The Countess of Albany. Vernon Lee

Compagnoni-Marefoschis, one of whom, a cardinal, was an old friend of the Stuarts, had placed their palace at the disposal of the royal pair. We most of us know what such palaces, in small Italian provincial towns south of the Apennines, are apt to be; huge, gloomy, shapeless masses of brickwork and mouldering plaster, something between a mediaeval fortress and a convent; great black archways, where the refuse of the house, the filth of the town, has peaceably accumulated (and how much more in those days); magnificent statued staircases given over to the few servants who have replaced the armed bravos of two centuries ago; long suites of rooms, vast, resounding like so many churches, glazed in the last century with tiny squares of bad glass, through which the light comes green and thick as through sea-water; carpets still despised as a new-fangled luxury from France; the walls, not cheerful with eighteenth-century French panel and hangings, but covered with big naked frescoed men and women, or faded arras; few fire-places, but those few enormous, looking like a huge red cavern in the room. The Marefoschis had got together all their best furniture and plate, and the palace was filled with torches and wax lights; a funereal illumination in a funereal place, it must have seemed to the little Princess of Stolberg, fresh from the brilliant nattiness of the Parisian houses of the time of Louis XV.

      The bride alighted; a small, plump, well-proportioned, rather childish creature, with still half-formed childish features, a trifle snub, a trifle soulless, very pretty, tender, light-hearted; a charming little creature, very well made to steal folk's hearts unconscious to themselves and to herself.

      The bridegroom met her. A faded, but extremely characteristic crayon portrait, the companion of the one of which I have already spoken, now in the possession of Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli (the only man still living who can remember that same Louise d'Albany), a portrait evidently taken at this time, has shown me what that bridegroom must have been. The man who met Louise of Stolberg at Macerata as her husband and master, the man who had once been Bonnie Prince Charlie, was tall, big-boned, gaunt, and prematurely bowed for his age of fifty-two; dressed usually, and doubtless on this occasion, with the blue ribbon and star, in a suit of crimson watered silk, which threw up a red reflection into his red and bloated face. A red face, but of a livid, purplish red suffused all over the heavy furrowed forehead to where it met the white wig, all over the flabby cheeks, hanging in big loose folds upon the short, loose-folded red neck; massive features, but coarsened and drawn; and dull, thick, silent-looking lips, of purplish red scarce redder than the red skin; pale blue eyes tending to a watery greyness, leaden, vague, sad, but with angry streakings of red; something inexpressibly sad, gloomy, helpless, vacant and debased in the whole face: such was the man who awaited Louise of Stolberg in the Compagnoni-Marefoschi palace at Macerata, and who, on Good Friday the 17th of April 1772, wedded her in the palace chapel and signed his name in the register as Charles III., King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland.

CHAPTER II.

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      THE BRIDEGROOM.

      On the Wednesday after Easter the bride and bridegroom made their solemn entry into Rome; the two travelling carriages of the Prince and of the Princess were drawn by six horses; four gala coaches, carrying the attendants of Charles Edward and of his brother the Cardinal Duke of York, followed behind, and the streets were cleared by four outriders dressed in scarlet with the white Stuart cockade. The house to which Louise of Stolberg, now Louise d'Albany, or rather, as she signed herself at this time, Louise R., was conducted after her five days' wedding journey, has passed through several hands since belonging to the Sacchettis, the Muti Papazzurris, and now-a-days to the family of About's charming and unhappy Tolla Ferraldi. Clement XI. had given or lent it to the Elder Pretender: James III., as he was styled in Italy, had settled in it about 1719 with his beautiful bride Maria Clementina Sobieska, romantically filched by her Jacobites from the convent at Innsbruck, where the Emperor Charles VI. had hoped to restrain her from so compromising a match; here, in the year 1720, Charles Edward had been born and had his baby fingers kissed by the whole sacred college; and here the so-called King of England had died at last, a melancholy hypochondriac, in 1766. The palace closes in the narrow end of the square of the Santissimi Apostoli, stately and quiet with its various palaces, Colonna, Odescalchi, and whatever else their names, and its pillared church front. There is a certain aristocratic serenity about that square, separated, like a big palace yard, from the bustling Corso in front; yet to me there remains, a tradition of my childhood, a sort of grotesque and horrid suggestiveness connected with this peaceful and princely corner of Rome. For, many years ago, when the square of the Santissimi Apostoli was still periodically strewn with sand that the Pope might not be jolted when his golden coach drove up to the church, and when the names of Charles Edward and his Countess were curiously mixed up in my brain with those of Charles the First and Mary Queen of Scots, there used to be in a little street leading out of the square towards the Colonna Gardens, a dark recess in the blank church-wall, an embrasure, sheltered by a pent-house roof and raised like a stage a few steep steps above the pavement; and in it loomed, strapped to a chair, dark in the shadow, a creature in a long black robe and a skull cap drawn close over his head; a vague, contorted, writhing and gibbering horror, of whose St. Vitus twistings and mouthings we children scarcely ventured to catch a glimpse as we hurried up the narrow street, followed by the bestial cries and moans of the solitary maniac. This weird and grotesque sight, more weird and more grotesque seen through a muddled childish fancy and through the haze of years, has remained associated in my mind with that particular corner of Rome, where, with windows looking down upon that street, upon that blank church-wall with its little black recess, the palace of the Stuarts closes in the narrow end of the square of the Santissimi Apostoli. And now, I cannot help seeing a certain strange appropriateness in the fact that the image of that mouthing and gesticulating half-witted creature should be connected in my mind with the house to which, with pomp of six-horse coaches and scarlet outriders, Charles Edward Stuart conducted his bride.

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. Click to ENLARGE

      For the beautiful and brilliant youth who had secretly left that palace twenty-four years before to re-conquer his father's kingdom, the gentle and gallant and chivalric young prince of whose irresistible manner and voice the canny chieftains had vainly bid each other beware when he landed with his handful of friends and called the Highlanders to arms; the patient and heroic exile, singing to his friends when the sea washed over their boat and the Hanoverian soldiers surrounded their cavern or hovel, who had silently given Miss Macdonald that solemn kiss which she treasured for more than fifty years in her strong heart—that Charles Edward Stuart was now a creature not much worthier and not much less repulsive than the poor idiot whom I still see, flinging about his palsied hands and gobbling with his speechless mouth, beneath the windows of the Stuart palace. The taste for drinking, so strange in a man brought up to the age of twenty-three among the proverbially sober Italians, had arisen in Charles Edward, a most excusable ill habit in one continually exposed to wet and cold, frequently sleeping on the damp ground, ill-fed, anxious, worn out by over-exertion in flying before his enemies, during those frightful months after the defeat at Culloden, when, with a price of thirty thousand pounds upon his head, he had lurked in the fastnesses of the Hebrides. We hear that on the eve of his final escape from Scotland, his host, Macdonald of Kingsburgh, prevented the possible miscarriage of all their perilous plans only by smashing the punch-bowl over which the Pretender, already more than half drunk, had insisted upon spending the night. Still more significant is the fact, recorded by Hugh Macdonald of Balshair, that when Charles Edward was concealed in a hovel in the isle of South Uist, the prince and his faithful followers continued drinking (the words are Balshair's own) "for three days and three nights." Hard drinking was, we all know, a necessary accomplishment in the Scotland of those days; and hard drinking,