The story of Henry Benedict Stuart, the Cardinal Duke of York
The recent and explosive memoir published by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and younger son of King Charles III, has certainly caused a furor among monarchists.
Details of misadventures and angers among royalty always find an audience in print. But our modern prince, Henry Charles Albert David, is certainly not the first royal troublemaker. There was another prince by the same name that vexed the prince’s ancestors. This was Henry Benedict Thomas Edward Maria Clement Francis Xavier Stuart, the Cardinal Duke of York, and known to his friends as King Henry IX.
The original Prince Henry was one of the casualties of the religious traumas of the 18th century. Many people know of the Glorious Revolution when William and Mary toppled King James II. King James was a Roman Catholic king, ruling a Protestant country, and when his second wife produced a male heir who was immediately baptized as a Catholic, it triggered a revolution.
King James fled into exile with his wife and baby, never to regain his throne. The young prince was also named James and remained in perpetual exile. In due time, the exiled prince produced two heirs, Charles and Henry, and their supporters came to be known as the Jacobites because of their father’s name in Latin was Iacobus. The elder of these two boys was the well known Bonnie Prince Charlie, who led a Scottish Catholic rebellion against the reigning House of Hanover in 1745 only to be defeated on Culloden Moor near modern Inverness.
Prince Henry was the younger and spare heir to the Jacobite pretenders to the Throne. But his life took a very different turn than his charismatic older brother. Henry was born in Rome in 1725 and was baptized by Pope Benedict XIII. A shy and quiet boy who was deeply pious, the prince spent most of his life in the Papal States. To the great annoyance of his older brother, he was ordained to the Catholic priesthood and made a cardinal of the Church. Charles feared quite correctly that this would harm the Jacobite cause by further offending the Protestant British. What is more, as a priest he could not marry and produce any more heirs.
For many years, the Cardinal Prince was very wealthy because with every ecclesiastical title he gained, another endowment he gained. Midway through his life he held territories in Italy, France and Mexico, which came with an income of 40,000 British pounds per year, an incredible sum for the times.
Later in his life, many of these estates were lost in the French Revolution and the subsequent invasions of Italy and Spain. The cardinal was almost reduced to poverty, but King George III of Great Britain granted him an annuity of 4,000 pounds a year. This was not mere charity to an impoverished relative, but because King George knew, what King Charles III has since learned, that unemployed princes can cause all sorts of troubles.
Meanwhile, the elder Prince Charles had managed to blot his copybook once again with the Catholic Church. As if losing at Culloden had not been enough to make the Catholic Stuarts look bad, the Bonnie Prince decided to regain his throne another way, by converting to Anglicanism.
Quietly approaching some aristocrats and political dealers, Charles suggested that he should now be accepted as king since there was now no longer a tie to the Catholic Church. This ploy might have worked for his grandfather James II, but by this time the upper classes of Britain were getting along just fine with the House of Hanover and George III.
But this religious change gave the popes the excuse they needed to end the public endorsement of the Stuarts. The pope did not recognize Prince Charles as an exiled king on the death of his father, nor did he recognize the Cardinal Prince. Since both brothers would soon die without legitimate heirs, the Jacobite cause would come to an end.
But the Cardinal Prince still played a quiet game. He did not renounce his claim to the British throne, and after his brother’s death, privately signed documents as “Henry R.” or “Henry the King.” A long standing prerogative of the British monarchs was the ritual “Touching for the King’s Evil” or a laying on of hands for physical healing. Henry quietly performed this royal ritual many times, and was the last known British “monarch” to do so. Nonetheless, he made no efforts to gain the throne. Henry was a dutiful cardinal and attended to his many duties with care and in 1758 was made a bishop.
By the time of his death in 1807, “King Henry IX” named his cousin King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia as his heir to the English and Scottish thrones and left him the few crown jewels which were still in his branch of the family. His executors sent several of the jewels to George, Prince of
Wales, later King George IV of Britain. At his death at the age of 82, Henry was among the longest serving cardinals in the history of the Church and the only member of the British royal family to bear that title.
All of the “Pretenders,” Prince James, and his two sons, Charles and Henry, were all buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. A monument to the Catholic Stuarts was raised to them on one of the columns in the Church. George IV, who had a secret admiration for the Jacobites, was among the donors. Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and mother of Elizabeth II, quietly paid for the refurbishment and restoration of the small shrine in recent times. It is still visible today to the modern tourists, who generally pass it by without any interest. Our modern Prince Harry might do well to reflect on the ignominy that awaits princes who defy the crown.