Charlotte Stuart, Duchess of Albany

For the next twelve years, Clementina and Charlotte continued to live in various French convents, supported by the 10,000-livre pension granted by James Stuart.[15] Charles never forgave Clementina for depriving him of "ye cheild", and stubbornly refused to pay anything for their support.[15] On 1 January 1766 James died, but Charles, now considering himself de jure Charles III of Scotland, England and Ireland, still refused to make any provision for the two, forcing Clementina, now styling herself Countess Alberstroff, to appeal to his brother Cardinal Henry Stuart for assistance. Henry gave them an allowance of 5,000 livres, but in return extracted a statement from Clementina that she had never been married to Charles—a statement she later tried to retract.[18]

Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, Charles's wife. She was only months older than his daughter Charlotte.

In 1772, the Prince, then aged fifty-one, married the nineteen-year-old Princess Louise of Stolberg-Gedern, who was only a year older than Charlotte.[19] Charlotte, now in penury, had consistently been writing to her father for some time, and she now desperately entreated him to legitimise her, provide support and bring her to Rome before an heir could be born. In April 1772, Charlotte wrote a touching, yet pleading, letter to "mon Auguste Papa" which was sent via Principal Gordon of the Scots College in Rome.[20] Charles relented and offered to bring Charlotte to Rome—he was now resident in the Palazzo Muti, the residence of the Stuarts-in-exile—but only on condition she would leave her mother behind in France. This she loyally refused to do, and Charles, in fury, broke off all discussions.[21]

A painting of Charlotte by Hugh Douglas Hamilton (c. 1770)

Towards the end of 1772, Clementina and Charlotte unexpectedly arrived in Rome to press their desperate cause in person.[22] However, the Prince reacted angrily, refusing even to see them, forcing their helpless return to France, from where Charlotte's pleading letters continued.[23][22] Three years later, Charlotte, now in her twenty-second year was in poor health. She was apparently suffering from a liver ailment shared by the Stuarts and decided her only option was to marry as soon as possible. Charles, however, refused to give permission either for her to marry or to take the veil, and she was left awaiting his royal pleasure.[24]

Ferdinand-Maximilien-Mériadec de Rohan (1738–1812), Archbishop of Bordeaux in 1769

Lacking legitimacy or permission, Charlotte was unable to marry.[25] Therefore she sought a protector and provider. Probably unbeknown to Charles, she became the mistress of Ferdinand Maximilien Mériadec de Rohan, Archbishop of Bordeaux and Cambrai.[25] Ferdinand de Rohan—related by blood to the house of Stuart as well as Bourbon and Lorraine[26]—was also unable to marry legitimately, having entered the Church as a younger son of a noble house. By him, she had three children: two daughters, Marie Victoire and Charlotte, and finally a son, Charles Edward.[27] Her children were kept secret and remained largely unknown until the 20th century.[28] When Charlotte eventually left France for Florence, she entrusted her children, and she was only just recovering from her son's birth,[29] to the care of her mother, and it appears that few, and certainly not her father, knew of their existence.[27]

When Charlotte arrived to live with her father in 1784, he was an ailing alcoholic. She found his physical state disgusting, and he was suffering from mental degeneration and using a litter for travel.[29] He did, however, introduce Charlotte into society, allowing her to wear his mother's famous Sobieska jewellery.[34] She continually, and unsuccessfully, sought gifts of jewels or money from her close-fisted father;[35] but this was probably largely out of a concern for the welfare of her mother and children.[35] Within a month of arriving at Florence, she did manage to persuade her father to provide at last for Clementina.[31] By this time, Charlotte was also in poor health, suffering from an ailment that would result in her death from "obstruction of the liver" just two years after her father. Indeed, shortly after she arrived in Florence, a protruding growth forced her to have clothes altered.[35] The biographer Douglas reports that around this time, a visitor described her as:[31]

a tall, robust woman of a very dark complexion and a coarse-grained skin, with more of a masculine boldness than feminine modesty or elegancy, but easy and unassuming in her manners, amply possessed of... volubility of tongue and... spirit of coquetry.

Charlotte sorely missed her mother (whom she vainly hoped Charles would allow to come to Rome) and her children, writing to her mother as many as 100 times in a single year;[10] she also feared that Rohan would take another lover; all this is revealed in her dispirited letters home, as she awaited Charles's death.[36] She was successful in helping to organise her father's social life, as well as in persuading him to reduce his drinking in his final years.[37] When staying for a short visit in Pisa with her father, she made a separate visit to her uncle Henry Stuart who was at Perugia. There she was successful in arranging a reconciliation between Henry and Charles.[37]

In December 1785, she enlisted the help of Henry Stuart to get Charles back to the Palazzo Muti in Rome.[37] On arrival in Rome with her father, the Pope welcomed Charlotte as the "Duchess of Albany".[37] In Rome, Charlotte remained her father's carer and companion, and did her best to make his life bearable until he died of a stroke two years later on 30 January 1788.[38][39] Her sacrifice for him was considerable—she was torn between an evident affection for her father in Rome and her mother and three children left behind in Paris.[36] On her father's death, the French court awarded her a pension of 20,000 livres.[39] Charlotte inherited much of her father's property, including his Florentine residence, furniture and ornaments, although many of the Sobieski family jewels passed to Henry Stuart.[40] She subsequently sold the Florentine palace and much of the possessions.[41]

Charlotte would spend much of her final months in the company of Henry Stuart.[41] She also became godmother to Countess Mary Norton, a member of her court.[41] Charlotte also wrote to her mother about her worsening health, noting that she had a swelling and pain when breathing.[41] She made several trips to improve her health at spa towns, including at Nocera in Umbria and at Bologna where she sought medical treatment.[41] Charlotte was to survive her father by only twenty-two months and never saw her children again. On 9 October 1789, while staying in Bologna at the Palazzo Vizzani Sanguinetti, the home of her friend the Marchesa Giulia Lambertini-Bovio, a relative of Pope Benedict XIV, she died there at age 36 of liver cancer.[42] In her will, written just three days before her death, Charlotte left her mother a sum of 50,000 livres and an annuity of a further 15,000.[42] Her physical possessions, jewels and other personal property passed to Henry.[42] However, it was two years before Henry Stuart, her executor, and now considered by Jacobites to be King Henry IX, would release the money. Indeed, he only agreed to do this when Clementina signed a "quittance" renouncing, on behalf of herself and her descendants, any further claim on the estate.[43] Charlotte was buried in the Church of San Biagio, near where she died, as she had requested in her will.[42] When the church was pulled down by the French in 1797, Charlotte's remains were believed to have been moved to the Oratorio della Santissima Trinità in 1801; however, this was not verified.[42] When it closed in 1961, her monument, and possibly her remains, were also moved to the nearby Chiesa della Santissima Trinità but again it is not known for certain where her remains lie.[42][43]

It appears that Clementina lived on in Fribourg, Switzerland, until her death in 1802 and that it was she who reared Charlotte's children in deliberate anonymity. Their identities were concealed by a variety of aliases and ruses and were not even being mentioned in Charlotte's detailed will, which makes reference only to Clementina and to Charlotte's desire that Clementina might be able to provide for "her necessitous relations". The reason that the children remained secret can be explained by the fact that the relationship between Archbishop Ferdinand de Rohan and Charlotte, who had been forbidden to marry, was highly illicit and would have been scandalous.[45] Marie Victoire Adelaide (born 1779) and Charlotte Maximilienne Amélie (born 1780) were thought to have been placed in the care of Thomas Coutts, the London banker, and a distant relative of the Walkinshaws. They remained in anonymity and were believed to have been simply absorbed into English society.[43]

Charlotte's son Charles Edward (born in Paris in 1784) followed a different path. Calling himself Count Roehenstart (Rohan+Stuart), he was educated by his father's family in Germany and became an officer in the Russian army and a general in the Austrian service. He travelled widely by visiting India, America, and the West Indies before he came to England and Scotland. He told such tall tales of his origins and adventures that few believed his claims to royal descent.[47] Indeed, it was not until the 20th century that the historian George Sherburn established that he was indeed who he had claimed to be.[47]He died in Scotland in 1854 as the result of a coach accident near Stirling Castle and was buried at Dunkeld Cathedral, where his grave can still be seen.[48] He married twice but had no issue.

It was generally believed that Charlotte's daughters also died without issue,[46] but Peter Pininski believed that Charlotte's daughter, Victoire Adelaide, had issue. Pininski's 2002 book suggested that Jules-Hercule, Prince de Guéméné and Duke of Montbazon, the elder brother of Ferdinand de Rohan (and aide-de-camp to Henry Stuart in 1745) recognised Charlotte's offspring as his own, which gave her status in that tight family, and he claimed that in 1793, at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Victoire Adelaide de Rohan went to relatives in Poland and there met and married Paul Anthony Louis Bertrand de Nikorowicz, a Polish nobleman and son of a banker. They had a son, Antime, who was the father of Charles and a daughter, Julia-Thérèse, who married Count Leonard Pininski and became Peter Pininski's great-great-grandmother.[45][49] Pininski's evidence for his thesis has been described as "often indirect, if not elliptical". The Rohans were a large family, and it is easy to confuse its many members.[50] A former chairman of the Royal Stuart Society, however, stated that Pininski's evidence seemed "genuine",[51] and the peerage editor Hugh Massingberd described it as "painstakingly researched ... proof to surely the most sceptical pedant's satisfaction".[52]

Pininski's hypothesis has, however, since been challenged by the genealogist Marie-Louise Backhurst in three articles in 2013, 2021 and 2023.[53] Backhurst provides evidence that Charlotte's second daughter, who was always called Victoire Adelaide, was married firstly at St Roch, Paris, in November 1804 to a military doctor, Pierre Joseph Marie de St Ursin, in the service of Napoleon. The marriage record has Victoire Adelaide Roehenstart, daughter of Maximilien and his wife, Clementine Ruthven, the same parental record as her brother Charles. By St Ursin, she was the mother of Theodore Marie de St Ursin, who was born in Paris on 29 June 1809 and was resident in Paris in 1832. He had entered the seminary of St Sulpice at Issy in 1828 and been ordained a deacon there that year, but died a deacon, aged 29, at Castres, Tarn, on 6 August 1838. In 1823, his mother had married again, to the naval officer Corbet James d'Auvergne, brother of the adopted son of the Duke of Bouillon, but her place and date of death have not yet been found. Backhurst concludes that Madame Nikorowicz was actually Marie Victoire de Thorigny and more likely to have been the illegitimate daughter of Jules, Prince de Rohan, brother of Ferdinand and thus a first cousin to Victoire Adelaide and without the Stuart descent. Pininski had argued that Backhurst's interpretation had been based on a destroyed document that was "reconstituted" seventy years later and that no document confirmed the birth of Marie Victoire's son.[54]

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The Bonnie Lass of Albanie

Charlotte Stuart's story did not take long to enter into the Jacobite folklore. The Scots poet, Robert Burns (1759–1796), a near contemporary, wrote a number of works celebrating the tragic romanticism of the Jacobite cause. Amongst them was The Bonnie Lass of Albanie, a lament to Charlotte Stuart that was probably written at the time of her death. Indeed, evidence from an unpublished collection of letters from Burns to Robert Ainslie reveals the poet's fascination with Charlotte in that he considered naming one of his own illegitimate children, Charlotte, after her.[55] Burns wrote:[56]

This lovely maid's of royal blood,
That ruled Albion's kingdoms three;
But Oh, Alas! for her bonnie face,
They hae wrang'd the lass of Albany.