James Francis Edward Stuart
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- James Francis Edward Stuart
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(1688 - 1766) called The Pretender, s. of James II (d. 1701); taken to France 1688; P. of Wales until 1701; proclaimed James III by Louis XIV; abortive expeditions to Scotland 1706 and 1708 as the self-proclaimed chevalier de St Georges; fought with French army 1708 - 9; in Bar-le-Duc, Lorraine, 1712 - 15; expedition to Scotland 1716; Lorraine, Avignon, 1717; Spain 1719; m. 1719 Princess Clementina Sobieska (d. 1735); 2 s., Charles Edward and Henry Benedict; d. Rome.
1717 - 66 principally Rome (Mar. 1717 - d. 1 Jan. 1766)
Following the failure of the 1715 rebellion in Scotland, James had returned to the exiled Stuart Court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, but British diplomatic pressure soon compelled him to leave. He accept an invitation to Rome from Pope Clement XI who welcomed him as a Catholic claimant to the English throne and made him an annual allowance. On his arrival in Rome in March 1717 James stayed in the Palazzo Gualterio, before moving in July to the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. In March 1719 he went to Spain to witness the start of the abortive Jacobite expedition to Scotland, contrived by the Spanish minister Cardinal Alberoni. He had returned to Italy by June when he met his bride, the eighteen-year-old Polish Princess Clementina Sobieska, in Viterbo; he had already been betrothed by proxy at Bologna on 9 May, see James Murray. Following their marriage at Montefiascone on 2 September 1719 they returned to Rome,1 James alleging that she combined the loveliness of seventeen with the sound sense and discrimination of thirty.2
The Pope acknowledged James and Clementina as reigning sovereigns and gave them the Palazzo Muti (on the Piazza SS.Apostoli), with the Palazzo Savelli at Albano as a summer residence. Their first son Charles was born on 31 December 1720. The Jacobite court soon settled into an annual routine: a grand reception on New Year's Eve to mark Prince Charles's birthday, a special mass on St George's Day at SS.Apostoli, and a formal visit from James to the Pope each May before his court retired to Albano for the summer; concerts at the Palazzo were widely attended. The Jacobite cause remained attractive in the 1720s as disaffection grew in Britain with Walpole's whig government and the Hanoverian George I. For the British traveller James was a fascinating presence in Rome, but for the British government he remained a threat. Since Britain had no formal diplomatic relationship with the Vatican, Whitehall used unofficial agents in Italy, of whom the most influential were Cardinal Alessandro Albani and the Prussian antiquarian Baron Philip von Stosch (whose diplomatic correspondence was conducted in French under the pseudonym of John Walton). The death of George I in 1727 appeared to provide James with another opportunity to assert his claims, and he departed for Avignon and Lorraine, only to be recalled by the Pope who feared British reaction.
James rejoined Clementina in Bologna in January 1728, staying in the Palazzo Vizzani,3 but their marriage was by now proving difficult. Following the birth of their second son, Henry, on 6 March 1725, the now querulous Clementina had retreated to the Ursuline convent of S.Cecilia, returning only after James had agreed to dismiss Colonel John Hay, his very competent, but Protestant, secretary of state. Her life was now devoted to piety, but her fasting and inactivity brought on her early death in Rome in 1735. Thereupon James developed a contrite piety of his own, and his relationships with his sons, particularly Charles, became brittle. Cunningham described him in 1736 as 'a tall, thin, raw-boned man with a sallow complexion and a pretty high nose, with a strong likeness of all the Stuart Family, though upon other occasions we observed him have a melancholy cast'.4 Thomas Gray called him 'a thin ill-made man, extremely tall and aukward, of a most unpromising countenance, a good deal resembling King James the Second [with] extremely the air and look of an idiot, particularly when he laughs or prays'.5
James appeared less in public, spending much of his time at Albano; the failure of his son's expedition to Scotland in 1745, the final Jacobite offensive, seems not to have surprised him. He was occasionally seen in his box at the opera in Rome, and in 1758 and 1762 he attended the annual prize-giving ceremonies at the Accademia di S.Luca.6 He died in Rome on 1 January 1766 and was accorded a state funeral by the Pope; he was buried in St Peter's.
In 1718 James had appointed Antonio David as his painter; he was also painted by Trevisani in 1720 (Holyrood) by Girolamo Pesci in 1721 (Bodleian Library, Oxford),7 and by Torelli in 1727.8 Of his later portraits he sat to Liotard in 1737 (SNPG) and there is a drawing by Francesco Ponzone of c.1741.8
1. See J. Lees-Milne, Last Stuarts; Skinner, Scots in Italy, and C. Petrie, Jacobite Movement. 2. Petrie (at n1), 23. Jesse, Selwyn, 1:117. 3. ASB am 118, b.118, fasc.19 (residence 1726 - 9). 4. Scots Charta Chest, 115. 5. Gray Letters, 1:167. 6. ANSL 51, f.121r; 52, f.39r. 7. Rawlinson jnl.MSS (3, 24 Apr. 1721). 8. Kerslake 1977, 156 - 9.