and head spy over the
Stuarts in Italy, kept the Pretender well in sight; but, in fact, things
had now become so public that spying had grown unnecessary. Already,
the year following the removal from Rome to Florence, Sir Horace Mann
wrote to Walpole that the Pretender's health was giving way beneath his
excesses of eating and drinking; dyspepsia and dropsy were beginning,
and a sofa had been ordered for his opera-box, that he might conveniently
snooze through the performance. For neither drunkenness nor ailments
would induce Charles Edward to let his wife out of his sight for a
minute. His systematic jealousy may possibly have originated, as the
English Minister reports Charles Edward to have himself declared, from
fear lest there might attach to the birth of any possible heir of his
those doubts of legitimacy which are almost invariably the lot of a
pretender; but there can be no doubt that jealousy was an essential
feature of his character, in which it amounted almost to monomania. He
had caged his mistress long after he had ceased, by his own avowal, to
care for her; he now caged his wife, and with probably about as much or
as little affection. He had fenced up Miss Walkenshaw's bed with tables
and chairs fitted with bells which the slightest touch set ringing;
he now (and so early as 1775) barricaded all avenues to his wife's
room excepting the one through his own. Very soon, also, the gross
and violent language, the blows which had fallen to the lot of the
half-tipsy mistress, were to be shared by the virtuous and patient wife.

[Illustration: LOUISE, COUNTESS OF ALBANY
_From a pastel once in the possession of the heirs of Fabre, now
in the possession of Mrs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place,
Winchfield, Hants._]

For virtuous and patient all accounts unite in showing the young
Countess of Albany to have been. In that corrupt Florence of the corrupt
eighteenth century, where every married woman was furnished, within two
years of her marriage, with an officially appointed lover who sat in her
dressing-room while she was finishing her toilet, who accompanied her
on all her visits, who attended her to balls and theatres, and, in fact,
entirely replaced, by the strict social necessities of the system of
cicisbeism, the husband, who was similarly employed about the wife
of another; in this society, where conjugal infidelity was a social
organisation supplemented by every kind of individual caprice of
gal