Louisa Maria Teresa Stuart - Life

Life

Louisa was the only full sibling of Prince James Francis Edward, the 'Old Pretender', to survive infancy, and was four years younger than her brother. The two were brought up together in France.

Louisa's tutor was an English Roman Catholic priest, Father Constable, who taught her Latin, history, and religion. She also had a governess, the Countess of Middleton, wife of the Jacobite peer Charles, 2nd Earl of Middleton. James Drummond, 4th Earl of Perth, another Jacobite peer living in France, praised the child's natural affability.

An allegorical portrait by Alexis Simon Belle of James Francis Edward and his sister Louisa Maria, showing the prince as a guardian angel leading his sister under the gaze of cherubim, was painted in 1699 and is now in the Royal Collection.

By the summer of 1701, King James was seriously ill, and had been away from Saint Germain seeking medical treatment, accompanied by his wife. However, in June the two returned home for the birthdays of their two children, and two months later James suffered a stroke, dying just two weeks later on 16 September. He was still able to talk when his children visited him for the last time, and to Louisa Maria he said:

Adieu, my dear child. Serve your creator in the days of your youth. Consider virtue as the greatest ornament of your sex. Follow close the great pattern of it, your mother, who has been, no less than myself, over-clouded with calumny. But time, the mother of truth, will, I hope, at last make her virtues shine as bright as the sun.

Soon after James's death, Louis XIV proclaimed James Francis Edward as king of England, Scotland and Ireland, and he was also formally recognised as king by Spain, the Papal States and Modena. He and his sister Louisa Maria were transferred to Passy, into the care of Antoine Nompar de Caumont and his wife, with Lady Middleton continuing as Louisa Maria's governess there.

In 1705, at the age of thirteen, Louisa Maria was a guest of honour at a ball at the Château de Marly, ranking only after Louis XIV himself, her own mother Queen Mary, and her brother James Francis Edward, considered by Louis to be another King.

On 23 March 1708, after a delay caused by the measles, the young James attempted a landing on Scottish soil, at the Firth of Forth, supported by a fleet of French ships. However, the force was driven off by a Royal Navy fleet led by Admiral Byng.

Louisa Maria enjoyed dancing and the opera, and became popular at the French court. Two possible matches for her were considered, with Louis XIV's grandson Charles, Duke of Berry (1686–1714), and with King Charles XII of Sweden (1682–1718). Neither took place, the first apparently due to Louisa Maria's equivocal position, and the second because the young King of Sweden was not a Roman Catholic.

Louisa felt keenly that Jacobites in exile had made huge sacrifices for her family, and she herself paid for the daughters of many of them to be educated. In this, she made no distinction between Roman Catholics and Protestants, supporting the daughters of both.