DOCUMENTS RELATING TO PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD’S GRANDSON Edited by HENRIETTA TAYLER INTRODUCTION THE subject of these papers is the son of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s only known child, Charlotte; the Prince himself repeatedly said and wrote that she was his only one. She was, of course, illegitimate, being the daughter of his mistress, Clementina Walkinshaw, and was born at Liège in 1753. Her son was also born out of wedlock, his father being Ferdinand de Rohan, Archbishop of Bordeaux and afterwards of Cambrai. Proofs of this statement can now be given, and the personal papers of the grandson himself, once in this country, are now in America, the owner of these, Professor George Sherman of Cambridge, Mass., intending to write a full biography as soon as his present work allows. Of the two previous lives of Charlotte, that by Major Skeet1 was written in ignorance of the existence of Charlotte’s numerous letters to her mother, which alone throw light on the latter part of her life, after she joined her father in Italy in 1784, and on her little family. Lady Tweedsmuir’s charming sketch of Charlotte, entitled the Funeral March of a Marionette,2 does touch on these letters (now in the Bodleian Library, forming part of the North papers) of which there are 350, but she had not made a detailed study of them, and says herself that the references scattered throughout them to Charlotte’s mysterious ‘ami’ form one of the puzzles of history, which may one day be solved.3 This has now been done, with the aid of the papers at present in America, to which reference is kindly allowed, and with that of the extracts here printed from the Hardwicke Papers in the British Museum (Add. MSS. British Museum, 35,622, ff. 118, 121). Prince Charles Edward’s grandson was, apparently, always acknowledged privately by his grandmother, Clementina Walkinshaw, though he was unknown to the grandfather. He aroused far less interest in his lifetime and after his death than did those two arrant ‘pretenders,’ John Hay Allen and Charles Manning Allen, who called themselves Sobieski Stuarts and created a legend that they were the sons of a mysterious infant born to Prince Charles’ wife, Louise of Stolberg, and hurried away from Italy in the charge of Captain, afterwards Admiral, Allen who brought it up as his 1 F. J. A. Skeet: Life and Letters of H.R.H. Charlotte Stuart, Duchess of Albany (1932). 2 Susan C. Buchan (Lady Tweedsmuir): Funeral March of a Marionette 3 Op. cit., p. 64. 118 PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD’S GRANDSON own son. It is hard to see how such a story gained any credence. If Charles and Louise had had a child they would have undoubtedly have published the fact to the world. That was the whole purpose of their marriage and of the French support of it, pecuniary and otherwise, since Louis xv., who died in 1774, and the French Government always desired ardently that there should be a Stuart heir, as a perpetual thorn in the side of the reigning house of Britain. But Louise never bore a child then nor afterwards. She told Napoléon long after, in answer to his question, that she had never done so, and even Royalty did not lie to the first Emperor of the French. Charles, however, had a child by Clementina Walkinshaw, well known and always acknowledged by him, Charlotte, the Pouponne of the letters of her youth and later Duchess of Albany. But of her children, two girls and a boy, no Jacobite author has up to the present been able to write, or at least to give any details. This can now be done. There is no longer any doubt that the father of the boy, Count Roehenstart, and his two sisters, was Prince Ferdinand de Rohan, Archbishop of Cambrai and brother of the famous Cardinal de Rohan. During the height of the Diamond Necklace scandal at the French Court in August 1785, Charlotte wrote to her mother from Florence of how distressed the ‘ami’ must be, and later throughout the trial and at the ultimate banishment of the Cardinal she expresses her sympathy, and sends messages to him. Among the letters of Charlotte to her mother in the Bodleian is, moreover, one in the handwriting of the Archbishop, identified from other letters of his though only signed with a cypher. This letter acknowledges his personal responsibility towards the children, and in one of Charlotte’s letters she alludes to him as a ‘bon papa,’ though he scarcely seems to have deserved this epithet, as he did for them as little as possible, trying to shift the onus to her. Horace Mann, that ever useful gossip, commented on her familiarity with the household of de Rohan, then Archbishop of Bordeaux, shortly before she left Paris to join her father, and hints at scandal. She herself constantly refers throughout the years 1785-89 to the ‘ami’ as being at Cambrai; sometimes with relief, as she can then write to her mother more freely without her letters being also read by him. In an early letter of 1784, written to her father while she was still in Paris, she notes the great intimacy existing between her and the de Rohan family and tells her ‘auguste Papa’ how kind they all are to her in helping her to get away to him and are among his best friends. This letter is in the Fort William Museum. The so-called Count Roehenstart had no doubt as to who was his mother, though he can never have seen her since a few months after his birth, but it is not clear if he was ever conscious of the identity of his father. He invented one for himself, a certain Swedish baron, whose family name he derived from an early and mythical race between INTRODUCTION 119 a Roe deer and a hen, though it is hard to believe that he expected to be taken seriously. On another occasion he claimed to be descended from a Scottish family of the name of Stuart, long settled in Sweden, whose territorial designation was Roehenstart. But, needless to say, no Dictionnaire de Noblesse knows of such a family. The name itself has been plausibly conjectured to have been invented either by the Count himself or by some humorous friend as a combination of Rohan and Stuart. (It will be noted that the writer of the letters from Stirling spells the name Rohenstadt, with a German flavour.) He gave varying accounts of the time and place of his birth. In the Memorial which he presented to the Prince Regent in 18171 he says that he was born in Rome on the 11th June 1784, and that is possibly the correct date, but the place is wrong, as it is known from the Fort William letter quoted above, from Horace Mann and other sources, that Charlotte was at that time still in Paris. Her father, Prince Charles Edward, after legitimising her and making her his heir in 1783, sent his major-domo, John Stuart, to Paris to fetch her in July 1784; but far from ‘flying to her father’s side’ (as Skeet so romantically puts it) she allowed nearly three months to elapse before she made a move, only reaching Florence on 4th October of that year. Many circumstances point to the probability that she was occupied in recovering from the birth of her son. Both the girls were older than he, as is shown by the details of their education, etc. in Charlotte’s later letters. Another date given by Roehenstart for his birth is 4th May 1786, and again the place is stated to be Rome, the Palazzo Colonna being specified. This date is manifestly impossible. Charlotte was in Rome, but in the voluminous diary kept by Cardinal York’s Secretary and still in the British Museum2 the writer happens to mention that on that day His Excellence came in from his episcopal palace at Frascati to visit his brother and niece in the Palazzo Muti and found them both in ‘very good health.’ A third possible date of birth in 1781 or 1782 comes from the date on Roehenstart’s tombstone, where he is stated to have died in his 73rd year, in 1854, but, as will be explained later, this was erected by strangers who probably only judged by the appearance of the old man. His mother never alludes to him by name in her letters to her mother, Clementina, though both his sisters, Aglae and Marie, are referred to; but at the end of March 1785 she writes of a precious ‘he’ who will shortly be returning from the country to Paris and says she relies on her mother to see that when he rejoins the others in ‘le petit jardin’ he ‘wants for nothing.’ This suggests a baby returning to Paris from its foster mother in the country. 1 This exists with the other papers in America awaiting publication by the owner. Allusion to it is authorised. 2 Add. MS5. 30,428-30,463. 120 PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD’S GRANDSON Charlotte died when her son was 5 years old, and never saw him again after she left him as a baby of 2 months old in Paris. Of this son himself, in whose veins ran the last known drop of Prince Charles’ blood, we have fortunately a good deal of information. He only died in November 1854, less than 100 years ago, and the Scotsman notice of his death, which took place in consequence of a coach accident on 28th October near Stirling, states that ‘the deceased gentleman was a General in the Austrian Army and claimed to be a descendant of Prince Charles Edward Stuart.’ His claim to the title of General is problematic, though he had certainly served in the Austrian Army during the Napoleonic wars: but that to be the grandson of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ is quite well founded.