
divorce and departure of Louise of Stolberg, 1784 brought two more highly significant developments in Charles Edward’s life. The first was a partial resolution of his financial difficulties. The second was the reappearance of his daughter Charlotte.

The financial resolution showed Henry in his least favourable light. With Louise out of the picture, both brothers felt able to bring the Sobieski monies out into the open. Liquidating these assets would have put all money worries behind the prince. But Henry was afraid that, when the statute of limitations on Polish redemption of the Sobieski rubies expired, Charles Edward would sell them off to the highest bidder.
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Since the disposal of the assets in the Monte di Pietà required the signature of both brothers, Henry got what he wanted by refusing to sign. This was completely contrary to the 1742 agreement, which explicitly stated that the disposal of these jewels was Charles Edward’s prerogative.
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Henry, who had huffed and puffed over his own technical rights during Gustav III’s financial settlement, was unwilling to concede his brother’s much clearer rights in this instance. He compounded his hypocrisy in 1786 by having the great Sobieski ruby set in his bishop’s mitre.
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And in 1796 he did what he had so denigrated his brother for having supposedly wanted to do: he sold a ruby from the collection, described as ‘as large as a pigeon’s egg’ for some £60,000.
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To palliate his poor treatment of his brother, Cardinal York offered him the rest of the Sobieski jewels without argument. This was no hardship to Henry. In contemporary terms he was a millionaire. His annual income from land and church benefices was in excess of 600,000 French livres. And he had just received the arrears from his Mexican benefices, whose payment had been suspended during the
north
American war. This amounted to 180,000 Roman crowns (£45,000).
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The charge of avarice and miserliness and love of money, so often brought against Charles Edward, ought rather to have been laid at his brother’s door.

The freeing of his assets in Rome from any further claims from Louise of Stolberg also enabled the prince to improve his living standards in other ways. Further items of furniture were brought up to Florence from the Palazzo Muti.
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The prince went so far as to ask the Grand Duke of Tuscany if he could place a canopy with a cloth of state over his box at the theatre. This was refused, but permission was given the prince to line the box as he pleased. In one of the Florentine theatres he furnished his box with crimson damask and cushions laced with gold. In the other theatre box the same process was repeated, except for the substitution of yellow damask.
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