Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography by Carolly Erickson Read Free Book Online

throne was remote indeed.
    James's failure was all the more bitter in that his cause had been weakened by an ugly personal scandal.
    Clementina, unstable, asthmatic and more than a little childish, had decided that she had had enough of marriage. She and James had produced two sons—a second son. Prince Henry, had been born in 1725—but motherhood had not brought her sufficient compensation for a joyless union with a man she had come to despise. To her James was ponderous, dull, overly conscientious; in short, unendurable. Everything about him—his heaviness of spirit, his lackluster leadership, his close alliance with Protestants—galled her. Her dissatisfaction gave intriguers their opportunity, and she allowed herself to be persuaded that James was being manipulated by unprincipled advisers, chiefly John Hay, James's secretary of state, his wife Marjory Hay, one of her own waiting women (and formerly a close friend), and James Murray, Marjory Hay's brother and Charles's principal tutor. When James dismissed her friend and confidante Mrs. Shelton, Clementina was enraged. Impulsively she moved out of the palace and went to live among the Ursuline sisters at the Convent of St. Cecilia.
    The principal difficulty in the marriage was simple incompatibility, for which neither party was to blame. But other issues arose to cloud and complicate the breach between husband and wife. Despite her initial acquiescence in James's decision to surround Prince Charles with Protestant attendants, Clementina had come to distrust them and to accuse them of subverting her son's faith. She also accused James of treating her badly, and of infidelity with Marjory Hay. Given James's scrupulous gentlemanliness, both charges seem far-fetched, and there is no surviving evidence to support either of them. Still, there was a great deal of gossip, and it made James look ineffectual and farcical, while drawing attention away from his increasingly desperate political undertakings.
    Worse still, the marital scandal created strain between James and the pope and certain of the cardinals. There were angry confrontations at the Palazzo Muti, reproachful letters, tensions that drained James of time and energy.
    "See, Madam, to what difficulties you expose me!" James wrote in exasperation to Clementina. "What honorable man will venture to serve me after the scenes you have publicly exhibited?" 3 His lofty regality had been tarnished, his pride wounded, his very income affected—for the pope informed James that his pension would be cut in half and he himself denied any further papal audiences until he agreed "to give satisfaction to his wife, and remove scandal from his house."
    Eventually Clementina and James became reconciled and she returned to the Palazzo Muti. But the reconciliation was largely a matter of form, the damage had been done. No wonder James was a king without a country, people said. How did he expect to govern a kingdom when he could not keep order in his own household?
    James and his family were in fact living on the margins of reality. He acted the role of king when in public, appearing at civic fêtes under a canopy of state, wearing his Star and Garter, surrounding himself with those who addressed him as king and doing his best to maintain the appearance of royal surroundings. He entertained the Roman nobility and as many visiting English as possible, serving them bountifully with fine food and wine (though he himself ate roast beef and called for English beer) and diverting them with music and polite conversation. He drank healths to the English ladies, discussed English laws and customs with impressive familiarity, even displayed a knowledge of the names and histories of the English aristocracy. Yet it was all a feat of imagination, for James had no real experience of England and very little of Scotland, and had met few of the English. His preference for roast beef and English beer was an acquired taste, a cultivated eccentricity that