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So multifarious and absorbing
are the attractions of Rome,— classical, medieval, papal, even modern—that
English-speaking travellers are apt to overlook the feet that the Eternal
City holds a neglected but romantic page of their own history ; indeed, with
the single exception of Canova’s well-known monument in St. Peter’s, most
visitors to Rome remain unaware of the existence of the many Stuart
landmarks and associations it contains. A few sight-seers have perhaps been
struck while viewing the fine basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere by the
royal escutcheons of England and France surmounted by the cross and scarlet
hat in the chapel restored by Cardinal York, who for some sixty years was
titular of this church ; but, generally speaking, very few indeed are
acquainted with the dingy old palace in the Piazza Santissimi Apostoli,
which for over half a century sheltered the little court of the Kings across
the Water, or with other buildings connected with the later history of this
ill-fated House, whose unbroken chain of misfortunes so excited the
compassion even of Voltaire.
The Piazza Santissimi
Apostoli, whose southern end opens directly into the newly-made busy Via
Nazionale, is a long quiet space bounded towards the east by the huge
Colonna palace and the pillared front of the church of the Apostles, its
western side being occupied by houses belonging to various noble Roman
families,awhile at its narrow northern end stands the old palace once
occupied by the Stuarts (a tall featureless pile of buildings, modernised
and totally uninteresting except for its historical memories) which is
to-day known as the Palazzo Balestro and familiar as the seat of the British
Consulate.
Shortly after the failure of
the rising of 1715, a result due in no small degree to his own supineness
and incapacity, the Chevalier de St. George (the James the Third of the
Legitimists and the Old Pretender of the Hanoverians) arrived in Rome, where
his young wife, Maria Clementina Sobieski, and a considerable number of
devoted adherents, chiefly of Scotch and Irish descent, were awaiting him.
From Pope Clement the Eleventh the exile received both royal honours and a
warm welcome, the Pontiff presenting his guest with this palace near the
church of the Holy Apostles as a suitable residence to contain both his
family and his little court. Here in this house, one year after his parents’
reception in Rome, was born the Young Chevalier, his tiny hands being
solemnly kissed by the whole College of Cardinals arrived hither in state to
salute the newly-born Prince of Wales, for whose requirements the Pope had
himself blessed and presented baby-linen ; and here five years later Henry
Benedict (named after the reigning Pontiff Benedict the Thirteenth) first
saw the light and was created Duke of York by his father,—two events which
were duly reported by the English spy, Walton, to his Government with the
addition of many spiteful inaccuracies. Here also died, in 1735, poor Maria
Clementina, grand-daughter of the famous John Sobieski, who had been the
saviour of Europe from the invading Turks under the walls of Vienna, after
an unhappy married life with her dismal taciturn husband, the “old Mr.
Melancholy” of Hanoverian wits, from whom on one occasion, in a mingled fit
of depression and jealousy, she had fled to the fashionable Ursuline convent
in the neighbouring Via Vittoria, remaining there over a year in spite of
threats and entreaties. Little as he had appeared to appreciate or
understand her in life, James Stuart deeply lamented Clementina’s death,
while the loss of their high-spirited mother must have been a terrible blow
to the two little princes now growing up to manhood in the gloomy old
palace.
Of James Stuart and his two
motherless sons the President de Brosses gives an amusing and vivid
description in his Lettres Familieres:
The King of England is
treated here with all the consideration due to recognised royalty. He lives
in the Piazza SS. Apostoli in a vast dwelling with no pretence of beauty,
where the Pope’s troops mount guard as they do [at the Quirinal] on Monte
Cavallo, and accompany him whenever he drives out, which, however, is
seldom. His house is very large on account of the many gentlemen of his own
country who remain attached to bis cause and reside with him. The most
distinguished of these is Milord
Dunbar, a Scotchman, [Lord
George Murray, fifth son of the first Duke of Atholl, and father of the
third Duke] a man of courage and highly esteemed, to whom the King, perhaps
for political reasons, has entrusted his children, although he professes the
Anglican religion.
De Brasses also tells his
readers that James is a thorough Stuart in face and figure, and that he
bears a strong resemblance both to his late father, James the Second, and to
his natural brother, the Duke of Berwick. He is excessively devout, spending
much of his mornings in prayer at his wife’s tomb in the church of the
Apostles. Of the young princes this genial old French gossip informs us that
in Roman society the little Duke of York, then aged fifteen, is the more
popular of the two on account of his pretty face and agreeable manners; but
that, for his own part, he prefers the elder son in whose character and
appearance he can perceive much latent courage and tenacity of purpose, an
opinion which history was to verify strikingly a few years later. Both boys
were devoted to music and both good performers: “The elder plays the ’cello
very well; the younger sings Italian songs with a pretty boy’s voice in the
best of taste; they hold a concert once a week : it is the best music in
Rome, and I never miss it.”
De Brasses also gives a
dismally humorous description of the mid-day meal which King James attended
in state, and before which the two boys were wont first of all to kneel for
their father’s blessing, while no guest was allowed to drink wine before the
King had helped himself at least once, a point of etiquette which the French
traveller found most inconvenient and productive of indigestion when on one
occasion his royal host forgot to call for the botde. At these solemn daily
banquets, de Brosses tells us, English was usually spoken between James and
his sons, though French and Italian were more familiar to the exiled family.
Rome was at this time full of
English travellers, many of whom were young men of rank and wealth making
the Grand Tour incompany with their tutors, and to such persons a glimpse of
James Stuart and the young princes would naturally be a matter of great
curiosity. But all English subjects were stricdy forbidden to visit the
Palazzo Stuart, a regulation that was carefully enforced by means of a
succession of spies in the employ of the British Minister at Florence,
England being then, as she is to-day, in the position of having no
ambassador accredited to the Holy See.
Nevertheless, in spite of
spies and adverse reports to Sir Horace Mann in Florence, an introduction to
the discarded King of Great Britain or to his sons at some theatre or
reception was eagerly sought after by English visitors to Rome, with the
result that not a few of the unwary were apt to find themselves embroiled
with the gentlemen of the mimic Jacobite court, who resented any expression
of ridicule or ill-will towards the Stuarts and their cause. That astute old
Hanoverian peer, Lord Chesterfield, himself married to a half-sister of
George the Second, particularly cautions his son, Philip Stanhope, who was
travelling in Italy soon after the Forty-Five, against such pitfalls in a
letter full of the cynical worldly advice which is characteristic of his
correspondence.
You will in many parts of
Italy meet with numbers of the Pretender’s people (English, Scotch and Irish
fugitives) especially at Rome ; and probably the Pretender himself. It is
none of your business to declare war on these people ; as litde as it is
your interest or, I hope, your inclination to connect yourself with them :
and therefore I recommend you to a perfect neutrality. Avoid them as much as
you can with decency and good manners; but, when you cannot avoid any
political conversation or debates with them, tell them that you do not
concern yourself with political matters ; that you are neither a maker nor a
deposer of kings; that, when you left England, you left a king in it, and
have not since heard either of his death or of any revolution that has
happened, and that you take Icings and kingdoms as you find them: but enter
no farther into matters with them, which can be of no use, and might bring
on heat and quarrels. When you speak of the Old Pretender, you will call him
only the Chevalier de St. George; but mention him as seldom as possible.
Should he chance to speak to you at any assembly, (as, I am told, he
sometimes does to the English) be sure that you seem not to know him ; and
answer him civilly, but always either in French or Italian ; and give him in
the former the appellation of Monsieur, and in the latter of Signore. Should
you meet with the Cardinal of York you will be under no difficulty, for he
has, as Cardinal, an undoubted right to Eminenza. Upon the whole, see any of
those people as little as possible ; when you do see them be civil to them
upon the footing of strangers but never be drawn into any altercations
with them about the imaginary right of their king, as they call him. . . .
Never know either the father or the two sons, any otherwise than as
foreigners ; and so not knowing their pretensions you have no occasion to
dispute them.
After this warning against
the exiled Stuarts and the contemptuous allusions contained in it, it is
amusing to read Lord Chesterfield’s further advice to his son to avoid also
the society of his own countrymen in Rome: “a number of idle, sauntering,
illiterate English, as there commonly is there, living entirely with one
another, supping, drinking, and sitting up late at each other’s lodgings;
commonly in riots and scrapes, when drunk ; and never in good company when
sober.”
With the failure of the
Forty-Five, followed three years later by the ungracious expulsion of the
Young Chevalier from French territory under the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle,
the political estimation of James Stuart’s court naturally declined, and his
own position in the papal capital became one of greater difficulty. The
younger son, feeling the Stuart cause definitely and for ever lost, now
entered the Roman Church with James’s consent and was made a cardinal (July
3rd, 1747,) at the early age of twenty-two, an irrevocable step which so
angered his brother that Charles Edward never again set foot in Rome until
after his father’s death, but continued for years to lead a wandering,
aimless, and somewhat disreputable life in various Continental cities.
Naturally low-spirited and now thoroughly saddened by the extinction of all
his hopes as well as by the absence of his elder son, the poor old exile in
the Palazzo Stuart gradually sank into a moping invalid and for the last
five years of his life never left his private apartments. At length on New
Year’s Day, 1766, James was seized with his last attack, and passed away in
the arms of Cardinal York, who in the double capacity of priest and son had
affectionately attended his father during these last years of suffering and
disappointment. Clement the Thirteenth seems to have been genuinely touched
by James’s death ; indeed, the Roman Church in recent times has not
possessed, with the exception perhaps of the Comte de Chambord (the Henry
the Fifth of French Legitimists), any member of royal rank who proved
himself throughout life at once so pious and so devoted, to the exclusion of
worldly interests, as this luckless son of the dethroned James the Second.
At the private expense of the
Pope a magnificent funeral was ordered, of which a minute description is to
be found in » rare contemporary work in my possession, entitled The Account
of the Illness, Death, Solemn Obsequies and Funeral of His Majesty, James
III., King of Great Britain. It raises a smile to read the extravagant
language of this quaint Italian pamphlet, which lauds in terms almost
fulsome the virtues both of the late King and of the long-dead Maria
Clementina.
Are not their devotion to the
Catholic Faith, their fortitude in the greatest misfortunes, their
magnanimity, their patience, their most liberal charity towards the Poor,
their perfect resignation to the will of God, such sublime Virtues as to
induce in us a certain hope of the eternal Salvation of these illustrious
twin-Souls?
From the same source we learn
that the body of James, richly dressed, lay in state in the neighbouring
church of the Holy Apostles (where for years he had been wont daily to hear
Mass and to pray beside his wife’s tomb), the whole building within and
without being draped with black hangings edged with lace and gold fringe and
decorated, according to the morbid taste of the period, with boughs of
cypress, with skulls and cross-bones, and with laudatory inscriptions upheld
by skeletons. The catafalque itself, raised on a dais of five steps and hung
with black velvet and cloth-of-gold, was flanked by four huge figures of
skeletons, each bearing a tall taper and a gilded palm-branch, while in
conspicuous positions were displayed the crowns of England, Scotland, and
Ireland together with the insignia of the various orders to which by right
of descent the deceased prince was entitled. In short, the funeral of the
Jacobite king in the old Roman basilica of the Santissimi Apostoli was as
costly, as dismal, and as pompous a ceremony as any royal burial that the
eighteenth century could devise.
In spite of the royal honours
paid publicly at death to James Stuart, Pope Benedict looked with' no
favourable eye upon the heir, for Charles Edward, who had now held aloof
from Rome for twenty-two years, had come to be regarded at the papal court
as a man of loose life, as an incorrigible drunkard and, worst of all, as a
renegade for political reasons from that faith of which his dead father had
been so shining an ornament. In spite of indignant protests from “Charles
the Third,” now at last returned to Rome, the escutcheons of Great Britain
and Ireland were removed from the entrance of the Palazzo Stuart by order of
the Pope, who at the same time refused to recognise the royal claims of its
owner, or to grant him even a private interview on the footing of a king.
Slighted thus by the papal court and spurning the good offices of his
brother, Charles Edward sulked in the dreary old house in which, thanks to
his drunken habits and quarrelsome temper, very few of his old adherents now
kept him company.
It was here that the special
envoy of the French King visited the wreck of him who was once known as
Bonnie Prince Charlie (and who, rumour said, was found by the ambassador in
a state of helpless intoxication) with proposals of marriage in order that
the Stuart line might not become extinct. The suggestion was eagerly grasped
at by the Prince, now aged fifty-one, who shortly afterwards betook himself
secretly to Paris, where an alliance was arranged for him with the
nineteen-year-old Louise of Stolberg, daughter of a German princeling and a
descendant on her mother’s side of the noble Scotch house of Bruce. This
marriage, proposed by Louis the Fifteenth, with the obvious intention of
harassing the English Crown by means of a Legitimist heir, and approved by
Cardinal York in the hope that such a step might bring back his erring
brother into the paths of orthodoxy and self-respect, took place in a
private house at Macerata, near Ancona, on Good Friday, 1772 ; and a few
days later, the bridegroom and bride, styling themselves King and Queen of
Great Britain, France, and Ireland, drove up to the door of their Roman
palace in a coach-and-six with outriders in scarlet liveries and white
Stuart cockades. In spite of a chilling reception from Pius the Sixth the
newly-wedded pair were at first fairly happy, and for a time at least his
marriage seems to have improved both Charles Edward’s prospects and
behaviour, while in Roman society the young bride at once became an object
of general interest and sympathy, her admirers even styling her Regina
Apostolorum in allusion to her place of residence. But in two years’ time
the Count and Countess of Albany (as they were now generally called outside
their own little Jacobite circle) grew weary of the continued slights of
Pope Pius and dissatisfied with each other, being mutually disappointed in
the non-appearance of an heir, the only object of their ill-assorted
loveless marriage, with the result that they finally quittfed Rome in 1774
for Florence, only to encounter there equal neglect and hostility from the
Grand-Ducal family of Tuscany and to live together yet more unhappily till
their final separation in December, 1780.
Meanwhile Cardinal York
continued to reside in Rome, where in spite of the sunken fortunes of his
House he always held a high reputation. As Bishop of Frascati and papal
Vice-Chancellor Henry Stuart divided his time between his Ua at Frascati and
the splendid palace of the Cancelleria, one of the great architect
Bramante’s best known and happiest efforts, which stands close to the Campo
de’ Fiori; while, a Roman by birth and a Roman ecclesiastic by choice, he
lived the ordinary life of a prince of the Church, strictly avoiding all the
petty and futile political intrigues in which his elder brother was
perpetually engaged. The good Cardinal was therefore sorely perplexed at
hearing of the escape of the Countess of Albany from the drunken violence of
Charles Edward in Florence and of her flight to Rome, where she spent some
months of the spring of 1781 in the aristocratic Ursuline convent in the Via
Vittoria, the same nunnery that had years before sheltered for a time her
husband’s mother. Nevertheless, Henry Stuart, knowing his brother’s
character and believing Louise’s story of insult and ill-treatment, received
his sister-in-law with every mark of kindness and finally installed her in a
suite of rooms in his own official palace of the Cancelleria. Nor did the
easy-going Cardinal see anything strange or irregular in the subsequent
arrival of the Countess's devoted cavaltere servente, the Piedmontese poet,
Vittorio Alfieri, who now hired the Villa Strozzi on the Esquiline, whence
he was wont to pay daily visits to Louise of Stolberg with the approval of
her brother-in-law. Perhaps her two years’ residence in the Cancelleria (so
different from her life with Charles Edward in the Palazzo Stuart hard by)
was the happiest period in the whole of Louise’s chequered career; feted by
the Roman aristocracy, protected by a kindly and complaisant Cardinal, and
attended on all occasions by an illustrious lover, the young Princess
enjoyed a delightful and all-too-short spell of popularity and pleasure,
which reached its zenith in the historic production of Alfieri’s Antigone
(with the author in the part of Creon) at the Spanish Embassy in the Piazza
di Spagna on November 30th, 1782.
But this platonic devotion
between the wife of the Jacobite King of England and the eccentric
red-haired Piedmontese Count, which was diverting all Rome, was abruptly put
an end to by the action of Cardinal York, who, after a visit to his brother
in Florence, then believed to be dying, suddenly veered round and expressed
the strongest disapprobation of all that he had hitherto condoned; indeed,
seeing what a reputation for exaggerated propriety, even prudery, the
English cardinal possessed among his colleagues, it seems strange that he
should ever hare sanctioned the daily visits of Alfieri to his sister-in-law
in such circumstances. Realising now the possible scandals and dangers of
the present arrangement, Henry Stuart, in high alarm, at once induced Pope
Pius to banish Alfieri from papal territory, and the enamoured tragedian
much against his will was compelled to quit Rome and his Psipsia, as he
theatrically styled the Countess of Albany; while the latter remained behind
in her apartments at the Cancelleria to bewail equally the absence of her
gifted lover and the continued existence of “the man in Florence,” who,
however, a little later consented to a legal deed of separation making his
wife practically independent of his control. So much for the two Roman
experiences of Louise of Stolberg ; one as the wife of a crownless king old
enough to have been her father, and the other as the romantic heroine of the
great Italian poet whose acknowledged wife she was afterwards to become.
By his brother’s death in
January, 1788, (that month always so fatal to the Stuarts), the empty
honours and disregarded claims of a discrowned king descended to Cardinal
York, who took little notice of this change in his position except by
erecting a memorial tablet to the unhappy Charles Edward in the
cathedral-church at Frascati, and by striking a commemorative medal with the
pathetic inscription, “Henry IX., by the grace of God, not by the will of
Man.” But Henry Stuart, to whose peaceful innocent life history has not yet
paid due regard, was not suffered to live on quietly in the city he so
loved, and which he had rarely left in the whole course of a long life-time.
Driven from Rome during the troubled years following upon the French
Revolution, and deprived both by political changes and by his own former
generosity of a once considerable income, the poor old man at length found
himself at seventy-three a penniless wanderer. At this critical moment an
annuity of £4.000 a year, gracefully tendered by George the Fourth, then
Prince Regent, and accepted with gratitude by his distant cousin, enabled
Cardinal York to spend the few remaining years of his life in state and
comfort, and thus, dependent on the bounty of his supplanters, the last
lineal descendant of the House of Stuart died in his villa at Frascati in
1807.
With these Roman
recollections of an unfortunate royal House, whose memory in spite of all
faults is still dear to the English-speaking race at lange, let us seek out
Canova’s famous monument in die north aisle of St Peter’s, close to the
entrance of the gaudy Capella del Coro where crowds daily attend to hear the
singing of the Pope’s choir. On the simple dignified tomb of pure white
marble, erected at the expense of the Prince Regent in 1819, only the father
is alluded to by his royal tide, though almost every account of this
monument wrongly declares that Charles Edward and Henry Stuart are likewise
named as kings in the inscription; as a matter of fact the three empty
titles of James the Third, Charles the Third, and Henry the Ninth are
engraved only on the three sepulchral urns which are preserved below in the
Grotte Vaticane or crypt of old St. Peter’s, now rarely shown to strangers.
It is pleasant to linger here a few moments in the incense-scented
atmosphere listening to the distant singing of the papal choir and
reflecting on the personal charm, the ill-luck, and the incapacity of these
Stuart princes and of the extraordinary devotion their cause inspired. Nor
should we omit to visit Maria Clementina’s monument, which is visible only a
few paces from the tomb of her husband and sons, consisting of a draped
sarcophagus in porphyry above which a Genius holds aloft a mosaic medallion
portrait of the queen with high powdered hair adorned with pearls. This
theatrical cenotaph was executed .by Bracchi at the expense of Pope Benedict
the Fourteenth, and on this incident Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, during a
visit to Rome many years afterwards, contrived to build up a ridiculous
story of a love intrigue between the Pope and the unhappy wife of the Old
Chevalier. Poor Clementina Stuart She was undoubtedly bigoted and
hotheaded, but no breath of scandal had ever touched her name until Lady
Mary’s posthumous logic revealed the hidden secret of her disappointed
miserable life.
Herbert M. Vauohan. |
