Charles Edward Stuart Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
- For the U.S. politician, see Charles E. Stuart
Despite his strong associations with Scotland, Charles was born in Rome, Italy, and brought up there with his father who was in exile having failed to regain the thrones of the Great Britain and Ireland from which his own father, King James II of England, had been deposed in 1688. In 1743, Charles fought at the Battle of Dettingen, where the British army was led by his chief rival, King George II. Two years later, the French invited him from Rome where he was living with his father to take part in an invasion of Britain and to lead a Jacobite rising on behalf of his father. The fleet was badly damaged by storms and the invasion abandoned, but Charles raised funds to fit out two ships one of which successfully landed him with seven companions at Eriskay on July 23, 1745.
The Jacobite cause was still supported by many Highland Clans, both Catholic and Episcopalian, and the Catholic Charles hoped for a warm welcome from these clans to start an insurgency by Jacobites throughout Britain, but there was no immediate response. Charles raised his father's standard at Glenfinnan and there raised a large enough force to enable him to march on the City of Edinburgh, which quickly surrendered. In September he defeated the only government army in Scotland at the Battle of Prestonpans, and by November was marching south at the head of around 6,000 men. Having taken Carlisle and progressed as far as Derby, he found himself beset by conflicting advice and agreed to turn back. Now he was pursued by the king's son, the Duke of Cumberland, who caught up with him at the Battle of Culloden on January 17, 1746, and inflicted a heavy defeat on the half-starved and demoralised Jacobite army.
Bonnie Prince Charlie's subsequent flight has become the stuff of legend, and is commemorated in the popular folk song "The Skye Boat Song" (lyrics 1884, tune traditional). Assisted by loyal supporters such as Flora Macdonald, he escaped the country, arriving back in France in September. The remainder of his life was spent in drunken idleness and debauchery. Although he married, in 1772, Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, known as the Countess of Albany, the marriage was unsuccessful and childless.
Prince Charles Edward Stuart died in Rome, and is buried in Saint Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. The death of his brother, Henry Benedict Stuart in 1807, ended the legitimate Stuart Royal line.
The prince did have a child, his bastard daughter, Charlotte, Duchess of Albany, his child by Clementina Walkinshaw (later known as Countess von Alberstrof). She was legitimated in 1783 by an Act of Legitimation signed in Paris by her father. However, this made no difference to her actual status as a bastard, since her father never married her mother. Therefore, she was never a legitimate heir to her father. Charlotte, who died in 1789, never married but she did have two daughters and a son by her lover, Prince Ferdinand de Rohan. Raised in strictest secrecy, their identities concealed by a variety of alias and ruses, all three children were thought to have left no issue, but it has been discovered that one of them did.
According to a well-reviewed and scrupulously footnoted book, "The Stuarts' Last Secret" by Peter Pininski (Tuckwell Press, 2001), Charlotte's younger daughter, Marie Victoire de Rohan, demoiselle de Thorigny, married Paul Anthony Louis Bertrand de Nikorowicz, a Polish nobleman. Their granddaughter, Julia de Nikorowicz, married Count Leonard Pininski and became author Peter Pininski's great-great-grandmother.
There is a public house named after the Bonnie Prince in Chellaston, Derby.
| Preceded by: "James VIII and III" | Jacobite succession | Succeeded by: '"Henry IX" |
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