Clementina Walkinshaw - Relationship With Charles Stuart

Relationship With Charles Stuart

After the defeat of the Prince's rebellion at Culloden in April 1746, Charles fled Scotland for France. In the following years, he had a scandalous affair with his 22-year-old first cousin Louise de Montbazon (who was married to his close friend, and whom he deserted when she became pregnant) and then with the Princess of Talmont, who was in her 40s. In 1752, he heard that Clementina was at Dunkirk and in some financial difficulties, so he sent 50 louis d'or to help her and then dispatched Sir Henry Goring to entreat her to come to Ghent and 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 shortly after left Charles' employ. However, by November 1752, Clementina was living with Charles, and was to 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 Sainte Marie-des-Fonts.

The relationship between prince and mistress was disastrous. Charles was already a disillusioned, angry alcoholic when they began living together, and he became violent towards, and insanely possessive of, Clementina, treating her as a "submissive whipping post". Often away from home on "jaunts", he seldom referred to his daughter, and when he did, it was as "ye cheild". During a temporary move to Paris, the Prince's lieutenants record ugly public arguments between the two, and that his drunkenness and temper were damaging his reputation. By 1760, they were in Basel, and Clementina had had enough of his intoxication and their nomadic lifestyle. She contacted Charles's staunchly Roman Catholic father James Stuart ('the Old Pretender') and expressed a desire to secure a Catholic education for Charlotte and to retire to a convent. (In 1750, during an incognito visit to London, Charles had nominally disavowed Roman Catholicism for the Anglican Church.) James agreed to pay her an annuity of 10,000 livres and, in July 1760, there is evidence to suggest he aided her escape from the watchful Charles, with the seven year-old Charlotte, to the convent of the Nuns of the Visitation in Paris. She left a letter for Charles expressing her devotion to him but complaining she had had to flee in fear of her life. A furious Charles circulated descriptions of them both, but it was to no avail.