Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (4 page)

The fervor quickened in her by the wonders of Rome's churches, the excitement of being the center of attention so intoxicated Clementina that she seemed not to mind the absence of her future husband. The weeks passed and she attended more great festivals, her friendship with the Ursulines deepening. The convent was becoming home to her; the comfortable, well furnished rooms suited her perfectly while allowing her to indulge her religious passions to the full. The sisters called her "Mother Superior" at her request, treating her with as much fondness as deference. She gave a banquet at the convent to celebrate James's birthday in June, and another in July to celebrate her own, dining with the sisters and seated under a royal canopy. No doubt Clementina had seen portraits or miniatures of James, but all she really knew of him was that he was nearly twice her age, and that so far he had been unable to attain his dream of conquering England. Whether or not she looked forward to becoming his wife we don't know. But then, the honor was so great that everyone expected her to be overjoyed—and perhaps she was.

For his part, James was once again in the throes of disappointment. Yet another invasion scheme had proved abortive, this time launched from Spain.

Philip V had provided thirty ships and five thousand men. This force was to land at Bristol and proceed eastward toward London, while at the same time a diversionary force of three hundred men would land in Scotland. James left for Spain shortly before Clementina arrived in Rome, and planned to follow the main fleet a few days after it left Cadiz. He was on his way to the coast from Madrid when word reached him that the fleet had encountered a violent storm off" Cape Finisterre and was so scattered that it could not possibly proceed. The small diversionary force managed to arrive safely in Scotland but was shortly afterward defeated at Glenshiel by government troops. To add insult to injury the battle at Glenshiel took place on James's birthday, June 10—while Clementina was banqueting with her nuns.

When James returned to Italy and met Clementina he was suffering all the pangs of disillusionment and must have looked it. He was aging rapidly, the lines on either side of his mouth and nose were deepening and his pale face was growing more gaunt. An admirer described him as "over-pensive and over-serious"; hostile witnesses thought he was ridiculously mournful, a tall, looming melancholic who never laughed and had the effect of squelching merriment in others.

James was anything but an eager, hopeful bridegroom, and Clementina must have been disappointed when she met him. They were married in the cathedral of Montefiascone, near Viterbo, in a ceremony of regal splendor. James wore an expression of paternal benevolence as he and his seventeen-year-old bride knelt before the bishop to recite their vows. Afterward there were formal receptions with all the local dignitaries and some of the Roman clergy coming to offer congratulations, and then a prolonged stay in Montefiascone before the couple journeyed back to Rome to start their married life together.

"She has surpassed all my expectations," James declared in praising his wife. "Had I asked God to give me a wife with all the qualities I could desire, I could not have hoped for another than the one He has been pleased to choose for me." He was more than content with her, he was completely satisfied. Clementina resumed her regimen of visiting Rome's churches and of calling at the Ursuline convent three or four times a week. She had her preoccupations, he had his; they got on without outward strain.

They lived in the Palazzo Muti, rented for them by Pope Clement. The four-story palazzo, built of golden brown stone and ornamented with columns and balustrades, was squeezed into a narrow street just off the Corso, Rome's broad, busy triumphal avenue. At the far end of the street was the Church of the Apostles, and the architect of the Muti, in deference to the nearby church, had crowned the palace roof with twelve stone figures of the twelve apostles. They stood guard over the dim alleyway like holy sentinels, watching the procession of servants, visitors and petitioners who entered and left the tiny courtyard of the palace in a steady stream.

To the hundreds of Scots and English exiles who had followed James to Rome and now lived from hand to mouth in squalid circumstances, the Muti Palace was a lodestar. They went there as often as the post reached the city, and waited for the latest news from England and elsewhere to be announced before returning to their tiny dark rooms and inadequate suppers. They watched for glimpses of King James and Queen Clementina coming and going in their coach, accompanied by a papal guard of troops, headed for an audience with the pope or a religious service. And they observed the arrivals and departures at the palace of the cardinals, noblemen and political envoys, speculating about what the visits might mean for the future of the Stuart cause.

By the summer of 1720 the exiles were delighted to learn that Clementina was expecting her first child. A Stuart prince was just what they needed to give them heart, and they looked forward to his birth with all the eagerness of men with too little to do and far too little to spend. Clementina was in good health; neither the sweltering heat nor the disease-ridden air of the city affected her. She often rode to the town of Albano in the hills to spend the afternoon in the cool gardens of Cardinal Aquaviva's palace, or she went with James to one of Rome's water carnivals, gaudy affairs at which the crowds were doused with jets of water while fashionable society paraded in finery around a flooded piazza.

By mid-December Clementina had grown "as big as a house," according to James, and her principal attendant Marjory Hay was becoming apprehensive about the approaching delivery. She thought the baby would not be born before January, and at the rate the diminutive mother was swelling, the birth was likely to be difficult and the labor prolonged.
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On December 26 Clementina went into false labor, and at once all the clergy and magistrates of the city and several dozen of the nobility were informed and invited to attend the birth. They arrived at the palace, only to be told that the queen was not in labor after all and sent home. Four days later messengers were dispatched to the same notables again, "at a very late hour," to request their presence in the birth chamber. This time Clementina was truly in labor, and her pains continued all night and most of the next day.
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James was determined to make certain there would be no controversy over the legitimacy of his child. (His own birth in 1688 had been attended by doubts and accusations of fraud; his father's enemies had claimed that he, James, was not the queen's child but another infant smuggled into the royal apartments in secret.) With so many witnesses present, he reasoned, no one could claim afterward that this baby was not Clementina's child. Cardinal Aquaviva, the papal secretary of state Cardinal Albani, the English cardinal of St. Peter's, brother of the Duke of Norfolk, and a great many other cardinals mingled with the princes, dukes and duchesses of the Roman nobility in the birth chamber and surrounding rooms, aware of Clementina's gasps and cries and impatient for the extended vigil to end. They waited all morning and afternoon, refreshing themselves with wine and food and distracting themselves with gossip. At about sunset Clementina reached the final stage of her labor. The crowd became subdued, the anguished noises from the birth chamber grew louder. Finally the baby was born. It was a boy, a prince to inherit all the rights, hopes and destiny of the Stuarts.

James announced that the tiny infant would be baptized at once with the names Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Maria.
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Charles and Edward were English royal names, Louis the name of the Stuart benefactor Louis XIV. John and Casimir recalled the baby's Polish grandparents, while Silvester and Maria were his Catholic baptismal names.

In the church of the Gesù a special mass was sung at the command of the pope to give thanks for the child's birth, and the cannon of Castel Sant'Angelo boomed out a salute. New Year's Day being by tradition a day of giving gifts, Pope Clement himself celebrated mass the next morning "for the gift granted to two such exemplary sovereigns, through whom the royal descent over three kingdoms is thus maintained."

Chapter 3

The heir to three kingdoms was a vigorous, hardy infant, fair like his mother and with her liveliness and animation. His hardihood was a good thing, for within hours of his birth he was taken from Clementina and propped up on a couch, wrapped in gorgeous embroidered robes and subjected to the scrutiny of the hundreds of notables who had been waiting throughout Clementina's long labor for a glimpse of him.

Tiny, red and squirming, all but lost in the folds of his robes, he was nonetheless Prince of Wales, and deserved royal honors. A royal canopy of state was stretched above his head, while at his feet knelt well-wishers in an endless procession: his father's devoted followers, who now became his followers as well; the members of the household; diplomats and courtiers; Roman aristocrats and, one by one, the powerful members of the College of Cardinals. The cardinals, magisterial in their sweeping crimson robes, gold crosses and heavily ringed hands, symbolized not only the power of the Church but that of the European states as well. Cardinal Gualtieri was protector of England, Cardinal Sacripanti protector of Scotland. The Spanish minister Cardinal Aquaviva, liaison between the Jacobites in Rome and the Spanish court, represented his master King Philip V, while Cardinal Paolucci, prime minister, secretary of state and Great Penitentiary to Pope Clement XI, represented the Holy See itself.

Had he been born the son of a reigning monarch instead of the son of a defeated exile. Prince Charles could hardly have received more attention. As it was, crowds gathered at the Palazzo Muti to watch the parade of dignitaries, visitors thronged the courtyard, gifts poured in. There were chests of doubloons from Spain, thousands of gold scudi from the cardinals and from Pope Clement, who also sent relics and consecrated garments for the prince's christening. Cardinal Ottoboni, protector of France, sent the proud father a kingly gift that had once belonged to the Tsar of Russia—a long velvet pelisse bordered in solid gold.

To the Jacobites, this child was "Britain's hope," and the motto
Spes Britanniae
appeared on a medal struck to commemorate his birth. The more credulous among them swore that the heavens themselves bore witness to the importance of the event. A new star had appeared, they said, never before seen. And a great storm had suddenly arisen to ravage the kingdom of Hanover, home of King George who wrongfully occupied the English throne, as if to presage his destruction at the hands of the rejuvenated Stuart line.

It had been rejuvenated, they liked to add, by the Sobieski blood. For if the Stuarts had, until then at least, been notably unlucky, the Sobieskis had produced, in the little prince's great-grandfather, a hero of godlike proportions.

The exploits of King John III of Poland were legendary. Not content to be, by all accounts, the handsomest, most energetic and strongest ruler of his day, widely read and renowned for his cultural patronage, he had been seized by a sense of destiny. He had determined to beat back the advancing Turks whose armies were threatening Vienna. Calling his undertaking a holy war, and taking on himself the mantle of the medieval crusading kings, he led his Poles and the army of the Holy Roman Empire to the gates of Vienna, where he succeeded in relieving the city just as the starving inhabitants were about to surrender themselves into Turkish hands. It was a remarkable victory, for the Ottoman force was vast and powerful and King John was handicapped by the loss of tens of thousands of men en route to the battle. He emerged not only victorious but practically deified, with the grateful Viennese bowing down to kiss his feet and fighting one another for the privilege of touching the hem of his garment. Savior of Europe, vanquisher of the infidel hordes. King John was a resplendent hero and now, nearly forty years after the event, his name was more venerated than ever.

In his earliest months Prince Charles flourished. An English nobleman, the Marquis of Blandford, who spent some time in Rome in 1721, went to the Palazzo Muti where James and Clementina welcomed him, the latter insisting that he visit her son. "He is really a fine promising child," the marquis observed, adding that the prince was attended by his own household of English servants. Two of these, both Londoners, "kept such a racket about us to make us kiss the young Pretender's hand, that to get clear of them as soon as we could we were forced to comply." At this Clementina "laughed very heartily, and told us she did not question but that a day would come that we should not be sorry to have made so early an acquaintance with her son."
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Blandford turned the comment aside with a gallant reply, but it irked him that he had been coerced into acknowledging the baby's regality. He was a Whig, a loyal subject of King George, with an "inbred dislike" for the pretensions of the Stuarts. Yet he had to confess that he was favorably impressed by James and Clementina, and in particular, by their degree of religious tolerance. Clementina told Blandford that Charles's attendants were mostly Protestants, for as "he was to live and die amongst Protestants she thought fit to have him bred up by their hands." In Poland, she added, there were no distinctions of religion, only of "honest and dishonest." James went even further, the marquis thought, in arranging for Protestant services to be performed at the palace for the benefit of his servants, courtiers and travelers. This, according to Blandford, was "amongst the greatest wonders of Rome."

Another wonder was James's undeniable kingliness. His "air of greatness" and majesty, the power of his glance, which lesser mortals found unbearable, the "fire in his eyes" when he lamented the sorry state of England, his "air of sincerity," lack of bigotry and evident high-mindedness all combined to overawe the marquis and threatened to make him "half a Jacobite." On first seeing James he was "perfectly stunned and not aware of himself," he confessed, and when James smiled on him the force of his "graceful countenance" was quite astonishing.