DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

ra) choly and mortified appearance.’ Drunk, and always drunk, his health began to fail. He left Rome to take the baths at Pisa, and then fixed his quarters at Florence, where he assumed the title of Count of Albany. But France remained watchful, and saw with regret the probable extinction of the line of the Stuarts. Prince Charles was advancing in years. His brother, Henry, now a prince of the Roman Church, was hopelessly re- moved from the succession. It served the policy of France to perpetuate a line of Pretenders as a means of fomenting discord in England. To give effect to this policy, a young and beauti- ful Princess of high birth, Louisa, the daughter of Prince Stolberg, was taken from a convent, where she was being educated, packed off to Florence, and there married to the Pretender. It is almost incredible that Charles, then fifty-two years of age, and. with a con- stitution shattered by drink and debauchery, should have lent himself to this plan, accepting not only a consort but a subsidy at the hands of a government which had merely utilised him for its own selfish purposes, and had left him in the lurch in the hour of his greatest need. But wearied by the monotony of his life and bribed into compliance, he gave his consent to the scheme. The wedding took place one Good Friday, 1772, in the neighbourhood of Ancona, whence after the honeymoon the newly married