A History of the Four Georges, Volume I | Page 6

slightest foundation
for the absurd story about the spurious heir to the throne. Some little
excuse was given for the spread of such a tale by the mere fact that
there had been delay in summoning the proper officials to be present at
the birth; but despite all the pains Bishop Burnet takes to make the
report seem trustworthy, it may be doubted whether any one whose
opinion was worth having seriously believed in the story, even at the
time, and it soon ceased to have any believers at all. At the time,
however, it was accepted as an article of faith by a large proportion of
the outer public; and the supposed Jesuit plot and the supposed
warming-pan served as missiles with which to pelt the supporters of the
Stuarts, until long after there had ceased to be the slightest chance
whatever of a Stuart restoration. This story of a spurious heir to a
throne repeats itself at various intervals of history. The child of
Napoleon the First and Maria Louisa was believed by many Legitimist
partisans to be supposititious. In our own days there were many
intelligent persons in France firmly convinced that the unfortunate

Prince Louis Napoleon, who was killed in Zululand, was not the son of
the Empress of the French, but that he was the son of her sister, the
Duchess of Alva, and that he was merely palmed off on the French {11}
people in order to secure the stability of the Bonapartist throne.
[Sidenote: 1714--The "Old Pretender"]
James Stuart was born, as we have said, on June 10, 1688, and was
therefore still in his twenty-sixth year at the time when this history
begins. Soon after his birth his mother hurried with him to France to
escape the coming troubles, and his father presently followed
discrowned. He had led an unhappy life--unhappy all the more because
of the incessant dissipation with which he tried to enliven it. He is
described as tall, meagre, and melancholy. Although not strikingly like
Charles the First or Charles the Second, he had unmistakably the Stuart
aspect. Horace Walpole said of him many years after that, "without the
particular features of any Stuart, the Chevalier has the strong lines and
fatality of air peculiar to them all." The words "fatality of air" describe
very expressively that look of melancholy which all the Stuart features
wore when in repose. The melancholy look represented an underlying
habitual mood of melancholy, or even despondency, which a close
observer may read in the character of the "merry monarch" himself, for
all his mirth and his dissipation, just as well as in that of Charles the
First or of James the Second. The profligacy of Charles the Second had
little that was joyous in it. James Stuart, the Chevalier, had not the
abilities and the culture of Charles the Second, and he had much the
same taste for intrigue and dissipation. His amours were already
beginning to be a scandal, and he drank now and then like a man
determined at all cost to drown thought. He was always the slave of
women. Women knew all his secrets, and were made acquainted with
his projected political enterprises. Sometimes the fair favorite to whom
he had unbosomed himself blabbed and tattled all over Versailles or
Paris of what she had heard, and in some instances, perhaps, she even
took her newly-acquired knowledge to the English Ambassador and
disposed of it for a consideration. At this time James Stuart is not yet
married; but marriage made as little {12} difference in his way of
living as it had done in that of his elderly political rival, George the

Elector. It is strange that James Stuart should have made so faint an
impression upon history and upon literature. Romance and poetry,
which have done so much for his son, "Bonnie Prince Charlie," have
taken hardly any account of him. He figures in Thackeray's "Esmond,"
but the picture is not made very distinct, even by that master of
portraiture, and the merely frivolous side of his character is presented
with disproportionate prominence. James Stuart had stronger qualities
for good or evil than Thackeray seems to have found in him. Some of
his contemporaries denied him the credit of man's ordinary courage; he
has even been accused of positive cowardice; but there does not seem
to be the slightest ground for such an accusation. Studied with the
severest eye, his various enterprises, and the manner in which he bore
himself throughout them, would seem to prove that he had courage
enough for any undertaking. Princes seldom show any want of physical
courage. They are trained from their very birth to regard themselves as
always on parade; and even if they should feel their hearts give way in
presence of danger,