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Because he needed an heir Charles finally married, at 51. Princess Louise was 32 years younger, but Author Mackenzie wastes no pity on her. He admits that his hero sometimes "took refuge in the bottle" but denies that he was "a confirmed sot." implies that any princess should have thought him a catch. Princess Louise did not, however; she twitted him for his lack of marital vigor, made fun of him behind his back, finally cuckolded him with Italian Poet Alfieri. Author Mackenzie is annoyed by the tradition that has made her out a wronged and romantic figure. Says he: "She was mercenary. She was a liar. She was cold to the very core of her being. She was pretentious. She was self-complacent. Such humor as she had was of the privy. She began life as a chatterbox with good teeth and a pretty complexion. She ended it as a dowdy, in terminable old bore, in a large red shawl." When she and Charles finally separated, he turned again to his bastard daughter, made her his legitimate heir. But she died two years after her father. The Pretenders were dead; there was nothing left of the Stuarts but pretense.
Casual readers may be puzzled to ob serve that the footnotes sometimes contradict Author Mackenzie on matters of Jacobite fact, sometimes disagree on mat ters of Jacobite opinion. Reason: Author Mackenzie went to South America before seeing the proofs, left them for his friend Alistair Tayler to read, mark, modify when his conscience called him.
The Author. With precocious promptness, British Novelist Edward Montague Compton* had his first literary fling when at the age of 22 months, he startled his actor-father Edward Compton by reading nursery rhymes at sight. By six, he had exhausted the family library. After public school and Oxford, he retired to write plays in the wilds of Cornwall. With characteristic speed, he turned out his first novel, The Passionate Elopement, in less time than it took him to find a publisher. From the War he got an O. B. E., was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, but when in 1932 he wrote up the work of the British Aegean Intelligence Service, in which he had served in 1917, he was tried in Old Bailey (TIME, Nov. 28, 1932 ), sternly fined £100 and costs for betraying official secrets. Last autumn, forgivingly, England's Iberian-American Institute sent him to Brazil to spread polite propaganda. He used to divide his time between Capri and 50-acre Channel Island Jethou, which is leased directly from the King, gives its tenant such crotchety feudal privileges as flying his own flag. But by 1931 feudal Jethou was again for rent.
* Mackenzie is an ancestral clan name.