Charlotte was the illegitimate daughter of Charles Edward Stuart, de jure King Charles III, known to history as Bonnie Prince Charlie, the hero of the 1745 Jacobite Rising and the eldest grandson of King James II in the legitimate male line. Of her Robert Burns wrote:
‘This lovely’s maid’s of Royal blood, that ruled Albion’s kingdoms three, but oh, Alas, for her bonnie face, they’ve wronged the Lass of Albany. We’ll daily pray, we’ll nightly pray, on bended knée most fervently, the time will come, with pipe and drum, we’ll welcome home fair Albany’.
Wronged poor Charlotte certainly was. The famously unlucky star which afflicted the Stuarts began its malign influence with her birth and waned only with her death.
It was in December 1745, during the Highland Rising, that Charles met Charlotte’s mother, shortly after the retreat from Derby to Glasgow. She was Clementina, daughter of the ardent Jacobite, John Walkinshaw of Barrowfield and Camlachie by Catherine, daughter of Sir Hugh Paterson of Bannockburn and Lady Jean Erskine, daughter of Charles, 5th Earl of Mar.
Charles, conspicuous for his lack of womanising, formed an attraction for Clementina at Bannockburn House whilst she nursed his severe fever after the victorious Battle of Falkirk. The attraction was mutual, but the relationship platonic, overtaken by events culminating in Charles’ defeat at Culloden, the legendary five months on the run in the Western Isles and his eventual escape to France. Once on the continent Charles vented his anguish by a descent into alchoholism and the high emotion of two passionate love affairs. The first was with Louise de Rohan, Duchess de Montbazon, his first cousin on his maternal Sobieski side. It produced the elder of his two illegitimate children, a little boy named Charles who was born weak and died in early 1749 aged nearly six months. Immediately afterwards, Charles fell into the arms of another Polish cousin, Marie-Anne Jablonowska, Princess de Talmont – an explosive relationship which ended without issue.
In May 1752, desperate for the warmth of domesticity, Charles sent for Clementina Walkinshaw with whom he set up home. They lived together as Count and Countess Johnson in Liège where their daughter, Charlotte, was born in 1753 and christened in October in the Church of La Bienheureuse Vierge Marie des Fonts. It was this open demonstration of a family life, which gave rise to the doubtful view that it constituted marriage under Scots Law. Concern that they had actually married provoked Charles’ younger brother, Cardinal Henry, into demanding from Clementina a written declaration to the contrary on pain of forfeiting her allowance. She had little option but to agree. Yet that was in 1767, after the couple had separated, and was designed to clear the way for Charles to marry and produce the legitimate male heir who was never to be.
Although Charles adored his little ‘Pouponne’, his relationship with Clementina was deteriorating because of his heavy drinking, justified fear of assassination by the Hanoverians, and constant travelling in desperate attempts to rescue something of the Stuart Cause. Towards the end of 1755 and until 1756 the family lived together in Basle as Dr and Mrs Thompson – the Hanoverian minister in Berne described their appearance as: ‘persons of easy fortune, but without the least affection of show or magnificence’.
Charles’ condition reached rock bottom upon the death knell of the Stuart Cause when, in November 1759, a French naval force under his nominal command, led by the Duke d’Aiguillon and the Count de Conflans, was destroyed in Quiberon Bay by Admiral Hawke during an attempt to invade Ireland. The much abused Clementina could take no more and in July 1760 fled with Charlotte from the Château de Carlsbourg to Paris with the help of Charles’ father and the protection of Louis XV. Charles was beside himself with grief but, unable to get his beloved daughter back, could only cope with this loss by cutting off all contact with her and Clementina.
In Paris, mother and daughter lived quiet lives under the care of the Archbishop of Paris at the Convent of the Nuns of the Visitation whilst Charles isolated himself at Carlsbourg until succeeding his father in Rome upon the latter’s death in 1766.
The French then produced a young bride for Charles – Princess Louise von Stolberg-Gedern. The couple were married in early 1772 and the bride’s single task was to produce a male heir to keep the Stuart card in play. But Louise proved barren whereupon, having recovered his health, Charles relapsed into drinking. Finally, Louise began an infamous affair with the young playboy, Count Vittorio Alfieri, and she and Charles were formally separated in 1784.
This marriage and its failure to produce an heir had a profound effect on Charlotte Stuart’s life. Upon his father’s death, Charles angrily refused to maintain Clementina and Charlotte’s allowance, maintaining his total silence towards them, refusing to answer a single letter from either. So his brother Henry took this duty upon himself, though reducing their pension from 6,000 to 5,000 livres and demanding from Clementina her written declaration that she and his brother had never married. Mother and daughter had to leave Paris for cheaper lodgings in the Convent of Notre Dame de la Miséricorde in Meaux-en-Brie.
Horrified by the implications of her father’s marriage, Charlotte travelled with Clementina to Rome in 1772 to appeal for recognition, bravely refusing to see her father without her mother. Forced back to Meaux by Henry, he at least agreed to allow them to move back to Paris where Charlotte’s petition to Louis XVI for material assistance was refused because, as Horace Walpole observed: ‘The House of FitzJames, fearing their becoming a burden to themselves, prevented the acknowledgement of the daughter’.
The next blow came in early 1775. Despite having ignored his daughter for so long, Charles decided he néeded to keep Charlotte in reserve as the Stuarts last hope. Though at her most eligible age, he forced her to promise neither to marry nor take the veil. These orders were communicated to her by Abbé Gordon, Principal of the Scots College in Paris who wrote back to Charles that:
‘Your letter touched her to such a degree that I was sorry I had spoken to her so freely … She was only six years old when she was carried off, so that she ought not to be entirely ruined for a fault of which her age hindered her to be anybody’s partner … She deserves better, being esteemed by all who know her as one the most accomplished women in this town …’
It was this most impossible of social situations which convinced Charlotte in early 1776 to resign herself to the drab life of an honorary canoness at a convent in Franche-Comté. On her way she was invited to dinner by Lord Elcho. She was twenty-two, outgoing, full of common sense and very patient. She had dark blond hair and bright blue eyes, being described by Horace Mann as having: ‘a good figure, tall and well made’. There she met and fell in love with her relation, the handsome, thirty-seven year old Prince Ferdinand de Rohan. Like Charlotte he too was neither free to marry nor have a family. For as the youngest son of the Duke de Montbazon he had been pushed into a church career and become the Archbishop of Bordeaux.
Changing her plans, Charlotte returned to Paris where Ferdinand leased a house for her and her mother on the same Rue St Jacques upon which stood the convent in which they lived as lady pensioners. He also acquired a country home for them south of Paris at Anthony. Having given up all hope of ever being recognised by and reconciled with her father, Charlotte began a secret family with Ferdinand. Between 1779–84 she bore him three children, Marie Victoire, Charlotte and Charles. For years their fates remained one of the mysteries of late Stuart history.
Yet it was precisely at this time that Charles’ relationship with Louise von Stolberg was breaking up and his robust health beginning to fail. This prompted him to perform an astonishing volte face. In a document dated March 23rd with a codicil dated two days later, Charles decided to make Charlotte his sole heir. In addition he created her Duchess of Albany, a dukedom traditionally reserved for the heirs of Kings of Scots. Five days later he raised her to the status of legitimate child with the additional title of Her Royal Highness and secured recognition of all this by the Vatican as well as the King and Parliament of France. Ultimately he invested her with the Order of the Thistle and even passed to her the right of Royal Succession. Yet it wasn’t until Charles recovered from his second near-fatal stroke in early 1784 that he wrote to Charlotte, telling her of his decisions and asking her to come and live with him in Florence. It should have been the answer to her prayers. But she had long given up hope for such a thing and was at that time pregnant with her third child.
Charlotte was unable to breathe a word of her secret family to either her father Charles in Florence nor uncle Henry in Rome. So she left her three children in Paris under the care of their grandmother, Clementina Walkinshaw as well as Ferdinand de Rohan and left for Italy, assuming their separation would not last too long.
Arriving in Florence on October 5th, 1785 Charlotte managed to nurse both her father and his finances back to health, bringing him greater happiness than he had known at any time since the Highland Rising. She also became the only woman to win and keep the heart of her uncle with whom she reconciled the notoriously difficult Charles after decades of estrangement, and returned her father into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church of his birth, winning praise from the Pope himself. Charlotte finally managed the unthinkable – Charles began to write warm and courteous letters to her mother. In her own to Clementina she revealed how badly she missed her family, openly hoping they would soon be reunited.
Her friends called her ‘the angel of peace’ and ‘her father’s guardian angel’. As the author of Charles’ happy twilight after her own long years of denial, Charlotte deserved much when her father finally died in 1788. But she had contracted a malignant cancer of the liver. Her last weeks of life were lived out in the knowledge she would never see her children, mother nor Ferdinand again, and in desperate concern for their safety in Paris with the outbreak of the French Revolution. In October 1789 Charlotte wrote to Clementina:
‘Don’t worry. I am well. I love you and will send news as soon as possible. Please kiss my dear friends for me’.
She died in Bologna one week later, at the house of the Marchesa Giulia Lambertini-Bovio who wrote to Henry that: ‘So blessed was her death, that the tears I pour out from grief are tears of tenderness’.