Henry Benedict, Cardinal York (1725-1807), born 300 years ago this March, was the last member of the royal family to take an active role in a papal Conclave, when he participated in the election of Pope Pius VII at Venice in 1800. Dr Robin Eagles investigates how he found himself in that position…

On 6 March 1725, Pope Benedict XIII (1724-30) was roused from a period of private prayer with the news that ‘Queen’ Clementina, consort of the exiled James Edward Stuart (to his Jacobite supporters, James III and VIII) had given birth to a son in the Palazzo Muti in Rome. In spite of James and Benedict having decidedly tricky relations, the Pope hurried over to greet the new infant and promptly baptized him Henry Benedict (along with perhaps as many as ten other names).

Unlike his older brother, Charles Edward, Henry Benedict has attracted comparatively little attention. This is hardly surprising given his reputation for caution and his eminently sensible decision not to follow his brother to Scotland in 1745. Instead, it was left to Henry to undertake the thankless but necessary task of remaining in France, rallying support, while Charles tried and failed to regain a crown, and ultimately to organize a ship to rescue the by then rather battered Young Chevalier after his months hiding in the heather.

The failure of the 45 Rebellion no doubt confirmed Henry in his view that further escapades were ill-advised, and helped convince him to follow an alternative path. In 1747, he made the momentous decision to enter the church and was fast-tracked through the clerical ranks, emerging as a Cardinal that summer. It was by no means welcome to his family, though James seems to have become reconciled to it sooner than Charles, writing to ‘My dearest Carluccio’ that he was:

Fully convinced of the sincerity and solidity of his vocation; I should think it a resisting of the will of God, and acting directly against my conscience, if I should pretend to constrain him in a matter which so nearly concerns him. [Kelly, 36]

It seems, in any case, that Henry’s decision was not wholly a surprise, and that plans may have been afoot to have him made a cardinal as far back as 1740. [Corp, 225] James was not minded to agree to a suggestion by Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58) that Henry be made Cardinal Protector of England, Scotland or Ireland, [Corp, 232] though the British press reported that ‘when’ the exiled dynasty was back in possession, Henry was to be sent as Papal Legate. [St James’s Evening Post, 25-28 July 1747]

Henry’s decision to abandon a potential military career did not prevent him from being an occasional focus for disloyalty in England. His birthday, the year after he entered the church, was celebrated by five inebriated students of Balliol College, Oxford, with minor hooliganism committed against staunchly Whig Exeter College, while one of them shouted out ‘God bless King James, God damn King George’. Two of the ringleaders were later sentenced to two years in prison for their actions. [Monod, 276-7]

In stark contrast to his undergraduate fan club, Henry appears to have set about his new vocation with studied seriousness. That he had not altogether forsaken his position as a claimant to the British throne is indicated, though, by his decision to issue a medal with his image on it following the death of his father in 1766, even though Charles (Charles III to the Jacobites) chose not to bother. The same medal was then reissued 22 years later, after Charles’s death, when Henry became (again, according to the Jacobite succession) Henry IX. On the reverse was a diplomatically worded Latin motto, taken from Peter’s first epistle: ‘Non desideriis hominum, sed voluntate dei’, which as Monod observes ‘was so inoffensive as to lack any real seditious import’. [Monod, 88, 91]

As the medal demonstrated, while Henry chose not to do anything to encourage rebellion against his cousin, George III, he was keen to insist on his royal status and to keep up certain rites and standards. Insisting on wearing ermine was one, but perhaps most important, he persisted with the family tradition of ‘touching’ for scrofula, issuing special tokens for people afflicted with the condition. His brother, Charles had touched at least one sufferer while in Edinburgh in 1745 [Brogan, 213, 217]

If Henry trod a cautious path from his entry into the church through to his own ‘succession’ on Charles’s demise, he was unable to prepare for the dramatic changes ushered in by the French revolution. In 1796, Bonaparte invaded Italy, and Pope Pius VI (1775-99) was forced to hand over vast sums to prevent widespread pillaging in and around Rome. Henry made his own contribution by parting with a ruby, once the property of his maternal family, worth an estimated £60,000. [Kelly, 97] The following year, a new invasion force proved less willing to be bought off, and Henry became an exile twice over – quitting his villa outside Rome for Messina, thence to Corfu before finally returning to the Italian peninsula and settling in Venice.

It was there, that the cardinal’s journey in some ways came full circle. Having spent his whole life a representative of a rival dynasty to the ruling Hanoverians, it was to his cousins that Henry was ultimately indebted for saving him from penury. Thanks to an intercession from Cardinal Borgia, contact was made with a sympathetic Catholic gentleman in England, whose contacts ultimately passed the petition for assistance to the king. Advised by William Pitt that Henry ‘the last relick of an Illustrious Family’ was now ‘reduced to a state of distress which bordered on wretchedness’, George concurred that something needed to be done and through Lord Minto, ambassador at Vienna, he offered Henry an annual pension of £4,000. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 30 Dec. 1799] Acknowledging the king’s ‘noble way of thinking’, Henry accepted.

Having been saved from eking out his final days in a state of poverty, Henry was able to focus on the Conclave, summoned following Pius VI’s death in August 1799, and which convened in Venice from the winter of 1799 through to the spring of 1800. While there had been various reports in the British press late the previous year of efforts being made ‘to seat Cardinal York in the Papal Chair’, he seems never to have been a serious candidate for the papacy himself. [Hampshire/Portsmouth Telegraph, 9 Dec. 1799] Rather, it was left to him to play a supporting role in the eventual election of Cardinal Chiaramonti as Pope Pius VII (1800-23). Later that year, he was able to stage a return to Rome, where he lived out his remaining days in comparative luxury.

To the very end, Henry maintained the careful course he had always navigated. In his will of 1802, signed (rather optimistically) Henry Roi, he repeated an earlier declaration that the de jure succession to the British throne lay (after him) with the reigning king of Sardinia. However, on his death five years later he was also careful to acknowledge the assistance he had received from his Hanoverian cousins by returning to George, Prince of Wales, some of the regalia carried overseas by his grandfather, James II and VII, almost 120 years earlier.

RDEE

Further Reading:
Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England (2015)
Edward Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719-1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile (2011)
Bernard Kelly, Life of Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal Duke of York (1899)
Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English people, 1688-1788 (1989)