REGINA APOSTOLORUM.
Charles Edward had refrained from drink, or at least refrained from any
excesses, in honour of his marriage. Perhaps the notion that France was
again taking him up, a notion well-founded since France had bid him
marry and have an heir, and the recollection of the near miscarriage of
all his projects, thanks to having presented himself, a year before, to
the French Minister so drunk that he could neither speak nor be spoken
to, perhaps the old hope of becoming after all a real king, had turned
the Pretender into a temporarily-reformed character. Or, perhaps, weary
of the life of melancholy solitude, of debauched squalor, of the moral
pig-stye in which he had been rotting so many years, the idea of
decency, of dignity, of society, of a wife and children and friends,
may have made him capable of a strong resolution. Perhaps, also, the
unfamiliar, wonderful presence of a beautiful and refined young woman,
of something to adore, or at least to be jealous and vain of, may have
wakened whatever still remained of the gallant and high-spirited Polish
nature in this morose and besotten old Stuart. Be this as it may,
Charles Edward, however degraded, was able to command himself when he
chose, and, for one reason or another, he did choose to command himself
and behave like a tolerably decent man and husband during the first few
months following on his marriage. Besides the redness of his face, the
leaden suffused look of his eyes, the vague air of degradation all about
him, there was perhaps nothing, at first, that revealed to Louise, Queen
of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, that her husband was a drunkard
and well-nigh a maniac. Engaging he certainly could not have been,
however much he tried (and we know he tried hard) to show his full
delight at having got so charming a little wife; indeed, it is easy to
imagine that if anything might inspire even a properly educated and
high-born young Flemish or German lady of the eighteenth century with
somewhat of a sense of loathing, it must have been the assiduities and
endearments of a man such as Charles Edward. But Louise of Stolberg had
doubtless absorbed, from her mother, from her older fellow-canonesses,
nay, from the very school-girls in the convent where she had been
educated, all proper views, negative and positive, on the subject of
marriage; nor must we give to a girl who was probably still too much of
a child, too much of an unromantic little woman of the world, undeserved
pity on account of degradation which she had most probably, as yet, not
sufficient moral nerve to appreciate. Her husband was old, he was ugly,
he was not attractive; he may have been tiresome and rather loathsome in
his constant attendance; he may even have smelt of brandy every now and
then; but as marriages had been invented in order to give young women a
position in the world, husbands were not expected to be much more than
drawbacks to the situation; and as to the sense of life-long dependence
upon an individual, as to the desire for love and sympathy, it was still
too early in the eighteenth century, and perhaps, also, too early in the
life of a half-Flemish, half-German girl, very childish still in aspect,
and brought up in the worldly wisdom of a noble chapter of canonesses,
to expect anything of that kind.
There must, however, from the very beginning, have been something unreal
and uncanny in the girl's situation. The huge old palace, crammed with
properties of dead Stuarts and Sobieskis, with its royal throne and daïs
in the ante-room, its servants in the royal liveries of England, must
have been full of rather lugubrious memories. Here James III. of England
and VIII. of Scotland had moped away his bitter old age; here, years
and years ago, Charles Edward's mother, the beautiful and brilliant
grand-daughter of John Sobieski, had pined away, bullied and cajoled back
from the convent in which she had taken refuge, perpetually outraged by
the violence of her husband and the insolence of his mistress; it was an
ill-omened sort of place for a bride. Around extended the sombre and
squalid Rome of the second half of the eighteenth century, with its
huge ostentatious rococo palaces and churches, its straggled, black
and filthy streets, its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its
population seemingly composed only of monks and priests (for all men of
the middle-classes wore the black dress and short hair of the clergy),
or of half-savage peasants and workmen, bearded creatures, in wonderful
embroidered vests and scarves, looking exceedingly like brigands, as
Bartolomeo Pinelli etched them even some thirty years later. A town
where every doorway was a sewer by day and a possible hiding-place for
thieves by night; where no woman durst cross the street alone after
dusk, and no man dared to walk home unattended after nine or ten; where,
driving about in her gilded state-coach of an afternoon, the Pretender's
bride must often have met a knot of people conveying a stabbed man (the
average gave more than one assassination per day) to the nearest barber
or apothecary, the blood of the murdered man mingling, in the black ooze
about the rough cobble-stones over which the coaches jolted, with the
blood trickling from the disembowelled sheep hanging, ghastly in their
fleeces, from the hooks outside the butchers' and cheesemongers' shops;
or returning home at night from the opera, amid the flare of the
footmen's torches, must have heard the distant cries of some imprudent
person struggling in the hands of marauders; or, again, on Sundays and
holidays have been stopped by the crowd gathered round the pillory where
some too easy-going husband sat crowned with a paper-cap in a hail-storm
of mud and egg-shells and fruit-peelings, round the scaffold where some
petty offender was being flogged by the hangman, until the fortunate
appearance of a clement cardinal or the rage of the sympathising mob put
a stop to the proceedings. Barbarous as we remember the Rome of the
Popes, we must imagine it just a hundred times more barbarous, more
squalid, picturesque, filthy, and unsafe if we would know what it was a
hundred years ago.
But in this barbarous Rome there were things more beautiful and
wonderful to a young Flemish lady of the eighteenth century than they
could possibly be to us, indifferent and much-cultured creatures of the
nineteenth century, who know that most art is corrupt and most music
trashy. The private galleries of Rome were then in process of formation;
pictures which had hung in dwelling-rooms were being assembled in those
beautiful gilded and stuccoed saloons, with their out-look on to the
cloisters of a court, or the ilex tops or orange espaliers of a garden,
filled with the faint splash of the fountains outside, the spectral
silvery chiming of musical clocks, where, unconscious of the thousands of
beings who would crowd in there armed with guide-books and opera-glasses
in the days to come, only stray foreigners were to be met, foreigners
who most likely were daintily embroidered and powdered aristocrats from
England or Germany, if they were not men like Winckelmann, or Goethe, or
Beckford. It was the great day, also, for excavations; the vast majority
of antiques which we now see in Rome having been dug up at that period;
and among the ilexes of the Ludovisi and Albani gardens, among the laurels
and rough grass of the Vatican hill, porticoes were being built, and
long galleries and temple-like places, where a whole people of marble
might live among the newly-found mosaics and carved altars and vases.
Moreover, there was at that time in Rome a thing of which there is now
less in Rome than anywhere, perhaps, in the world--a thing for which
English and Germans came expressly to Italy: there was music. A large
proportion of the best new operas were always brought out in Rome--always
four or five new ones in each season; and the young singers from the
conservatorios of Naples came to the ecclesiastical city, where no
actresses were suffered, to begin their career in the hoop skirts and
stomachers, and powdered _toupés_ with which the eighteenth century was
wont to conceive the heroines of ancient Greece and Rome. The bride of
Charles Edward was herself a tolerable musician, and she had a taste for
painting and sculpture which developed into a perfect passion in
after life; so, with respect to art, there was plenty to amuse her.
It was different with regard to society. By insisting upon royal honours
such as had been enjoyed by his father, but which the Papal Court,
anxious to keep on good terms with England, absolutely refused to give
him, the Pretender had virtually cut himself and his wife out of all
Roman society; for he would not know the nobles on a footing of equality,
and they, on the other hand, dared know him on no other. The great
entertainments in the palaces where Charles Edward had so often danced,
the admired of all beholders, in his boyhood, were not for the Count and
Countess of Albany. There remained the theatres and public balls, to
which the Pretender conducted his wife with the assiduity of a man
immensely vain of having on his arm a woman far too young and too pretty
for his deserts. And, besides this, there was a certain amount of vague,
shifting foreign society, nobles on the loose, and young men on their
grand tour, who mostly considered that a visit to the Palazzo Muti, or
at least a seemingly accidental meeting and introduction in the lobby of
a theatre or the garden of a villa, was an indispensable part of their
sight-seeing. Such people as these were the guests of the Palazzo Muti;
and, together with a few Jacobite hangers-on, constituted the fluctuating
little Court of Louise, Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland,
whom the people of Rome, hearing of the throne and daïs in the ante-room
and of the royal ceremonial in the palace near the Santissimi Apostoli,
usually spoke of as the _Regina Apostolorum_; while only a very few, who
had approached that charming little blonde lady, corrected the title to
that of Queen of Hearts, Regina dei Cuori. Among the few who bowed
before Charles Edward's wife, in consideration of this last-named
kingdom, was a brilliant, wayward young man, destined to remain a sort
of brilliant, wayward, impracticable child until he was eighty; and
destined, also, to cherish throughout the long lives of both, the sort
of half genuine, half affected, boy's, or rather page's, passion with
which Queen Louise had inspired him. Karl Victor von Bonstetten, of a
patrician family of Bern, a Frenchified German, more French, more
butterfly-like than any real Frenchman, even of the old _régime_, came
to Rome, already well-known by his romantic friendship with the Swiss
historian Müller, and by the ideas which he had desultorily and gaily
aired on most subjects, in the year 1773. In his memoirs he wrote as
follows of the "Queen of Hearts": "She was of middle height, fair, with
dark-blue eyes, a slightly turned-up nose, and a dazzling white English
complexion. Her expression was gay and _espiègle_, and not without a
spice of irony, on the whole more French than German. She was enough to
turn all heads. The Pretender was tall, lean, good-natured, talkative.
He liked to have opportunities of speaking English, and was given to
talking a great deal about his adventures--interesting enough for a
visitor, but not equally so for his intimates, who had probably heard
those stories a hundred times over. After every sentence almost he would
ask, in Italian, 'Do you understand?' His young wife laughed heartily at
the story of his dressing up in woman's clothes." A dull, garrulous
husband, boring people with stories of which they were sick; a childish
little wife, trying to make the best of things, and laughing over the
stale old jokes; this is what may be called the idyllic moment in the
wedded life of Charles Edward and Louise. What would she have felt, that
strong, calm lady, growing old far off in the Isle of Skye, had she been
able to see what Bonstetten saw; had she heard the Count and Countess of
Albany laughing, the one with the laughter of an old sot, the other with
the laughter of a giddy child, over the adventures of that heroic Prince
Charlie whose memory was safe in her heart as the sheets he had slept in
were safe in her closet, waiting to be her grave-clothes?
Forty-four years later, when the Queen of Hearts was a stout, dowdy old
lady, with no traces of beauty, and himself a flighty, amiable old
gossip of seventy, Karl Victor von Bonstetten wrote to the Countess of
Albany from Rome: "I never pass through the Apostles' square without
looking up at that balcony, at that house where I saw you for the first
time."