Read Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Online
Authors: Frank McLynn
Yet this increased material prosperity was insignificant compared with Charles’s reconciliation with his daughter Charlotte.
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Even after the humiliating rebuff in Rome in 1773, Charlotte refused to take no for an answer. She had all her father’s dogged stubbornness. Using her friend Abbé Gordon, in 1774 she threatened to marry some unknown commoner unless Charles did something for her. Angry at being threatened like this, the prince warned her that she could be cast into anathema for ever if she took such a step.
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Baulked in this tactic, Charlotte then bombarded the French court with memoranda, lamenting her own and her mother’s plight.
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She won the powerful support of the duc de Richelieu and the duc de Bourbon.
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Charles Edward would have done well at this stage to silence his daughter by promising her something, for Charlotte’s appeals to Versailles cut across Charles Edward’s own lobbying of the French court (this was just after 1774 when the prince was writing to Maurepas and Vergennes). Faced with competing claims, Louis XVI decided that Clementina Walkinshaw and Charlotte had the more deserving case. Their suit would also be cheaper to settle. ‘Pouponne’ and her mother were awarded a small pension.
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Charlotte meanwhile kept plugging away at her father, undeterred by his refusal to answer her letters.
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In 1774 she found a new ally. Doctor Mahony, James’s personal physician, appealed on her behalf, explaining to Charles Edward about the obstruction in her liver and the pain it produced.
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The prince’s reply to this was shockingly callous. He simply reiterated his warning that if she again strayed out of France for any reason, she would lose all hope of any future advantage or protection.
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No amount of special pleading about the
prince’s
worries about the succession can mitigate the lack of compassion in that letter.
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Gordon and Caryll, Charlotte’s great champions, were left to shake their heads in disbelief at her father’s coldness. This lack of paternal feeling for a seriously ill young woman certainly played its part in Caryll’s decision to quit the prince’s service in 1775. Gordon was particularly disgusted at Charles’s ‘dog in the manger’ attitude to his daughter. He would neither offer her a word of encouragement nor allow her to marry someone with enough money to keep her, ‘since she is at present of a proper age, and if she were to wait much longer, it is probable she would find none’. All her doctors were agreed that her spirits were dashed by Charles Edward’s uncompromising posture, and that this depression augmented the organic symptoms in her liver. After all, as Gordon pointed out, ‘she was only six years old when carried off that night. She ought not to be utterly ruined for a fault of which her age hindered to be any ways partner.’
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Yet as soon as she recovered from that buffet, Charlotte kept up the steady drip-drip of pressure on her father.
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She hinted that if forbidden to marry, she would join a mendicant order of nuns. How she fused secular and religious ambitions will shortly appear. And, to the prince’s fury, his new Paris agent (a replacement for the ageing Gordon) took up the refrain. William Cowley, Prior of the English Benedictines in Paris, started to press her case, repeatedly referring to her bad health and the ominous swelling in her side.
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These representations must have kept Charlotte at the back of the prince’s mind. Nevertheless, his action in June 1784 surprised a lot of people. No sooner was the ink dry on Gustav III’s divorce settlement than the prince announced that he was recognising Charlotte as his legitimate daughter and heiress. This would entitle her to the appellation ‘duchess of Albany’.
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The prince then asked her to come with all speed to Florence.
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In the act of legitimation the prince referred to himself as ‘grandson of James II, king of Great Britain’. He then wrote to Vergennes to get his solemn deed of recognition registered with the Paris Parlement and to renew the call for the money Gustav was supposed to have negotiated out of Versailles.
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As with everything Charles Edward touched, problems of protocol immediately arose. Louis XVI recognised Charlotte as the ‘Pretender’s daughter’ by letters patent of August 1784, registered by the Parlement of Paris the following month, but refused to accept the title of the duchess of Albany.
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Armed with this patent, the prince tried to browbeat the court of Tuscany. He asked for his daughter’s recognition as duchess, alleging that the French king had already allowed this. The Grand Duke knew the true situation. He allowed the act of legitimation to be published in Florence, but deleted all references to ‘the Duchess of Albany’.
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Nevertheless, this was a great achievement for Charlotte. All her highest hopes had come to fruition, thanks to her patient and dauntless perseverance. But why did the prince come round so dramatically, after years of cold and callous disregard? The answer is to be sought in his psychology rather than his emotions. There was little of the light on the road to Damascus here.
The delayed shock of Louise’s departure took time to make its full impact felt. But after 1781 it is safe to say that there are signs of senility in Charles Edward. His rapturous reception of Gustav III was significant. Having previously displayed a capacity for relatively mature functioning, the prince in the last phase of his life entered a period of regression. Characteristically, this psychological condition involves cleaving to people who will treat the subject as a favoured only child, and holding at arm’s length those who will not accord him that status.
In short, Charles Edward’s seemingly magnanimous actions towards his daughter in 1784 are far more likely to have reflected his own needs than spontaneous emotion for the once much-loved Pouponne.
Charlotte was indifferent to such nuances. She had achieved her life’s ambition. In high excitement she made ready to leave the convent of St Marie in Paris. She wrote to Henry in rather vainglorious style, presuming to address him as uncle now that she was legitimate daughter and heiress of the prince.
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Then, on 18 September 1784, she started south for Florence.
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At the beginning of October she arrived in the Tuscan capital.
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The prince tried to arrange for her to be presented to the Grand Duchess, but this ploy failed since Charlotte had no letter of recommendation from the French queen.
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But her coming did cause a minor sensation in Florence, as Mann reluctantly conceded, though granting Charlotte only the status of curiosity value:
she is allowed to be a good figure, tall and well-made, but that the features of the face resemble too much those of her father to be handsome. She is gay, lively and very affable, and has the behaviour
of
a well-bred French woman, without assuming the least distinction among our ladies on account of her new dignity.
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The fashionable ladies of Florence flocked to leave their cards at the Palazzo Guadagni. Charlotte, who was a good administrator, set about organising the household. She made sufficiently rapid progress to be able to take Charles Edward on a tour of Tuscany two weeks after her arrival.
Clearly the condition in which she found her father deeply shocked her. She decided he needed fresh air and an escape from the tedious Florentine routine in which he had become ossified for the past decade. They headed west to Lucca to see a much-praised opera.
30
On the way there the prince gave ample proof that he needed round-the-clock nursing. At Pistoya he was convulsed with an apoplectic fit that lasted four hours. But Charlotte persisted with the excursion. They proceeded to the theatre at Lucca.
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The coming of the prince’s daughter seemed to change his luck. There had been a long silence from Versailles since Gustav’s intervention.
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Suddenly word came that Vergennes had granted a pension of 60,000 livres a year to the prince, with a reversionary payment to Charlotte of 10,000 livres a year to her on his death.
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To clear up any doubts about Charlotte’s eligibility to bequests on his death, the prince made a solemn declaration that Charlotte was his only child and that he had no others, especially not with Louise of Stolberg.
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The other piece of good fortune was the Pope’s recognition of Charlotte as duchess of Albany. Pius VI had received reports that Charlotte had brought about a miraculous transformation in the prince’s temper and bearing. As a reward, he granted her the title that neither France nor the duchy of Tuscany were prepared to concede.
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This papal recognition left Cardinal York out on a limb. Furious both about Charlotte’s legitimation, on which he was not consulted, and with her ‘impertinence’ in writing to him in an over-familiar tone, he had resisted her blandishments.
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When he protested to the prince, Charles Edward coldly told him that it was not his business, nor was it for him to cavil where the Pope and the French court had raised no difficulty; since he did not dispute Henry’s rights, Cardinal York ought not to dispute his.
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Henry always squirmed under the lash of his brother’s rebukes. He looked around for a means of petty vengeance. Thinking that Louise of Stolberg had now renounced Alfieri for ever, he began to soften towards her. There was a brief resumption of their correspondence.
Louise
, now in Bologna and jealous of Charlotte’s ‘usurpation’ did not waste the opportunity to pour out her bile:
The king continues to do a thousand absurdities in Florence, although he can scarcely move from one room to another by means of his swollen legs. His illness does not, however, prevent him bestowing the order of St. Andrew at the end of a banquet on his daughter and on a certain lord who attends him. It is all very ridiculous.
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Ridiculous was an epithet better applied to the situation Cardinal York now found himself in. It took the acidulous Walpole to put his finger on the central absurdity: ‘So the Pope, who wouldn’t grant the title of king to the Pretender, allows his no-Majesty to have created a Duchess! And the Cardinal of York, who is but a ray of the Papacy, and who must think his brother a king, will not allow her title!’
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In what was left of 1784 Charlotte had no time to conciliate her uncle. Her hands were full with the ailing prince. By now his health had declined to the point where he no longer took the air in his coach twice daily, as accustomed. He complained of being permanently in great pain and of a feeling of suffocation in his chest.
40
Mann continually remarked that Charlotte would not have to wait long to reap her inheritance.
Charlotte did her best to amuse and distract him. The French traveller Dupaty praised her work as nurse in the most glowing terms.
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Private balls were held at the house three times a week. The prince would watch Charlotte’s lady friends dancing for a while, then gradually doze off.
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With the position in the Palazzo Guadagni stable at the beginning of 1785, Charlotte set out to achieve a reconciliation with Cardinal York. On 23 and 30 April she sent Henry two humble and deferential letters, in which she spoke of the grief that prevented her writing at greater length; she hinted also at the disease in her liver. Henry was obviously moved. On 4 May he came round to her decisively. ‘Since you appear so anxious for my friendship and my confidence, which greatly pleases me, I can assure you sincerely that you have both.’
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Henry then wrote to the Pope to say that although certain aspects of the legitimation process had been offensive to him, he now accepted Charlotte unreservedly both as niece and duchess.
44
The seal of amity was set on this relationship during a tour of Tuscany. In May 1785 Charlotte and her father were in Pisa for the waters. The prince was very ill; but for the duchess the doors of the Pisan nobility were all open.
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Encouraged by her reception there,
Charlotte
set out for a more extended progress around Tuscany in the autumn.
46
It was at Monte Freddo village near Perugia in October 1785 that she and the prince met Henry. Careful diplomacy had prepared all three for this summit conference. It was a complete success. The two brothers claimed to have regained their childhood love for each other. The cardinal was even more charmed by Charlotte than he expected to be.
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The two of them agreed that the interests of Charles Edward’s health were best served by a removal to Rome. They made plans to quit Florence.
Meanwhile, along with her strategy of achieving a total
rapprochement
with the cardinal, Charlotte had been encouraging the two brothers to co-operate in the second of her two grand aims: the humbling of Louise of Stolberg. After her release from Rome in July 1784, Louise was reunited with Alfieri at Colmar. This was risky. If it was found that the recently divorced countess of Albany was living in sin, her pensions both from the Pope and the prince were likely to be stopped. In mid-October 1784, the lovers parted again, he to Pisa, she to Bologna. Then in May 1785 Louise appeared in Paris.
Charlotte had by this time collected enough incriminating evidence against Louise to damage her badly. When the full details of Louise’s continuing affair were laid before him, Henry was outraged. For a second time he had trusted her and for a second time she had made a fool of him. Henry wrote to Charles Edward, suggesting strong measures against an ‘object’ like Alfieri, who had besmirched the Stuart family name.
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The prince was happy to oblige. He decided to renege on the financial side of the settlement negotiated by Gustav III. Since he had contracted the marriage in the first place only on a false promise from France, it was for France to bail out the ‘Queen of Hearts’, if that was Louis XVI’s desire.
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