Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (4 page)

The Prince is certainly the finest, charmingest child in the world. He is a great musician, sings and plays on his violin continually. No porter’s child in the country has stronger legs and arms, and indeed he makes good use of them, for he is continually in motion. He eats, sleeps and drinks mightily well. One can’t see a finer child every way, neither can one wish him better in every respect than he is.
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By the age of three, then, with the problems of nurse and governess satisfactorily solved, the young Charles Edward seemed to have survived the worst dangers of childhood. It was time to think in earnest about his education. At first simple lessons had been entrusted to a Signor Anchini.
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But it was clearly the moment to appoint someone with weightier credentials as the prince’s tutor. Charles had already had a woman brought from England as an English language teacher, but the experiment was not a success and put James off the idea of further educational hiring in the land of which he was
de jure
monarch.
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Under Hay’s influence James’s choice fell on Andrew Michael Ramsay.
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Ramsay appealed to him as the protégé and biographer of Archbishop Fénelon of Cambrai, the great philosophical influence on James. It was from Fénelon that James had learned the stoical attitude of quietism that was so to infuriate his son in later years.

Born the son of a baker in Ayr in 1686, Ramsay had already made his name as a writer of politico-theological treatises, and was later to be a significant figure in French freemasonry in the 1730s. He had won James’s favour by dedicating his latest work to him, flattering him as a potential royal patron. Yet in many ways the choice of Ramsay was imaginative. His educational thinking was in advance of his time: he believed in drawing out his pupils, not in learning by heart or rote.

Ramsay arrived in Rome from Paris in January 1724, but he was fated to spend only nine months with the prince. Ramsay was indissolubly associated with the Mar faction among the Jacobites, and it was in 1724 that James broke decisively with Mar, after the bishop of Atterbury had exposed Mar’s secret double-dealing
overtures
to London.
⁵⁰
By November Ramsay, no longer in James’s confidence, was on the road back to Paris.

In recoiling from the protégé of a man he considered a traitor, James unwittingly went on to open a Pandora’s box. His next solution to the problem of Charles Edward’s education was to summon James Murray of Stormont from Paris as his governor, while recalling Thomas Sheridan from his duties as an emissary in Vienna to be under-governor.
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Since this action was to lead straight to the greatest crisis in James’s life, it is worth asking why he felt impelled to take it. From the fact that James’s correspondence is full of references to the need to remove the young prince from the company of females, dilettante critics have assumed that he was motivated by general misogynism or a vague distaste for the female sex. The truth is altogether more prosaic and more specific. It was an abiding fear of aristocratic parents in the eighteenth century that children left too long in the company of maids would be sexually molested. No less a person than Cardinal Bernis testified to having suffered such a fate as a child.
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If James’s motives were characteristically sound and conscientious, his handling of the prince’s transition from female to male care turned out to be a disaster. To assess correctly the causes of the sensational marital rift in the Stuart household caused by this transfer of power, we need to retrace our steps in an attempt to chart the mental progress of Queen Clementina.

It is clear that James was misled as to the intensity of the queen’s feelings for her first-born and judged by appearances alone. Clementina, it is true, did not give the appearance of being inseparable from her child, but sober reflection might have alerted James that there were good reasons for this.

The most important of these was Clementina’s poor health and the uncertainty surrounding her future childbearing potential. There were repeated false alarms about a second pregnancy for Clementina, most notably in May 1721, June 1722 and November 1723.
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Hopes of another Stuart child were so regularly disappointed that the English spy Stosch (codename Walton) reported to London that an ‘obstruction’ meant Clementina’s childbearing days were already at an end.
⁵⁴

In addition, Clementina’s mother died in 1721, causing her great grief.
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Moreover, there are solid grounds for thinking that Clementina very soon found James a disappointment. His dour, stoical, pragmatic approach to life failed to strike a chord in her romantic soul. To make up for her sadnesses and disappointments she turned
for
solace to her infant son. This process was camouflaged by her frequent absences from his side, whether on
villegiatura
at Albano or on more extended trips, such as that to Lucca in 1722.
⁵⁶

James for his part might well have underrated the queen’s attachment to Charles Edward, since he himself was so besotted with the child. His pet name for his son, ‘Carluccio’, made its first appearance in May 1721.
⁵⁷
On Charles’s birthday James asked whether it was appropriate for one so young to be made a knight of the garter. He received the reply that (quite apart from the consideration that a monarch is not constrained in such matters) there were precedents in the honours given Edward, son of Edward IV, and Richard, duke of York, not to mention Henry VII’s son Arthur.
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James determined on the honour as Charles Edward’s second birthday present. A letter on 27 December 1722 neatly encapsulates the joy of the doting father:

I gave my son the Garter and the St Andrew on Christmas Day. He continues, thank God, very well except suffering now and then a little on pushing his teeth, and he is already such a lover of music that I shall be tempted to carry him one night to the Opera.
⁵⁹

Both the prince’s parents, then, were in thrall to unusually strong emotions over their son. It has to be remembered that such strong bonding was by no means the norm at the time. One leading authority on eighteenth-century childhood has gone so far as to suggest that high infant mortality actually imposed a ‘tenderness taboo’ between parent and child and so kept such strong emotions at bay.
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No such consideration weighed with James and Clementina. In retrospect their conflicting needs and requirements for their son had already set them on a collision course.

The departure of Ramsay in November 1724 coincided almost exactly with the announcement that the queen was again pregnant. This time the pregnancy was successful.
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The imminent arrival of a second child concentrated James’s mind. It was immediately after the birth of Henry Benedict, in March 1725, that James took the final decision to put Charles into the hands of Murray and Sheridan.

James’s decision was singularly unwise on a number of counts. It failed to take account of the fact that the queen might perceive a causal link between the birth of Henry and the departure of Charles Edward from the care of the women. There is some reason to think that after bringing forth her second son Clementina suffered from a form of post-puerperal depression.
⁶²
In this state, her imagination might have magnified the significance of James’s move to regularise
Charles
Edward’s education. She could well have seen it as an attempt to drive a wedge between herself and her first-born.

Certainly the queen’s confidante Mrs Sheldon did nothing to disabuse her of the idea. James had been unhappy with the governess’s behaviour for some time. When it was announced that the prince was to be taken out of her hands, she struck back with a whispering campaign directed at the impressionable Clementina. Angered by her meddling, James tried to dismiss her.
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This drew tearful reproaches from the queen. To placate her, James switched to praises for Sheldon’s qualities and offered to soften the blow by putting Henry in her charge. But when it became clear that there was no going back on the decision to place Charles Edward with Sheridan and Murray, Mrs Sheldon, presuming on the queen’s protection, flew into a violent rage and was openly impertinent to James.
⁶⁴
James retorted by ordering Sheldon to leave Rome. The governess then successfully appealed to Clementina for reinstatement.

Charles Edward, meanwhile, is likely to have experienced feelings of double jeopardy. The birth of a sibling is always a traumatic event for a pampered only child.
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To have juxtaposed the birth of a rival with an order expelling Charles from the care of the women was insensitive of James, to say the least. Charles Edward’s natural feelings of resentment towards the fledgling Henry would have been compounded by a sensation of the ‘end of Eden’. Such a transition was far too brutal.

In this single act of transfer to the male world (unexceptionable in itself) lay the seeds of the entire later family tragedy: Clementina’s abrupt separation from her husband, the fatal rift between her and James and much else. Charles’s dislike for his brother never abated. Clementina herself never displayed much affection for Henry. James too would later sense the truth that Clementina had preferred her son to her husband. Most important of all, the unconscious mutual antagonism between James and Charles Edward began at this point.

In part James’s insensitivity to the superheated atmosphere within his own family may have been the result of his preoccupation with public affairs. The years 1721–5 had seen an alarming decline in Jacobite fortunes. The regular correspondence with Philip V of Spain had tailed off; the Atterbury plot of 1722 in England had failed disastrously; the traditional French support for the Stuarts had been put into reverse under the duc d’Orleans and the Abbé Dubois and later the duc de Bourbon. Most crushingly of all, in the very month of Henry’s birth Peter the Great died, the Czar who had written to
James
in his own hand assuring him that he would definitely send an expedition to England to restore the Stuarts.

Faced with this plethora of frustration, one unconscious motive in James’s mind in bringing Charles Edward out of the hands of the women might have been a desire to accelerate the pace of Jacobite activity. His sense of impatience and frustration, particularly noted at this time by the spy Walton,
⁶⁶
might well have led him to leave his domestic flank unguarded.

At all events, James remained unaware of the storm about to break around him. On 25 September 1725 he wrote blithely to Atterbury: ‘The Prince has left the women without concern, and will, I hope, now improve faster than he could have done amongst them.’
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To celebrate the event Murray was given the titular earldom of Dunbar.
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Dunbar did not long enjoy his triumph. Clementina at once struck back. She ordered her women, and Mrs Sheldon especially, not to release the prince into Dunbar’s tutorial care.
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This immediately drew an angry response from James. He at once dismissed Mrs Sheldon, accusing her of meddling beyond her proper sphere.
⁷⁰
Clementina’s response to this was massive retaliation. Taking Mrs Sheldon and all her retinue with her, the queen sought sanctuary in the Ursuline convent. Since she held the Hays responsible for Sheldon’s dismissal, she informed James that she would return to the Palazzo Muti only when her
bêtes noires
were dismissed and Mrs Sheldon reinstated. Again James responded hamfistedly. Always at his worst when on his royal dignity, he wrote the queen a pompous letter which is, however, significant for the latent tensions it hints at in the Palazzo Muti.
⁷¹
After referring patronisingly to ‘the weakness of your sex’, he moved on to the real nub of her grievance: that with the importation of Sheridan and Dunbar she too was being edged away from contact with her son:

It is true I have given a general order that the governor and under-governor should never leave him for a moment and they always accompany him to my chamber, even though they don’t always do it to you, for example when you were dressing. The reason for this order is that he should not escape among the servants, where children learn nothing good.
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After assuring her that it was never his intention to deprive her of sight of her son, James went on to draw a clear distinction between the courtesies he was prepared to offer his queen and his unyielding resolution to exercise his rights as paterfamilias; these included the irrevocable dismissal of Mrs Sheldon and his equally inflexible determination
to
keep on John Hay and his wife. He concluded by asking Clementina to admit that her dissatisfaction with life in the Palazzo Muti did not just begin when he took his son out of the hands of the women.
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As for Dunbar, he had chosen him after mature reflection and on the basis of a long acquaintance with his character and merits. He found it incredible that Clementina should object to him.
⁷⁴

But Clementina was as adamant in her resolve as James in his. Neither side would capitulate; neither would compromise. The unsavoury row between Stuart king and queen became the sensation of Europe. Untold harm was done to the Jacobite cause. James’s envoys had laboured hard to build up an anti-Hanoverian alliance of Spain, Austria and Russia. All their hard work now lay in ruins. Stuart credibility was totally lost. The Jacobites never recovered from this crushing blow. The Whigs moved in for the kill. Their Roman agent Walton spewed out the most scurrilous propaganda, to the effect that the real reason for Clementina’s flight was that Mrs Hay was James’s mistress.
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This was nonsense, but some of the mud stuck.

Meanwhile Cardinal Alberoni, ostensibly pro-Jacobite but really in the pay of the English, was instructed to do his utmost to make sure that Clementina stayed in the Ursuline convent. Small wonder that Sir Robert Walpole in Paris declared himself publicly one of Clementina’s supporters.
⁷⁶
English intelligence unaided could never have pulled off such a stunning anti-Jacobite
coup
as this family débâcle.