Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (3 page)

The pressures on a Stuart prince who would come to manhood in the early 1740s were therefore immense. He was involved in both a race against time and, it seemed, against destiny itself. The race against time was pressing, since England would have had more than fifty years to settle down under the aegis of the ‘Glorious Revolution’; and because it was already late in the day to prise the leaders of the Jacobite diaspora out of their comfortable career niches in France, Spain, Austria and Russia.

The battle with history seemed an uphill struggle because of the incredible, almost supernatural, ill-luck of the Stuarts. When the Stuarts were the Scottish house of Stewart, they could record that their first four king Jameses had died by murder or misadventure. When the Stewarts gained the throne of England also, their bad fortune attained legendary proportions. Charles Edward Stuart’s grandfather James II had been driven into permanent exile. His great
uncle
Charles II had endured a long period of exile. His great-grandfather Charles I had been beheaded, as had his even more remote ancestor Mary Queen of Scots.

For all these reasons, the pressure on the young prince to succeed would be enormous. The peculiar milieu of his birth, the eccentric role he had to play as phantom Prince of Wales, and the weight of history pressing down on his royal house, meant that the cards were stacked against him even before he was born. These are facts we must never lose sight of as we follow him through life.

(1720–6)

FOR A LONG
time there was uncertainty over when the happy event could be expected. James admitted that the doctors had got the dates wrong: ‘it is indeed a little singular to have mistaken so much as three or four months in her reckoning’,
¹
but he attributed this to the general excitement and the feeling that the wish for a royal pregnancy might be father to the thought. The consequence was that, just one month before the prince’s birth, the expected date of Clementina’s confinement was set anywhere between early December and mid-January.
²

Clementina enjoyed unfalteringly robust health during the pregnancy. This allowed James to address himself to issues of protocol surrounding the birth. A royal childbirth in the eighteenth century was a public event in every sense: labour and parturition would be witnessed by a multitude of onlookers. This raised the question of who should be present. Naturally, all the exiled Jacobites in Rome clamoured for a place at the bedside. Since it was impracticable for the lying-in chamber to hold them all – and dangerous petty jealousies would arise between those invited and those excluded
³
– James announced that only existing members of the royal household plus selected cardinals from the College of Cardinals would be present.
⁴
In the event, nearly one hundred people were present at the lying-in chamber, including foreign ambassadors and the leading lights in the Roman nobility.
⁵

By 9 December 1720 James was convinced that his queen was in her ninth month and expected her to be brought to bed at any time.
⁶
Yet it was Friday 27 December before the labour pains began, or rather the pains of a false labour. The throng of spectators arrived but retired after several hours when nothing happened.

For all that, the confinement was as difficult for the queen as the pregnancy had been easy. All Friday night the pain continued. On Saturday the surgeons were consulted. They reported nothing untoward despite the fact that the queen was ‘delirious with pain’.
⁷
On Sunday the 29th the contractions ceased only to return in the evening. Thereafter the dolorous labour continued until Tuesday evening. Three-quarters of an hour after sunset on 31 December she gave birth to a son.
⁸
An hour later the Stuart prince was baptised by Bishop Bonaventura and given the names Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria.
⁹

The birth of a Stuart heir was received with very great joy in Rome. The Pope sent 10,000 scudi as a present. A carnival-like excitement ensued in the city. The wine ran freely, fireworks were let off, and the princes of the Church vied with each other in writing verses of congratulations.
¹⁰

James hurried to announce the birth to the great European potentates who were (or might be presumed to be) sympathetic to the Stuart cause: Peter the Great, Philip of Spain, the Emperor of Austria.
¹¹
In his great happiness James forgot the protracted labour.
¹²
Very soon the replies of felicitation came back.
¹³
Philip V and Elizabeth (Isabela) Farnese of Spain were particularly enthusiastic.
¹⁴
As Charles Wogan reported from Cartagena: ‘I must do justice to the honest Spaniards, who swear that neither they nor their forefathers have ever been so much put out of their gravity by the birth of any prince of their own.’
¹⁵

The birth of Charles Edward Stuart was thought by the Jacobites to be especially significant in two ways. Its occurrence at Christmastime and on the eve of the New Year gave it an obvious symbolic resonance.
¹⁶
And at that very moment, in England, the South Sea Bubble crisis seemed to confirm in detail everything Jacobite critics had said about Whig corruption. Thoroughly discredited by this financial fiasco, the Hanoverian regime appeared particularly vulnerable; conditions seemed propitious for another attempt at Jacobite restoration.
¹⁷

For the first two months of Charles Edward’s life the ‘lusty child’ did well, according to James’s official reports.
¹⁸
Unfortunately we possess no detailed daily record of Charles’s early months such as Héroards’s classic account of Louis XIII.
¹⁹
However, some revealing scraps of information are extant. With the use of these enough can be built up from inference to provide a reasonably convincing picture of the prince’s childhood.
²⁰

It was the near-universal practice of the time to employ a wet-nurse
to
suckle the infant.
²¹
The nurse was thought to be a figure of cardinal importance, because nursing experiences were held to be indelibly imprinted on the child. It was considered that, just as the mother’s mental state could affect the foetus she carried, so could that of the nurse influence the new-born infant. It was even thought that temperamental traits could be transmitted from nurse to child: sloth, impiety, promiscuity. So the ideal nurse had to combine a number of attributes. Free from the dreaded syphilis, she had to lactate at just the right temperature; if the nurse’s milk was too hot, for example, it was feared that an effeminate boy might be the result. Moreover, because of the ‘transmission’ factor, the soul of the nurse had to be ‘beautiful’. Small wonder, then, that Madame de Sévigné was prepared to put up with the most insolent demands from her nurse’s husband in order to retain the imagined paragon for her child.
²²
And all this was quite apart from the most basic consideration of all, that a successful nursing bond was a prerequisite in an era of high infant mortality. Where this rate ranged between 25 and 75 per cent, depending on social class, the survival of an infant could never be taken for granted, but was regarded rather as a major achievement.

The first wet-nurse to be employed at Charles Edward’s side was an Englishwoman for, as James declared: ‘Our son, who is a brave, lusty boy … is looked after … in the English way, for though I cannot help his being born in Italy, yet as much as in me lies he shall be English for the rest all over.’
²³

But the relationship between nurse and prince did not prosper. Alarmed at the lack of progress and seemingly ailing physique of the young Charles Edward, James changed his nurse after two months.
²⁴
In pique, the dismissed nurse revealed to the English some of the secrets of the Palazzo Muti.
²⁵

James’s reaction may seem a panicky one, but the alarmingly high rate of eighteenth-century infant mortality has to be remembered.
²⁶
At any rate, his judgment was soon vindicated. The new nurse, Francesca Battaglia, did everything James expected of her and more.
²⁷

Apart from wet-nursing, the salient child-rearing practices of the time were those of swaddling and cold-bathing. We know for certain that the infant Charles Edward was swaddled.
²⁸
In the early eighteenth century the arguments for swaddling were thought to be conclusive. These were threefold: first, that the child needed to learn correct human posture; second, for self-protection, on the ground that limbs could be dislocated by random movement; third, for warmth, especially in cold climates.
²⁹

It is true that by the time of Charles Edward’s birth the practice of swaddling was beginning to be questioned in the Anglo-Saxon world, notably by Locke,
³⁰
but the outer ripples of this debate had not yet reached Rome in the early 1720s.

The other absolute value entertained in contemporary child-rearing was a conviction as to the desirability of cold-bathing.
³¹
This was so common a practice at the time and so much taken for granted that we should need conclusive evidence before deciding that this Spartan austerity was not visited on the prince.

Though there is some slight evidence that Charles Edward was a backward baby, he made good progress with his new nurse. He was teething at six months. As his father proudly remarked: ‘there is all the appearance that he will breed them easily’.
³²
On 12 April 1722 he was weaned, at the age of fifteen months.
³³
Though this was relatively late by the standards of the time, the prince’s father continued to express every satisfaction with his son’s progress.
³⁴

But if the problem of a satisfactory nurse had now been solved, that of an appropriate governess still remained. On 21 April 1721 James wrote to the earl of Mar (Jacobite commander in Scotland in the 1715 rising) on the subject:

The qualities of a person for so important a charge are obvious, the better born she be, the better, but what is above all requisite is prudence, a reasonable knowledge of the world and a principle of obedience, attachment and submission to me, which may put her above private envies or faction. I know by experience these qualities are rare, but without them all things will not be well managed, and with the last the case might happen the child might personally suffer by it, and his life and good ought to be only regarded by one that looks after him. Till he is a year old, our English woman will do and she doth mightily well, but after that she will not be big enough, I mean she will be
of too low a rank
. (Italics mine)
³⁵

The Englishwoman referred to seems to have been a Mrs Lelido.
³⁶
By the time the prince was six months old, Mrs Lelido (whom James described as having ‘taken a wonderful deal of care of him and has succeeded very well in the way she has taken’) was taking him out every day in the royal coach.
³⁷
But her ‘low rank’ told against the good lady. In March 1722 Mrs Sheldon was appointed as the prince’s governess.

This appointment was to have momentous consequences. Sheldon was a daughter of one of James II’s equerries and sister-in-law of
General
Dillon, currently in good standing with James but soon, like the earl of Mar, to be cast into royal anathema. All the evidence shows Mrs Sheldon to have been a forceful, even domineering personality, not remotely answering the description James gave Mar. But she appealed mightily to Clementina, who was already chafing at the hold John Hay and his wife had over the king – an influence apparent ever since 1715.
³⁸
None of James’s appointments was ever particularly fortunate. This one was to be ill-starred even by the singular standards of ‘Jamie the Rover’.

In the early days of her incumbency Mrs Sheldon’s task was onerous enough. A letter prescribing treatment for rickets (June 1722) suggests that the young prince was suffering from this ailment.
³⁹
In the same month there is even stronger evidence that fears were entertained about juvenile arthritis in the eighteen-month-old Charles Edward.
⁴⁰
On 29 August 1722 Mrs Sheldon found herself called on to answer queries about the prince’s health. The reply is informative both about Charles Edward and the no-nonsense governess herself:

He never was very lusty, but after the appearance of the bad symptoms, he grew sensibly thinner and continued so. The sutures of his head seem closed enough for his age, the head is a little large in proportion to his body, but not very much so. He has no crookedness in the bones of his limbs, neither are they sensibly thicker than they should be with regard to their length. The back-bone is in no ways bent but a little weak. The joints of the knees come too much inward or meet too right when his ankles separate too much; the ligaments of his ankles some time ago were very close, and his own toes turned much out, but they are now sensibly mended. He suffers scarce so much as others do in the breeding of his teeth and what he had got of them are very sound. He has now but six, though the two last he had but a month ago, and we expect every day to see two more. He has had since the heats, upon his breast and arms, a small outbreaking which the French call ‘La Miniature’ that came and went away again by turns and now and then a few pimples upon his face, but this is common to children in this country. When he is led supported by things such as he is fond of, his head falls forward, but when he is in one’s arms, he holds it up much better but not so erect as might be desired.
⁴¹

Yet Charles Edward was soon making good progress. He threw off a bad cold around his second birthday without difficulty.
⁴²
In April 1723 James spoke of his son’s improving daily ‘in mind and body’.
⁴³
Signs
of the prince’s later robustness and energy can be seen in an aside in John Hay’s correspondence when he talks of Charles’s ‘running about from morning to night’.
⁴⁴
The young prince was speaking well by the time he was two, and in his third year clear signs of a liking for music emerged.
⁴⁵
An excellent description of the child’s progress is given in a letter from Hay in May 1724: