THE "BONNIE PRINCE'S" BRIDE
In the pageant of our history there are few more attractive figures than
that of "Bonnie Prince Charlie," the "yellow-haired laddie" whose blue
eyes made a slave of every woman who came under their magic, and whose
genial, unaffected manners turned the veriest coward into a hero, ready
to follow him to the death in that year of ill-fated romance, "the
forty-five."
The very name of the "Bonnie Prince," the hope of the fallen Stuarts,
the idol of Scotland--leading a forlorn hope with laughter on his lips,
now riding proudly at the head of his rabble army, now a fugitive
Ishmael among the hills and caves of the Highlands, but ever the last to
lose heart--has a magic still to quicken the pulses. That later years
proved the idol's feet to be of clay, that he fell from his pedestal to
end his days an object of contempt and derision, only served to those
who knew him in the pride of his youth to mingle pity with the glamour
of romance that still surrounds his name.
In the year 1772, when this story opens, Charles Edward, Count of
Albany, had already travelled far on the downward road that led from
the glory of Prestonpans to his drunkard's grave. A pitiful pensioner of
France, who had known the ignominy of wearing fetters in a French
prison, a social outcast whose Royal pretensions were at best the
subject of an amused tolerance, the "laddie of the yellow hair" had
fallen so low that the brandy bottle, which was his constant companion
night and day, was his only solace.
Picture him at this period, and mark the pathetic change which less than
thirty years had wrought in the Stuart "darling" of "the forty-five,"
when many a proud lady of Scotland would have given her life for a smile
from his bonnie face. A middle-aged man with dropsy in his limbs, and
with the bloated face of the drunkard; "dull, thick, silent-looking
lips, of purplish red scarce redder than the 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 this "Young Chevalier" when France took it into her head to
make a pawn of him in the political chess-game with England. As a man he
was beneath contempt; as a "King"--well, he was a _Roi pour rire_; but
at least the Royal House he represented might be made a useful weapon
against the arrogant Hanoverian who sat on his father's throne. That
rival stock must not be allowed to die out; his claims might weigh
heavily some day in the scale between France and England. Charles Edward
must marry, and provide a worthier successor to his empty honours.
And thus it was that France came to the exiled Prince with the
seductive offer of a pretty bride and a pension of forty thousand crowns
a year. The besotted Charles jumped at the offer; left his brandy
bottle, and, with the alacrity of a youthful lover, rushed away to woo
and win the bride who had been chosen for him.
And never surely was there such a grotesque wooing. Charles was a
physical wreck of fifty-two; his bride-elect had only seen nineteen
summers. The daughter of Prince Gustav Adolf of Stolberg and the
Countess of Horn, Princess Louise was kin to many of the greatest houses
in Europe, from the Colonnas and Orsinis to the Hohenzollerns and
Bruces. In blood she was thus at least a match for her Stuart
bridegroom.
She had spent some years in the seclusion of a monastery, and had
emerged for her undesired trip to the altar a young woman of rare beauty
and charm, with glorious brown eyes, the delicate tint of the wild rose
in her dimpled cheeks, a wealth of golden hair, and a figure every line
and movement of which was instinct with beauty and grace. She was a
fresh, unspoilt child, bubbling with gaiety and the joy of life, and her
dainty little head was full of the romance of sweet nineteen.
Such then was the singularly contrasted couple--"Beauty and the Beast"
they were dubbed by many--who stood together at the altar at Macerata on
Good Friday of the year 1772--the bridegroom, "looking hideous in his
wedding suit of crimson silk," in flaming contrast to the virginal white
of his pretty victim. It needed no such day of ill-omen as a Friday to
inaugurate a union which could not have been otherwise than
disastrous--the union of a beautiful, romantic girl eager to exploit the
world of freedom and of pleasure, and a drink-sodden man old enough to
be her father, for whom life had long lost all its illusions.
It is true that for a time Charles Edward was drawn from his bottle by
the lure of a pretty and winsome wife, who should, if any power on earth
could, have made a man again of him. She laughed, indeed, at his maudlin
tales of past heroism and adventure in love and battle; to her he was a
plaster hero, and she let him know it. She was "mated to a clown," and a
drunken clown to boot--and, well, she would make the best of a bad
bargain. If her husband was the sorriest lover who ever poured
thick-voiced flatteries into a girl-wife's ears, there were others,
plenty of them, who were eager to pay more acceptable homage to her; and
these men--poets, courtiers, great men in art and letters--flocked to
her _salon_ to bask in her beauty and to be charmed by her wit.
After all, she was a Queen, although she wore no crown. She had a Court,
although no Royalties graced it. From the Pope to the King of France, no
monarch in Europe would recognise her husband's kingship. But at such
neglect, the offspring of jealousy, of course, she only smiled. She
could indeed have been moderately happy in her girlish, light-hearted
way, if her husband had not been such an impossible person.
As for Charles Edward, he soon wearied of a bride who did nothing but
laugh at him, and who was so ready to escape from his obnoxious presence
to the company of more congenial admirers. He returned to his brandy
bottle, and alternated between a fuddled brain and moods of wild
jealousy. He would not allow his wife to leave the door without his
escort; if she refused to accompany him, he turned the key in her
bedroom door, to which the only access was through his own room.
He took her occasionally to the theatre or opera, his brandy bottle
always making a third for company. Before the performance was half
through he was snoring stertorously on the couch which he insisted on
having in his box; and, more often than not, was borne to his carriage
for the journey home helplessly drunk. And this within the first year of
his wedded life.
If any woman had excuse for seeking elsewhere the love she could not
find in her husband it was Louise of Albany. There were dames in plenty
in Rome (where they were now living) who, not content with devoted
husbands, had their _cisibeos_ to play the lover to them; but Louise
sought no such questionable escape from her unhappiness. Her books and
the clever men who thronged her _salon_ were all the solace she asked;
and under temptation such as few women of that country and day would
have resisted, she carried the shield of a blameless life.
From Rome the Countess and her husband fared to Florence in 1774; and
here matters went from bad to worse. Charles was now seldom sober day
or night; and his jealousy often found expression in filthy abuse and
cowardly assaults. Hitherto he had been simply disgusting; now he was a
constant menace, even to her life. She lived in hourly fear of his
brutality; but in her darkest hour sunshine came again into her life
with the coming of Vittorio Alfieri, whose name was to be linked with
hers for so many years.
At this time Alfieri was in the very prime of his splendid manhood, one
of the handsomest and most fascinating men in all Europe. Some four
years older than herself, he was a tall, stalwart, soldierly man,
blue-eyed and auburn-haired, an aristocrat to his finger-tips, a daring
horseman, a poet, and a man of rare culture--just the man to set any
woman's heart a-flutter, as he had already done in most of the capitals
of the Continent.
He was a spoilt child of fortune, this Italian poet and soldier, a man
who had drunk deep of the cup of life, and to whom all conquests came
with such fatal ease that already he had drained life dry of its
pleasures.
Such was the man who one autumn day in the year 1777 came into the
unhappy life of the Countess of Albany, still full of the passions and
yearnings of youth. It was surely fate that thus brought together these
two young people of kindred tastes and kindred disillusions; and we
cannot wonder that, of that first meeting, Alfieri should write, "At
last I had met the one woman whom I had sought so long, the woman who
could inspire my ambition and my work. Recognising this, and prizing so
rare a treasure, I gave myself up wholly to her."
Those were happy days for the Countess that followed this fateful
meeting--days of sweet communion of twin souls, hours of stolen bliss,
when they could dwell apart in a region of high and ennobling thoughts,
while the besotted husband was sleeping off the effects of his drunken
orgies in the next room. To Alfieri, Louise was indeed "the anchor of
his life," giving stability to his vacillating nature, and inspiring all
that was best and noblest in him; while to her the association with this
"splendid creature," who so thoroughly understood and sympathised with
her, was the revelation of a new world.
Thus three happy years passed; and then the crisis came. One night the
Prince, in a mood of drunken madness, inflamed by jealousy, attacked his
wife, and, after severely beating her, flung her down on her bed and
attempted to strangle her. This was the crowning outrage of years of
brutality. She could not, dared not, spend another day with such a
madman. At any cost she must leave him--and for ever.
When morning came, with Alfieri's assistance, the plan of escape was
arranged. In the company of a lady friend--and also of her husband, now
scared and penitent, but fearing to let her out of his sight--she drove
to a neighbouring convent, ostensibly to inspect the nuns' needlework.
On reaching her destination she ran up the convent steps, entered the
building, and the door was slammed and bolted behind her in the very
face of Charles Edward, who had followed as fast as his dropsical legs
would carry him up the steps. The Prince, blazing at such an outrage,
hammered fiercely at the door until at last the Lady Abbess herself
showed her face at the grating, and told him in no ambiguous words that
he would not be allowed to enter! His wife had come to her for
protection; and if he had any grievance he had better appeal to the Duke
of Tuscany.
Thus ended the tragic union of the "Bonnie Prince" and his Countess.
Emancipation had come at last; and, while Louise was now free to devote
her life to her beloved Alfieri, her brutal husband was left for eight
years to the company of his bottle and the ministrations of his natural
daughter, until a drunkard's grave at Frascati closed over his mis-spent
life. The pity and the tragedy of it!
Louise of Albany and her poet-lover were now free to link their lives at
the altar--but no such thought seems to have entered the head of either.
They were perfectly happy without the bond of the wedding-ring, of which
the Countess had such terrible memories; and together they walked
through life, happy in each other and indifferent to the world's
opinion.
Now in Florence, now in Rome; living together in Alsace, drifting to
Paris; and, when the Revolution drove them from the French capital,
seeking refuge in London, where we find the uncrowned Queen of England
chatting amicably with the "usurper" George in the Royal box at the
opera--always inseparable, and Louise always clinging to the shreds of
her Royal dignity, with a throne in her ante-room, and "Your Majesty"
on her servants' lips. Thus passed the careless, happy years for
Countess and poet until, in 1803, Alfieri followed the "Bonnie Prince"
behind the veil, and left a desolate Louise to moan amid her tears,
"There is no more happiness for me."
But Louise was not left even now without the solace of a man's love,
which seemed as indispensable to her nature as the air she breathed.
Before Alfieri had been many months in his Florence tomb his place by
the Countess's side had been taken by François Xavier Fabre, a
good-looking painter of only moderate gifts, whose handsome face,
plausible tongue, and sunny disposition soon made a captive of her
middle-aged heart. At the time when Fabre came thus into her life Madame
la Comtesse had passed her fiftieth birthday--youth and beauty had taken
wings; and passion (if ever she had any--for her relations with Alfieri
seem to have been quite platonic) had died down to its embers.
But a man's companionship and homage were always necessary to her, and
in Fabre she found her ideal cavalier. Her _salon_ now became more
popular even than in the days of her young wifehood. It drew to it all
the greatest men in Europe, men of world-wide fame in statesmanship,
letters, and art, all anxious to do homage to a woman of such culture
and with such rare gifts of conversation.
That she was now middle-aged, stout and dowdy--"like a cook with pretty
hands," as Stendhal said of her--mattered nothing to her admirers, many
of whom remembered her in the days of her lovely youth. She was, in
their eyes, as much a Queen as if she wore a crown; and, moreover, she
was a woman of magnetic charm and clever brain.
And thus, with her books and her _salon_ and her cavalier, she spent the
rest of her chequered life until the end came one day in 1824; and her
last resting-place was, as she wished it to be, by the side of her
beloved Alfieri. In the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence, midway
between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli, the two lovers
sleep together their last sleep, beneath a beautiful monument fashioned
by Canova's hands--Louise, wife of the "Bonnie Prince" (as we still
choose to remember him) and Vittorio Alfieri, to whom, to quote his own
words, "she was beyond all things beloved."