that James showed himself in
the slightest degree worthy of the crown towards which he reached.
Indeed, his conduct showed a reckless indifference to the means most
likely to attain that crown which it is difficult to account for. When
everything depended for the success of his schemes upon the friends he
made abroad and the favor he retained at home, he wantonly acted as if
his dearest purpose was to alienate the one and to wholly lose the
other. His conduct towards his wife, and his persistent and stupid
favoritism of the Mar man and woman--especially the woman--drove the
injured and indignant Clementine into a convent, and made the great
European {201} princes of Spain, Germany, and Rome his adversaries.
Spain refused him entrance to the kingdom unaccompanied by his wife;
the Pope struck him a heavier blow in diminishing by one-half the
income that had hitherto been allowed him from the Papal treasury. But
worse than the loss of foreign friends, worse even than the loss of the
Sistine subsidy, was the effect which his treatment of his wife
produced in the countries which he aspired to rule. His wisest
followers wrote to him that he had done more to injure his cause by his
conduct to Clementine than by anything else in his ill-advised career.
At last even James took alarm; his stubborn nature was forced to yield;
the obnoxious favorites were dismissed, and a reconciliation of a kind
was effected between the Stuart king and queen. But fidelity was a
quality difficult enough for James to practise, and when the Queen died
in 1735 it is said that she found death not unwelcome.

[Sidenote: 1734-1735--Charles in his first campaign]

In the mean time the young Prince Charles grew up to early manhood.
Princes naturally begin the world at an earlier age than most men, and
Charles may be said to have begun the world in 1734, when, as we have
seen, at the age of fourteen, he took part in the siege of Gaeta as a
general of artillery, and bore himself, according to overwhelming
testimony, as became a soldier. Up to this time his education had been
pursued with something like regularity; and if at all times he
preferred rowing, riding, hunting, and shooting to graver and more
secluded pleasures, he was not in this respect peculiar among young
men, princes or otherwise. If, too, he never succeeded in overcoming
the difficulties which the spelling of the English language presented,
and if his handwriting always remained slov