al, accepted ecclesiastical rank, and a
cluster of rich benefices. A breach between Charles and James followed,
which was never healed, despite the touching letters of the king to his
"dearest Carluccio." Charles betook himself to adventurous and secret
projects. In the Highlands he had learned to seek the consolation of the
poor, and to forget hunger, cold, misery, and sorrow in drink. He drank
"our best bowlsman," says an islander, under the table. The habit soon
dominated him, and--with his disgraceful arrest and imprisonment, when
he refused to acknowledge the peace of Aix la Chapelle and to withdraw
from France--soured his character and ruined his life. Released from
Vincennes, he hurried to the then Papal city of Avignon, where he
introduced boxing-matches. England threatened to bombard Civita Vecchia,
and Charles had to depart. Whither he went no man knows. There is a
Jacobite tract of 1750, purporting to be written by his equerry, Henry
Goring. According to this, Charles, Goring, and a mysterious Comte de la
Luze (Marshal Keith?), went to Lyons, Dijon, Strasbourg. Here Charles
rescued a beautiful girl from a fire, and honorably declined to take
advantage of her manifest passion for her preserver. The party was
attacked by assassins, Charles shot two of them, La Luze and Goring
accounted for others. They took ship from some northern coast, were
tempest-driven to an unfriendly port, visited, apparently, Frederick the
Great, spent some time in Lithuania, and there are hints of a love
affair, though Charles had already proclaimed that he would never
marry to beget royal beggars. He certainly visited Sweden; there was
talk of him as a candidate for the Polish crown. For many years
(1749-1755) neither James nor the English Government knew where Charles
really was. Grimm says that for three years he lay hidden in the house
of a lady in Paris, a friend of the Princesse de Tallemant. A sportsman
and a lover of the open air is not likely to have loitered so long with
Armida in a secret chamber. There is tattle about him in D'Argenson's
"Memoirs;" a disguised shabby prince appears now and then, none knows
whence, and vanishes. In the papers of Charles Stuart, Comte d'Albanie,
one finds a trace of a visit paid by the prince to Ireland. There is
evidence, in the State Papers, that he was not far from Paris, in June,
1749. We have it under his own hand, in the Stuart Papers at Windsor,
that he visited London on September 5, 175