BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE PART ONE – CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Throughout history there have been a number of people whose fame, long after their deaths, have not been merely consigned to the pages of dusty seldom-read history books, but have instead remained fresh in the public’s minds, their posthumous reputations, for good or ill, usually far outstripping anything they may have achieved in their lifetime.

Numerous examples come to mind, from all echelons of society: Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Richard III, Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Dick Turpin, Abraham Lincoln, Sitting Bull, Cleopatra, to name just a very few.

Richard III

Many of these figures owe their everlasting fame to the scribblings of authors, who have taken the real deeds of these people and elaborated on them in the cause of creating a good read, sometimes fictionalising them to the point that if the personages written about returned from the dead and read their ‘biographies’ they would be unlikely to recognise more than a few basic facts about themselves.

Often, even in their lifetimes, opinions about renowned people were polarised, depending on whether you were a beneficiary or a victim of the renowned person’s actions, and this polarisation is later reflected in both historical non-fiction and fiction.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, who features in my series The Jacobite Chronicles, is such a person.

The Hanoverian propaganda of the day portrayed him as an effeminate Italian fop unable to speak English, a fanatical Roman Catholic in thrall to the Pope who wanted nothing more than to force his idolatrous primitive religion on a righteous Protestant country. Anyone who refused to convert would be burnt at the stake as the Stuarts recreated Bloody Mary’s reign, and Britain would be plunged back into civil war. Added to this was the fact that he was a renowned drunkard and debaucher of women, and that as he marched through the country at the head of his army of half-naked illiterate savages, women would be raped, babies spitted, roasted and eaten, and men ruthlessly cut down in the fields.

Normally history is written by the victors, in which case the above description should be the current view of the Bonnie Prince, but due to a combination of the shocking brutality of Cumberland’s forces after Culloden, the incredible loyalty of the clansmen who sheltered the prince for five months after the battle, eschewing the £30,000 reward on offer to anyone who betrayed him, the fact that the Jacobites wrote much more catchy tunes than the opposition, and Sir Walter Scott’s romanticising not only of the Jacobites, but of Highlanders in general, means that another image has proliferated, of a tragic romantic hero, handsome, charismatic and courageous, heroic in battle and relentlessly optimistic in defeat, the wronged prince at the head of his band of loyal and noble kilted warriors, whose just cause and way of life was ruthlessly crushed by the pompous and unutterably dull Hanoverian usurpers.

Neither of these versions of the prince can possibly be true; had he been the derisory person the Hanoverians portrayed him to be, far from persuading the clan chiefs (reluctant to a man) to rise for him, having been confronted by a simpering, Italian-speaking, drunken religious maniac, they’d have been more likely to drown him in the loch and have done with it than risk everything to follow his cause. Similarly, had he been the paragon of perfection who now adorns a million shortbread tins, incapable of any wrong, then every clan in Scotland and most of England and Wales would have swept him cheering to victory, and the House of Hanover would be a distant blip in the history of the British monarchy.

My version of the Bonnie Prince, along with the Duke of Cumberland are, unashamedly, written from a mainly Jacobite viewpoint (More on Cumberland in a future blog). But I have done an enormous amount of painstaking research in an attempt to get beneath the fiction and portray something of the real person, in as far as we can ever really know a person through the writings of others.

So, here is my take on the life of Prince Charles Edward Stuart.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart. By William Mosman

Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart was born on the evening of 31^st December 1720 in the residence of his exiled father in the Palazzo Muti, in Rome. The timing of his birth, at the end of an old year, was deemed by Jacobites to be very propitious, and there was great celebration. After a few minor hiccups, the baby thrived and by the time he was three, his adoring father James turned his attention to the prince’s education, which in those days meant weaning him away from the exclusively female care of his equally adoring mother, nurse and governess and placing him the hands of male tutors, to ensure he would learn to be a real man.

At the same time that male tutors were being engaged, Charles’ mother Clementina was giving birth to her second son, Henry. James couldn’t have chosen a worse time to separate his eldest son from his mother. The upshot of this was an enormous and very public marital dispute, as Clementina refused to relinquish Charles, and James tactlessly dismissed one of her closest servants and insisted on removing Charles from her care. Clementina left him, repairing to a convent in an extremely public separation which was the sensation of Europe at the time, and caused untold damage to the Stuart cause, making James the laughing stock of Europe.

Prince Charles’ mother, Maria Sobieska

As the Pope, who had personally baptised the prince, was brought into the dispute by the devoutly Catholic Clementina, this raised questions of the child’s religious instruction, especially as the tutors James had engaged were Protestants, it being believed that if Charles was to grow up to reclaim the throne of Britain, a Protestant country, he needed to have a relevant education. The Pope was afraid that Charles was going to become a Protestant, and declared the tutor James had engaged to be unsuitable. James in response effectively told the Pope to mind his own business, and becoming terrified that his son might be kidnapped by extremists, kept him with him at all times. As a result, his papal pension was halved as the battle between James and Clementina now became a battle between James and all the Catholic countries of Europe. Determined not to submit, James moved from Rome to Bologna.

Charles’ father, James Francis Edward Stuart

So what sort of effect was this having on the five-year-old prince, in his formative years? As well as being forcibly separated from his mother, a traumatic experience for any child, and then being openly used as ammunition in their ongoing dispute, if he hadn’t been aware before that he represented the sole hope of the Stuart dynasty to regain the throne of Great Britain, he certainly was now.

Last year in August I visited the Jacobite exhibition in Edinburgh. One of the featured exhibits was a painting by Antonio David of the five-year-old prince pointing to the Prince of Wales feathers. Nearby is a letter written by the prince to his father two years later, after his parents were reconciled, in which he replies to a letter from his father, stating ‘I will be very dutiful to Mamma, and not jump too near her’.  From a personal point of view I found these two artefacts very poignant. In the painting is the hope of the house of Stuart, his infant shoulders already carrying the impossibly heavy burden of the Jacobites’ hopes, while in the letter is a normal, boisterous little boy having to apologise for alarming his emotionally fragile mother. To me it stresses the disparity between what he was, and what he devoted the rest of his childhood and adolescence to becoming.

Prince Henry, Charles’ younger brother as a child. The resemblance to Charles is striking.

In Bologna his education continued apace. He formed a very close bond with his tutor Thomas Sheridan, whose devotion to and indulgence of the prince, for good or ill, led him to become almost a father figure. This fond relationship continued until Sheridan’s death.

Although all the evidence shows the prince to have been intelligent – in spite of his undoubted charisma he would not have been able to achieve what he did had he been a dullard – he does not seem to have been overly academic, preferring outdoor pursuits to the schoolroom. To that end, by the time he was seven he was already riding, learning to shoot (he later became an expert shot, both with the bow and the gun), and had learnt to dance almost as well as an adult. In addition he spoke English very well, and was learning to write it, as well as Italian and French. Everyone who met him spoke highly of his accomplishments and were charmed by his conversation and behaviour. Even taking into account the customary sycophancy employed when speaking of royalty, it’s clear that Prince Charles showed exceptional promise for his years.  This carried through to his adulthood, such that later even his enemies, upon meeting him, had to admit that he was very attractive, not just physically but in personality. He was, of course, far from perfect; he could be extremely stubborn and wilful, as was shown in his absolute refusal to kiss the Pope’s feet at the tender age of four, in open defiance of his parents.

In 1727 King George I died and James, not wishing to let this golden opportunity pass, left for the north in an abortive attempt to claim the throne of Great Britain. This coincided with the return of Clementina to the marital home, which prompted the dutiful letter of apology. Charles now had to deal with the return of a mother he hadn’t seen for two years and the sudden absence of his father. In a gesture that was to be repeated many times during his life when put under terrible stress, the prince fell ill.

In looking at the relationship of James and Clementina with each other and their son, coupled with Sheridan’s indulgent devotion, you can clearly see the seeds being sown of Charles’ attitude to most of his later relationships. This is not to blame the parents for what the child became in later life – there comes a point in every adult’s life when they have to take responsibility for their own actions – but it does, for me at least, lead to understanding and sympathy for the choices he made as a man.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart as an adolescent

Although Clementina had returned she was clearly mentally unwell, suffering from depression and religious mania. She had decided that her marriage was a divine punishment, and adopted a regimen of extreme fasting and penance which was to lead to her death in 1735. The relationship between husband and wife was catastrophic, with James, having in fairness tried several tactics that failed to persuade her out of her mindset, keeping as far away as possible from her. We don’t really know much about her relationship with her two sons at this point; she certainly loved them, but she appears to have found their youthful high spirits very taxing.

Charles’ relationship with his father seems to be one of the child constantly aiming and failing to please. As he grew older he moulded himself into the consummate warrior; an expert horseman and shot, an accomplished musician, golfer and dancer. He was tall, handsome, extremely athletic, charismatic, with the skill of being able to charm aristocrats and commoners alike; he won the hearts of everyone he met.

In spite of all of this, rather than praising him for his successes, James continuously picked fault with him, making it clear that he preferred his second son, who was far more academic. In response Charles rebelled against his father’s oppressive, critical regime, which resulted in his privileges being withdrawn, and in him subsequently falling ill again.  This all came to a head when Charles’ head tutor, Dunbar, attempted to chastise the prince over his lacklustre attention to academic studies.  The twelve-year-old prince flew into a rage, kicking Dunbar and threatening to kill him, a threat he refused to retract or apologise for for nearly a week, in spite of being locked in his room.

When Charles was fourteen, he was allowed to get his first taste of military action. Although it was a somewhat orchestrated appearance in the trenches, he did see some action and was commended for his coolness under fire. The whole affair was a great propaganda success for the Stuarts, with the prince winning over the Neapolitan nobility and causing great alarm amongst the Hanoverians.  This triumph caused James to send an extremely critical and downright hurtful letter to his son, which seems inexplicable unless you conclude that James was jealous of his son’s success, when he himself had failed to win the hearts of his followers in the past.

Later developments only reinforce this conclusion, as I hope to prove. In my next blog I’ll look at the lead up to the ’45 itself and the prince’s role in it.