On January 31st 1788 Prince Charles Edward Stewart, “The Young Pretender”, died in Rome, he was 67.
With the disaster at Culloden unfolding before him and victory being torn the Jacobites, it must be noted that the Prince wanted to charge forward and save the day. Colonel O’Sullivan ordered Colonel O’Shea of Fitzjames’s to take Charles to safety. “They won’t take me alive!” he screamed, minutes before being led off the field, guarded by Glenbucket’s men and the soldiers of the Edinburgh Regiment. Still he tried to return to the fray, before an officer, Major Kennedy, “seized the bridle and led the prince firmly away from the scenes of carnage”. As he later said, “he was forced off the field by the people about him”
After Culloden and his escape it has been largely told that the Bonnie Prince hit the bottle.
Now they say that history is told by the victors, but Charles’s drinking was also written about by those closest to him, there is this extract “From a Journal by Young Clanranald - Lyon in Mourning,
"When in the forest house of Glencoridale in South Uist, he would step into a by-chamber, which served as a pantry, and, when he stood in use of it, put the bottle of brandy to his head without ceremony.”
This was when he was in hiding a large bounty on his head, but his drinking had been talked about since the retreat from Derby.
Truth be told Charlies father, James had been concerned about his sons liking for alcohol in 1744, before he even set out for Scotland, during his flight through the heather two years later he was drinking a bottle of brandy a day, and even engaging in drinking contests. His established liability to mood swings can only have been exacerbated by this.
Always irritable when thwarted, by 1750 he displayed signs of uncontrolled rage when his will was crossed; when women crossed him, they could experience physical as well as verbal violence: as Voltaire put it in 1763, George II secured Canada “at the very time the Stuart Prince was aiming kicks and blows at women” From the 1760s, except when hunting, Charles began to be almost perpetually drunk. His drinking and rages, which alienated his declining band of supporters, finally led to a parting of ways between himself and the last of his senior Scottish staff, Andrew Lumisden, his private secretary, in 1768. The severe stroke which brought Charles’ life to a close was no doubt linked to his drinking.
But it is not widely known that the prince, still in his twenties, made a secret visit to London in 1750 to stimulate another rising in England, which later became known as the Elibank plot, during which, it is believed, he converted to the Church of England.
In reality, what completely put to bed any hope of a Stuart restoration was the removal of support by France. France had continued to toy with the idea of an invasion of Britain – as ever, a means of destabilising the British state, her trade and her colonial interests – during the Seven Years’ War, until major defeats meant abandoning any such attempt. Charles’s behaviour in the face of yet another crushing disappointment, in particular his drunkenness, disgusted the French and eventually he and his cause were abandoned for good.
This was followed, in turn, by the papacy. On the death of his father in 1766, Pope Clement XIII did not recognise Charles as the Jacobite king Charles III, de jure king of England, Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, the peaceful accession of a third king George, in 1760, suggested that as an active, political cause, Jacobitism, along with its fundamental aim of a Stuart restoration, was effectively dead. Yes the Vatican put a roof over his head, but this was largely due to his brother Henry Benedict being a Roman Catholic Cardinal, rather than his heritage.
On Charles’s death in 1788, his brother, Henry Benedict, became the Jacobite Henry IX of England and I of Scotland. But, as a Roman Catholic cardinal, it was with him that the direct, legitimate line ended on his death in 1807. By this time the beleaguered cardinal, who had witnessed the French Revolution (and lost the financial support of his Bourbon cousin in the process) had begun receiving an annual pension of £4,000 from George III – yes, from the very Hanoverian monarch or, in Jacobite terminology ‘usurper’, that his father and brother had fought so hard, and at such great cost, to remove from the British throne. Henry, unlike his father and brother, did not press his claim.
However, the current official Jacobite claimant, according to the Royal Stuart Society, is Franz von Bayern of the House of Wittelsbach, a prince of Bavaria, as his name suggests, and the great-grandson of the last king of Bavaria, Ludwig III. Franz von Bayern – or, as Jacobites would call him, Francis II – became the Jacobite de jure king in 1996, and is descended from the youngest daughter of Charles I (Princess Henrietta-Anne) via the House of Savoy and the House of Este.
The picture shows an older Charles, from around 1775, which, if the date is correct puts him at about 45 years old.