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.

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.
Click to [ENLARGE]

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.

CHAPTER VI.

ALFIERI.