In the year 1772, when this story opens, Charles Edward, Count of Albany, had already travelled far on the downward road that led from the glory of Prestonpans to his drunkard’s grave.  A pitiful pensioner of France, who had known the ignominy of wearing fetters in a French prison, a social outcast whose Royal pretensions were at best the subject of an amused tolerance, the “laddie of the yellow hair” had fallen so low that the brandy bottle, which was his constant companion night and day, was his only solace.

Picture him at this period, and mark the pathetic change which less than thirty years had wrought in the Stuart “darling” of “the forty-five,” when many a proud lady of Scotland would have given her life for a smile from his bonnie face.  A middle-aged man with dropsy in his limbs, and with the bloated face of the drunkard; “dull, thick, silent-looking lips, of purplish red scarce redder than the skin; pale blue eyes tending to a watery greyness, leaden, vague, sad, but with angry streakings of red; something inexpressibly sad, gloomy, helpless, vacant, and debased in the whole face.”

Such was this “Young Chevalier” when France took it into her head to make a pawn of him in the political chess-game with England.  As a man he was beneath contempt; as a “King”—­well, he was a Roi pour rire; but at least the Royal House he represented might be made a useful weapon against the arrogant Hanoverian who sat on his father’s throne.  That rival stock must not be allowed to die out; his claims might weigh heavily some day in the scale between France and England.  Charles Edward must marry, and provide a worthier successor to his empty honours.

And thus it was that France came to the exiled Prince with the seductive offer of a pretty bride and a pension of forty thousand crowns a year.  The besotted Charles jumped at the offer; left his brandy bottle, and, with the alacrity of a youthful lover, rushed away to woo and win the bride who had been chosen for him.

And never surely was there such a grotesque wooing.  Charles was a physical wreck of fifty-two; his bride-elect had only seen nineteen summers.  The daughter of Prince Gustav Adolf of Stolberg and the Countess of Horn, Princess Louise was kin to many of the greatest houses in Europe, from the Colonnas and Orsinis to the Hohenzollerns and Bruces.  In blood she was thus at least a match for her Stuart bridegroom.

She had spent some years in the seclusion of a monastery, and had emerged for her undesired trip to the altar a young woman of rare beauty and charm, with glorious brown eyes, the delicate tint of the wild rose in her dimpled cheeks, a wealth of golden hair, and a figure every line and movement of which was instinct with beauty and grace.  She was a fresh, unspoilt child, bubbling with gaiety and the joy of life, and her dainty little head was full of the romance of sweet nineteen.