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

fooled no one into actually thinking he was an Englishman.
    The pretense extended to everyone and everything around him. His followers might call him king to his face, but they informed on him behind his back, their loyalty easily compromised by promises of money or glory elsewhere. His guests might eat his food and drink his wine with affability but were privately skeptical of his claims. His lodgings, both the Roman palazzo and the summer palazzo at Albano, were spacious but empty, for James could not afford to furnish them grandly and what money he had went to pay his servants and rescue his fellow exiles from their own humiliating poverty. His carriages, the guardsmen of his retinue, his horses, his very clothing came from the generosity of others. He had nothing of his own, except the anxieties that lack engendered.
    And there were other anxieties, created by the unsettling presence of spies. In the employ of the duplicitous Baron von Stosch were dozens of James's servants, who gave the baron regular and detailed accounts of what went on at the Palazzo Muti. Nothing, it seemed, escaped the baron's notice—not what was whispered in the servants' quarters, not which baths Clementina visited in order to promote fertility, not what punishments were meted out to the little princes when they were disobedient. Even the oldest and apparently most faithful of the servants might be recruited as paid informers, and this led James, his wife and sons to be constantly wary.
    Among James's close acquaintances was Cardinal Alessandro Albani, a wealthy, worldly and discriminating man who was the pope's nephew and whose other relatives were frequent guests at the Stuart palace. Albani, like his colleague, Von Stosch, was in the habit of letting the British government know everything he could discover about James, his family and his plans.
    No one could be completely trusted. Hence the need for constant circumspection, secrecy, the presumption that unfriendly ears were always listening. Letters and messages had to be written in code, and messengers watched. People and places were referred to by cryptic references known only to an elite few. False information had to be spread in order to throw the hounds off the scent.
    And where there were spies, there might well be poisoners, assassins, gangs of thugs paid to harass and do harm. Italy had a long tradition of intrigue and violence, in some circles it was a way of life. No one was immune from its menace, no matter how powerful. Indeed, power was a magnet for violence, as James well knew. The dark, narrow alleyways of Rome were hiding places for colonies of thieves and brigands, men who waited their chance to rob prosperous tourists, murder priests and rape nuns. Such characters would not scruple to assassinate a Pretender to the English throne, or his sons. Not when every street had chapels and oratories offering sanctuary to criminals, where they could be neither pursued nor punished.
    Rome was, in a sense, a fitting setting for the court of a Pretender, its antique pretense hiding a shabby reality. In the early eighteenth century Rome was a grandiose shell of ruins and parkland inhabited by a small population catering to hordes of tourists, most of them English. Immensely broad avenues stretched away across long distances, flanked by magnificent churches, villas and public buildings. Wide piazzas adorned by opulent fountains and towering antique statues drew crowds of sightseers, beggars, peasants driving heavily laden donkeys and idlers resting from the midday heat. The Forum, then known as the Cow Field, or Campo Vaccino, was a jumble of half-submerged arches, towers and columns through which livestock wandered. Weeds sprouted from the ruins, bits of fluted marble and carved capitals jutted from the dirt and mud underfoot. Tumble-down huts and cottages, some built from the ruins, leaned against monuments, their occupants lounging in the shade of patches of trees. Animals were tethered