THE BRIDEGROOM.
On the Wednesday after Easter the bride and bridegroom made their solemn
entry into Rome; the two travelling carriages of the Prince and of the
Princess were drawn by six horses; four gala coaches, carrying the
attendants of Charles Edward and of his brother the Cardinal Duke of
York, followed behind, and the streets were cleared by four outriders
dressed in scarlet with the white Stuart cockade. The house to which
Louise of Stolberg, now Louise d'Albany, or rather, as she signed
herself at this time, Louise R., was conducted after her five days'
wedding journey, has passed through several hands since belonging to the
Sacchettis, the Muti Papazzurris, and now-a-days to the family of
About's charming and unhappy Tolla Ferraldi. Clement XI. had given or
lent it to the Elder Pretender: James III., as he was styled in Italy,
had settled in it about 1719 with his beautiful bride Maria Clementina
Sobieska, romantically filched by her Jacobites from the convent at
Innsbruck, where the Emperor Charles VI. had hoped to restrain her from
so compromising a match; here, in the year 1720, Charles Edward had been
born and had his baby fingers kissed by the whole sacred college; and
here the so-called King of England had died at last, a melancholy
hypochondriac, in 1766. The palace closes in the narrow end of the
square of the Santissimi Apostoli, stately and quiet with its various
palaces, Colonna, Odescalchi, and whatever else their names, and its
pillared church front. There is a certain aristocratic serenity about
that square, separated, like a big palace yard, from the bustling Corso
in front; yet to me there remains, a tradition of my childhood, a sort
of grotesque and horrid suggestiveness connected with this peaceful and
princely corner of Rome. For, many years ago, when the square of the
Santissimi Apostoli was still periodically strewn with sand that the
Pope might not be jolted when his golden coach drove up to the church,
and when the names of Charles Edward and his Countess were curiously
mixed up in my brain with those of Charles the First and Mary Queen of
Scots, there used to be in a little street leading out of the square
towards the Colonna Gardens, a dark recess in the blank church-wall, an
embrasure, sheltered by a pent-house roof and raised like a stage a few
steep steps above the pavement; and in it loomed, strapped to a chair,
dark in the shadow, a creature in a long black robe and a skull cap
drawn close over his head; a vague, contorted, writhing and gibbering
horror, of whose St. Vitus twistings and mouthings we children scarcely
ventured to catch a glimpse as we hurried up the narrow street, followed
by the bestial cries and moans of the solitary maniac. This weird and
grotesque sight, more weird and more grotesque seen through a muddled
childish fancy and through the haze of years, has remained associated in
my mind with that particular corner of Rome, where, with windows looking
down upon that street, upon that blank church-wall with its little
black recess, the palace of the Stuarts closes in the narrow end of the
square of the Santissimi Apostoli. And now, I cannot help seeing a
certain strange appropriateness in the fact that the image of that
mouthing and gesticulating half-witted creature should be connected in
my mind with the house to which, with pomp of six-horse coaches and
scarlet outriders, Charles Edward Stuart conducted his bride.
Illustration: 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._
For the beautiful and brilliant youth who had secretly left that palace
twenty-four years before to re-conquer his father's kingdom, the gentle
and gallant and chivalric young prince of whose irresistible manner and
voice the canny chieftains had vainly bid each other beware when he
landed with his handful of friends and called the Highlanders to arms;
the patient and heroic exile, singing to his friends when the sea washed
over their boat and the Hanoverian soldiers surrounded their cavern or
hovel, who had silently given Miss Macdonald that solemn kiss which she
treasured for more than fifty years in her strong heart--that Charles
Edward Stuart was now a creature not much worthier and not much less
repulsive than the poor idiot whom I still see, flinging about his
palsied hands and gobbling with his speechless mouth, beneath the
windows of the Stuart palace. The taste for drinking, so strange in a
man brought up to the age of twenty-three among the proverbially sober
Italians, had arisen in Charles Edward, a most excusable ill habit in
one continually exposed to wet and cold, frequently sleeping on the damp
ground, ill-fed, anxious, worn out by over-exertion in flying before his
enemies, during those frightful months after the defeat at Culloden,
when, with a price of thirty thousand pounds upon his head, he had
lurked in the fastnesses of the Hebrides. We hear that on the eve of his
final escape from Scotland, his host, Macdonald of Kingsburgh, prevented
the possible miscarriage of all their perilous plans only by smashing
the punch-bowl over which the Pretender, already more than half drunk,
had insisted upon spending the night. Still more significant is the
fact, recorded by Hugh Macdonald of Balshair, that when Charles Edward
was concealed in a hovel in the isle of South Uist, the prince and his
faithful followers continued drinking (the words are Balshair's own)
"for three days and three nights." Hard drinking was, we all know, a
necessary accomplishment in the Scotland of those days; and hard
drinking, we must all of us admit, may well have been the one comfort
and resource of a man undergoing the frightful mental and bodily
miseries of those months of lying at bay. But Charles Edward did not
relinquish the habit when he was back again in safety and luxury.
Strangely compounded of an Englishman and a Pole, the Polish element,
the brilliant and light-hearted chivalry, the cheerful and youthfully
wayward heroism which he had inherited from the Sobieskis, seemed to
constitute the whole of Charles Edward's nature when he was young and,
for all his reverses, still hopeful; as he grew older, as deferred
and disappointed hopes, and endured ignominy, made him a middle-aged
man before his time, then also did the other hereditary strain, the
morose obstinacy, the gloomy brutality of James II. and of his father
begin to appear, and gradually obliterated every trace of what had been
the splendour and charm of the Prince Charlie of the '45. Disappointed
of the assistance of France, which had egged him to this great enterprise
only to leave him shamefully in the lurch, Charles Edward had, immediately
upon the peace of Aix la Chapelle, become an embarrassing guest of
Louis XV., and a guest of whom the victorious English were continually
requiring the ignominious dismissal; until, wearied by the indifference
to all hints and orders to free France from his compromising presence,
the Court of Versailles had descended to the incredible baseness of
having the Prince kidnapped as he was going to the opera, bound hand and
foot, carried like a thief to the fortress of Vincennes, and then
conducted to the frontier like a suspected though unconvicted swindler,
or other public nuisance.
This indignity, coming close upon the irreparable blow dealt to the
Jacobite cause by the stupid selfishness which impelled Charles Edward's
younger brother to become a Romish priest and a cardinal, appears to
have definitively decided the extraordinary change in the character of
the Young Pretender. During the many years of skulking, often completely
lost to the sight both of Jacobite adherents and of Hanoverian spies,
which followed upon that outrage of the year 1748, the few glimpses
which we obtain of Charles Edward show us only a precociously aged,
brutish and brutal sot, obstinate in disregarding all efforts to restore
him to a worthier life, yet not obstinate enough to refuse unnecessary
pecuniary aid from the very government and persons by whom he had been
so cruelly outraged. We hear that Charles Edward's confessor, with whom,
despite his secret abjuration of Catholicism, he continued to associate,
was a notorious drunkard; and that the mistress with whom he lived for
many years, and whom he even passed off as his wife, was also addicted
to drinking; nay, Lord Elcho is said to have witnessed a tipsy squabble
between the Young Pretender and Miss Walkenshaw, the lady in question,
across the table of a low Paris tavern. The reports of the many spies
whom the English Government set everywhere on his traces are constant
and unanimous in one item of information: the Prince began to drink
early in the morning, and was invariably dead drunk by the evening; nay,
some letters of Cardinal York, addressed to an unknown Jacobite, speak
of the "nasty bottle, that goes on but too much, and certainly must at
last kill him." But, although drunkenness undoubtedly did much to
obliterate whatever still remained of the hero of the '45, it was
itself only one of the proofs of the strange metamorphosis which had
taken place in his character. We cannot admit the plea of some of his
biographers, who would save his honour at the price of his reason.
Charles Edward was the victim neither of an hereditary vice nor of a
mental disease; drink was in his case not a form of madness, but merely
the ruling passion of a broken-spirited and degraded nature. He had the
power when he married, and even much later in life, when he sent for his
illegitimate daughter, of refraining from his usual excesses; his will,
impaired though it was, still existed, and what was wanting in the sad
second half of his career was not resolution, but conscience, pride, an
ideal, anything which might beget the desire of reform. The curious
mixture of brow-beating moroseness with a brazen readiness to accept and
even extort favours, he would appear, as he ceased to be young, to have
gradually inherited from his father; he was ready to live on the alms of
the French Court, while never losing an opportunity of declaiming
against the ignoble treatment which that same Court had inflicted on
him. He became sordid and grasping in money matters, basely begging
for money, which he did not require, from those who, like Gustavus III.
of Sweden, discovered only too late that he was demeaning himself from
avarice and not from necessity. While keeping a certain maudlin sentiment
about his exploits and those of his followers, which manifested itself
in cruelly pathetic scenes when, as in his old age, people talked to him
of the Highlands and the Rebellion; he was wholly without any sense of
his obligation towards men who had exposed their life and happiness for
him, of the duty which bound him to repay their devotion by docility to
their advice, by sacrifice of his inclinations, or even by such mere
decency of behaviour as would spare them the bitterness of allegiance to
a disreputable and foul-mouthed sot. But, until the moment when old and
dying, he placed himself in the strong hands of his natural daughter,
Charles Edward seems to have been, however obstinate in his favouritism,
incapable of any real affection. When his brother Henry became a priest
Charles held aloof for long years both from him and from his father; and
this resentment of what was after all a mere piece of bigoted folly, may
be partially excused by the fact that the identification of his family
with Popery had seriously damaged the prospects of Jacobitism. But the
lack of all lovingness in his nature is proved beyond possibility of
doubt by the brutal manner in which, while obstinately refusing to part
with his mistress at the earnest entreaty of his adherents, he explained
to their envoy Macnamara that his refusal was due merely to resentment
at any attempted interference in his concerns; but that, for the rest,
he had not the smallest affection or consideration remaining for
the woman they wished to make him relinquish. As if all the stupid
selfishness bred of centuries of royalty had accumulated in this man
who might be king only through his own and his adherents' magnanimity,
Charles Edward seemed, in the second period of his life, to feel as
if he had a right over everything, and nobody else had a right over
anything; all sense of reciprocity was gone; he would accept devotion,
self-sacrifice, generosity, charity--nay, he would even insist upon
them; but he would give not one tittle in return; so that, forgetful of
the heroism and clemency and high spirit of his earlier days, one might
almost think that his indignant answer to Cardinal de Tenein, who
offered him England and Scotland if he would cede Ireland to France,
"Everything or nothing, Monsieur le Cardinal!" was dictated less by the
indignation of an Englishman than by the stubborn graspingness of a
Stuart. His further behaviour towards Miss Walkenshaw shows the same
indifference to everything except what he considered his own rights. He
had crudely admitted that he cared nothing for her, that it was only
because his adherents wished her dismissal that he did not pack her off;
and subsequently he seems to have given himself so little thought either
for his mistress or for his child by her, that, without the benevolence
of his brother the Cardinal, they might have starved. But when, after
long endurance of his jealousy and brutality, after being watched like
a prisoner and beaten like a slave, the wretched woman at length took
refuge in a convent, Charles Edward's rage knew no bounds; and he
summoned the French Government, despite his old quarrel with it, to
kidnap and send back the woman over whom he had no legal rights, and
certainly no moral ones, with the obstinacy and violence of a drunken
navvy clamouring for the wife whom he has well-nigh done to death.
Beyond the mere intemperance and the violence born of intemperance which
made Charles Edward's name a byword and served the Hanoverian dynasty
better than all the Duke of Cumberland's gibbets, there was at the
bottom of the Pretender's character--his second character at least, his
character after the year 1750--heartlessness and selfishness, an absence
of all ideal and all gratitude, much more morally repulsive than any
mere vice, and of which the vice which publicly degraded him was the
result much more than the cause. The curse of kingship in an age
when royalty had lost all utility, the habit of irresponsibility, of
indifference, the habit of always claiming and never giving justice,
love, self-sacrifice, all the good things of this world, this curse had
lurked, an evil strain, in the nature of this king without a kingdom,
and had gradually blighted and made hideous what had seemed an almost
heroic character. Royal-souled Charles Edward Stuart had certainly
been in his youth; brilliant with all those virtues of endurance,
clemency, and affability which the earlier eighteenth century still
fondly associated with the divine right of kings; and royal-souled, hard
and weak with all the hardness and weakness, the self-indulgence,
obstinacy, and thoughtlessness for others of effete races of kings, he
had become no less certainly, in the second part of his life; branded
with God's own brand of unworthiness, which signifies that a people, or
a class, or a family, is doomed to extinction.
Such was the man to whom the easy-going habit of the world, the
perfectly self-righteous indifference to a woman's happiness or honour
of the well-bred people of that day, gave over as a partner for life a
half-educated, worldly-ignorant and absolutely will-less young girl of
nineteen and a half, who doubtless considered herself extremely
fortunate in being chosen for so brilliant a match.
There is a glamour, even for us, connected with the name of Charles
Edward Stuart; in his youth he forms a brilliant speck of romantic light
in that dull eighteenth century, a spot of light surrounded by the halo
of glory of the devotion which he inspired and the enthusiasm which he
left behind him. We feel, in a way, grateful to him almost as we might
feel grateful to a clever talker, a beautiful woman, a bright day, as to
something pleasing and enlivening to our fancy. But the brilliant effect
which has pleased us is like some gorgeous pageant connected with the
worship of a stupid and ferocious divinity; nay, rather, if we let our
thoughts dwell upon the matter, if we remember how, while the prisons
and ship-holds were pestilent with the Jacobite men and women penned up
like cattle in obscene promiscuity, while the mutilated corpses were
lying still green, piled up under the bog turf of Culloden, while so
many of the bravest men of Scotland, who had supplicated the Young
Pretender not to tempt them to a hopeless enterprise, were cheerfully
mounting the scaffold "for so sweet a prince," Charles Edward was
dancing at Versailles in his crimson silk dress and diamonds, with
his black-eyed boast the eldest-born Princess of France. Nay, worse,
if we remember how the man, for whose love and whose right so much
needless agony had been expended, let himself become a disgrace to the
very memory of the men who had died for him: if we bear all this in
mind, Charles Edward seems to become a mere irresponsible and fated
representative of some evil creed; the idol, at first fair-shapen and
smiling, then hideous and loathsome, to which human sacrifices are
brought in solemnity; a glittering idol of silver, or a foul idol of
rotten wood, but without nerves and mind to perceive the weeping all
around, the sop of blood at its feet. And now, after the sacrifice of so
many hundreds of brave men to this one man, comes the less tragic, less
heroic, perfectly legitimate and correct sacrifice to him of a pretty
young woman, not brave and not magnanimous, but very fit for innocent
enjoyment and very fit for honourable love.