5 The Nineteenth-Century Gothic Revival

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4.10 MINIATURE OF PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD STUART IN LATER LIFE

Watercolour and varnish on ivory

Circa 1770

On the back of this miniature is a contemporary manuscript note that reads:

P” C” Very good likeness in 1770 attest by Henry Crathorne Esqr often on his travels and frequently in his company.

In 1770, Prince Charles (1720-1788) was a disappointed man, alienated from the Catholic Church and embittered that his claimto the British throne in 1766 on the death of his father, James III and VIII (16881766), had not been officially recognised bythe pope, or the kings of France and Spain, and indeed that they had recognised the Hanoverian succession as valid. He had a number of mistresses and two illegitimate children, and, following the failure of the 1745 rebellion, he took to drinking heavily.

The face of the Prince in this miniature differs greatly from the earlier painting: the effects of alcohol and unwise living are clearly visible in his features.

In 1772 he married Princess Louise Stolberg-Gedern (1752-1824), who was thirty-two years his junior, but the union was not a success. She claimed that he physically abused her, and eventually separated from Prince Charles to live with the Italian dramatist Count Vittorio Alfieri (1752-1803). Prince Charles died in 1788 and is buried in StPeter’s in Rome.

Henry Crathorne came from a Catholic Yorkshire family and is almost certainly identical with the “Sir Henry Crathorn of York” who registered as a student at the Collegio dei Nobili di San Francesco Saverio at Bologna in May 1772 and then at the Collegio San Carlo at Modena in August 1773 as part of his grand tour of Italy. It also seems likely that he is the same Mr Crathorne who arrived in Rome in the autumn of 1774 accompanied by a former student of StOmers, Father William Meynell SJ (1744-1826), before spending the winter moving between Rome and Naples. Prince Charles had a wide circle of companions: from the surviving evidence, Crathorne was one of these.

Crathorne’s movements in Italy are recorded in the surviving letters of the Halifax-born English Jesuit, Father John Thorpe (1726-1792), another former student of St Omers, who lived in Rome from 1756 until his death.

It is not clear how the miniature passed into the hands of the Society of Jesus. However, it was presented to Stonyhurst in 1842 by the Lancashire-born provincial

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superior of the English Jesuits, Father Randal Lythgoe (1793-1855), who opened the new Jesuit day school of St Francis Xavier in Liverpool that year.

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The Nineteenth-Century Gothic Revival 5