bborn graspingness of a
Stuart. His further behaviour towards Miss Walkenshaw shows the same
indifference to everything except what he considered his own rights. He
had crudely admitted that he cared nothing for her, that it was only
because his adherents wished her dismissal that he did not pack her off;
and subsequently he seems to have given himself so little thought either
for his mistress or for his child by her, that, without the benevolence
of his brother the Cardinal, they might have starved. But when, after
long endurance of his jealousy and brutality, after being watched like
a prisoner and beaten like a slave, the wretched woman at length took
refuge in a convent, Charles Edward's rage knew no bounds; and he
summoned the French Government, despite his old quarrel with it, to
kidnap and send back the woman over whom he had no legal rights, and
certainly no moral ones, with the obstinacy and violence of a drunken
navvy clamouring for the wife whom he has well-nigh done to death.
Beyond the mere intemperance and the violence born of intemperance which
made Charles Edward's name a byword and served the Hanoverian dynasty
better than all the Duke of Cumberland's gibbets, there was at the
bottom of the Pretender's character--his second character at least, his
character after the year 1750--heartlessness and selfishness, an absence
of all ideal and all gratitude, much more morally repulsive than any
mere vice, and of which the vice which publicly degraded him was the
result much more than the cause. The curse of kingship in an age
when royalty had lost all utility, the habit of irresponsibility, of
indifference, the habit of always claiming and never giving justice,
love, self-sacrifice, all the good things of this world, this curse had
lurked, an evil strain, in the nature of this king without a kingdom,
and had gradually blighted and made hideous what had seemed an almost
heroic character. Royal-souled Charles Edward Stuart had certainly
been in his youth; brilliant with all those virtues of endurance,
clemency, and affability which the earlier eighteenth century still
fondly associated with the divine right of kings; and royal-souled, hard
and weak with all the hardness and weakness, the self-indulgence,
obstinacy, and thoughtlessness for others of effete races of kings, he
had become no less certainly, in the second part of his life; branded
with God's own brand of unworthiness, which signifies that a people, or