For a time

dependent of him by allowing her a pension. the unhappy prince bore up manfully against his destiny. But when all hope seemed over, when every field of active exertion was closed against him, when his ambition and his affection were alike blighted, his spirit and character sank with his fortunes, and in the spring of 1761, we find the British Ambassador, Stanley, writing from Paris, that the son of the Pretender was given to drinking to such excess, as to be often drunk in the morning, and to be carried senseless to bed every evening by his attendants. He became titular King of England by the death of his father in 1766; and Wraxall relates, on what he describes as the highest authority, that in 1770, when the affair of the Falkland Islands threatened war between Great Britain and Spain, the Duc de Choiseul, then Prime Minister of France, thought the time favourable for a fresh effort in favour of the Stuarts. A messenger was despatched to Rome, requesting the immediate presence of the Pretender at Paris. He obeyed the summons, and an interview was arranged for the very day of his arrival. He was to come disguised in a hackney-coach, at midnight, to the Hôtel de Choiseul, where the Duc and the Marshal de Broglie were in attendance to receive him. After waiting an hour, they were on the point of separating, under an impression that some unforeseen accident had occurred, when the carriage drove up, and out of it got, or rather was helped with difficulty, the titular King of England, in a state of drunkenness which rendered the most ordinary communication with him an impossibility. The next day he received a peremptory order to quit France.

When things had come to this pass, it might have been expected that the degraded representative of a fallen dynasty, unfit for action and useless even as a tool, would soon have dropped into insignificance; but in an age of intrigue, and under the corrupt political system which then prevailed in every continental court, no means of weakening or distracting a rival power was to be despised. The House of Hanover might be disquieted, and the approaching period of its uncontested stability might be postponed, if it could not be overthrown; and for this purpose, the competing race must be kept up as long as possible. Charles Edward was childless; his brother was priest. He must therefore be married, on the chance of his having an heir to his claims, to his disappointments, and not improbably to his shame. In August 1771, he was suddenly summoned again to Paris, and informed by the Duke of Fitzjames, on behalf of the French Court, that if he would take to himself a wife of their choosing, a pension of 240,000 livres would be settled on him.

a

The chosen subject of this strange proposal was Louise, Princess of Stolberg, daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, Prince of Stolberg-Gedern, the scion of an ancient and distinguished family raised to princely rank in the person of his father. Her mother was a daughter of the illustrious house of Horn, and she was maternally allied to the Bruces in Scotland, the Montmorencys and Créquis in France, the de Croys and de Lignes in the Low Countries, the Colonnas and Orsinis in Italy, the Gonzagas and Medinacelis in Spain. The circumstances of the family were not on a par with their descent. Her father, a lieutenant-general in the Austrian service, was killed in the bloody battle of December 5th, 1757, fought and gained by Frederick the Great against Marshal Daun; and her mother was left a widow at the age of twenty-four, with four daughters: Louise, the eldest, born September 20th, 1752, being then in her sixth year. The Empress Maria Theresa gave the mother a pension, and undertook to provide for the daughters. At that period there existed in the Austrian Netherlands several well-endowed chapters, exclusively reserved for such of the female nobility as could prove the required number of quarterings. That of Mons was the most distinguished; and the first stall that fell vacant in it was placed at the disposal of the Princess, who nominated Louise. The patent was executed in December 1761, when she was in her tenth year. Her education was completed in a convent, and she first entered upon her full rights as canoness in her seventeenth year, when she also made her début in society; for there was little or nothing of an ecclesiastical character about these chapters beyond the name. The Abbess of Ste. Wandru, as her principal was designated, was Charlotte, Princess of Lothringen, sister of Francis I., a lady famed for mundane tastes and accomplishments; and altogether we cannot well conceive a more agreeable life for an orphaned and dowerless girl of quality than lay within the reach of the damsel in question, when she consented, nothing loth, to receive Charles Edward as her bridegroom, she being not yet twenty, and he fifty-two. The difference in age might have been overlooked, and many marriages might be cited where equal or greater disparity has proved no bar to happiness; but Charles Edward was thoroughly used up.' All cotemporary accounts describe him as mentally and bodily a wreck. Eighteen years before, when his father pressed him to marry, he replied, that the unworthy conduct of certain ministers, and the troubles of December 1748 (the date of the deportation from Paris) had rendered it impossible for him to settle down anywhere without risk to his honour. • Were it

even possible to find a place of refuge, I think our family has had misfortune enough. I will not marry so long as I am in misery, for such a step would only multiply this misery. If a son chanced to resemble the father in character, he too 'would be bound hand and foot, if he refused to obey a vile 'minion of authority.' He did not adhere to this resolution, which was uttered in a moment of pique, and he once meditated an alliance with the Czar in the hope of Russian aid. He fell in with the French project from pecuniary motives.

For the young canoness of Mons,' says M. de Reumont, this marriage might have attractions. It was a crown that was offered her, a crown without true significance, but 'wreathed by the splendour which is lent by centuries of legiti'macy and great events, a crown which had once belonged to 'the glorious race of Robert Bruce, whose blood flowed in her veins, a crown set in rich pearls by the truth of a people, by the sanctity of misfortune, by ready courage in danger, by cheerfulness in self-sacrifice. Dieu et mon droit, and the "Scottish Nemo me impune lacessit, found an echo in the device ' of the Stolbergs' Spes nescia falli, -in the Fuimus of the 'Bruces.' The mother probably was influenced by more solid considerations. She must have exaggerated the chances of a restoration, and have looked forward to a period when her daughter would be a queen in right earnest; or she would hardly have hurried on the marriage with the view of concealing it from her kind benefactress, the empress, who was deeply offended when she heard of it.

M. de Reumont desires us to observe that both the year and the day were ominous. It was the year (1772) that witnessed the first partition of Poland, the restoration of despotic government in Sweden, the startling drama of Caroline Matilda and Struensee in Denmark, and some minor symptoms of general disturbance in the South. The formal and concluding ceremony of the marriage took place at Macerata, in the private chapel of Cardinal Marefoschi's palace on the 17th April, which fell on a Good Friday. In later years, the Countess of Albany frequently declared that her marriage had turned out precisely as a marriage solemnised on the lamentation-day of Christen'dom might have been expected to turn out.'

'Ille dies primus leti primusque malorum
Causa fuit.'

The honeymoon passed off pleasantly enough. After spending a couple of days at Macerata, the new-married pair left for Terni, and slept at the house of Count Spada, whose

brother had been long attached to the mimic court of the Stuarts. The grace and animation of the bride made the most agreeable impression on the ladies of the house, who, however, were struck by the circumstance that she, despite her youth and freshness, wore rouge, which she also strongly recommended to the Countess Spada, although her cheeks also showed not the smallest want of such an addition. They reached Rome on the 22nd April, when they made their entry with a semblance of royal pomp. Four couriers preceded them; then came the travelling carriage of the Prince, then that of the Princess, in which were the bride and bridegroom, both drawn by six horses; two other carriages with their attendants; two others with the attendants of Cardinal York. Immediately on their arrival, the Cardinal paid the Princess a long visit, and presented her with a rich snuff-box set in diamonds, containing a draft for forty thousand Roman crowns. Charles Edward notified to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pallavicini, the arrival of the King and Queen of England;' but the recognition was politely evaded, and they were obliged to content themselves with the varying amount of reverence that compassionate courtesy, chivalrous loyalty, or interested flattery might produce. Bonstetten, the accomplished patrician of Berne, as M. de Reumont calls him, best known as the friend of Madame de Staël and Sismondi, gives an animated description of their appearance and establishment in the winter of 17731774, when they occupied the Palace Muti:

"The Queen of Hearts, as the Queen of England was called, was of the middle height, blonde, with deep blue eyes, a nose slightly turned-up, the complexion dazzlingly fair, like that of an Englishwoman. Her expression was maliciously gay, but naturally not without a dash of raillery; her nature more French than German. She seemed made to turn everybody's head. The Pretender was large, lean, of a kindly disposition, talkative. He delighted to speak English, and spoke much and willingly of his adventures, interesting enough for a stranger, whilst those about him might possibly have been obliged to listen to them a hundred times. His young wife laughed heartily at the history of his having been disguised in woman's clothes, considering his mien and stature.'

At this point, as at several others, M. de Reumont digresses, agreeably and instructively, to portray the society of the period and the place. Although the daily life of the Italian nobles was simple and frugal, the princes of the Church, occasionally, gave entertainments on a scale of grandeur rarely equalled in France; but the equivocal position of the titular King and Queen made public appearances of all sorts disagreeable to

them, and after residing a year in Rome they went to Leghorn, and soon afterwards to Sienna; where the scene is laid of a mysterious adventure, revived in 1847 by two gentlemen named Stuart as the foundation of a claim to the lineal representation of the extinct line. The substance of the story, which was unsparingly exposed by the late Mr. Lockhart, was that Charles Edward had, in 1773, by his wife a son, whose birth was kept secret, and who was carried on board an English frigate, the commander of which, Admiral O'Halloran, brought up the child as his own; that this scion of royalty afterwards appeared on board of a man-of-war among the Western Islands of Scotland, was married to an English lady, and was alive in 1831.*

Towards the end of October 1774, the royal pair took up their abode in Florence. The Grand Duke Peter Leopold followed the example of the Pope, or rather improved upon it, by avoiding any official notice whatever of their arrival; which did not prevent the nobility or courtiers from partaking of the Pretender's hospitality. The ladies held more aloof in consequence of the Countess's refusal to place herself on a footing of equality with them by returning their visits. The evening was commonly passed at the theatre, and on one occasion, Charles Edward happening to engage in an altercation with a French officer, was reminded that he forgot who his adversary was: 'I know that you are a Frenchman,' was the retort, and that is enough.' He was half intoxicated at the time, and so inveterate grew the craving for stimulants, that at a somewhat later period he is described as having always a bottle of Cyprus wine in his box. Soon after his arrival in Florence, his health gave way, his appetite failed, he showed symptoms of dropsy, and he became so helpless that he was obliged to be carried from his carriage to a sofa, on which he lay during the performance. The Countess was in constant attendance: whether from jealousy or affection, he never suffered her to be out of his sight in public; and it may be presumed that her attachment to such a helpmate was not heightened by this constant and compelled companionship.

Such was the state of things, when (in the autumn of 1777) Alfieri arrived in Florence. We shall give the commencement and rapid progress of his passion in his own expressive words;

SeeTales of the Century, or Sketches of the Romance of HisStory between the Years 1746 and 1846, by John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, Edinburgh, 1847; and The Quarterly 'Review,' vol. lxxxi. p. 57.