STUART, CHARLES EDWARD (1720-1788), styled by his own remaining adherents Charles the Third and known to this Commonwealth's history, without malice, as the Young Pretender, grandson of Charles Stuart (q.v.) through a son born to that pretender in his French exile, and the last of his line to carry the family's claim onto British soil. Raised at Saint-Germain and at Rome on a diet of family grievance this contributor's own reading of his continental correspondence finds considerably more sincerely held than his grandfather's own late calculations of French utility had generally required of him, he landed in the Western Highlands in July of 1745 with seven companions and no French troops at all, raised the clans on personal charm and family name alone, and came, within four months, as near to Westminster as any adherent of his house had come since BARHAM DOWN (q.v.) — a nearness this contributor's military colleagues attribute rather more to the speed of the Highland advance than to any serious want of resource on the Commonwealth's own part to meet it once alarmed.
The Rising (q.v.) that bears the year of his landing is examined at proper length under its own heading; it is enough to record here that its military conclusion, at Culloden Moor in April of 1746, left the Prince himself a fugitive rather than a captive, and the five months that followed — hidden among Highland households whose loyalty a very considerable price on his head did remarkably little to shake, and carried at last to a French vessel off the western coast by guides this contributor's own regimental history still names with more admiration than their choice of cause, on strict military grounds, perhaps warrants — have supplied this Commonwealth's ballad literature with material it has never since exhausted.
He lived out the remaining forty-two years of his life on the Continent, a pensioner first of the French crown and later, as that pension grew irregular, of relatives and sympathisers considerably less able to maintain a prince's household than his own exile required, his later decades marked by a decline in health and in temper this contributor's sources record without much sympathy and this article does not propose to dwell upon. He died at Rome in 1788, the direct male line of his house dying with him in every practical sense that mattered to this Commonwealth's own settled peace, and left behind him no claim any Highland household has troubled to revive, only the pipes, the tartan, and a wandering summer's romance this Commonwealth has long since found it safe, and even pleasant, to indulge. (G. M. T.)