FLORENCE.
It is quite impossible to tell the precise moment at which began what
Horace Mann, most light-hearted and chirpy of diplomatists, called the
Countess of Albany's martyrdom. As we have seen, Charles Edward had
momentarily given up all excessive drinking at the time of his marriage.
Bonstetten thought him a good-natured garrulous bore, and his wife a
merry, childish young woman, who laughed at her husband's oft-told
stories. This was the very decent exterior of the Pretender's domestic
life in the first year of his marriage. But who can tell what there may
have been before beneath the surface? Who can say when Louise d'Albany,
hitherto apparently so childish, became suddenly a woman with the first
terrible suspicion of the nature of the bondage into which she had been
sold? Such things are unromantic, unpoetical, coarse, common-place; yet
if the fears and the despair of a guiltless and charming girl have any
interest for us, the first whiff of brandy-tainted breath which met the
young wife in her husband's embraces, the first qualms and reekings
after dinner which came before her eyes, the first bestial and unquiet
drunkard's sleep which kept her awake in disgust and terror, these
things, vile though they be, are as tragic as any more ideal horrors. At
the beginning, most probably, Charles Edward drank only in the evening,
and slept off his drunkenness over-night; nor does Bonstetten appear to
have guessed that there was any skeleton in the palace at the Santissimi
Apostoli. But the spies of the English minister soon reported that
Charles Edward was returning to his old ways; that the "nasty bottle,"
as Cardinal York called it, had got the better of the young wife; and
when, two years after their marriage, the Count and Countess of Albany
had left Rome and settled in Florence, Charles Edward seems very soon to
have acquired in the latter place the dreadful notoriety which he had
long enjoyed in the former.
Circumstances also had conduced to replunge the Pretender into the
habits to which the renewed hope of political support, the novelty of
married life, and perhaps whatever of good may still have been conjured
up in his nature by the presence of a beautiful young wife, had
momentarily broken through. The French Government, after its sudden
pre-occupation about the future of the Stuarts, seemed to have
completely forgotten the existence of Charles Edward, except as regarded
the payment of the pension granted on his marriage. The child that had
been prepaid by that wedding pension, who was to rally the Jacobites
round a man whose claims must otherwise devolve legitimately in a few
years to the Hanoverian usurpers, the heir was not born, and, as month
went by after month, its final coming became less and less likely. Nor
was this all. Charles Edward seems to have expected that the sudden
interest taken by the Court of Versailles in his affairs, and his new
position as a married man and the possible father of a line of Stuarts,
would bring the obdurate sovereigns of Italy, and especially the Pope,
to grant him those royal honours enjoyed by his father, but hitherto
obstinately denied to the moody drunkard whose presence in the paternal
palace had been occasionally revealed only by the rumour of some more
than ordinarily gross debauch, or the noise of some more than ordinarily
violent scene of blackguardly altercation.
Charles Edward, as I have already had occasion to remark, while
absolutely callous to the rights which self-sacrifice and heroism might
give others over him, was extremely alive to the rights which, as a
Stuart and as an obstinate and wilful man, he imagined himself to
possess over other folk; and, while it never occurred to him that there
might be something slightly ungentlemanly in a prince who had secretly
abjured the Catholic faith for political reasons continuing to live in a
house and on a pension granted him by the unsuspecting sovereign Pontiff
in consideration of his being a martyr for the glory of the Church, he
was fully persuaded of the cowardly meanness which prevented Clement
XIV., whose interest it was to jog on amicably with England, from
acknowledging the grandson of James II. as a legitimate King of Great
Britain and Ireland. It is therefore easy to conceive the accumulation
of disappointment and anger with which Charles Edward saw his hopes
deluded. He had, immediately on his return to Rome, officially announced
to Clement XIV. the arrival in the Eternal City of King Charles III. and
his Queen, and the Pope had condescended no answer save that he had
hitherto been unaware of the existence of such persons, and that he
would suffer none such to live under his jurisdiction. He had, for more
than a year, imposed upon his wife (despite Cardinal York's and her own
entreaties, if we may credit Sir Horace Mann) the title and etiquette of
a Queen, and had flaunted his scarlet liveries along the Corso day after
day, with no result save that of making the Roman nobles keep carefully
out of the way wherever he and his wife might go; nay, more, he had
replaced over the doorway of his residence the royal escutcheon of Great
Britain, only to return from the country one day and find that the
Pontifical police had taken it down during his absence. After this we
can understand, as I said, the disappointment and rage which must have
accumulated in his heart, and which, fifteen months after his wedding,
made him abandon the base town of the popes and seek sympathy and
dignity in the capital of Tuscany. But he was destined only to
further disappointment. The Grand Duke, Peter Leopold, the practical,
economical, priest-hating, paternally-meddlesome, bustlingly and
tyrannically-reforming son of Maria Theresa, was not the man to console
so mediæval and antiquated and unphilosophical a thing as a Stuart. The
arrival, the presence of Charles Edward in Florence, was absolutely
ignored by the Court, and no invitations of any sort were sent out
either to King Charles III. or to the Count of Albany. Except the
Corsinis, old friends of the Stuarts, who had known Charles Edward in
his brilliant boyhood, and who politely placed at his disposal their
half-suburban palace or casino, opening on to the famous Oricellari
Gardens, no one seemed inclined to pay any particular respects to the
new-comers. There was, indeed, no pressure from the Government (as had
been the case in Rome), and the Florentine nobles, whose exclusiveness
and pride had been considerably diminished by the inroad of swaggering
Lorenese favourites under the Grand Duke Francis, and of cut and dry
Austrian officials under his son Peter Leopold, showed a sort of
lukewarm willingness to receive the Count and Countess of Albany on
equal terms into their society. But Charles Edward wanted royal honours;
he forbade his wife demeaning her queenly position by returning the
visits of Florentine ladies, and the nobles of the Tuscan Court
gradually left the would-be King and Queen of England to their own
resources.
These resources, with the exception of receiving such few visitors as
might care to know them on unequal terms, and a dogged pushing into
notice in every place, promenade, theatre, or nobles' club, where no
invitation was required, these resources consisted on the part of
Charles Edward in the old, old consoler, the flask of Cyprus or bottle
of brandy, in the even grosser pleasures of excessive eating, the
indefatigable, assiduous courtship of his young wife, and the occasional
rows with his servants and acquaintances. The Count and Countess of
Albany appear to have inhabited the Casino Corsini until 1777, when they
sent for the greater part of the furniture of their Roman house, and
established themselves in a palace, bought of the Guadagnis and later
sold to the Duke of San Clemente, between the now suppressed Porta San
Sebastiano and the Garden of St. Mark's. In both these places Sir Horace
Mann, the vigilant Minister to the Tuscan Court and head spy over the
Stuarts in Italy, kept the Pretender well in sight; but, in fact, things
had now become so public that spying had grown unnecessary. Already,
the year following the removal from Rome to Florence, Sir Horace Mann
wrote to Walpole that the Pretender's health was giving way beneath his
excesses of eating and drinking; dyspepsia and dropsy were beginning,
and a sofa had been ordered for his opera-box, that he might conveniently
snooze through the performance. For neither drunkenness nor ailments
would induce Charles Edward to let his wife out of his sight for a
minute. His systematic jealousy may possibly have originated, as the
English Minister reports Charles Edward to have himself declared, from
fear lest there might attach to the birth of any possible heir of his
those doubts of legitimacy which are almost invariably the lot of a
pretender; but there can be no doubt that jealousy was an essential
feature of his character, in which it amounted almost to monomania. He
had caged his mistress long after he had ceased, by his own avowal, to
care for her; he now caged his wife, and with probably about as much or
as little affection. He had fenced up Miss Walkenshaw's bed with tables
and chairs fitted with bells which the slightest touch set ringing;
he now (and so early as 1775) barricaded all avenues to his wife's
room excepting the one through his own. Very soon, also, the gross
and violent language, the blows which had fallen to the lot of the
half-tipsy mistress, were to be shared by the virtuous and patient wife.
[Illustration: 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._]
For virtuous and patient all accounts unite in showing the young
Countess of Albany to have been. In that corrupt Florence of the corrupt
eighteenth century, where every married woman was furnished, within two
years of her marriage, with an officially appointed lover who sat in her
dressing-room while she was finishing her toilet, who accompanied her
on all her visits, who attended her to balls and theatres, and, in fact,
entirely replaced, by the strict social necessities of the system of
cicisbeism, the husband, who was similarly employed about the wife
of another; in this society, where conjugal infidelity was a social
organisation supplemented by every kind of individual caprice of
gallantry; where women were none the worse thought of if they added
to the official _cavaliere servente_ a whole string of other lovers,
varying from the Cardinals of the Holy Church to the singers who
played women's parts, in powder and hoops, at the opera; in this world
of jog-trot immorality, where jealousy was tolerated in lovers, but
ridiculous in husbands, such a couple as the Count and Countess of
Albany was indeed a source of pity, wonder, and amazement. But if a
husband who barricaded his wife's room, never went out without her, nor
permitted her to go out without him, who was never further off than the
next room during the presence of any visitor, was a marvellous sight;
still more marvellous was a beautiful and charming woman of twenty-three
or twenty-four, who cast no glances of longing at the brilliant
cavaliers all round her, who consoled her dreary prison-hours with
reading hard enough for a professor at the university, and who showed
towards the peevish, violent, disgustingly-ailing old toper who
overshadowed her life with his presence nothing, as Horace Mann tells
us, but attention and tenderness. The fact is that Louise of Stolberg,
much as her subsequent life and ways of thought proved her to be a woman
of the eighteenth century, and not at all above the eighteenth century's
easy-going habits and conventional ideas, was a kind of woman rare at
all times and rarest of all in a time like her own, With a kindly and
affectionate temper, the immense bulk of her nature, the overbalance, the
top-heaviness of it, was intellectual; and intellectual not in the sense
of the ready society intelligence, so common among eighteenth-century
women, but in the sense of actual engrossing interest and in abstract
questions and ideals. The portraits done of her immediately after her
marriage show, as I have said, a remarkably childish person; and
childish, without much ballast of passion or even likings, the likeness
sketched by Bonstetten seems certainly to show her. But there are women
who, while immature as women and human beings, are precocious as
intellects, and in whom the character, instead of rapidly developing
itself by the force of its own emotions and passions, seems in a manner
to be called into existence by the intelligence: retarded natures, in
whom the thoughts seem to determine the feelings. Of this sort, I think,
we must imagine the Countess of Albany, if we would understand the
anomalies of her life: a person rather deficient in sensitiveness;
indifferent, light-hearted, in her girlhood; not rebelling against the
frightful negativeness of existence, the want of love, of youth, of
brightness, of all that a young girl can want in the early part of her
married life; not rebelling against the positive miseries, the constant
presence of everything that was mentally and physically loathsome in the
second period of this wedded slavery; a woman of cold temperament, and
even, you might say, of cold heart, and safe, safe in the routine of
duty and suffering, until a merely intellectual flame burst out, white
and cold, in her hitherto callous nature. A creature, so to speak, only
half awake, or awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her books and
tried to puzzle out her mathematical problems; and going through life by
the side of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, in a kind of
somnambulistic indifferentism, perhaps not feeling her miseries very
acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless liberty,
their inane lovers, their empty wholeness of life.
Thus the routine continued. The Count and Countess of Albany, cured
by this time of any affectation of royalty, had gradually got
domesticated in Florentine society. People began to go to their house,
the newly-bought palace in Via San Sebastiano. People came to the
opera-box where Charles Edward lay stretched, dozing or snoring, his
bottle of Cyprus wine by his side, on his sofa. It is easy to read
through the lines of Sir Horace Mann's pages of social tittle-tattle,
that Florence, frivolous and unintellectual and corrupt though it was,
and, perhaps, almost in proportion to its frivolity, emptiness, and
corruption, felt a strange sort of interest, experienced a vague, mixed
feeling, pity, fear, and general surprise and want of comprehension
towards this beautiful young woman, with her dazzling white complexion,
dark hazel eyes and blonde hair, her childish features grown, perhaps
not less young, but more serious and solemn for her five years of wasted
youth and endured misery, with her reputation for coldness, her almost
legendary eccentricities of intellectual interests. Women like this one
are apt to be regarded not so much with dislike and envy, as with the
mixed awe and pity which peasants feel towards an idiot, by frivolous
and immoral people like those powdered Florentines of a hundred years
ago, whose brocaded trains and embroidered coats have long since found
their way into the cupboards of curiosity shops, and been cut up into
quaint room decoration by æsthetically-minded foreigners; pity and awe
the more natural when, as in the case of Louise d'Albany, it is evident
to every man and woman, however heartless and stupid, that the creature
in question is a victim, and an innocent one. People were led, perhaps
to some extent by impertinent curiosity, by the lazy desire to have
some opinion to give upon that now legendary household of the besotten,
sleepy, nauseous old King of England and his terribly virtuous and
intellectual young Queen, to the palace in Via San Sebastiano; and men
and women of fashion led thither, as to one of the curious sights of
Florence, their country cousins and their distinguished visitors from
other parts. And thus, one day in the autumn of 1777, there was brought,
we know not by whom, half-curious and half-indifferent, to the _salon_
of the Countess of Albany a certain very tall, thin, pale young man of
twenty-eight, with handsome, mobile, rather hard aquiline features,
choleric, flashing blue eyes, and a head of crisp, bright red hair; a
man of fashion, nattily dressed in the Sardinian uniform, but with
something strange, untamed, morose about his whole aspect which
contrasted singularly with the effete gracefulness and amiability of
young Florentine dandies. He had heard of the Countess of Albany's
eccentricities long before; she had doubtless heard of his.
One can imagine the curiosity with which the wild, moody young officer
fixed those bright, hard, steel, flashing blue eyes upon the beautiful
young woman of whom he had heard that she was, what no woman of
his acquaintance (and his acquaintance was but too large) had
been--intellectual and virtuous. One can imagine the curiosity, much
vaguer and more indifferent, with which the woefully cold and woefully
weary young woman met the scrutiny of those hard, flashing blue eyes,
and took the moral measure of this eccentric creature, come from Turin
to Florence with some ten or twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn
Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing tragedies. The common friend,
whose name has been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced to the
Countess of Albany Count Vittorio Alfieri.