Free Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography by Carolly Erickson Page A

health troubled him, his physicians sometimes prescribing goat's milk to improve his digestion along with "a course of steel." 1 5
    Life went on, but with marked differences. James was less visible, Charles and Henry much more so. They received all the attention now, with parties given in their honor where they mingled suavely with cardinals and princes and dignitaries from foreign courts. Once a week Charles and Henry held a musical soiree, where Charles played the viol and Henry sang, to the accompaniment of a small string ensemble. A visiting Frenchman, Charles Des Brosses, heard them. ''Yesterday I entered the room as they were executing the celebrated composition of Corelli, the Notte di natale , " he wrote, "and expressed my regret at not having heard the commencement. When it was over they were going to begin a new piece, when Prince Charles stopped them saying, 'Stop, I have just heard that Monsieur Des Brosses wishes to hear the last composition complete.'" 16 The Corelli was repeated, and Des Brosses took away an impression of Charles's considerateness and good manners.
    He had not yet become the "great and good man" his father often urged him to be, but Charles was progressing well. The world had begun to notice him, to applaud his merits, and to speculate about what chance he might have to succeed where his father had failed.
     
    Chapter 5
    James was worried about his elder son. He was growing up, yet he remained, in James's view, "very innocent, and extreme backward in some respects for his age." He was old enough to shave, yet not old enough, it seemed, to take an interest in women, not even the beautiful women of Rome. He was also "wonderfully thoughtless for one of his age," and would not apply his mind to anything. In personality he was more a bright, accomplished child than a young man. He clung to childish pastimes instead of, in his father's words, "endeavoring to cultivate the Talents which Providence had given him." He had not developed the depths and moods of adolescence; he remained a sunny, irrepressible boy, infectiously blithe yet without the dignity and weight of burgeoning maturity.
    No doubt James missed in his son the qualities which he himself had in abundance: gravity, excessive seriousness, dutiful religiosity. His younger son Henry was developing all these traits. What was wrong with Charles? How was he ever to muster the sense of responsibility that James felt so keenly and without which he could never hope to accomplish the great task James would one day pass on to him?
    Von Stosch reported that James and Charles often went walking together amid the ruins of Rome, talking and planning. Though it seemed to the baron that they were scheming to invade England, the truth may have been that James was trying to impress on his ebullient son just how significant and challenging an undertaking the invasion of England was, and how in order to encompass it Charles would have to develop self-discipline and sober concentration.
    Though Charles could not be expected to understand it, there was something weighing on James, and it added poignancy to his efforts to shape his son into a future king.
    For the past decade and more the Jacobite cause had been disintegrating. One by one the men who had fought with and for James were dying, and there were few younger men as yet to take their places. The last spark of English resistance to the Hanoverians had come in 1722, when a barrister named Christopher Layer had gathered a small force of men and plotted to capture King George and seize the Tower and St. James's Palace, Layer had been discovered, imprisoned and ultimately hanged, and though the incident had frightened the Whig government it had also strengthened it, by presenting a specter of revolution to be raised whenever the opposition became restive.
    There was a Jacobite bloc in the House of Commons, led by William Shippen, but it represented too modest a voting strength to carry much weight, even when