Charles met only with ‘mortifications’ at Rome. The Pope dared not treat him on a Royal footing. In April 1766, our old friend, Lochgarry, took service with Portugal. Charles sent congratulations, ‘and doubts not your son will be ready to draw the sword in his just Cause.’ The sword remained undrawn. Charles had now but an income of 47,000 livres; he amused himself as he might with shooting, and playing the French horn! He never forgave Miss Walkinshaw, whom his brother, the Cardinal, maintained, poorly enough. Lumisden writes to the lady (July 14, 1766): ‘No one knows the King’s temper better than you do. He has never, so far as I can discover, mentioned your name. Nor do I believe that he either knows where you are, nor how you are maintained. His passion must still greatly cool before any application can be made to him in your behalf.’
A report was circulated that Charles was secretly married to Miss Walkinshaw. On February 16, 1767, Lumisden wrote to Waters on ‘the dismal consequences of such a rumour,’ and, by the Duke of York’s desire, bade Waters obtain a denial from the lady. On March 11 the Duke received Miss Walkinshaw’s formal affidavit that no marriage existed. ‘It has entirely relieved him from the uneasiness the villainous report naturally gave him.’ On January 5, 1768, Lumisden had to tell Miss Walkinshaw that ‘His Royal Highness insists you shall always remain in a monastery.’ Lumisden was always courteous to Miss Walkinshaw. Of her daughter he writes: ‘May she ever possess in the highest degree, those elegant charms of body and mind, which you so justly and assiduously cultivate. . . . Did the King know that I had wrote to you, he would never pardon me.’
On December 20, 1768, Charles had broken with Lumisden and the rest of his suite. ‘Our behaviour towards him was that of faithful subjects and servants, jealous at all times to preserve his honour and reputation.’ They had, in brief, declined to accompany Charles in his carriage when his condition demanded seclusion. Lumisden writes (December 8, 1767), ‘His Royal Highness’ (the Duke of York) ‘thanked us for our behaviour in the strongest terms.’
We need follow no further the story of a consummated degradation. Charles threw off one by one, on grounds of baseless suspicion, Lord George Murray, Kelly (to please Lord Marischal), Goring, and now drove from him his most attached servants. He never suspected Glengarry. But neither time, nor despair, nor Charles’s own fallen self could kill the loyalty of Scotland. Bishop Forbes, far away, heard of his crowning folly, and—blamed Lumisden and his companion, Hay of Restalrig! When Charles, on Good Friday, 1772, married Louise of Stolberg, the remnant of the faithful in Scotland drank to ‘the fairest Fair,’ and to an heir of the Crown.
‘L’Écosse ne peut pas te juger: elle t’ aime!’
Into the story of an heir, born at Sienna, and entrusted to Captain Allen, R.N., to be brought up in England, we need not enter. In Lord Braye’s manuscripts (published by the Historical MSS. Commission) is Charles’s solemn statement that, except Miss Walkinshaw’s daughter, he had no child. The time has not come to tell the whole strange tale of ‘John Stolberg Sobieski Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart,’ if, indeed, that tale can ever be told. [321] Nor does space permit an investigation of Charles’s married life, of his wife’s elopement with Alfieri, and of the last comparatively peaceful years in the society of a daughter who soon followed him to the tomb. The stories about that daughter’s marriage to a Swedish Baron Roehenstart, and about their son, merit no attention. In the French Foreign Office archives is a wild plan for marrying the lady, Charlotte Stuart, to a Stuart—any Stuart, and raising their unborn son’s standard in the American colonies! That an offer was made from America to Charles himself, in 1778, was stated by Scott to Washington Irving on the authority of a document in the Stuart Papers at Windsor. That paper could not be found for Lord Stanhope, nor have I succeeded in finding it. The latest Scottish honour done to the King was Burns’s ‘Birthday Ode’ of 1787, and his song for ‘The Bonny Lass o’ Albany.’
‘This lovely maid’s of royal blood,
That rulèd Albion’s kingdoms three,
But oh, alas for her bonnie face!
They hae wrang’d the lass of Albanie!’
Tout finit par des chansons!
Of the Stuart cause we may say, as Callimachus says of his dead friend Heraclitus: