When, in the following year, a war with France seemed inevitable, some of his French friends petitioned the French court to take advantage of this favourable opportunity to make one more attempt to restore the Stuarts. Charles himself came to France, and appears to have made exertions in his own behalf, but the time was consumed in fruitless negotiations, and Charles returned to Italy and the retirement of private life. It seems to be with this attempt that a document contained among the Stuart Papers is connected. This document purports to be notes of a statement made by a deputation, sent over to Prince Charles, at a conference with him, drawn up at his own desire; it is dated August 15, 1755. If this document is authentic, and there seems to be no reason to believe otherwise, the deputies must have lectured the prince on his conduct most fearlessly and outspokenly, and in a manner to which princes are mostly strangers.
It is not known what reception the deputation met with, or how this message was received by him; but, at his desire, the address was committed to writing, and sent to him. Charles returned an indignant answer, informing his “friends” that reason might, and he hoped should, always prevail with him, but his own heart deceived him if threats or promises ever would. He despised, he said, the malice of those who aspersed his character, and considered it below his dignity to treat them in the terms they deserved. He told them he had long desired a churchman from his friends to attend him, but that his expectations had been hitherto disappointed.[1356]
Though Charles at first affected not to feel the indignity offered to him by the French government, yet it is certain that it left upon him an indelible impression, soured his disposition, and tended to confirm into a habit the propensity to tippling which he contracted during his long and exhausting wanderings in the Highlands. Indeed, his mind, which never was of the strongest or noblest type, appears to have been quite unhinged. During his long incognito he scarcely ever corresponded with his afflicted father,—a silence which he said was not owing either to neglect or want of duty, but because his situation was such that he could do nothing but vent “imprecations against the fatality of being born in such a detestable age.”[1357] Led away by his passions, and reckless of the feelings or wishes of others, he would suffer no control; and so infatuated did he become, that in resisting the admonitions of his friends, he thought he was pursuing a course honourable to himself, and dutiful towards the “honest man,”—his father;[1358] but James was not to be misled by such false notions, and hinted, that though he was happy to find Charles in such sentiments, yet it was possible that what he might think for the best might be otherwise. “Do you,” he asks the prince, “rightly understand the extensive sense of honour and duty from which you say you will never go astray? If you can,” he continues, “keep up to that rule, you will then be really an honest man, which is the new name you give me, and with which I am much pleased, since it is a title I value more than all those which vanity can desire, or flattery invent. It is a title we are all obliged to pretend to, and which we may all, without vanity, think we deserve, and unless we deserve it, we, in reality, can neither be happy in the next world, nor even in this, because peace and tranquillity of mind is only the share of honest men. The best wish I can therefore make you, is that you may yourself long deserve and enjoy that title it would be the most effectual means of drawing down God’s blessing upon you.”[1359]
Prince Charles Edward Stuart.
From an Original Drawing by Ozias
Humphrey, R.A. Taken at Florence 1776.
After the estrangement of his friends, Charles appears to have given up all thoughts of restoration, and resided chiefly at Avignon till shortly before the death of his father, on December 31, 1766, when he returned to Italy, fixing his abode at Florence. The Chevalier had, for several years, been in a declining state of health, and, for two years before his death, had been confined to his bed-chamber. His remains were carried to the church of the parish where he had resided, and were decorated with all the insignia of royalty. Over the bed was this inscription:—“Jacobus Magnæ Britanniæ Rex, Anno MDCCLXVI.” The body lay in state three days, during which none but the Italian princes and British subjects were admitted into the church. The corpse was then removed in procession to St Peter’s church to be interred. By his will, the Chevalier left his real estate, which yielded about forty thousand crowns per annum, exclusive of pensions, to Prince Charles. He also left him a box of jewels belonging to the crown of Poland, formerly pledged to the Sobieski family, if not redeemed. The jewels belonging to his own family he directed to be divided between Charles and Henry.
From the state of comparative seclusion in which the Chevalier passed the most part of his life, his personal history is less known than either that of his father, or his son, Charles Edward. His character, to judge from his correspondence and the many acts of individual kindness he showed towards his exiled adherents, was benevolent and estimable. He seems to have been better acquainted with the principles of the English constitution than any of his race, and would, had he been called to empire, have very possibly eschewed the dangerous rock of the prerogative on which his grandfather and father split. His boast was not merely that he was an Englishman, but that, to use an Italian phrase, there was not “a greater Englishman than himself.”[1360]
After his father’s death, Prince Charles retired to Albano, near Rome, where he appears to have lived in great seclusion till the year 1772, when the court of Versailles, desirous for its own selfish purposes to prevent the male line of the house of Stuart from becoming extinct, negotiated a marriage between him and the young princess Louisa Maximiliana Carolina of Stolberg-Gedern; and the three Bourbon courts all concurring in the match, a suitable allowance was settled by them on the prince and his wife. Charles, who, in consequence of the refusal of the court of Rome to recognise the titles which his father had assumed, had taken that of the Count of Albany, which when a youth he had used on his travels through Italy, took up his residence upon his marriage in the neighbourhood of Florence, whither he was invited by the grand duke of Tuscany. The marriage was unfortunate. Charles had lived too long single to enjoy connubial happiness; and his mind, soured by misfortune and degraded by dissipation, unfitted him for the discharge of the domestic virtues.[1361] An English lady who saw Prince Charles at Rome in 1770, describes him thus:—“The Pretender is naturally above the middle size, but stoops excessively; he appears bloated and red in the face, his countenance heavy and sleepy, which is attributed to his having given in to excess of drinking, but when a young man he must have been esteemed handsome. His complexion is of the fair tint, his eyes blue, his hair light brown, and the contour of his face a long oval; he is by no means thin, has a noble person and a graceful manner. His dress was scarlet, laced with broad gold lace; he wears the blue riband outside of his coat, from which depends a cameo, antique, as large as the palm of my hand, and he wears the same garter and motto as those of the noble St George in England. Upon the whole, he has a melancholy, mortified appearance.”[1362]
Charles and the princess lived together uncomfortably till 1780, Charles, it is said, often treating his youthful, beautiful, accomplished, and gentle wife with the greatest brutality. In 1777 she became acquainted with the great Italian dramatist Alfieri, and the two immediately conceived for each other a passionate, lasting, and comparatively pure love; for while her husband lived there is every reason to believe that she remained faithful to him. The princess left Charles in 1780, and took up her residence with his brother the cardinal at Rome, but shortly after removed from that to Baden and ultimately to Paris, where Alfieri joined her, and they separated no more. On her husband’s death, it is understood that she was privately married to Alfieri, who died in 1803, she surviving him upwards of twenty-one years. When Tuscany fell under the dominion of Bonaparte, he ordered the princess, then living in Florence, (she having incurred his displeasure), to repair to Paris. She was afterwards allowed to return to Florence, where it is said she made a left-handed marriage with a French historical painter, named Francis Xavier Fabre, the friend of Alfieri, whom upon her death she appointed her universal executor.