The Countess of Albany. Vernon Lee

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Alfieri and the Countess of Albany From the original portrait in the possession of the Marchesa A. Alfieri de Sostegno

Charles Edward Stuart From a pastel, painter unknown, once in the possession of the heir of the Countess of Albany's heir Fabre. Now in the possession of Mrs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place, Winchfield, Hants

Louise, Countess of Albany From a pastel once in the possession of the heirs of Fabre, now in the possession of Mrs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place, Winchfield, Hants

CHAPTER I.

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      THE BRIDE.

      On the Wednesday or Thursday of Holy Week of the year 1772 the inhabitants of the squalid and dilapidated little mountain towns between Ancona and Loreto were thrown into great excitement by the passage of a travelling equipage, doubtless followed by two or three dependent chaises, of more than usual magnificence.

      The people of those parts have little to do now-a-days, and must have had still less during the Pontificate of His Holiness Pope Clement XIV.; and we can imagine how all the windows of the unplastered houses, all the black and oozy doorways, must have been lined with heads of women and children; how the principal square of each town, where the horses were changed, must have been crowded with inquisitive townsfolk and peasants, whispering, as they hung about the carriages, that the great traveller was the young Queen of England going to meet her bridegroom; a thing to be remembered in such world-forgotten places as these, and which must have furnished the subject of conversation for months and years, till that Queen of England and her bridegroom had become part and parcel of the tales of the "Three Golden Oranges," of the "King of Portugal's Cowherd," of the "Wonderful Little Blue Bird," and such-like stories in the minds of the children of those Apennine cities. The Queen of England going to meet her bridegroom at the Holy House of Loreto. The notion, even to us, does savour strangely of the fairy tale.

      What were, meanwhile, the thoughts of the beautiful little fairy princess, with laughing dark eyes and shining golden hair, and brilliant fair skin, more brilliant for the mysterious patches of rouge upon the cheeks, and vermilion upon the lips, whom the more audacious or fortunate of the townsfolk caught a glimpse of seated in her gorgeous travelling dress (for the eighteenth century was still in its stage of pre-revolutionary brocade and gold lace and powder and spangles) behind the curtains of the coach? Louise, Princess of Stolberg-Gedern, and ex-Canoness of Mons, was, if we may judge by the crayon portrait and the miniature done about that time, much more of a child than most women of nineteen. A clever and accomplished young lady, but, one would say, with, as yet, more intelligence and acquired pretty little habits and ideas than character; a childish woman of the world, a bright, light handful of thistle-bloom. And thus, besides the confusion, the unreality due to precipitation of events and change of scene, the sense that she had (how long ago—days, weeks, or years? in such a state time becomes a great muddle and mystery) been actually married by proxy, that she had come the whole way from Paris, through Venice and across the sea, besides being in this dream-like, phantasmagoric condition, which must have made all things seem light—it is probable that the young lady had scarcely sufficient consciousness of herself as a grown-up, independent, independently feeling and thinking creature, to feel or think very strongly over her situation. It was the regular thing for girls of Louise of Stolberg's rank to be put through a certain amount of rather vague convent education, as she had been at Mons; to be put through a certain amount of balls and parties; to be put through the formality of betrothal and marriage; all this was the half-conscious dream—then would come the great waking up. And Louise of Stolberg was, most likely, in a state of feeling like that which comes to us with the earliest light through the blinds: pleasant, or unpleasant? We know not which; still drowsing, dreaming, but yet strongly conscious that in a moment we shall be awake to reality.

      There was, nevertheless, in the position of this girl something which, even in these circumstances, must have compelled her to think, or, at all events, to meditate, however confusedly, upon the present and the future. If she had in her the smallest spark of imagination she must have felt, to an acute degree, the sort of continuous surprise, recurring like the tick of a clock, which haunts us sometimes with the fact that it really does just happen to be ourselves to whom some curious lot, some rare combination of the numbers in life's lottery, has come. For the man whom she was going to marry—nay, to whom, in a sense, she was married already—the unknown whom she would see for the first time that evening, was not the mere typical bridegroom, the mere man of rank and fortune, to whom, whatever his particular individual shape and name, the daughter of a high-born but impoverished house had known herself, since her childhood, to be devoted.

      Louise Maximilienne Caroline Emanuele, daughter of the late Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern, Prince of the Empire, who had died, a Colonel of Maria Theresa, in the battle of Leuthen; and of Elisabeth Philippine, Countess of Horn, born at Mons in Hainaut, the 20th September 1752, educated there in a convent, and subsequently admitted to the half-ecclesiastic, half-worldly dignity of Canoness of Ste. Wandru in that town: Louise, Princess of Stolberg, now in her twentieth year, had been betrothed, and, a few weeks ago, married by proxy in Paris to Charles Edward Stuart, known to history as the Younger Pretender, to popular imagination as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and to society in the second half of the eighteenth century as the Count of Albany. The match had been made up hurriedly—most probably without consulting, or dreaming of consulting, the girl—by her mother, the dowager Princess Stolberg, and the Duke of Fitz-James, Charles Edward's cousin. The French Minister, Duc d'Aiguillon, in one of those fits of preparing Charles Edward as a weapon against England, which had more than once cost the Pretender so much bitterness, and the Court of Versailles so much brazenly endured shame, had intimated to the Count of Albany that he had better take unto himself a wife. Charles Edward had more than once refused; this time he accepted, and his cousin Fitz-James looked around for a possible future Queen of England. Now it happened that the eldest son of Fitz-James, the Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of Berwick, had just married Caroline, the second daughter of the widow of Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern; so that the choice naturally fell upon this lady's elder sister, Louise of Stolberg, the young Canoness of Ste. Wandru of Mons.

      The alliance, short of royal birth, was, in the matter of dignity, all that could be wished; the Stolbergs were one of the most illustrious families of the Holy Roman Empire, in whose service they had discharged many high offices; the Horns, on the other hand, were among the most brilliant of the Flemish aristocracy, allied to the Gonzagas of Mantua, the Colonna, Orsinis, the Medina Celis, Croys, Lignes, Hohenzollerns, and the house of Lorraine, reigning or quasi-reigning families; and Louise of Stolberg's mother was, moreover, on the maternal side, the grand-daughter of the Earl of Elgin and Ailesbury, a Bruce, and a staunch follower of King James II. Such had been the inducements in the eyes of the Duke of Fitz-James; and therefore in the eyes of Charles Edward, for whom he was commissioned to select a wife. The inducements to the Princess of Stolberg had been even greater. Foremost among them was probably the mere desire of ridding herself, poor and living as she was on the charity of the Empress-Queen, of another of the four girls with whom she had been left a widow at twenty-five. It had been a great blessing to get the two eldest girls, Louise and Caroline, educated, housed for a time, and momentarily settled in the world by their admission to the rich and noble chapter of Ste. Wandru: it must have been a great blessing to see the second girl married to the son of Fitz-James; it would be a still greater one to get Louise safely off her hands, now that the third and fourth daughters required to be thought of. So far for the desirability of any marriage. This particular marriage with Prince Charles Edward was, moreover, such as to tempt the vanity and ambition of a lady like the widowed Princess of Stolberg, conscious of her high rank, and conscious, perhaps painfully conscious of the difficulty of living up to its requirements. The Count of Albany's grandfather