Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/277

 PRINCE CHARLES STUART 185 proclaimed that he would never marry to beget royal beggars. He certainly visited Sweden ; there was talk of him as a candidate for the Polish crown. For many years (1749-1755) neither James nor the English Government knew where Charles really was. Grimm says that for three years he lay hidden in the house of a lady in Paris, a friend of the Princesse de Tallemant. A sportsman and a lover of the open air is not likely to have loitered so long with Armida in a secret chamber. There is tattle about him in D'Argenson's " Memoirs ; " a disguised shabby prjjfce appears now and then, none knows whence, and vanishes. In the papers of Charles Stuart, Comte d'Albanie, one finds a trace of a visit paid by the prince to Ireland. There is evidence, in the State Papers, that he was not far from Paris, in June, 1749. We have it under his own hand, in the Stuart Papers at Windsor, that he visited London on September 5, 1 750, returning to Paris on September i3th. Here, as we know from the document left by Archibald Came- ron, Lochiel's brother, the last man executed for the rising, or rather for a later plot, Charles renounced the Catholic faith, Charles himself gives 1 750 as the date of this conversion. It came five years too late, and he recanted his recanta- tion. He was in England again later (1752), and held his last council in Merri- worth Castle in Kent. There is a legend of his ghost haunting a house in Godal- ming, which probably comes from a tradition of his residence there. Since 1 750 or thereabouts, a Miss Clementina Walkinshaw, of Barrowfield, had been his mis- tress. He is said to have met her near Glasgow, and flirted with her ; when or where she fled to him on the continent is obscure. Mr. Ewald supposes her to have been with him in Paris before the affair of Vincennes (1748). The writer, however, has seen a letter from Paris to a sister of Miss Walkinshaw describ- ing the arrest at the Opera House, without the most distant allusion to Clemen- tina, about whom her sister would be concerned. Clementina, judging by a minia- ture, was a lady with very large black eyes ; a portrait in oil gives a less favorable view of her charms. In 1754 Charles was again in England, and in Nottingham. He actually walked in Hyde Park, where someone, recognizing him, tried to kneel to him. He therefore returned at once to France. He is reported to have come back in 1755* or 1756, braving the reward of ,30,000 for his head. The Jacobites now requested him to dismiss Clementina Walkinshaw, whose eldest sister was a lady housekeeper in the Hanoverian family. A scrap in Charles's hand at Windsor proves that he regarded some lady as a possible traitor, but he declined to be dictated to, in his household matters, by his adherents. This gave the English Jacobites an excuse for turning their coats, of which they availed themselves. Sir Walter Scott makes the romance of " Redgauntlet " hang on the incident. About this time jottings of Charles prove that he fancied himself a Republican. He hated Louis XV., and declined on one occasion to act as a bug-bear (tpouvantair), at the request of France. He had already struck a medal in honor of the British Navy and contempt of the French. He is now lost sight of till 1760, when Miss Walkinshaw, with his daughter, left his protec- tion for that of a convent. This lady, in some letters, now unluckily lost, en- deavored to persuade her family that she was married to the prince. A later myth