rts to restore
him to a worthier life, yet not obstinate enough to refuse unnecessary
pecuniary aid from the very government and persons by whom he had been
so cruelly outraged. We hear that Charles Edward's confessor, with whom,
despite his secret abjuration of Catholicism, he continued to associate,
was a notorious drunkard; and that the mistress with whom he lived for
many years, and whom he even passed off as his wife, was also addicted
to drinking; nay, Lord Elcho is said to have witnessed a tipsy squabble
between the Young Pretender and Miss Walkenshaw, the lady in question,
across the table of a low Paris tavern. The reports of the many spies
whom the English Government set everywhere on his traces are constant
and unanimous in one item of information: the Prince began to drink
early in the morning, and was invariably dead drunk by the evening; nay,
some letters of Cardinal York, addressed to an unknown Jacobite, speak
of the "nasty bottle, that goes on but too much, and certainly must at
last kill him." But, although drunkenness undoubtedly did much to
obliterate whatever still remained of the hero of the '45, it was
itself only one of the proofs of the strange metamorphosis which had
taken place in his character. We cannot admit the plea of some of his
biographers, who would save his honour at the price of his reason.
Charles Edward was the victim neither of an hereditary vice nor of a
mental disease; drink was in his case not a form of madness, but merely
the ruling passion of a broken-spirited and degraded nature. He had the
power when he married, and even much later in life, when he sent for his
illegitimate daughter, of refraining from his usual excesses; his will,
impaired though it was, still existed, and what was wanting in the sad
second half of his career was not resolution, but conscience, pride, an
ideal, anything which might beget the desire of reform. The curious
mixture of brow-beating moroseness with a brazen readiness to accept and
even extort favours, he would appear, as he ceased to be young, to have
gradually inherited from his father; he was ready to live on the alms of
the French Court, while never losing an opportunity of declaiming
against the ignoble treatment which that same Court had inflicted on
him. He became sordid and grasping in money matters, basely begging
for money, which he did not require, from those who, like Gustavus III.
of Sweden, discovered only too late that he was demean