he real
tragedy threatened. Charles Edward had outraged and beaten his mistress;
older and much more profoundly degraded, he now outraged and beat his
wife. In 1780 Sir Horace Mann reports upon the "cruel and indecent
behaviour" of which Mme. d'Albany was the victim. Ill-treatment and
terror were beginning to undermine her health, and there can be no
doubt, I think, that the symptoms of a nervous disorder, of which she
complained a couple of years later to Alfieri's bosom friend Gori, must
originally have been produced in this unusually robust young woman by
the horrible treatment to which she was at this time subjected. Mme.
d'Albany, who had astonished the world by her resignation, appears to
have fairly taken fright; she wrote to her brother-in-law Cardinal
York, entreating him to protect her from her husband. The weak-minded,
conscientious cardinal was not the man to take any bold step; he promised
his sister-in-law all possible assistance if she were driven to
extremities, but begged her to endure a little longer and save him the
pain of a scandal. So the Countess of Albany, long since abandoned by
her own kith and kin, abandoned also by her brother-in-law, alone in the
world between a husband who was daily becoming more and more of a wild
beast, and a lover who was fearful of giving any advice which might
compromise her reputation or separate them for ever, went on suffering.

But the moment came when she could suffer no more. At the beginning of
the winter of 1780, the celebration of St. Andrew's day by Charles
Edward and his drinking companions, was followed by a scene over which
Alfieri drops a modest veil, calling it vaguely a violent bacchanal
which endangered the life of his lady. From the biographers of Charles
Edward we learn that the Pretender roused his wife in the middle of
the night with a torrent of insulting language which provoked her to
vehement recriminations; that he beat her, committed foul acts upon her,
and finished off with attempting to choke her in her bed, in which he
would probably have succeeded had the servants not been waked by the
Countess's screams and dragged Charles Edward away.[1]

Alfieri, partly from an honourable reluctance to see his lady made the
heroine of a public scandal, and partly, no doubt, from the more selfish
fear lest a separation from her husband might imply a separation also
from her lover, had long persisted in advising the Countess against any
extreme measure.