The Last Monarch of England

In November 1725, the always febrile gossip of the Holy See was aswirl with news of the marital discord afflicting arguably the most exalted resident foreigners in Rome. The wife, whose side most of Roman society, the Holy Father included, espoused, publicly accused her husband of compromising her young sons’s blamelessly Catholic households, by admitting over them the influence of known heretics. Her friends more discreetly accused a particular Protestant lady of having polluted the couple’s marriage bed. The aggrieved wife departed to the shelter of the Ursuline convent of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, leaving behind her sons, the younger being only eight months old. This infant boy was Henry Benedict Stuart, Jacobite Duke of York, younger brother of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and, as fate would have it, destined to be the last legitimate male in the senior line of his seven-hundred-year-old Scottish royal dynasty.

Henry’s mother was a beautiful, pious, and spectacularly rich Polish princess, Maria Clementina Sobieska. His father, James Francis Edward Stuart, was, to his openly devoted or covertly sympathetic followers, James III and VIII of England, Scotland, Ireland and France. But to the Protestant, Hanoverian monarchs, and Whig government of what had, in 1707, become the United Kingdom of Great Britain, James was merely “the Pretender.” The Stuart-Sobieski marriage, brilliant in prospect, proved a disappointment for reasons not entirely under this consistently (and, in Stuart terms, traditionally) unfortunate royal couple’s control. 

In 1718, Clementina, recently identified by a Jacobite emissary, the implausibly gallant Irish Chevalier Charles Wogan, as the perfect bride for James, had been forcibly detained at Innsbruck through the menacing workings of Hanoverian-Habsburg diplomacy. This was an arena in which the Hanoverians possessed an unlovely form. England’s first King George had held his own unfaithful, divorced wife in close confinement for the last three decades of her life. Clementina was astonishingly sprung from Innsbruck by the admirable Wogan, and, after a proxy marriage, at last united in the flesh with her Stuart husband in September 1719. She found him disappointingly lacking in Wogan’s panache. Although James and Clementina did develop strong feelings for one another, too many of these were to prove painfully destructive. 

Hanoverian espionage and Jacobite factional intrigue played out their subtly dispiriting effects on this idealistic, solemn young couple’s magnificent but melancholy attempts at marital harmony in the Palazzo Muti, the Roman residence lent to the Stuarts by the Papacy. When in 1720 Clementina very promptly bore Charles Edward Stuart, Jacobite Prince of Wales, the child was falsely rumoured to be sickly, and his birth to have rendered his mother barren. No sooner had the exiled queen, in the spring of 1725, disproved this fiction at the birth of her second son, Henry, than she herself became convinced, through the advice of a self-interested court clique, of her husband’s infidelity to herself and, by extension, to their shared Catholic religion. This precipitated her abandonment of her young sons, a course that agonized Clementina, though she felt it to be her undoubted pious duty. Five years later, with the Jacobite royal family uneasily reunited, jaded English Whigs entertained each other by speculating that Clementina must be the mistress of the highly civilized new Florentine Pope, Clement XII.

On her emergence from Santa Cecilia in 1727, Clementina—whose affection for her sons was always as fierce as her care over them was erratic—had the sense to appoint as the two-year-old Henry’s governess Winifred, Countess of Nithsdale, the extraordinary woman who had already been caring for Prince Charles in his mother’s absence. Lady Nithsdale was trustworthy, Catholic, and possessed an indisputably heroic reputation. She had suffered personal insult at the loutish hands of George I, smuggled her condemned husband out of the Tower of London disguised as her maid, and ridden into Scotland to save the family papers and estates, paying the price of a miscarriage on the return journey. It was Lady Nithsdale’s proud boast that she had “done the Elector [of Hanover, otherwise George I] more harm than any woman in Christendom.”

Henry evidently progressed both happily and well under Lady Nithsdale’s care. When he was four years old, he and his brother, happily settled in adjoining bedchambers, favorably impressed the visiting philosophe Montesquieu, who would remain a friend into the princes’ adult lives. James declared his pride in and love for the little Duke of York in what was for him extraordinarily cheerful language. At the age of nine Henry received a rare but severe paternal reprimand. Owing to his precociously spirited protest over his father’s refusal to let him join his fourteen-year-old brother as a soldier by serving as an allied officer at the Spanish siege of Gaeta, the little Duke was temporarily deprived of the Order of the Garter.

Not long after his mother’s premature death in 1735, mentally and physically sacrificed to her unrelenting good works, Henry, now ten, was described by a visiting Etonian dilettante as physically beautiful, dignified, a superlative dancer and singer, and generally an accomplished wunderkind. This musical taste, inherited from his mother, was shared by his older brother. Charles had gained at Gaeta, and maintained since, a reputation for military competence. Although less lettered than his father, he seemed to some impatient Jacobites a more dynamic leader. 

This mutually affectionate pair of princes, placed—over their mother’s plangent objections—since early childhood at least partially in the care of Protestant Episcopalian Scots, and, like their father, speaking fluent, occasionally witty English, represented a public relations triumph for the Jacobites compared with the sullenly German-speaking, internally quarrelsome Hanoverians. Princely portraits, to the delight of posterity, poured out of Jacobite Rome, notable examples flowing from the brushes of Antonio David and Louis Gabriel Blanchet. Furthermore, since no monarch resident in Great Britain had been recognized by the Papacy since the accession of Queen Anne, Britons of rank in Rome, whatever their political tendency in their native country, were drawn to, made welcome, and assisted by the exiled Stuart court and thus inevitably attracted by the charms of its young princes. English travellers of means fought to adjoin the Stuart box at the Opera.

Though Henry was considered early on to be physically delicate and criticized in particular by one Protestant governor for sharing the frantic religiosity of his mother, when the hour of destiny arrived he demanded the chance to accompany and perhaps equal his older brother in arms, declaring to Charles that he would fain “fly through fire and water to be with you.” Accordingly, in the summer of 1745, Henry, using the title Count of Albany, was dispatched to Paris. Ironically, reports of Charles’s victory at Prestonpans, coupled perhaps with the younger brother’s tact of manner, immediately secured Henry what his elder brother had been refused over the course of a whole year: an audience with his cousin Louis XV. Henry was then granted the dignified if nominal command over the French component of the proposed invasion of Britain, lying in readiness at Dunkirk. 

One wild report was later to detail the capture of the Jacobite Duke of York, taken by the British navy aboard a seized French vessel, but the truth of the younger Stuart brother’s disposition during the rebellion was less dramatic. The Dunkirk armament’s executive command lay in the raddled hands of the Duc de Richelieu, that perfumed rake immortalized implicitly in the novels, explicitly in the histories of Nancy Mitford. True to form, Richelieu never stirred from harbor. Henry was seconded to action against the Habsburgs at Antwerp, where he was said to have matched his brother’s exemplary conduct at Gaeta twelve years previously. 

During his fleeting months of triumph, dining out in Dunkeld, Charles remarked that he was more concerned for his brother’s anxiety than his father’s: “the king [i.e. James III & VIII] has . . . learnt to bear up easily under the misfortunes of life. But poor Harry! His young and tender years makes him much to be pitied, for few brothers love as we do.” Unlike all too many royal bonds of fraternity, this affection would endure through severe tribulations until Charles’s death.

Henry’s experience of the Forty-Five might seem uneventful compared with Charles’s archetypally doomed heroism, but it seems that it was the younger Stuart brother whose character was the more profoundly altered by the high drama of 1745 to 1746. Charles remained an impulsive, optimistic, proud adventurer all his life, passing outwardly from a compelling figure to a pathetic one, always the same venturesome adolescent within. By contrast Henry, after reuniting with his defeated, always beloved elder brother, seems to have made a cold-blooded and thorough reassessment of the family’s hereditary cause.

According to Andrew Lang—an authority as devoted to historical as to poetic truth when it came to the House of Stuart—James III had planned many great marriages for his younger son, but once remarked that he knew none of them would ever take place. Prince Charles remained similarly unbetrothed by 1746, in part because of his father’s persistent hope that he might convince their cousin Louis XV to grant his heir a French princess (Charles himself at one point developed even higher vaunting hopes of proposing to the Tsarina Elizaveta of Russia). In any case, without his elder son’s knowledge, the “Old Pretender” now allowed his younger son to take a deeply unworldly step from the point of view of both their dynasty’s propagation and of its credibility in the stubbornly Protestant kingdoms it still hoped to regain. 

In 1747, to Charles’s fury, expressed with characteristic melodrama as “a dagger through my heart,” Henry was made a cardinal by Pope Benedict XIV, his godfather, a scholarly pontiff who showed consistent friendship to the Jacobites but was also admired by Protestant men of letters and influence such as Horace Walpole. Subtle British diplomacy had tried to induce the pope to take this step at some point previously through pecuniary inducement. Now it was accomplished apparently entirely by the youngest Stuart’s own wish, though the prince’s decision was encouraged and facilitated by Cardinal de Tencin, a French Jacobite advisor who had previously urged on Henry’s projected invasion of England. Henry, for his part, assured Charles of his unaffected loyalty and love, describing himself prophetically as “a Brother, who you will be sensible at last is not unworthy of your kindness.” In 1748, the dynastic blow was struck home by Henry’s ordination as a priest. Unlike, for example, the infamous cardinal-turned-military-dictator Cesare Borgia, Henry had carefully and deliberately ruled out any return to a princely career and a splendidly negotiated marriage.

As cardinal-deacon, Henry’s first appointment was to the Roman parish church of Santa Maria in Campitelli, a Baroque construction completed half a century before his birth, and already the centre of a tradition of prayer for the return of England to Catholicism. Henry’s first diaconate therefore symbolized his continuing commitment to the Stuart quest by alternate means, even if his new profession in practice set that quest back, in all but its spiritual prestige within Catholic Christendom. Created Jacobite Duke of York at birth, Henry now adopted the style Cardinal York and was granted the privilege of attaching ermine to the scarlet robes of his office. Moreover, in what was to become a consistent pattern, when he was advanced to the rank of priest his indulgent Papal godfather let him retain his diaconal benefice. 

The Catholic sovereigns of Europe instantly realized that here at last was a Stuart prince who could be supported at relatively little financial cost and with a considerable, immediate political return in the form of Papal favor. By 1751, Henry was already the richest of his family, with benefices in Italy, France, Flanders, and Spain, and large, lucrative estates in the Spanish Americas. He had an official Roman residence of his own as Archpriest of the Vatican, but initially preferred to continue living with his father at the Palazzo Muti. His relations with his brother, on the other hand, had sharply worsened, especially because the court of France in particular had perfected the trick of flattering the politically inoffensive and at times positively influential cardinal, while slighting the increasingly, if understandably, desperate and erratic Charles. 

In fact, both brothers had in their own way by now realized the logical impossibility of the Stuart cause when defined as both faithfully Catholic and practicably worldly. Henry chose to lead a faithful and comfortable life within the Church of (most of) his ancestors, while Charles apostatized during a secret visit to London in 1750. Charles then plotted spiritedly if vainly for some time thereafter with the remnants of Scots Episcopalians and English “Nonjurors” (the romantically consistent handful of clergy and laity who had refused their allegiance to the parliamentary usurpation of William and Mary since 1688).

In 1752, a serious difference of opinion arose between James III and his generally well-disposed younger son (James’s total estrangement from his heir having hardened into a deeply regretted, mutually accepted truth). This concerned the major-domo of Henry’s household, the twenty-seven-year old cardinal’s inseparable friend, Giovanni Lercari, whose presence had become intolerable to James. The details of Henry’s romantic life are by the standards of his amorous family inconspicuous. But sufficiently plentiful, various, and reliable contemporary evidence suggests that he liked the presence of good-looking young clerics about him and that he formed at least two close bonds with particular male friends. Into the Lercari affair, the amiable Benedict XIV now interposed himself. Lercari moved on, eventually to the Archbishopric of Genoa, while Henry’s unaffected position in his godfather’s affections was confirmed by his appointment as cardinal-priest at the Byzantine-built Basilica of the Santi Apostoli.

Even his kindly Papal godfather was once heard to dismiss Henry as a remarkably priggish bore, so quite possibly matters never proceeded further with Lercari—or his eventual successor—than intense emotional intimacy and constant friendly attendance. But eighteenth century Italy, and especially its visiting, resident and exiled English speaking communities, presented arguably the most pleasant and civilized landscape for a discreet aristocratic homosexual existence that world history has yet devised. This was a milieu that included the painter Thomas Patch; Sir Horace Mann, British Resident at Florence and as such tasked with observing the Stuarts in and around Rome; Sir Horace’s cousin, namesake, and for four decades indefatigable and impassioned correspondent, Horace Walpole; and a numerous contingent of the “amphibious” noble house of Hervey. 

The 1750s once again represent a dramatic contrast in the fortunes of the Stuart brothers. Charles changed his religion, survived assassination by brigands, adopted as a disguise the clerical habit his younger brother wore by right, re-united with an unpopular former lover met during the Forty-Five and suspected (unjustly) of treachery by many Jacobites, was in fact betrayed by a separate secret agent, fathered an illegitimate daughter, wandered Europe under a peerageful of pseudonyms, evaded Hanoverian surveillance with an ease that sadly but unavoidably implies a measure of official negligence or contempt, negotiated with Russia, Prussia, and the ever fickle French and alienated his last significantly armed Scots partisan, MacPherson of Cluny. Henry solidified his reputation as a patron of music (both sacred and secular), art and letters, was appointed Camerlengo of the College of Cardinals just before the death of his godfather in 1758, presided over the Conclave that elected Pope Benedict’s successor Clement XIII, and emerged shortly thereafter as titular Archbishop of Corinth—if not a more substantial a dignity than any held by his father and brother, then at least a sunnier and more venerable one. The fraternal comparison appears to pit a genuinely Byronic hero only narrowly avant la lettre against a timelessly unruffled Maecenas.

In 1760, the brothers outlived their second Hanoverian King. Their now mostly bedridden, mentally waning, septuagenarian father had no chance of recall at the expense of the third George, a youthful, as yet untainted, popular, Anglophone native Londoner. Charles’s increasingly regular barbarities now drove away his roundly wronged companion, Clementina Walkinshaw (she had been christened for his mother by her ardently Jacobite, Glaswegian family) and their daughter Charlotte. The next year Henry, who had now collected two Roman basilicas, became Bishop of Frascati (anciently Tusculum). At Frascati he had a fine new palace, La Rocca, and in 1763 he picked up another in Rome, the Palazzo della Cancelleria, on being named vice chancellor of the Church. To curious Latin country folk Cardinal York became a favorite sight as he daily sped in his coach between these magnificent seats. The Palazzo Muti of his father’s exile, with its attendant familial trauma and internecine struggles, was now left far behind. In his rural see Henry soon became extremely well-loved as a byword for charitable bounty.

Henry endeavored in vain to persuade his errant brother to attend their father’s deathbed in 1766. And, after conducting James III’s funeral and arranging for him to lie in state at the Santi Apostoli, he also failed to obtain Papal recognition as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland for his brother. Once again, as in 1746, the brothers re-encountered one another with relief and delight. But Charles, who had not improved his reputation by his refusal to console his father’s final days, was admitted into the Papal presence only as Cardinal York’s brother, and left with the doubtful name of Baron Renfrew accompanied by no special diplomatic status.

In 1769 Henry was given a congenial task by Pope Clement, to reinvigorate the moribund Jesuit seminary in Frascati with his abundant enthusiasm, erudition and cash. He also formed the most stable attachment of his life, with the younger Perugian nobleman Angelo Cesarini. Henry had grown into control of his destiny and had honorably buried his father in every sense; he would not be baulked this time as he had been in the case of Lercani. As successively a canon, bishop, monsignor and cardinal, Cesarini remained at the cardinal’s side for the rest of Henry’s long life. Cesarini’s subsequent care, or lack thereof, of his friend’s papers suggests that he lacked Henry’s decorous orderliness and bibliomania, but presumably he possessed other sympathetic attributes.

At around this time Henry had arranged a slightly more cordial reception for Charles by a new pope, Clement XIV, and in 1772 Charles was at last able to parlay this almost-recognition at several removes into marriage to a young, Catholic German minor princess, Louise of Stolberg (Charles having by this point just about returned to the Church of his birth). Unfortunately for Henry, the newly married couple were stalked the next year by Charles’s previous, unofficial, and penurious family, Clementina and Charlotte, and Charles palmed them off qualmlessly upon his tactful and charitable younger brother. Henry had already taken the precaution of paying Clementina a quiet pension on condition that she swore (probably truthfully) that she had never married Charles, a rare stroke of beadiness in defence of his own dynastic rights.

Henry thus acquired some years of peace from his discomfiting family’s demands, years in which Charles descended further beneath the yoke of what his brother called “the nasty bottle,” failed to exploit George III’s difficulties in America and antagonized his wife just as he had once exhausted the endurance of his lover. It was thus Louise, now styling herself Countess of Albany, who was the next of Henry’s relations to disturb his tranquil existence. The Cardinal sensibly advised her to adopt his mother’s refuge, the convent of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, as her own. Louise had justly dwelt upon Charles’s violence and alcoholism while omitting her own romance with the Piedmontese poet, Count Vittorio Alfieri (from whose secretary, Gaetano Polidori, were in due course to spring Lord Byron’s physician Dr John Polidori—inventor of the modern vampire—and the doctor’s niece and nephew, the Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti siblings). 

After three years of fraternal frost, Charles convinced Henry of his wife’s adultery. In the midst of the marriage’s entire breakdown, Henry found his theoretical rights increasingly threatened by his illegitimate niece Charlotte. Realising that Charlotte was now destined to be his own sole child, Charles legitimized her as heir to his exiguous “private estate,” and created her Duchess of Albany despite Henry’s objections. Both brothers were ironically unaware that Charlotte had several illegitimate offspring of her own by an archbishop from the House of Rohan.

At the anticlimactic funeral of “Charles III” in 1788, Henry presided as he had in the case of their father, though the pope would for the present only let this renegade and discredited hero be commemorated in Frascati, not in Rome. Henry now privately assumed the style Henry IX of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland. Whatever certain sentimentally Jacobite Scottish Nationalists have preferred to believe, he was never known by anyone either as King Henry or as Henry I of Scots or Scotland. Unlike his elder brother, he never expressed any particular interest in his family’s ancestral kingdom, whose stark beauties were not particularly aligned to his more classical temperament. He is nonetheless one among several almost-kings and lost princes of Scotland of the same name, including Henry Earl of Northumberland, the twelfth century heir of King David I; Henry Lord Darnley, murderous and murdered consort of Mary Queen of Scots; Henry Prince of Wales, the popular, militantly Protestant heir of James VI and I; and Henry Duke of Gloucester, the pleasant natured and also firmly Protestant youngest brother of Charles II. Henry IX was the last “monarch of England” to touch for the King’s Evil—a highly visible, literally charismatic, religio-political regal statement by which he showed himself most profoundly to be a Stuart.

Only a year after Henry’s “accession,” the Papacy under Pius VI at last acknowledged the right of the Hanoverian King of Great Britain, George III, in spite of both his fanatical anti-Catholicism and his intermittent lunacy. With understandable petulance Henry threatened never to return to Rome, but he loved his native city far too much to contemplate seriously such a sacrifice, until events forced his hand. Having attained the emptiest crown in Europe at the age of sixty-three, the cardinal-king might have assumed his life’s tergiversations, mostly the by-products of an accident of birth, were broadly over. The premature death of his niece Charlotte appeared to bring to a close one old and cacophonous song. In fact, the greatest trial, quite unrelated to the particular troubles of the Stuarts, still lay ahead.

Ever since the marriage of Charles I to Princess Henrietta Maria of France in 1625, the Stuart kings on, and indeed off, their British thrones had existed in parallel with and, all too often, dependence upon their far more powerful and prestigious Bourbon cousins. But in 1793, the French Revolution claimed the heads of the King and Queen of France. Henry held a Requiem Mass at Frascati for Louis XVI, his cousin and, as he had latterly seen it, colleague. In 1796, General Bonaparte entered Italy, and in 1798, the French took Rome and captured Pius VI. In the course of these momentous events, Henry offered the pope that loyalty and quality which had once been at his father and brother’s disposal. Despite the insult of 1789, he furnished Pius with the vast majority of his private fortune. At the declaration of the Roman Republic the seventy-three-year old Cardinal at last fled, with Cesarini, to Naples. His estates, his matchless library, and celebrated collection of paintings were pillaged and auctioned by French troops; his American holdings succumbed to revolution in Mexico. 

After further adventures involving piratical Greeks, Henry and Cesarini set up house in Venice, close by the Rialto, where Henry in 1799 attended his fourth and final Papal Conclave, which elected Pius VII (in no Conclave, including the one which he orchestrated as Camerlengo, did Henry step forward as a leading politician in the College of Cardinals, showing only a quiet, conservative fondness for the Jesuit Order). Not long afterwards, in ill health and unaccustomed poverty, he was rescued by a most improbable savior. Following the Papal recognition of George III, a notoriously unflagging and, in the Hanoverian king’s well-known view, irritating place-seeker, John Coxe Hippisley, had managed to persuade Pitt the Younger to accredit him as some kind of half-acknowledged British representative at the Papal court. It was Hippisley who was told of Henry’s plight by a concerned friend, Cardinal Borgia, a distant collateral descendant of the more celebrated Borgias, known for his antiquarian rather than Machiavellian accomplishments.

Hippisley, that supremely hardened, if hitherto disappointed, intriguer, managed to arrange the exceptionally satisfactory compromise whereby Henry was persuaded to accept a considerable British pension, thus, in Hanoverian eyes, acknowledging the newer dynasty’s tenure of his forefathers’s throne. Henry himself, with Hippisley’s connivance and his own habitual, finicky exact reasoning in de jure terms, interpreted this payment as the long overdue, legally acknowledged repayment by the Parliament of England of his grandmother Queen Mary’s dowry (that is, Mary of Modena, Queen Consort of James II and VII).

In the manner of a Shakespearean tragicomedy, hardly had the British pension arrived than a thawing of Papal-Napoleonic relations followed. The cardinal-king was allowed back to his see of Frascati, where his flock celebrated this little restoration in rapturous crowds. Three years later the traditional seniority within the College of Cardinals, propelled the now very elderly Henry to the rank of Dean of the College and Bishop of Ostia; as usual he bent the rules and remained at Frascati. 

During these twilight years of renewed comforts Henry befriended a cousin, the spiritually-minded Charles Emmanuel IV of Savoy, who had abdicated the throne of Sardinia and retired to Frascati. It was naturally to Charles Emmanuel, a personal friend, neighbor, and son in the Catholic Church, with an excellent de jure Jacobite claim deriving from “Minette,” Henriette Anne Stuart, sister of Charles II, that Henry left his rights upon his death, and that of the legitimate Stuart senior line, in 1806. His heir was not, as British propaganda and later Victorian sentimentality had it, George III, to whom Henry was proportionately grateful for the timely disposal of funds to which he felt he had a perfect right. But Cesarini (Henry’s executor) did release some Jacobite jewels and relics into British custody, probably reflecting some warmth from the cardinal towards his Protestant cousins, and the island kingdoms he had never seen.

The Stuarts are easily, and generally, dismissed by the always self-regarding Whiggish tradition of teleological British history as, by and large, doomed Catholic Romantics. The life and career of Henry, especially in juxtaposition to that of his brother, shows most usefully the greater complexity of the truth. Rather than being, like Robert Graves’s Claudians, divided merely into good and bad apples, the Stuarts encompassed not one but two broad dichotomies—between the idealists and the pragmatists, in addition to the religious declivity between unswerving Catholics and eclectic Protestants. Nor do these two kinds of variation, contrary to Whig assumptions past and present, map neatly on to one another. 

In choosing to become not just a son, but a prince of the Catholic Church, Henry did not merely doom his family’s lofty aspirations in the world, critically flickering as these already were. He also proved himself to be the most outstanding example in his entire dynasty of Catholic realism, just as his brother Charles’s remarkable but sad trajectory transmuted him into the epitome of eclectic romanticism. In his humanity, canniness, and cultivation, his private friendships, family affections, and aversion (if at all possible) to high drama, conflict whether military or personal, and unnecessary physical inconvenience, Henry resembles most intriguingly the dynasty’s greatest Protestant realist—his great-great-grand-father, James VI and I. While operatic protagonists abounded all over their family tree, the first Stuart King of England and the last Stuart to claim that title were kind and true both to their intimate friends and to themselves, and died in their beds after leading comfortable, competent careers in the trickiest of circumstances.

Minoo Dinshaw is the author of Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman and a contributing editor of The Lamp.