Episode 2 The Stuarts in Exile

It was the last day of December, 1720,

and there was one place that everyone in Rome wanted to be.

It was the hottest ticket in town.

Cardinals, ambassadors and dignitaries

assembled in a gilded private chapel...

..to pay their tributes to the new-born heir

of an ancient dynasty.

Son of James, Pretender to the British throne,

and Clementina, the daughter of a Polish prince.

A child baptised on the day of his birth as Charles Edward Stuart.

A boy that would come to be known by many different names...

.."The Young Pretender"...

.."The Prince Over The Water"...

..and, of course, "Bonnie Prince Charlie".

The man who, at the age of 24, raised a legendary Highland army...

And God defend Scotland!

CHEERING

..an army that captured Carlisle, Preston and Manchester,

and terrified London.

And the legacy of Charles, "The Young Chevalier",

is still with us.

270 years afterwards,

people are still laying wreaths...

..in loving memory.

But of his 67 years,

Charles spent only 11 months in Scotland.

So, this is not a Scottish story,

not a British story,

but a European story...

..of kings, popes and princes,

of great military and diplomatic alliances.

How the exiled Stuarts used,

and were used, by the most powerful European dynasties.

In the 1720s, the Stuarts were among the most illustrious

and notorious families in Rome.

They were, if nothing else, something of an upmarket tourist attraction.

James and his wife Clementina would be driven through this,

the Piazza Navona,

in an open carriage.

Visitors from Britain were fascinated at the chance to see

their exiled royal family.

One account describes their child, the infant Charles,

being carried aloft and shooting at onlookers with his toy crossbow.

The fascination with weaponry - well, it was not hard to fathom.

Stuart history had been bloody.

The boy's grandfather, King James VII of Scotland

and II of England and Ireland,

had been driven from power and into exile,

seen as too aggressively Catholic and too close to the French.

His son, also James, had attempted to reclaim his crowns

in the failed Jacobite Uprisings of 1708, 1715

and, finally, in 1719.

That same year, James escaped to the Continent

and married Clementina.

They settled here, in Rome.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The Pope, Clement XI,

recognised the Catholic James as the rightful king of England, Scotland

and Ireland. He gave the young couple two palaces, an allowance

and a papal guard.

Five years later, James and Clementina brought their

four-year-old son Charles to the Papal Palace.

As was the custom, both parents kissed the Pope's feet.

Charles did not fancy the idea,

and refused, point blank.

You can make too much of one childish moment,

but this seems to have been a young boy confident in his own skin

and no shrinking violet.

The life of the exiled Stuarts

is hidden deep within the workings of this city.

These are the Rome headquarters of a multinational construction company.

On the surface, there is absolutely nothing remarkable

about these offices. Nothing special...

..until you look up.

The ceilings are very special indeed.

These interiors have never been filmed before.

The oldest examples were commissioned by Pope Clement XI,

to decorate the home he had chosen for King James.

Clement renamed the building the Palazzo del Re -

The King's Palace.

The furnishings were extremely lavish and expensive.

We have the accounts. An awful lot of money was spent

producing a sequence of state apartments, building up to

the King's apartment, and then into this gallery,

which is just beyond the King's bedchamber.

Do we have any sense of how these buildings and these new decorations

were received at the time?

Oh, they were well received.

I mean, this became an important social centre in Rome.

You have to remember that, because the Pope did,

Roman society recognised James as King.

Therefore, the princes and the cardinals of Rome came always to

this building to pay their court to James.

Living amid such opulence did not come cheap.

The Stuart Palace employed upwards of 100 servants,

paid for by the pension James received annually from the Pope -

today worth around £750,000.

James's rooms were here, on the first floor.

His wife Clementina occupied the floor above.

Her household took charge of baby Charles

and, four years later,

his younger brother Henry.

Outside the palace would have been a very visible sign

-that this was an exiled court?

-Yes, indeed.

Up there, above the doorway,

there would have been the English royal coat of arms,

placed there at the request of the Pope, to recognise

that this was the palace of the legitimate King of England.

He is the only king in Rome and, consequently,

his status is second only to that of the Pope.

Queen Clementina is, of course, the First Lady of Rome.

And so this gives them immense social status among the cardinals

and princes and people of Rome. This can be particularly interestingly

seen when they go to the opera, because they have certain privileges

when they go to the opera. The most interesting of all

is that James is given three boxes, because he is the king

of three kingdoms.

And you have one box for your kingdom.

The Holy Roman Emperor had two, because he claimed to be

the King of Spain, but James had three.

Directly across the square from the Palazzo del Re

is the magnificent church of Santi Apostili.

From their arrival in 1719, the Stuarts would come here to worship.

The exiled king, James, commissioned the singing of a special mass

for his son every year, on January 31.

While most of his British subjects were Protestant, James was Catholic,

but he did not want his Catholicism to stand in the way

of his restoration to the throne.

James had said many times that he would respect the different

religious beliefs of his people. James's vision was also

a Britain of three kingdoms - England, Scotland and Ireland.

That vision was seen as a grave threat to the new British state

that was determined to exclude his family from power.

James and his Jacobite supporters were continually monitored.

-My trick, I think.

-Yes, my son. No-one is to approach

-within earshot.

-Your Majesty, not a black beetle

shall show its nose, though faith, they might be English spies,

the way they encroach on us.

Into the story comes a gentleman called Philipp von Stosch...

..who arrived in Rome in January 1722.

Outwardly, he was known as a dealer in antiques.

But Stosch had another job.

He was a spy, operating under the pen-name

of Mr Walton.

Every week, he would write back to England with intelligence

gleaned from a mole within the Stuart court.

Those letters, written in coded French,

revealed that the exiled Stuart king and queen

were having major marital difficulties.

Walton described how, in November 1725,

James gave voice to what Walton described as

"paroles fortes" - very angry words against his wife.

Controversially, James had decided to remove infant Charles

from the queen's household and place him in the hands

of six male appointees.

Walton described how Clementina wrote to the abbess of a Rome convent,

asking for the main door to be left open at a pre-determined time.

And on November 15 1725, Clementina slipped through the door

and into sanctuary.

Walton recorded her saying, "I would rather suffer death

"than live in the king's palace with persons who have no religion,

"honour nor conscience."

The separation of the Stuart king and queen shocked Europe.

What hope for the dynasty returning to Britain

if they genuinely despised each other?

James and Clementina would remain separated for two years.

It would take almost a decade for the Stuarts to get their reputation

back on track.

And it would not be James or Clementina who would achieve this.

It would be their eldest son, Charles.

What we now call Italy was,

in the 18th century, a collection of independent kingdoms

and city states.

In 1734, the 14-year-old Charles was given permission by the Pope

to leave the city of Rome...

..to accompany his cousin, the Duke of Berwick,

serving with the Spanish army, then at war with the Austrian-occupied

Kingdom of Naples.

100 miles south of Rome,

the Spanish army began to lay siege here,

in the fortified harbour town of Gaeta.

Close to the city walls, the fighting was ferocious.

The Spanish were anxious to keep the young prince at a safe distance

from the front line,

but Charles wanted to witness the battle first-hand.

He impressed his older soldier cousin, who reported,

"Neither the noise of cannon, nor the hiss of bullet

"could produce any sign of fear in him."

Despite his years, Charles was every inch the noble warrior prince.

After a four-month siege,

the town of Gaeta surrendered and the young prince basked

in reflected glory.

Charles departed Gaeta bedecked in jewellery,

with two fine horses - all gifts from the Spanish.

Back in Rome, the Pope himself provided Charles with an honour guard

of 50 men.

The physical actions of the young prince

eclipsed the domestic melodramas of his parents.

The Stuarts were back, in the handsome, glamorous form

of this most plausible young prince.

The spy Walton warned that the Stuarts had re-emerged

as "a dangerous enemy".

But dangerous to whom?

Standing in the way of a Stuart restoration

to the British throne was a family with its roots here,

in the tiny German state of Hanover.

The dynasty that would become known as the Hanoverians

came to prominence in 1714.

Back then, the elector, or prince, of Hanover,

was 52nd in line to the British throne.

His name was George

and he was the king at the very bottom of the pack.

But there was a problem with the 51 above him - they were Catholic.

The English Act of Settlement had ruled against a Catholic monarch.

So, aged 54, and unable to speak a word of English,

the Protestant George came up trumps

and became King George I of Great Britain.

George took the crown the Stuarts claimed as their own.

But just a year after his coronation,

he faced a 10,000-strong Jacobite rising.

George needed to advertise the power and potential of his new dynasty

and with the help of two English engineers,

he shaped the royal gardens here at Herrenhausen

into a potent symbol of Hanoverian ambitions.

"I want to show the world

"what we can do."

And so he started to lay out the waterworks.

And it took another six years

until the Great Fountain started, at up to 35 metres,

and was, in those days, the highest fountain in Europe.

And there were some British... English engineers,

Burns and Holland. They had a very complicated technique,

but it works,

with five waterwheels and pumps, and they just manage to do it

for up to 35 metres.

And this was amazing. He could show his power.

And what do you think that was aiming to say?

What do you think George's vision was?

I think it was saying, "We do not have the biggest garden,

"we don't have the biggest country or the biggest state,

"but we can have the highest fountain.

"So, I am worthy of being king of England."

Yet behind the hydraulic wizardry,

behind the horticultural splendour, the Hanoverians, like the Stuarts,

were not a happy family.

In London, King George faced sexual and financial scandals

and was frequently accused of diverting money and armies

from Britain to Hanover.

George died in 1727

and his son, also called George, took the British throne.

He and his supporters would portray their Stuart rivals

as dangerous Catholics and backward-looking relics -

the very opposite of his progressive, Protestant monarchy.

The Hanoverians were a dynasty on the make.

They were now major players on the European stage -

ambitious, keen to make their mark.

18th-century politics were bitterly partisan.

On the one hand,

there were the Tories.

They had opposed the Hanoverians.

They were said to be riddled with covert Jacobites,

so, unsurprisingly, King George banished them from government...

..leaving power in the hands of the Whig Party,

who had secured the Hanoverian succession.

In charge of the Whigs,

and Britain's first Prime Minister,

was Robert Walpole.

Walpole had spent much time and effort cultivating the Hanoverians,

so he protected them - sometimes from themselves,

but mostly from the Jacobites.

And Walpole saw Jacobites everywhere.

To counter that threat,

Walpole established Britain's first state-sponsored intelligence agency.

He saw the Jacobites as the reds under the bed -

the 18th-century equivalent of Philby, Burgess and Maclean,

the notorious Cambridge spy ring.

I think it is very accurate to think of the whole situation between the

Jacobites and the British government

as a kind of long-running Cold War.

It involved agents and a vast amount of interception of communications,

which the British government did shamelessly, on a vast scale,

regularly opening the correspondence,

not just of suspected Jacobites,

but of everyone who was sending mail overseas.

They would stop the mail in London or at the Channel ports and then

send hastily made copies of letters to deciphering teams

-back in London or nearby.

-How worthwhile was this huge investment

in surveillance, code-breaking, reporting, vigilance?

I mean, it is rather like the CIA operation to spy on

the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Um...

they invested billions in it, erm, over decades,

and yet at the end of it,

despite having acquired a huge amount of information, a huge amount

of data, they couldn't predict the fall of the Soviet Union.

Walpole spent fortunes hunting Jacobites all across Europe.

But there was a very real threat much closer to home.

The Tories.

Exclusion from power had fuelled their resentment

and their hatred of George and his devoted servant, Robert Walpole.

Often when we think of Jacobites the word itself conjures up

Hollywood images of swashbuckling, fearless Scottish Highlanders.

But the man who lived on this fine country estate

just west of Cambridge was a Jacobite of a very different stamp.

A man called Sir John Hynde Cotton,

an old-school English Tory who'd lost his lucrative government job.

By the early 1740s he was broke

and his estate here at Madingley was heavily mortgaged.

And the flamboyant Hynde Cotton was no great friend of the Hanoverians.

He's an extremely charismatic, even rather bombastic figure.

He's a famously brilliant parliamentary speaker,

patron of poets and playwrights.

He's extremely proud of his, erm,

boasted ability to get through six bottles of claret in an evening

while remaining, as he claimed, perfectly sober.

He makes an unsuccessful attempt to introduce

the kilt as an English fashion accessory.

So a very colourful figure.

And what makes English Jacobitism

different from Scottish Jacobitism or Irish Jacobitism?

They want to bring back the glory of England under Queen Elizabeth I,

under Charles II,

and so it's partly about recovering an England that's been lost

but it's partly also about making England a great power in the world.

So how did someone like John Hynde Cotton

set about making his support for the exiled Stuarts known?

A lot of that is really centred here, at Madingley Hall.

He brings paid agents of the exiled Jacobite court

into his residence, he wines and dines them, he promises his support,

he sends messages via these agents back to the exiled court in Rome.

For much of the 1720s and '30s,

the English Jacobites had posed little real threat.

But that all changed in 1740, when Britain went to war with France

in the War of the Austrian Succession.

And from his rooms here in Madingley

Hynde Cotton passed British state secrets to the French government,

offering support for a French invasion scheduled for 1744.

An invasion that was intended to lead not only to a Stuart restoration

but to a Tory one as well.

On 8 February, 1744,

a young man on horseback arrived on this Paris street.

He was beyond exhaustion.

Travelling in disguise, his journey from Rome had taken an entire month.

That man was Charles Stuart.

Now 23, he had grown into a true warrior prince.

He was handsome, strong and a brilliant marksman.

News that the French were secretly planning to invade Southern England

had brought him here.

A force of 15,000 was to capture London to reinstall

the Stuarts on the throne, but all had not gone according to plan.

From England, Hynde Cotton had written to the French king, Louis XV,

demanding a delay to the invasion.

His letter had been intercepted and Cotton was placed under surveillance.

And worse followed.

A month after Charles arrived in Paris,

the French invasion fleet was blown apart by a Channel storm.

Charles crossly damned the storm as a Protestant wind,

but he wasn't about to give up.

Charles remained in Paris and appealed to the French king

to put together plans for a new invasion.

But the notoriously indecisive King Louis made no promises

and fell short of backing the Stuart cause.

55 years before,

Louis's great-grandfather had given the exiled Stuarts sanctuary

in the magnificent palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

Now, in the summer of 1744,

Charles found more humble Parisian lodgings here,

in what's now the artists' quarter of Montmartre.

Charles had been ordered by Louis to remain incognito,

to keep his head down and stay out of the public eye.

But he refused, point blank.

In fact, the glamorous young prince traded on his celebrity,

seeking popular support for a French-backed Stuart restoration.

And portraits of James and Charles were widely circulated

as part of a propaganda campaign to remind the French public that

the Stuarts were the legitimate kings of England, Scotland and Ireland,

and that they would be a staunch ally to the French.

-Voila!

-Bravo!

Voila!

-Merci beaucoup.

-Merci, ah?

-Et bonne journee.

-Merci beaucoup.

-Voila, bonne chance.

-Au revoir.

By the spring of 1745, and still in Paris,

Charles offered King Louis a new plan.

Instead of invading England, Charles proposed that the French

give military support to a rising of the Scottish clans.

Scottish clans that had supported his father in the 1715 rebellion.

The Scottish chiefs had a high reputation in Europe.

And they are considered as remarkable warriors.

Such an enterprise did not need much money.

Did not need much soldiers.

Such an enterprise needed a charismatic man,

and Charles was a right man in such a struggle, in fact,

for he was a young man, he was an impressive man, he was...

he had a great courage and...

..he had already the behaviour of a hero.

But in the end, King Louis wasn't persuaded.

He refused Charles's request for a 3,000-strong French army.

And Charles left Paris.

In late June, 1745, he headed southwest,

towards the city of Nantes, and then on to the mouth of the River Loire.

He'd assembled a secret arsenal of 20 cannons,

11,000 guns and 2,000 broadswords.

He'd also put together a war chest of 4,000 gold coins.

Charles was heavily in debt.

He needed funds not just to finance his invasion

but also to pay off his loans.

Back in Rome, his father pawned the family silver

as security on a loan of 120,000 crowns.

With no foreign power offering support, the Stuarts were

acting alone and at great speed,

but with very good reason.

The English Jacobites had advised Charles

that this was a good time to invade.

King George II was out of the country.

So too was the Duke of Cumberland's army.

The door to London wasn't exactly wide open,

but it had been left a little ajar.

Charles assembled a tiny invasion force of 700 Irish mercenaries

here on Belle Ile, a small island 15 miles off the Brittany coast.

He chartered two ships, both privateers,

operated by French-backed pirates.

They set sail on 16 July, 1745,

bound for Scotland.

Things did not begin well.

CANNON FIRE

Four days out, his larger ship, the Elisabeth,

was gravely damaged by a British warship and limped back to port.

Charles lost his small mercenary army. He lost his cannons.

He and his seven officers pressed on in the smaller ship, the Doutelle.

Two weeks after leaving Belle Ile,

on 3 August, 1745, she anchored off the Hebridean island of Eriskay.

Look! Look over there!

Scotland!

His great Scottish adventure had begun.

The reaction of the clan chiefs was mixed.

What have you brought us here for if you cannot honour your promises?

Where's your 10,000 French troops?

But on the afternoon of Monday 19 August

the 24-year-old Charles raised the Stuart colours at Glenfinnan.

1,000 clansmen, Macdonalds and Camerons, looked on.

And two days later the Jacobite rebels set out for Edinburgh.

They avoided General Cope's government army.

And attracted hundreds of new recruits.

Six weeks after landing on Eriskay, Charles arrived, unchallenged,

in Scotland's capital.

His appearance divided opinion.

The city's political leaders hedged their bets,

but Edinburgh's women were said to be captivated by the young prince.

But Charles's focus was unwavering.

And 400 miles to the south,

the Hanoverian government was becoming increasingly anxious.

The army commanded by George II's youngest son,

the Duke of Cumberland, was recalled from Flanders.

General Wade's army was ordered to Newcastle.

And finally, General Cope's 2,500-man army

sailed from Aberdeen to the east of Edinburgh and camped at Prestonpans.

And early on the morning of 21 September, Cope's men

were surprised by an almost equal number of Jacobite soldiers.

300 government troops were killed

in less than ten minutes of ferocious fighting.

Here was proof that Charles Stuart and his Jacobite followers

were a serious and deadly threat to the British government.

Six weeks after their victory at Prestonpans,

the Jacobite troops headed south, into England.

They arrived on the outskirts of Derby on 4 December, 1745.

They had made spectacular progress.

They'd left Edinburgh just over a month before.

They'd captured Carlisle,

which Charles had entered on a white horse flanked by bagpipers.

Next they travelled on to Preston and Manchester.

A government spy, a man named Eliezer Birch,

was waiting for them as they approached Derby.

Birch had the rather clever idea of using peas to count

the size of the Jacobite force.

For every hundred men he placed a single pea in his pouch.

He watched as the Jacobite cavalry approached first,

then the foot soldiers, six or eight abreast, with bagpipes

and men carrying the cross of St George to attract English followers.

Birch would have needed 55 peas

to count a force of 500 cavalry and 5,000 infantry.

An army almost entirely composed of well-drilled

and ferocious Highlanders.

Charles's men had encountered little resistance,

but had attracted almost no English recruits, and as they arrived

in Derby on the evening of 4 December

they were closing in on England's capital.

This was their southern outpost,

Swarkestone Bridge on the River Trent,

just four or five days' march from Westminster.

-SAT-NAV:

-Distance to London, 110 miles.

In Cambridge, Hynde Cotton buried three portraits of the Stuarts

in case they fell into the wrong hands.

In London there was rioting, a run on the Bank of England.

The Hanoverian regime was in genuine danger.

The next morning,

Charles attended church at what's now Derby Cathedral.

Immediately after, he and his generals held a council of war.

Time and again, Charles was asked for evidence that English

or French armies were on their way.

There was none.

Charles's military commander, Lord George Murray, was pessimistic.

Protecting the capital, a force of 4,000 men,

including the Grenadier Guards, was stationed at Finchley.

80 miles north of Charles's army,

General Wade had 6,000 men in Wetherby.

Closer still, the Duke of Cumberland had 9,000 men in Lichfield,

just 25 miles to the southwest.

In total, Charles's army was outnumbered by almost four to one.

That afternoon, Charles rode out of Derby.

His aim was to persuade local landowners

to pledge support, soldiers or weapons.

The man who wanted to be Britain's king

was reduced to cold-calling the local nobility.

He visited the Burdetts of Foremarke Hall.

Nothing.

Next, the Poles of Radbourne Hall.

Again, nothing.

And finally the Harpurs of Calke Abbey.

Nothing.

Everywhere Charles was treated politely,

but nowhere did he attract any sign of support.

And it begs the question, what help could the landowners have given?

100 years before, the families might have dispatched the local yeomanry,

but now, what use gardeners, footmen, stable boys,

against a standing professional army?

That night, Charles returned to Derby.

He met again with his military advisers

and Lord George Murray spoke plainly.

Sir, it is your council's recommendation,

endorsed by me, that the army should retreat.

Retreat?

Clan Ranald.

MacLeod.

Will not one of you march with me on London?

Things could have been very different.

Charles and the clan chiefs didn't know that the French King Louis

was planning his own 15,000-strong invasion of England

in support of the Jacobites.

But when Charles and his army turned back to the north,

Louis abandoned his plans.

The Jacobites returned the way they had come, through Manchester

and Preston and back into Scotland,

pursued all the way by the Duke of Cumberland's army.

With Edinburgh now in government hands, Charles made for Glasgow.

His army arrived on Boxing Day 1745.

The city gates were left open and he reviewed his troops here,

on Glasgow Green.

When we tell the story of the Jacobites, there are certain places

that seem woven into the fabric of that narrative.

There's Glenfinnan, where Charles raised his standard,

marching into Edinburgh, capturing Carlisle.

Glasgow doesn't normally get much of a look-in. But it's important,

because Glasgow frankly didn't care much for the Jacobites.

The Presbyterians of 18th-century Glasgow had no religious affinity

with the largely Episcopalian or Catholic Scottish Jacobites.

And Glasgow wasn't looking back to a Stuart past

when the city's tobacco lords and ship owners

were busy making their fortunes in the Hanoverian present.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Jacobites in 1745

is the extreme popularity with which they were met.

They were not.

In fact, there was great resistance throughout all towns,

and especially those with... something to lose.

Economy was booming in Glasgow.

And the Jacobite threat was something that would unseat

everything that they had built.

Most people didn't want to be bothered.

They were settling into the Union,

they were happier than they had been in many, many years.

Charles left Glasgow on 3rd January 1746.

Two weeks later, his troops defeated a Hanoverian army at Falkirk,

and then withdrew further north.

The Duke of Cumberland continued the pursuit.

His British government army contained three Scottish infantry regiments.

And on 16th April, at Culloden,

Cumberland's troops put the exhausted Jacobite army to the sword.

1,500 of Charles's 5,000 men were killed or wounded.

The bells of Glasgow Cathedral rang out in celebration.

The Jacobites had been defeated.

Contemporary accounts talked of the general drinking of health

and bonfires in every street.

BELLS TOLL

Reaction to the battle divided Scotland.

The Highlanders paid a heavy price for Charles's rebellion.

Their language, their culture, even their kilts were outlawed.

As for Charles, he disappeared into the heather.

He spent five months in the wilds of northwest Scotland,

hunted by government forces, then rescued by a French warship.

Charles arrived back in France as quite possibly the most famous man

in Europe. He had tried to regain the Stuarts' crown, and he'd failed.

But he was only 25 - he could always try again.

In Paris, Charles was reunited with

his younger, deeply religious brother - Henry.

The pair were lavishly entertained by King Louis,

who proposed that they should live here, at the Chateau de Vincennes.

And straight away,

Charles wrote to Louis asking for military support. 18-20,000 men.

Charles described his recent Scottish adventures as "a setback".

It couldn't be clearer - he wanted to try again.

OPERATIC SINGING

And to succeed, he needed French popular support.

On the 28th October 1746, he came to the Paris Opera.

The audience expected arias and sopranos.

Instead, they got The Young Pretender.

APPLAUSE

The audience erupted into rapturous, wild cheering.

Charles found himself making more bows than any of the performers.

For the young prince, this was a magical moment of appreciation.

He distributed medals and maps of his British exploits.

Again, he won over the French public,

but his relationship with the French king steadily withered.

Louis reneged on his offer of a palace.

And when the French king

offered Charles a royal pension, he refused it.

Charles was losing the favour of his most important ally.

And he was about to lose someone closer still.

In April 1747, Charles was invited to dinner by his brother.

He arrived to find Henry's servants ready to serve the meal,

but of Henry, there was no sign.

Charles waited and waited.

For three whole days, he heard nothing.

Until a letter from Henry arrived.

The dinner invitation had been a ruse.

His younger brother had secretly departed from Paris.

He was travelling back to Rome.

Henry Stuart, supported by his father James,

was giving up the Stuart cause to become a cardinal.

Charles' brother had never seemed likely to have children,

to preserve the Stuart line. But here was the final word.

Charles was furious, and severed all contact with his father and brother.

The future of the Stuart dynasty now rested entirely on him.

A single assassin's bullet could end everything.

Worse was to follow.

The War of the Austrian Succession ended in 1740,

with the peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

The terms of that treaty obliged the French state

to evict Charles Stuart from their territory.

Increasingly drunken, promiscuous,

Charles ignored King Louis's repeated demands to leave France.

He knew he was in genuine danger.

On 10th December, he headed once again to the opera,

the scene of his great popular acclaim just over a year earlier.

His carriage approached the gates of the opera house...

..as an army of 1,200 men prepared to receive him.

A sergeant came up to Charles and kneed him...

..in the back.

He was disarmed, he was arrested, his hands and feet were bound.

Just like a common criminal.

He was transported back to familiar ground - the Chateau des Vincennes.

This was part of the palace that Louis had offered him

as a residence just two years earlier.

Then, Charles had been the darling of France and feted across Europe.

Now, he was heading for the palace dungeon

as a prisoner of the French state.

CELL DOOR SLAMS

KEYS JINGLE

So this is the cell to which Charles was brought.

Just a simple bed and chair, and very small.

"Ce n'est pas magnifique," he said.

It was far from magnificent.

He wasn't the first occupant.

There had clearly been a priest incarcerated here before.

It was all a far cry from what he was used to.

Brought up in the gracious splendour of Roman palazzi,

this small cell was the nadir of his fortunes.

The next morning, Charles agreed to leave France.

What followed was the start of Charles's slow descent into

drink, debauchery and political obscurity.

He flitted around different European cities, but no-one wanted him.

Then, in the summer of 1750,

he showed once again that he had not lost the power to surprise.

He travelled, in disguise, to London.

The 29-year-old Charles paid his first visit

to England's capital in September 1750.

The trip was shrouded in secrecy,

but included a spying mission to the Tower of London.

Five years after his march on London, Charles was now clutching at straws.

He became central to a series of plots, involving -

as each unfolded -

French, Swedish, Prussian and Scottish Highland troops.

It was all rather far-flung, desperate...sad, even.

Charles met a group of English Jacobites.

Hynde Cotton had died the year before.

Charles attempted to win the support of those who remained.

But he didn't.

The English Jacobites said that they had no money,

that they were spied upon, that they couldn't raise men.

Just what they had told him five years before.

Nothing had changed.

But Charles himself was about to make a seismic change.

The man who had been brought up in the heart of Catholic Rome,

who'd been given an honour guard by the Pope...

had decided to become a Protestant.

Can we tell anything about Charles's religiosity

or Charles the man in connection with this decision to convert?

I think not very much.

All the evidence suggests that

Charles was essentially a freethinker,

someone who had very little in the way of religious belief.

Has debauchery was the topic of a lot of conversation

in Catholic circles. It was a concern in Catholic circles.

The general view is that Charles was engaged in

a very cynical publicity exercise that therefore

actually brought him no benefit at all.

Charles left London after just one week.

Any lingering hopes of the Stuart restoration faded as the months

and years went by. But he and his family would have one last chance.

In 1756, Britain declared war on France.

Three years into what would come to be called The Seven Years' War,

the French were losing.

They needed a new plan.

The French Foreign Minister, Etienne du Choiseul,

proposed an invasion of England.

100,000 French troops would be carried across the Channel

in a fleet of flat-bottomed boats.

De Choiseul invited Charles Stuart to talk about this project

here at his home in central Paris.

This meeting gave Charles

and the Jacobite cause a chance to piggyback the French invasion.

Charles was broke, an alcoholic,

flitting between cheap houses with his mistress Clementina.

They had one child, Charlotte.

But now, here was the prospect of the French army

he had longed for in the winter of 1745.

Charles arrived for the meeting on 5th February, 1759.

He was late, he was drunk.

He was asked to lead the supporting invasion of Scotland,

or Ireland if he preferred.

Charles refused. It was England or nothing.

De Choiseul was not best pleased.

The French fleet of flat-bottomed boats intended to carry

the invasion force was brought together here, at Quiberon Bay.

Charles had no guarantees.

He had a profound and not unreasonable distrust of the French.

Yet it was a great chance, probably his best ever chance,

and probably also his last chance.

Yet he didn't show up.

In the end, it hardly mattered.

The French warships that were to

escort the invasion fleet

set sail from Brest on 14th November,

bound for Quiberon Bay.

Six days later, they were attacked

and defeated by a Royal Navy fleet

under the command of Admiral Edward Hawke.

The Jacobite cause hadn't died at Culloden in 1746.

It died 13 years later, somewhere over there,

at the Battle of Quiberon Bay in 1759.

Charles's life continued along the same sad trajectory.

His mistress, Clementina, sought sanctuary in a Paris convent,

just as his mother had done.

And in December 1765, news arrived from Rome that his father,

James, was gravely ill.

James Stuart, The Old Pretender,

died on 1st January, 1756.

Charles arrived in Rome three weeks later, after a 22-year absence.

When he reached the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli,

his brother had choreographed a crowd to chant "viva il Re!" -

"long live the King!"

But he wasn't the king.

After long consideration,

Pope Clement XIII had refused to recognise Charles

as his father's successor.

Across the square, the Stuart family home had once been bedecked with

the English royal coat of arms.

It was gone.

Charles was not a king and this was no longer a king's palace.

Charles sought consolation with a daily diet

of six bottles of Cyprus wine.

He married the young Princess Louise, who like his mother

and mistress before would escape to a convent.

The final years were truly dreadful.

The man who had once been Bonnie Prince Charlie now had elephantiasis

in his leg, which was hideously swollen with sores and open wounds.

He also had terrible piles and ulcers

and was in permanent pain.

He died on 31st January, 1788,

in the very palace where he had been born 67 years before.

Charles had no legitimate children.

His one illegitimate daughter, Charlotte,

outlived her father by only a year.

The direct Stuart line continued on until 1807

in the form of Cardinal Henry Stuart.

This was his church.

Like his elder brother, Henry's life ended in turmoil.

At the age of 72, he lost his fortune and income

when Napoleon's French army sacked Rome.

In his final years, he was awarded a pension by the Hanoverian king,

George III.

Of the many memorials to the Stuarts,

the most important is here...

in the very heart of the Catholic world.

St Peter's Basilica, in the Vatican.

In death and in exile, James, Charles and Henry

were granted the regal status they were denied in life.

Their fate had always been in the hands of Europe's great powers,

but their legacy would be strongest in the country

they had fought for but hardly knew.

Lot number three,

a finely presented lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair.

£4,200.

Relics of The Young Pretender up for sale to the highest bidder.

31, 32 is back in, next bid is 34,000.

At 32,000...

For two-and-a-half centuries, Scotland has been fascinated by

the rise and fall of the Stuarts

and their dashing and much-lamented prince.

# Will ye no' come back again

# Will ye no' come back again? #

From Walter Scott to Kenneth McKellar, and on to the present day,

the powerful and romantic image of the Stuarts

presents a Scotland that never quite happened.

Charles didn't come back again.

And there's little doubt about who actually won

the great dynastic battle of the 18th century.

The success of the Hanoverian Dynasty

is written large in Edinburgh's New Town.

In the end, the Hanoverians gave Scotland

and Britain what most people wanted.

Industry, empire, stability and money.

But a lot of what-ifs remain.

Not just, "What if the Jacobite army had marched south from Derby?"

Exactly how different would a Jacobite Britain have been?

What of Britain's empire? Of its religion? Of its government?

Three centuries later, these questions of how we are ruled

and from where still haven't quite gone away.