Soon after, London became an asylum to a fugitive ‘Queen.’ In 1791, the French revolution drove the widow of Charles Edward to leave Paris and seek a refuge in London. The Countess of Albany must have felt some surprise at finding herself well received in St. James’s Palace by the king and queen. She was there by force ‘of that tupsy-turvy-hood which characterises the present age,’ as some wit remarked, at a supper at Lady Mount-Edgcumbe’s. She was presented by the young Countess of Aylesbury (of that Jacobite family) as Princess of Stolberg. Walpole’s record is:—‘She was well-dressed and not at all embarrassed. The King talked to her a good deal, but about her passage, the sea, and general topics. The Queen in the same way, but less. Then she stood between the Dukes of Gloucester and Clarence, and had a good deal of conversation with the former, who perhaps may have met her in Italy. Not a word between her and the Princesses, nor did I hear of the Prince; but he was there, and probably spoke to her. The Queen looked at her earnestly. To add to the singularity of the day, it is the Queen’s birthday. Another odd accident, at the Opera, at the Pantheon, Mme. d’Albany was carried into the King’s box, and sat there. It is not of a piece with her going to Court, that she seals with the royal arms.’ Walpole thought that ‘curiosity’ partly brought her to London; and that it was not very well bred to her late husband’s family, ‘nor very sensible, but a new way of passing eldest.’ He had not then seen her, and when he did, at the end of May, his report was: ‘She has not a ray of royalty about her. She has good eyes and teeth, but, I think, can have had no more beauty than remains, except youth. She is civil and easy, but German and ordinary. Lady Aylesbury made a small assembly for her on Monday, and my curiosity is satisfied.’
IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS.
On the old Chevalier’s birthday, the 10th of June, Dr. Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, escorted Hannah More to the House of Lords, to hear the king deliver the speech by which he prorogued Parliament. On that once famous day for defiantly wearing a white rose and risking mortal combat in consequence, the Countess of Albany ‘chose to go to see the King in the House of Lords, with the crown on his head, proroguing the Parliament.’ ‘What an odd rencontre!’ says Walpole, ‘was it philosophy or insensibility?’ and he adds his belief, without stating the grounds for it, ‘that her husband was in Westminster Hall at the Coronation.’ Hannah More was being ‘very well entertained’ with the speech; but the thing that was most amusing, as she prettily described it, ‘was to see, among the ladies, the Princess of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, wife of the Pretender, sitting just at the foot of that throne which she might once have expected to have mounted; and what diverted the party when I put them in mind of it, was that it happened to be the 10th of June, the Pretender’s birthday! I have the honour to be very much like her, and this opinion was confirmed yesterday when we met again.’
It has been seen what Walpole and others thought of the Jacobites’ queen when she came to London. The lady kept a diary during her sojourn here, from which may be collected her opinions of the English and England of her day.
THE COUNTESS, ON ENGLISH SOCIETY.
The widow of Charles Edward found England generally, and London in particular, much duller than even she had expected. She saw crowds but no society. People lived nine months in the country, and during the three months in town they were never at home, but were running after one another. They who were not confined half or all the year with gout, went to bed at four, got up at midday, and began the morning at two in the afternoon. There was no sun, but much smoke, heavy meals, and hard drinking. The husbands were fond and ill-tempered; the wives good from a sense of risk rather than disinclination for their being otherwise, and they loved gaming and dissipation. There was a family life, but no intimate social life; no taste nor capacity for art. The most striking part of the judgment of the Countess of Albany refers to English laws and constitution. ‘The only good,’ she says in her Diary, ‘which England enjoys, and which is inappreciable, is political liberty.... If England had an oppressive government, this country together with its people would be the last in the universe: bad climate, bad soil, and consequently tasteless productions. It is only the excellence of its government that makes it habitable.’ This judgment of England by a Jacobite princess or queen, whose husband would have changed all but the climate, is at least interesting. In England the Duchess of Devonshire and many other ladies treated her as ‘queen.’ ‘The flattery’ (says the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ July, 1861, p. 170), ‘which the writers probably regarded as polite badinage, was accepted as rightful homage by the countess.’
HANOVERIAN JACOBITES.
Her sojourn in England was from April to August. Her design to visit the scenes in Scotland which her late husband had rendered historical, was obliged to be given up for lack of means; and she became, but not till the death of the Cardinal of York, the recipient of an annuity from George III. This king, like many of his family before him, and like all after him, had a strong feeling of sympathy with the Stuarts. Indeed, the recognised Jacobitism of the king, and of the royal family in general, was the apology made by friends of the Stuart for holding office under what they had once called ‘the usurping family.’ Hogg (‘Jacobite Relics’) has recorded that a gentleman in a large company once gibed Captain Stuart of Invernahoyle, for holding the king’s commission while he was, at the same time, a professed Jacobite. ‘So I well may,’ answered he, ‘in imitation of my master; the king himself is a Jacobite.’ The gentleman shook his head, and remarked that the king was impossible. ‘By G—!’ said Stuart, ‘but I tell you he is, and every son that he has. There is not one of them who, if he had lived in my brave father’s days, would not to a certainty have been hanged.’
The public learned, in 1793, how different the ‘family feeling’ had been in the past generation. The ‘Monthly Review’ (in August of that year), in a notice of the Memoirs of the Marshal Duke de Richelieu, states that the temporary refuge offered to Charles Edward in Friburg, after his expulsion from France, highly displeased the Court at St. James’s. The British minister wrote in a very haughty style to the magistrates of that State, complaining that it afforded an asylum to an odious race proscribed by the laws of Great Britain. This was answered by L’Avoyer with proper spirit. ‘This odious race,’ said he, ‘is not proscribed by our laws. Your letter is highly improper. You forget that you are writing to a sovereign State; and I do not conceive myself obliged to give you any further answer.’
JACOBITE BALLADS.