The private passions of Bonnie Prince Charlie - Hugh Douglas

Charles Edward Stuart lives on as a romantic hero of legend yet, behind that image, history shows him to be a charismatic self-seeker who loved only himself and his cause. Hugh Douglas shows that Bonnie Prince Charlie was also a man capable of passionate love. This is a re-examination of the Scottish hero whose flawed character and lack of success in matters of the heart influenced his relations with the royal courts of Europe and played an important part in his role in the history of Scotland and England - perhaps contributing as much to the defeat of the Jacobite cause as "Butcher" Cumberland's musket fire at Culloden. As well as the torrid affair with the young Duchesse de Montbazon in Paris and the tragic tale of Clementine Wilkinshaw, which resulted in a child, the author looks at the Prince's other relationships with women, from the formative one with his mother, to his disastrous late dynastic marriage to Louise de Stolberg, in which he was left a lonely, elderly cuckold, comforted by his daughter in his last years.