PRINCE CHARLIE AND His LADIES— Compton Mackenzie—Knopf ($3).
Monarchy's sun may be setting, but monarchists are still loyal to their lost causes in many a stoutly republican country. The Stuarts sank long ago below the English horizon, but the Jacobitish after glow lingered. That all Jacobites are not yet dead was shown this week when Novelist Compton Mackenzie published Prince Charlie and His Ladies. Author Mackenzie writes Jacobitingly, speaks with contumely of "Whig" reviewers who deplore his loyalist zeal. U. S. readers may not share Author Mackenzie's emotions nor his unflagging interest in the controversial minutiae of the Jacobite legends, but they will not need Scottish blood to perk up their ears at these echoes of "the Forty-five." Author Mackenzie's is not a formal history of the Young Pretender but a series of portraits of the women who made up a large part of his life. Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Sylvester Maria (1720-1788), like most royalty, was less racially pure than many of his subjects. His mother, Princess Clementina, was German-Polish, the granddaughter of John Sobieski, famed Turk-toppler. From her Prince Charlie inherited his charm, his love of adventure. Clementina's marriage with Pretender James was a runaway to romance that turned into a drab political alliance; the Old Pretender was not the glamorous figure his son turned out to be.
Of the events of "the Forty-five" leading up to the bloody collapse at Culloden, Author Mackenzie tells little, concentrates on the loyal heroism of Prince Charlie's protectors after the battle, when redcoats combed the country for him. One of his hostesses, Anne Macintosh, on a visit to London three years after, found herself dancing with the Duke of Cumberland (known to all good Jacobites as "the Butcher of Culloden"). The first dance over, she asked if she might choose the air for the second, called for The Auld Stuarts Back Again.
Most famed of these Jacobite ladies was Flora Macdonald, who risked her life more than once to guide the Prince to safety, dressed him in women's clothes and passed him off as her maid. Her loyalty did not prevent her marrying later and becoming the mother of ten. When Johnson and Boswell made their tour of the Hebrides they visited her, and she and the old lexicographer hit it off from the first. His typical tribute to her was inscribed on her tomb: "A name that will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honour. She is a woman of middle stature, soft features, gentle manners, and elegant presence." Safe back in France after his fiasco, Prince Charlie became a young-man-about-Paris. Author Mackenzie says that Charles, like his ancestress Mary. Queen of Scots, was "essentially cold sexually," but women liked him nevertheless. His liaison with Mme de Talmond was largely a political move, but he and Clementina Walkinshaw were lovers from the time they first met; she bore him a daughter, Charlotte, the only child he ever had. Why she left him remains something of a mystery. Though she wrote and asked his forgiveness Charles never saw her again.