Charlotte Stuart, styled Duchess of Albany (29 October 1753 – 17 November 1789) was the illegitimate daughter of the Jacobite pretender Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie" or the "Young Pretender") and his only child to survive infancy.
Charlotte's mother was Clementina Walkinshaw, who was mistress to Charles Edward from 1752 until 1760. After years of abuse, Clementina left him, taking Charlotte with her. Charlotte spent most of her life in French convents, estranged from a father who refused to make any provision for her. Unable to marry, she herself became a mistress with illegitimate children, taking Ferdinand de Rohan, Archbishop of Bordeaux, as her lover.
She was finally reconciled with her father in 1784, when he legitimised her and created her Duchess of Albany in the Jacobite peerage. She left her children with her mother, and became her father's carer and companion in the last years of his life, before dying less than two years after him. Her offspring was raised in anonymity; however, as Prince Charles Stuart's only grandchildren, they have been the subject of Jacobite interest since their lineage was uncovered in the 20th century.
Royal parentage
left|thumb|Prince Charles Edward Stuart (portrait by [[Allan Ramsay (artist)|Allan Ramsay, 1745)]]
left|thumb|Clementina Walkinshaw (unknown artist, c. 1760)
Charlotte Stuart was born on 29 October 1753 in Liège to Charles and his mistress, Clementina Walkinshaw. Charles and Clementina had met during the Jacobite rising of 1745, when he came to Scotland from France in an attempt to regain by force the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, which had been lost by his grandfather, James II of England (and VII of Scotland) in 1689. Clementina was the youngest of the ten daughters of John Walkinshaw of Barrowhill. The Walkinshaws owned the lands of Barrowfield and Camlachie, and her father had become a wealthy Glasgow merchant (founding the textile village of Calton). However, he was also an Episcopalian Protestant and a Jacobite who had fought for the Prince's father in the rising of 1715, been captured at the Battle of Sheriffmuir, before escaping from Stirling Castle and fleeing to continental Europe. In 1752, he heard that Clementina was at Dunkirk and in some financial difficulties and so he sent 50 louis d'or to help her and then dispatched Sir Henry Goring to entreat her to come to Ghent and to live with him as his mistress. Goring, who described Clementina as a "bad woman", complained of being used as "no better than a pimp" and soon left Charles's employ. However, by November 1752, Clementina was living with Charles and would remain as his mistress for the following eight years. The couple moved to Liège where Charlotte, their only child, was born on 29 October 1753 and baptised into the Roman Catholic faith at the church of Notre Dame-des-Fonts in Liège.
Separation from father (1760–1783)
The relationship between the prince and Charlotte's mother was disastrous. Charles was already a disillusioned, angry alcoholic when they began living together, and he became violent towards and insanely possessive of Clementina,—was also unable to marry legitimately, having entered the Church as a younger son of a noble house. By him, she had at least three children: two daughters, Charlotte Maximilienne Amélie and Marie Victoire or Victoire Adélaïde, and finally a son, Charles Edward. Her children were kept secret and remained largely unknown until the 20th century. When Charlotte eventually left France for Florence, she entrusted her children, and she was only just recovering from her son's birth, to the care of her mother, and it appears that few, and certainly not her father, knew of their existence.
Reconciliation with her father
Only after his childless marriage to Louise was over, and Charles had fallen seriously ill, did he take an interest in Charlotte. She was now thirty and she had not seen her father since she was seven. On 23 March 1783, he altered his will to make her his heir and, a week later, signed an act of legitimisation. This act, recognising her as his natural daughter and entitling her to succeed to his private estate, was sent to Louis XVI of France. Henry Stuart, however, contested the legitimisation as being irregular and confusing to the succession. Louis XVI eventually did confirm the act and register it with the Parlement of Paris, but not until 6 September 1787.
In July 1784, having granted his wife Louise a legal separation, Charles wrote to his daughter calling her "ma chère fille". In his letter, he summoned Charlotte to Florence, where he was now resident. She arrived in Florence on 5 October 1784. In November, he installed her in the Palazzo Guadagni as Duchess of Albany,
Companion to her father
When Charlotte arrived to live with her father in 1784, he was an ailing alcoholic. She found his physical state disgusting, and he was suffering from mental degeneration and using a litter for travel. He did, however, introduce Charlotte into society, allowing her to wear his mother's famous Sobieska jewellery. She continually, and unsuccessfully, sought gifts of jewels or money from her close-fisted father; but this was probably largely out of a concern for the welfare of her mother and children. Within a month of arriving at Florence, she did manage to persuade her father to provide at last for Clementina. By this time, Charlotte was also in poor health, suffering from an ailment that would result in her death from "obstruction of the liver" just two years after her father. Indeed, shortly after she arrived in Florence, a protruding growth forced her to have clothes altered. The biographer Douglas reports that around this time, a visitor described her as:
<blockquote>
a tall, robust woman of a very dark complexion and a coarse-grained skin, with more of a masculine boldness than feminine modesty or elegancy, but easy and unassuming in her manners, amply possessed of... volubility of tongue and... spirit of coquetry.</blockquote>
Charlotte sorely missed her mother (whom she vainly hoped Charles would allow to come to Rome) and her children, writing to her mother as many as 100 times in a single year; She was successful in helping to organise her father's social life, as well as in persuading him to reduce his drinking in his final years. When staying for a short visit in Pisa with her father, she made a separate visit to her uncle Henry Stuart who was at Perugia. There she was successful in arranging a reconciliation between Henry and Charles.
Final months and death
In December 1785, she enlisted the help of Henry Stuart to get Charles back to the Palazzo Muti in Rome. On arrival in Rome with her father, the Pope welcomed Charlotte as the "Duchess of Albany". In Rome, Charlotte remained her father's carer and companion, and did her best to make his life bearable until he died of a stroke two years later on 30 January 1788. Her sacrifice for him was considerable—she was torn between an evident affection for her father in Rome and her mother and children left behind in Paris. then discovered the letters from Charlotte to her mother from which he wrote his biography of Charles Edward.
Children
It appears that Clementina lived on in Fribourg, Switzerland, until her death in 1802 and that it was she who reared Charlotte's children in deliberate anonymity. Their identities were concealed by a variety of aliases and ruses and were not even being mentioned in Charlotte's detailed will, which makes reference only to Clementina and to Charlotte's desire that Clementina might be able to provide for "her necessitous relations". The reason that the children remained secret can be explained by the fact that the relationship between Archbishop Ferdinand de Rohan and Charlotte, who had been forbidden to marry, was highly illicit and would have been scandalous. He married twice but had no issue.
It was generally believed that Charlotte's daughters also died without issue, They had a son, Antime, and she later died in Vienna in 1836. Antime was the father of Charles and a daughter, Julia-Thérèse, who married Count Leonard Pininski and became Peter Pininski's great-great-grandmother. Pininski's evidence for his thesis has been described as "often indirect, if not elliptical". The Rohans were a large family, and it is easy to confuse its many members. A former chairman of the Royal Stuart Society, however, stated that Pininski's evidence seemed "genuine", and the peerage editor Hugh Massingberd described it as "painstakingly researched ... proof to surely the most sceptical pedant's satisfaction".
Pininski's hypothesis is challenged by the genealogist Marie-Louise Backhurst in three articles in 2013, 2021 and 2023. Backhurst provides evidence that Charlotte's second daughter, who was always called Victoire Adélaïde, was married firstly at St Roch, Paris, in November 1804 to a military doctor, Pierre Joseph Marie de St Ursin, in the service of Napoleon. The marriage record has Victoire Adélaïde Roehenstart, daughter of Maximilien and his wife, Clementine Ruthven, the same parental record as her brother Charles. By St Ursin, she was the mother of Theodore Marie de St Ursin, who was born in Paris on 29 June 1809 and was resident in Paris in 1832. He had entered the seminary of St Sulpice at Issy in 1828 and been ordained a deacon there that year, but died a deacon, aged 29, at Castres, Tarn, on 6 August 1838. In 1823, his mother had married again, to the naval officer , brother of the adopted son of the Duke of Bouillon, and she eventually died at Nice in March 1871.
Backhurst has concluded that Madame Nikorowicz was actually Marie Victoire de Rohan, Mademoiselle de Thorigny (born June 1779), and more likely to have been the illegitimate daughter of Jules Hercule Mériadec, Prince de Rohan, brother of Ferdinand and thus a first cousin to Victoire Adélaïde and without the Stuart descent. Pininski had earlier argued that Backhurst's interpretation had been based on a destroyed document that was "reconstituted" seventy years later and that no document confirmed the birth of Marie Victoire's son.
thumb|Marie Victoire de Thorigny, Madame Nikorowicz—perhaps Charlotte's daughter
Since then, Pininski has responded to Backhurst latest articles in a 2024 paper, in which he argues that every piece of evidence concerning Charlotte's three children is circumstantial, as their parentage is either false or not given in primary sources.
Pininski mentions that Charlotte's correspondence with her mother indicates the existence of a fourth child, Marie Aglaë, who has not been accounted for (and perhaps died young). He explains this by remarking that the idea Charlotte only had three children as indicated by her letters to her mother might be incorrect, since it could be that the children were not always together.
Furthermore, while he accepts that Marie Victoire and Victoire Adélaïde were probably different people, he rejects the possibility that the former might have been a natural daughter of Jules de Rohan. Pininski asserts that the two women were most likely siblings, both daughters of Charlotte Stuart and Ferdinand de Rohan. He maintains that the parentage of Madame Nikorowicz given in the baptismal record as Jules Hercule and Marie Grosset (the daughter of his secretary) seems to be fabricated, and refers to the refusal of the Abbé Barnabé of Veigné (near Tours) to baptise Charlotte's son, called Auguste Maximilian or Charles Edward, as a child of Jules as evidence.
According to Pininski, Jules Hercule was not known to have been unfaithful to his wife and would have been unlikely to sire Marie Victoire, as by 1779 he was 53 years old. Neither would he have had reason to recognize the child of "so humble a mother", nor grant her the prestigious style of "Demoiselle de Thorigny". Pininski also notes that when Marie Grosset was paid off by Jules de Rohan in 1782 for "services rendered" there was no mention of such a daughter. On the other hand, Charlotte Maximilienne and Victoire Adélaïde remained in France and both seem to have married middle-class men. Burns wrote:
<blockquote><poem>
This lovely maid's of royal blood,
That ruled Albion's kingdoms three;
But Oh, Alas! for her bonnie face,
They hae wrang'd the lass of Albany.</poem></blockquote>
Notes and references
Sources
- Douglas, Hugh (2004) "Walkinshaw, Clementine, styled countess of Albestroff (c.1720–1802)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, , retrieved 2007-12-14 (subscription required)
- Magnusson, Magnus, Scotland: The Story of a Nation London, 2000 HarperCollins
- Pininski, Peter, The Stuarts' Last Secret Tuckwell Press, 2001
- Pittock, Murray G. H. (September 2004; online edn, May 2006) "Charles Edward (1720–1788)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, , retrieved 2007-12-14 (subscription required)
- Uilleam Stiùbhart, Domhnall, The cursed fruits of Charlie's loins? in The Scotsman 15 April 2005 (The Scotsman.com)