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[Illustration: ALFIERI AND THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY
_From the original portrait in the possession of the Marchesa A.
Alfieri de Sostegno_]
THE COUNTESS
OF ALBANY
BY
VERNON LEE
WITH PORTRAITS
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMX
SECOND EDITION
Printed by BALLANTYNE AND CO. LIMITED
Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND
MADAME JOHN MEYER,
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME,
SO OFTEN AND SO LATELY TALKED OVER TOGETHER,
IN GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE REGRET.
PREFACE
In preparing this volume on the Countess of Albany (which I consider as
a kind of completion of my previous studies of eighteenth-century
Italy), I have availed myself largely of Baron Alfred von Reumont's
large work _Die Gräfin von Albany_ (published in 1862); and of the
monograph, itself partially founded on the foregoing, of M. St. René
Taillandier, entitled _La Comtesse d'Albany_, published in Paris in
1862. Baron von Reumont's two volumes, written twenty years ago and when
the generation which had come into personal contact with the Countess of
Albany had not yet entirely died out; and M. St. René Taillandier's
volume, which embodied the result of his researches into the archives of
the Musée Fabre at Montpellier; might naturally be expected to have
exhausted all the information obtainable about the subject of their and
my studies. This has proved to be the case very much less than might
have been anticipated. The publication, by Jacopo Bernardi and Carlo
Milanesi, of a number of letters of Alfieri to Sienese friends, has
afforded me an insight into Alfieri's character and his relations with
the Countess of Albany such as was unattainable to Baron von Reumont and
to M. St. René Taillandier. The examination, by myself and my friend
Signor Mario Pratesi, of several hundreds of MS. letters of the Countess
of Albany existing in public and private archives at Siena and at
Milan, has added an important amount of what I may call psychological
detail, overlooked by Baron von Reumont and unguessed by M. St. René
Taillandier. I have, therefore, I trust, been able to reconstruct the
Countess of Albany's spiritual likeness during the period--that of her
early connection with Alfieri--which my predecessors have been satisfied
to despatch in comparatively few pages, counterbalancing the thinness of
this portion of their biographies by a degree of detail concerning the
Countess's latter years, and the friends with whom she then corresponded,
which, however interesting, cannot be considered as vital to the real
subject of their works.
Besides the volumes of Baron von Reumont and M. St. René Taillandier, I
have depended mainly upon Alfieri's autobiography, edited by Professor
Teza, and supplemented by Bernardi's and Milanesi's _Lettere di Vittorio
Alfieri_, published by Le Monnier in 1862. Among English books that I
have put under contribution, I may mention Klose's _Memoirs of Prince
Charles Edward Stuart_ (Colburn, 1845), Ewald's _Life and Times of
Prince Charles Stuart_ (Chapman and Hall, 1875), and Sir Horace Mann's
_Letters to Walpole_, edited by Dr. Doran. A review, variously
attributed to Lockhart and to Dennistoun, in the _Quarterly_ for 1847,
has been all the more useful to me as I have been unable to procure,
writing in Italy, the _Tales of the Century_, of which that paper gives
a masterly account.
For various details I must refer to Charles Dutens' _Mémoires d'un
Voyageur qui se repose_ (Paris, 1806); to Silvagni's _La Corte e la
Società Romana nel secolo XVIII._; to Foscolo's _Correspondence_, Gino
Capponi's _Ricordi_ and those of d'Azeglio; to Giordani's works and
Benassù Montanari's _Life of Ippolito Pindemonti_, besides the books
quoted by Baron Reumont; and for what I may call the general pervading
historical colouring (if indeed I have succeeded in giving any) of the
background against which I have tried to sketch the Countess of Albany,
Charles Edward and Alfieri, I can only refer generally to what is
now a vague mass of detail accumulated by myself during the years of
preparation for my _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_.
My debt to the kindness of persons who have put unpublished matter at my
disposal, or helped me to collect various information, is a large one.
In the first category, I wish to express my best thanks to the Director
of the Public Library at Siena; to Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri, a great
collector of autographs, in the same city; to the Countess Baldelli and
Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli of Florence, who possess some most curious
portraits and other relics of the Countess of Albany, Prince Charles
Edward, and Alfieri; and also to my friend Count Pierre Boutourline,
whose grandfather and great-aunt were among Madame d'Albany's friends.
Among those who have kindly given me the benefit of their advice and
assistance, I must mention foremost my friend Signor Mario Pratesi, the
eminent novelist; and next to him the learned Director of the State
Archives of Florence, Cavaliere Gaetano Milanese, and Doctor Guido
Biagi, of the Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuel of Rome, without whose
kindness my work would have been quite impossible.
Florence,
March 15, 1884.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.--THE BRIDE 1
CHAPTER II.--THE BRIDEGROOM 14
CHAPTER III.--REGINA APOSTOLORUM 25
CHAPTER IV.--THE HEIR 33
CHAPTER V.--FLORENCE 46
CHAPTER VI.--ALFIERI 57
CHAPTER VII.--THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE 72
CHAPTER VIII.--THE ESCAPE 80
CHAPTER IX.--ROME 91
CHAPTER X--ANTIGONE 102
CHAPTER XI.--SEPARATION 120
CHAPTER XII.--COLMAR 134
CHAPTER XIII.--RUE DE BOURGOYNE 142
CHAPTER XIV.--BEFORE THE STORM 155
CHAPTER XV.--ENGLAND 166
CHAPTER XVI.--THE MISOGALLO 176
CHAPTER XVII.--CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI 190
CHAPTER XVIII.--FABRE 199
CHAPTER XIX.--THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS 207
CHAPTER XX.--SANTA CROCE 220
ILLUSTRATIONS
ALFIERI AND THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY
_From the original portrait in the possession of the Marchesa A.
Alfieri de Sostegno_
CHARLES EDWARD STUART
_From a pastel, painter unknown, once in the possession of the heir
of the Countess of Albany's heir Fabre. Now in the possession of
Mrs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place, Winchfield, Hants_
LOUISE, COUNTESS OF ALBANY
_From a pastel once in the possession of the heirs of Fabre, now
in the possession of Mrs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place,
Winchfield, Hants._
THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY.
CHAPTER I.
THE BRIDE.
On the Wednesday or Thursday of Holy Week of the year 1772 the inhabitants
of the squalid and dilapidated little mountain towns between Ancona and
Loreto were thrown into great excitement by the passage of a travelling
equipage, doubtless followed by two or three dependent chaises, of more
than usual magnificence.
The people of those parts have little to do now-a-days, and must have
had still less during the Pontificate of His Holiness Pope Clement XIV.;
and we can imagine how all the windows of the unplastered houses, all
the black and oozy doorways, must have been lined with heads of women
and children; how the principal square of each town, where the horses
were changed, must have been crowded with inquisitive townsfolk and
peasants, whispering, as they hung about the carriages, that the great
traveller was the young Queen of England going to meet her bridegroom;
a thing to be remembered in such world-forgotten places as these, and
which must have furnished the subject of conversation for months and
years, till that Queen of England and her bridegroom had become part
and parcel of the tales of the "Three Golden Oranges," of the "King of
Portugal's Cowherd," of the "Wonderful Little Blue Bird," and such-like
stories in the minds of the children of those Apennine cities. The Queen
of England going to meet her bridegroom at the Holy House of Loreto. The
notion, even to us, does savour strangely of the fairy tale.
What were, meanwhile, the thoughts of the beautiful little fairy
princess, with laughing dark eyes and shining golden hair, and brilliant
fair skin, more brilliant for the mysterious patches of rouge upon
the cheeks, and vermilion upon the lips, whom the more audacious or
fortunate of the townsfolk caught a glimpse of seated in her gorgeous
travelling dress (for the eighteenth century was still in its stage of
pre-revolutionary brocade and gold lace and powder and spangles) behind
the curtains of the coach? Louise, Princess of Stolberg-Gedern, and
ex-Canoness of Mons, was, if we may judge by the crayon portrait and the
miniature done about that time, much more of a child than most women of
nineteen. A clever and accomplished young lady, but, one would say,
with, as yet, more intelligence and acquired pretty little habits and
ideas than character; a childish woman of the world, a bright, light
handful of thistle-bloom. And thus, besides the confusion, the unreality
due to precipitation of events and change of scene, the sense that she
had (how long ago--days, weeks, or years? in such a state time becomes a
great muddle and mystery) been actually married by proxy, that she had
come the whole way from Paris, through Venice and across the sea,
besides being in this dream-like, phantasmagoric condition, which must
have made all things seem light--it is probable that the young lady had
scarcely sufficient consciousness of herself as a grown-up, independent,
independently feeling and thinking creature, to feel or think very
strongly over her situation. It was the regular thing for girls of
Louise of Stolberg's rank to be put through a certain amount of rather
vague convent education, as she had been at Mons; to be put through a
certain amount of balls and parties; to be put through the formality of
betrothal and marriage; all this was the half-conscious dream--then
would come the great waking up. And Louise of Stolberg was, most likely,
in a state of feeling like that which comes to us with the earliest
light through the blinds: pleasant, or unpleasant? We know not which;
still drowsing, dreaming, but yet strongly conscious that in a moment we
shall be awake to reality.
There was, nevertheless, in the position of this girl something which,
even in these circumstances, must have compelled her to think, or, at
all events, to meditate, however confusedly, upon the present and the
future. If she had in her the smallest spark of imagination she must
have felt, to an acute degree, the sort of continuous surprise, recurring
like the tick of a clock, which haunts us sometimes with the fact that
it really does just happen to be ourselves to whom some curious lot,
some rare combination of the numbers in life's lottery, has come. For
the man whom she was going to marry--nay, to whom, in a sense, she was
married already--the unknown whom she would see for the first time that
evening, was not the mere typical bridegroom, the mere man of rank and
fortune, to whom, whatever his particular individual shape and name, the
daughter of a high-born but impoverished house had known herself, since
her childhood, to be devoted.
Louise Maximilienne Caroline Emanuele, daughter of the late Prince
Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern, Prince of the Empire, who had
died, a Colonel of Maria Theresa, in the battle of Leuthen; and of
Elisabeth Philippine, Countess of Horn, born at Mons in Hainaut, the
20th September 1752, educated there in a convent, and subsequently
admitted to the half-ecclesiastic, half-worldly dignity of Canoness of
Ste. Wandru in that town: Louise, Princess of Stolberg, now in her
twentieth year, had been betrothed, and, a few weeks ago, married by
proxy in Paris to Charles Edward Stuart, known to history as the Younger
Pretender, to popular imagination as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and to
society in the second half of the eighteenth century as the Count of
Albany. The match had been made up hurriedly--most probably without
consulting, or dreaming of consulting, the girl--by her mother, the
dowager Princess Stolberg, and the Duke of Fitz-James, Charles Edward's
cousin. The French Minister, Duc d'Aiguillon, in one of those fits of
preparing Charles Edward as a weapon against England, which had more
than once cost the Pretender so much bitterness, and the Court of
Versailles so much brazenly endured shame, had intimated to the Count of
Albany that he had better take unto himself a wife. Charles Edward had
more than once refused; this time he accepted, and his cousin Fitz-James
looked around for a possible future Queen of England. Now it happened
that the eldest son of Fitz-James, the Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of
Berwick, had just married Caroline, the second daughter of the widow of
Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern; so that the choice
naturally fell upon this lady's elder sister, Louise of Stolberg, the
young Canoness of Ste. Wandru of Mons.
The alliance, short of royal birth, was, in the matter of dignity, all
that could be wished; the Stolbergs were one of the most illustrious
families of the Holy Roman Empire, in whose service they had discharged
many high offices; the Horns, on the other hand, were among the most
brilliant of the Flemish aristocracy, allied to the Gonzagas of Mantua,
the Colonna, Orsinis, the Medina Celis, Croys, Lignes, Hohenzollerns,
and the house of Lorraine, reigning or quasi-reigning families; and
Louise of Stolberg's mother was, moreover, on the maternal side, the
grand-daughter of the Earl of Elgin and Ailesbury, a Bruce, and a
staunch follower of King James II. Such had been the inducements in the
eyes of the Duke of Fitz-James; and therefore in the eyes of Charles
Edward, for whom he was commissioned to select a wife. The inducements
to the Princess of Stolberg had been even greater. Foremost among them
was probably the mere desire of ridding herself, poor and living as she
was on the charity of the Empress-Queen, of another of the four girls
with whom she had been left a widow at twenty-five. It had been a great
blessing to get the two eldest girls, Louise and Caroline, educated,
housed for a time, and momentarily settled in the world by their
admission to the rich and noble chapter of Ste. Wandru: it must have
been a great blessing to see the second girl married to the son of
Fitz-James; it would be a still greater one to get Louise safely off her
hands, now that the third and fourth daughters required to be thought
of. So far for the desirability of any marriage. This particular
marriage with Prince Charles Edward was, moreover, such as to tempt the
vanity and ambition of a lady like the widowed Princess of Stolberg,
conscious of her high rank, and conscious, perhaps painfully conscious
of the difficulty of living up to its requirements. The Count of
Albany's grandfather had been King of England; his father, the Pretender
James, had lived with royal state in his exile at Rome, recognised as
reigning Sovereign by the Pope, and even, every now and then, by France
and Spain. No Government had recognised Charles Edward as King of
England; but, on the other hand, Charles Edward had virtually been King
of Scotland during the '45; he had been promised the help of France to
restore him to his rights; and although that help had never been
satisfactorily given in the past, who could tell whether it might
not be given at any moment in the future? The ups and downs of politics
brought all sorts of unexpected necessities; and why should the French
Government, which had ignominiously kidnapped and bundled off Charles
Edward in 1748, have sent for him again only a year ago, have urged him
to marry, unless it had some scheme for reinstating him in England? The
Duke of Fitz-James had doubtless urged these considerations; he had not
laid much weight on the fact that Charles Edward was thirty-two years
older than his proposed wife; still less is it probable that he had bade
the Princess of Stolberg consider that his royal kinsman was said to be
neither of very good health, nor of very agreeable disposition, nor of
very temperate habits; or, if such ideas were presented to the Princess
Stolberg, she put them behind her. Be it as it may, these were matters
for the judicious consideration of a mother; not, certainly, for the
thoughts of a daughter. The judicious mother decided that such a match
was a good one; perhaps, in her heart, she was even overwhelmed by the
glory which this daughter of hers was permitted by Heaven to add to all
the glories of the illustrious Stolbergs and Horns. Anyhow, she accepted
eagerly; so eagerly as to forget both gratitude and prudence: for so far
from consulting her benefactress, Maria Theresa, about the advisability
of this marriage, or asking her sovereign permission for a step
which might draw upon the Empress-Queen some disagreeable diplomatic
correspondence with England, the Princess of Stolberg kept the matter
close, and did not even announce the marriage to the Court of Vienna;
yet she must have foreseen what occurred, namely, that Maria Theresa,
mortified not merely in her dignity as a sovereign, but also, and
perhaps more, in her ruling passion of benevolent meddlesomeness, would
suspend the pension which formed a large portion of the Princess's
income, and compel her to the abject apology before restoring it. The
marriage with Charles Edward Stuart was worth all that!
Louise of Stolberg was probably well aware of the extreme glory of the
marriage for which she had been reserved. The Fitz-Jameses, in virtue of
their illegitimate descent from James II., considered themselves and
were considered as a sort of Princes of the Blood; and as such they
doubtless impressed Louise with a great notion of the glory of the
Stuarts, and the absolute legitimacy of their claims. On his marriage
Charles Edward assumed the title, and attempted to assume the position,
of King of England; so his bride must have considered herself as the
wife not merely of the Count of Albany, but of Charles III., King of
Great Britain, France, and Ireland. She was going to be a _Queen_! We
must try, we democratic creatures of a time when kings and queens may
perfectly be adventurers and adventuresses, to put ourselves in the
place of this young lady of a century ago, brought up as a dignitary
of a chapter into which admission depended entirely upon the number
and quality of quarterings of the candidate's escutcheon, under a
superior--the Abbess of Ste. Wandru--who was the sister of the late
Emperor Francis, the sister-in-law of Maria Theresa; we must try and
conceive an institution something between a school, a sisterhood, and a
club, in which the ruling idea, the source of all dignity, jealousy,
envy, and triumph, was greatness of birth and connection; we must try
and do this in order to understand what, to Louise of Stolberg, was the
full value of the fact of becoming the wife of Charles Edward Stuart.
One hundred and twelve years ago, and seventeen years before the great
revolution which yawns, an almost impassable gulf, between us and the
men and women of the past, a woman, a girl of nineteen, and a Canoness
of Ste. Wandru of Mons, need have been of no base temper if, on the
eve of such a wedding as this one, her mind had been full of only one
idea: the idea, monotonous and drowningly loud like some big cathedral
bell, "I shall be a Queen." But if Louise of Stolberg was, as is most
probable, in some such a state of vague exultation, we must remember
also that there may well have entered into such exultation an element
with which even we, and even the most austerely or snobbishly democratic
among us, might fully have sympathised. Her mother, her sister, her
brother-in-law, and the old Duke of Fitz-James, who had made up her
marriage and married her by proxy, and every other person who had
approached her during the last month, must have been filling the mind of
Louise of Stolberg with tales of the '45 and of the heroism of Prince
Charlie. And her mind, which, as afterwards appeared, was romantic,
fascinated by eccentricity and genius, may easily have become enamoured
of the bridegroom who awaited her, the last of so brilliant and ill-fated
a race, the hero of Gladsmuir and Falkirk, at whose approach the
Londoners had shut their shops in terror, and the Hanoverian usurper
ordered his yacht to lie ready moored at the Tower steps; the more than
royal young man whom (as the Jacobites doubtless told her) only the
foolish and traitorous obstinacy of his followers had prevented from
reinstating his father on the throne of England. Historical figures,
especially those of a heroic sort, remain pictured in men's minds at
their moment of glory; and this was the case particularly with the Young
Pretender, who had disappeared into well-nigh complete mystery after his
wonderful exploits and hairbreadth escapes of the '45; so that in the
eyes of Louise of Stolberg the man she was about to marry appeared most
probably but little changed from the brilliant youth who had marched on
foot at the head of his army towards London, who had held court at
Holyrood and roamed in disguise about the Hebrides.
Still, it is difficult to imagine that as the hours of meeting drew
nearer, the little Princess, as her travelling carriage toiled up the
Apennine valleys, did not feel some terror of the future and the
unknown. The spring comes late to those regions; in the middle of April
the blackthorn is scarcely budding on the rocks, the violets are still
plentiful underneath the leafless roadside hedges; scarcely a faint
yellow, more like autumn that spring, is beginning to tinge the scraggy
outlines of the poplars, which rise in spectral regiments out of the
river beds. Wherever the valley widens, or the road gains some hill-crest,
a huge peak white with newly-fallen snow confronts you, closes in the
view, bringing bleakness and bitterness curiously home to the feelings.
These valleys, torrent-tracks between the steep rocks of livid basalt or
bright red sandstone, bare as a bone or thinly clothed with ilex and
juniper scrub, are inexpressibly lonely and sad, especially at this time
of year. You feel imprisoned among the rocks in a sort of catacomb open
to the sky, where the shadows gather in the early afternoon, and only
the light on the snow-peaks and on the high-sailing clouds tells you
that the sun is still in the heavens. Villages there seem none; and you
may drive for an hour without meeting more than a stray peasant cutting
scrub or quarrying gravel on the hill-side, a train of mules carrying
charcoal or faggots; the towns are far between, bleak, black, filthy,
and such as only to make you feel all the more poignantly the utter
desolateness of these mountains. No sadder way of entering Italy can
well be imagined than landing at Ancona and crossing through the
Apennines to Rome in the early spring. To a girl accustomed to the fat
flatness of Flanders, to the market-bustle of a Flemish provincial town,
this journey must have been overwhelmingly dreary and dismal. During
those long hours dragging up these Apennine valleys, did a shadow fall
across the mind of the pretty, fair-haired, brilliant-complexioned
little Canoness of Mons, a shadow like the cold melancholy blue which
filled the valleys between the sun-smitten peaks? And did it ever occur
to her, as the horses were changed in the little post-towns, that it was
in honour of Holy Week that the savage-looking bearded men, the big,
brawny, madonna-like women had got on their best clothes? Did it strike
her that the unplastered church-fronts were draped with black, the
streets strewn with laurel and box, as for a funeral, that the bells
were silent in their towers? Perhaps not; and yet when, a few years
later, the Countess of Albany was already wont to say that her married
life had been just such as befitted a woman who had gone to the altar on
Good Friday, she must have remembered, and the remembrance must have
seemed fraught with ill omen, that last day of her girlhood, travelling
through the black deserted valleys of the March, through the
world-forgotten mountain-towns with their hushed bells and black-draped
churches and funereally strewn streets.
At Loreto--where, as a good Catholic, the Princess Louise of Stolberg
doubtless prayed for a blessing on her marriage, in the great sanctuary
which encloses with silver and carved marble the little house of the
Virgin--at Loreto the bride was met by a Jacobite dignitary, Lord
Carlyle, and five servants in the crimson liveries of England. At
Macerata, one of the larger towns of the March of Ancona, she was
awaited by her bridegroom. A noble family of the province, the
Compagnoni-Marefoschis, one of whom, a cardinal, was an old friend of
the Stuarts, had placed their palace at the disposal of the royal pair.
We most of us know what such palaces, in small Italian provincial towns
south of the Apennines, are apt to be; huge, gloomy, shapeless masses of
brickwork and mouldering plaster, something between a mediæval fortress
and a convent; great black archways, where the refuse of the house, the
filth of the town, has peaceably accumulated (and how much more in those
days); magnificent statued staircases given over to the few servants
who have replaced the armed bravos of two centuries ago; long suites
of rooms, vast, resounding like so many churches, glazed in the last
century with tiny squares of bad glass, through which the light
comes green and thick as through sea-water; carpets still despised
as a new-fangled luxury from France; the walls, not cheerful with
eighteenth-century French panel and hangings, but covered with big naked
frescoed men and women, or faded arras; few fire-places, but those few
enormous, looking like a huge red cavern in the room. The Marefoschis
had got together all their best furniture and plate, and the palace was
filled with torches and wax lights; a funereal illumination in a
funereal place, it must have seemed to the little Princess of Stolberg,
fresh from the brilliant nattiness of the Parisian houses of the time of
Louis XV.
The bride alighted; a small, plump, well-proportioned, rather childish
creature, with still half-formed childish features, a trifle snub, a
trifle soulless, very pretty, tender, light-hearted; a charming little
creature, very well made to steal folk's hearts unconscious to
themselves and to herself.
The bridegroom met her. A faded, but extremely characteristic crayon
portrait, the companion of the one of which I have already spoken, now
in the possession of Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli (the only man still
living who can remember that same Louise d'Albany), a portrait evidently
taken at this time, has shown me what that bridegroom must have been.
The man who met Louise of Stolberg at Macerata as her husband and
master, the man who had once been Bonnie Prince Charlie, was tall,
big-boned, gaunt, and prematurely bowed for his age of fifty-two;
dressed usually, and doubtless on this occasion, with the blue ribbon
and star, in a suit of crimson watered silk, which threw up a red
reflection into his red and bloated face. A red face, but of a livid,
purplish red suffused all over the heavy furrowed forehead to where it
met the white wig, all over the flabby cheeks, hanging in big loose
folds upon the short, loose-folded red neck; massive features, but
coarsened and drawn; and dull, thick, silent-looking lips, of purplish
red scarce redder than the red skin; pale blue eyes tending to a watery
greyness, leaden, vague, sad, but with angry streakings of red;
something inexpressibly sad, gloomy, helpless, vacant and debased in the
whole face: such was the man who awaited Louise of Stolberg in the
Compagnoni-Marefoschi palace at Macerata, and who, on Good Friday the
17th of April 1772, wedded her in the palace chapel and signed his name
in the register as Charles III., King of Great Britain, France, and
Ireland.