Bonnie Prince Charlie in Love

by Hugh Douglas

Overview

Romantic hero of legend or charismatic self-seeker in love with himself and his cause? Which is the real Charles Edward Stuart? Hugh Douglas goes beyond the flaws of Bonnie Prince Charlie's character to prove that here was a man capable not only of deep and enduring passion, but also love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752473802
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	10/24/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	12 Years

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Bonnie Prince Charlie in Love

The Private Passions of Prince Charles Edward Stuart

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By Hugh Douglas

The History Press

Copyright © 1995 Hugh Douglas
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7380-2

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CHAPTER 1

Ye Bonny Prince

Si vous avée etée content de votre nuit mon amour je vous avoue que pour moi j'en ai etée enchantée Je me flatte que nous en passerons encore longtemp de même ...

How easy it is to imagine the scene: it was already past two in the afternoon and outside, beyond the rich curtains, the winter's day was beginning to fade as the young duchess emerged from her dressing room and sat down at her escritoire to write. In the privacy of her own room, she could savour the joy of what had passed last night within these walls, on that very bed, and anticipate what might be tonight. The moment she put her pen to paper the words began to tumble from it:

If you were happy with your night my love I swear that for my part I was enchanted I tell myself with pleasure that we shall spend many more of the same ...

Her passion ran so high that she forgot grammar, punctuation and spelling. But what did these matter? For him she had risked much, but she was ready to risk as much again – her husband's distress, her mother-in-law's anger, her father's sorrow, her own reputation. Nothing mattered – for Louise was in love.

Such a scene might have come straight from the pen of Victor Hugo. Had it done so, readers might have thought it had been inspired by a ghost from this room: for this house, in the fashionable Place Royale in the heart of Paris, was to become Victor Hugo's home a century later. Today it is the Victor Hugo Museum.

In the latter part of 1747, when it was a lovers' tryst, the house was the Hôtel de Guéméné, home of a branch of the powerful Rohan family. The author of the letter was Louise de la Tour d'Auvergne, wife of Jules de Rohan, Duc de Montbazon, and daughter of the Great Chamberlain of France, the Duc de Bouillon. Her lover was none other than Charles Edward Stuart, Louise's cousin, and the hero of Paris since his return the previous year from his brave but disastrous attempt to win back the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland for his father, who ruled in exile as James VIII of Scotland and III of England.

Louise and Charles were passionately in love and had been meeting secretly in her bedroom for months. Now the risk was even greater because her husband, one of Prince Charlie's best friends, was an officer in the French army, newly returned from the campaigns in Flanders, which had just ended for the winter.

Louise didn't care about the risk she ran; her letter was urgent if she was to be sure she would see her lover again tonight, so she continued in short breathless sentences:

That will be my only happiness I await your news with impatience Goodbye my love I am very well Until tonight come and spend it in the arms of the one who loves no one in the world but her own dear love.

The letter was unsigned and so secret she had made her lover promise to destroy it, but he didn't – so it is still there for anyone to read as proof of Prince Charlie's broken promise, a piece of bad faith as well as testimony to the remarkable power of the love that existed between them.

Every nightly tryst brought the lovers closer to the eye of the storm that discovery would unleash, for ardour and jealousy were making the impetuous Charles take risks even here inside the house under the nose of Jules and his mother, a tough but wise woman. Louise's mother-in-law, Madame de Guéméné, must have suspected something of this kind might happen because, when she drew up her son's marriage contract, she insisted it should stipulate that the young couple must live at her house in Paris. Charles described the mother-in-law as 'une vieille folle' (an old lunatic).

At the time of the marriage Madame de Guéméné's son was only sixteen and his bride a year older, but in royal circles, where the more powerful a man was the more he could break the rules, one could not be too careful – after all, if King Louis could flaunt mistresses, Madame de Châteauroux and later Madame de Pompadour at Fontainebleau and Versailles, why should pretty little Louise, with her husband a serving soldier, not fall prey to some lecherous young man at court?

And that was just what had happened to Louise in spite of Madame de Guéméné's precautions and the eagle eye under which she kept her daughter-in-law.

Charles Edward was not exactly a young man of the French court, lecherous or otherwise, for no Stuart had been permitted officially to set foot on French territory ever since the Treaty of Utrecht barred them from the country in 1713. However, Charles returned to France after his disastrous defeat at the battle of Culloden, and he was still there in 1747. King Louis would have been delighted to be rid of him and tried hard to coerce him into leaving, but the Prince stayed on, the hero of the people of Paris who admired his daring achievement, which had so nearly come off. Parisians – indeed the whole of Europe – adored him almost as passionately as Louise did. They applauded him in the street and cheered him to the echo whenever he appeared in public at the opera, and they bought pictures of him in warrior's uniform which were on sale all over Paris. Prince Charlie was a never-ending source of gossip among them and so powerful that even King Louis XV could not order him out of the country as he certainly wished to do since Prince Charlie was a constant nuisance and critic of the French government. Whether France or Britain liked it or not, Charles Stuart continued to enjoy Parisian life to the full and to mix brazenly among court circles from which he was officially barred. He even attended masked balls at which royalty and government ministers were present.

And now he had fallen head over heels in love with his own cousin, the daughter of his mother's sister and the wife of one of his best friends. It was the first time Prince Charlie, a confirmed bachelor in the eyes of the world up to now, had been known to show deep affection for any woman, but when love struck it did so with all the force of one of the claymores his Highland soldiers had wielded in battle in Scotland. When Charles Stuart fell for Cousin Louise, there was no mistaking that he was in love!

The Jacobite world, or at least those in that small circle close enough to him to be aware of the momentous happening, wondered how this could be. Was this the man who, only a couple of years before in Scotland, had been so cold and offhand with women that both friends and enemies commented on it? His supporter, Lord Elcho, had watched the Prince's awkwardness in female company at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, and felt compelled to make excuses for it.

'He had not been much used to Womens Company, and was always embarrassed while he was with them,' Elcho remarked as he watched the Prince at levées and balls.

During all the time Charles had been holding court in the Scottish capital it had been the same: his coldness could not be hidden, especially whenever fashionable ladies rushed to the palace in droves to kiss his hand, and Elcho was embarrassed to recall that 'his behaviour to them was very cool'.

Coolness towards women, surely born of shyness, was one of the lesser charges which dogged Bonnie Prince Charlie, not merely during his time in Scotland, but all through life and into history. There have been smears that he was undersexed, or at least partially impotent, but these are as ill-founded as insinuations that he was homosexual like his great-great-grandfather, King James VI and I. His younger brother, Prince Henry, Duke of York, has also been accused of having homosexual relationships, but on much stronger grounds.

During the '45 Rising many slanders were put about, some labelling Charles as homosexual while others accused him of flagrant womanizing – enemy progaganda didn't care how the sexual slanders were slanted or even whether they contained a basis of truth, just so long as they showed the Prince in an unfavourable light and were detrimental to his Cause.

Apart from the many reports of aloofness towards women during the rising, a story circulated that, when asked why he would not dance at one of the Holyrood balls, the Prince beckoned a huge Highlander standing guard at the doorway. Stroking the man's beard, the Prince exclaimed, 'These are the beauties to whom I must now make love, and for a few thousands of whom I would fain dispense with all yonder fair damsels.' The brawny Highlander's response is not recorded, but we must resist the temptation to judge the incident against today's sexual attitudes. If any such thing happened and Charles did make the remark, it was certainly not prompted by any homosexual proclivities, but was merely a joke with a deal of common sense behind it. At that moment Charles Stuart's sole objective was to win back his father's crowns, and the Highlanders were his main supporters in the fight to achieve that.

On the reverse side of the sexual coin the Hanoverians tried to make propaganda of 'affairs' with mistresses in Scotland, especially poor, innocent Jenny Cameron, who did nothing more than bring a group of Cameron men to join his army, but was pilloried by pamphleteers and cartoonists, and Flora MacDonald, who helped him to escape over the sea to Skye disguised as her maidservant. The accusations against both Jenny and Flora were so preposterous they could not have been believed by his most gullible enemy, but nonetheless the country was polluted by them during the '45 and after.

By some strange omission, the anti-Charlie propaganda machine did not pick up the one sexual fling the Prince enjoyed during the '45. Clementine Walkinshaw was almost certainly the Prince's mistress during a brief period in January 1746, but the relationship was never noticed by his enemies or made use of by them.

The truth is that Prince Charlie was a late starter when it came to falling in love, but when he did, it was with wild crazed fervour, which set the Jacobite movement buzzing. What's more, his love was usually reciprocated with equal ardour.

Charles Edward Stuart showed little interest in the female sex as a child because, from his birth in Rome in 1720, he was brought up in a largely masculine environment. His parents' marriage was an unhappy one and it was left to his father to arrange most of his education and guide him towards manhood. The upbringing of a prince has always been remote from the world around him, but for Charles and his brother, Henry, born five years later, growing up was a very unnatural experience, cut off from the real world at a court, which was not really royal at all. Their grandfather, James VII and II had lost his throne more than a generation earlier, and their father, James VIII and III, pretended to be a king in Rome, a city remote in distance and outlook from the country he claimed as his.

Women played little part in life at the Pretender's court and the boys grew up with no experience of female company other than as partners at formal balls at the formal little courts they visited in friendly Italian states. They were naïve insofar as love was concerned.

When Charles discovered love at last, he was past his mid-twenties, and it was unfortunate that he did not marry then for a wife might have brought some degree of stability and point to his life. Instead he 'campaigned' through a series of love affairs in the middle years of his life, which aroused him to white hot passion and resulted in two illegitimate children and a succession of fights as heroic as the battles he fought during his 'rash adventure' in Scotland.

But the bonnie prince proved to be a rough and jealous wooer, who flew into wild rages, and insisted on always having his own way with every woman for whom he cared. Louise was the first in a line of liaisons with unhappy endings. Worst of all, he became insanely jealous without reason and abused nearly every woman he ever loved, and he beat his women if they dared to disobey him.

As far as the ordinary supporter of the Cause was concerned it was this wild and utterly unacceptable social behaviour that finally killed off the Jacobite Cause rather than any political or military victories of his enemies. Charles's drinking has been blamed for the destruction of Jacobite hopes, and the Prince's fondness for the bottle certainly did inflict serious injury, but supporters began to leave in disgust when they saw how he treated the women for whom he professed to care. Love always proved another Culloden for Prince Charlie.

Yet, all through life, Charles Edward Stuart exercised a kind of magic power over women, those who met him and those to whom he was no more than a name. He had an ability to retain a mesmeric power even over the women he treated badly and he could always cast his spell over those whom he ignored; in Edinburgh they hung from windows and crowded round him in the street just to touch him. Strangers, many not even Jacobite sympathizers, cheered him as he passed by and remembered him long after:

'Ye windows were full of Ladys who threw up their handkerchiefs and clap'd their hands and show'd great loyalty to ye Bonny Prince,' wrote one of them, Magdalen Pringle, as she watched the Prince ride out to review his army at Duddingston, just outside Edinburgh.

Charles paid scant attention to these fawning women who flocked to see him, yet they continued to surround him in ever-growing numbers. In spite of his outrageous behaviour towards them, they still called him Bonnie Prince Charlie, swooned at his feet, and urged their menfolk to go out and fight for him. Why? Because he was a princely, charismatic figure, a leader who had in him that ability, which some men possess, to attract women to him in spite of treating them with unfeeling cruelty.

Prince Charlie has much to answer for insofar as the women in his life are concerned, for he showed them no consideration and demanded everything they had to give, while offering little in return. It has to be admitted that the same charges have been levelled at him in regard to his relationships with men: to those who surrounded him and supported him so loyally he showed ingratitude, insensitivity, and meanness of spirit as well as of pocket. A charge of cowardice, levelled at him after he escaped from the battlefield at Culloden, does not stand up, but most of the others do.

It was in Scotland in 1745 that the bonnie prince who has survived in historic legend, was born – the darling of almost every woman, the hero of many men until he marched into England, when his rash adventure fell apart at Derby. There he was forced to accept the advice of his generals and retreat to Scotland. He headed north with ill grace and all the way was sullen and withdrawn. The campaign was lost during that retreat, long before Cumberland's deadly gunfire raked the ranks of the Highlanders on the battlefield of Culloden.

Charles has been accused of being ill educated, stupid, a bad leader and without a scrap of political awareness, and it has even been suggested that it might have been better if he had died a hero at Culloden rather than lived on to become Europe's wild man. But all that is grossly unfair to him: Charles Stuart was a brave man. He may not have been an intellectual and had little book learning, but from childhood he was a perceptive boy, who took in all that was on offer by way of education at his father's narrow little court at Rome. He may not have learnt much about reading, writing or mathematics, but he absorbed the elements of kingship as it should be practised under the rules of divine right by which his father lived.

Charles's downfall is often blamed on an inability to come to terms with the demise of his Cause after Culloden – disappointment which made him turn more and more to the 'nasty bottle'. This change of character has been attributed to political naïvety and crass ignorance of diplomacy, but the Prince was not inept at all. It is true that he was a poor diplomat who never learnt to negotiate: as a prince of a royal house which believed it had ruled by God's divine right for nearly four centuries, he saw no need to negotiate with anyone. He bade people to do what he wanted, and ordered his women about in the same regal manner as he commanded his generals – and usually the women were more obedient than the generals.

Prince Charlie was foolish in his handling of those adherents to the Cause who haunted the court at Rome or the Paris Jacobite circle, and he never trusted them totally: in the light of the shiftiness of some of the professed loyal Jacobite followers around him, perhaps that demonstrated shrewd judgement rather than a lack of it.

The Prince certainly was politically aware: he had been well trained from childhood in the conspiratorial atmosphere of his father's court to follow world events. The only pity is that Jacobite supporters who came to Rome were inclined to tell King James what they thought he would want to hear rather than what he ought to know, a charming, but sometimes irritating fault still found in many Irishmen and Scots. Consequently both King and Prince were far less aware than they ought to have been of what was really going on in Britain, France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, or even in the Vatican a few hundred yards away from their own court at the Muti Palace.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Bonnie Prince Charlie in Love by Hugh Douglas. Copyright © 1995 Hugh Douglas. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
Map: Prince Charlie's Europe,
Chronology: The Life of Charles Edward Stuart, 1720–88,
Geneaological Table,
1 Ye Bonny Prince,
2 A Poisoned Inheritance,
3 Jewel of the Sobieskis,
4 Beloved, Betrayed Carlusu,
5 Carluccio – 'Dutifull Son',
6 The Girl He Left Behind,
7 Under Petticoat Patronage,
8 Conquest at Bannockburn,
9 'Colonel' Anne and Her Regiment,
10 The Romance that Never Was,
11 Dearest Cousins,
12 A Dagger in My Heart,
13 Cherchez la Femme,
14 Discarded by 'Mrs Clemi',
15 A Wife or a Mistress?,
16 Trumping the Queen of Hearts,
17 The Wilful Lass of Albany,
18 Love Lost and Love Found,
Notes,
Bibliography,