The life of one of Scotland's most romantic and tragic figures. King James II's eldest legitimate grandson, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known everywhere as 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', achieved international fame at the age of twenty five as the man who by his charisma, daring and energy led the Rising of 1745 against George II which all but succeeded in restoring his exiled royal family - the Stuarts - to their thrones of Scotland, England and Ireland. The romance of this dramatic military episode and the legend of the prince's extraordinary months on the run in the Western Highlands after his defeat at Culloden in 1746, eclipse the deeply human story of a brilliant but flawed man. Vital, magnanimous and sensitive in victory, yet scarred as a youth by the anorexia which killed his mother, his defeat in successive risings led to an alchoholism which destroyed Charles's heroic qualities and all his early promise. Prince Charles Edward's life is often focused on the 1745 Rising.
But this new biography charts his early life and reveals the Polish origin of his astonishing dynamism and brittle psyche, inherited from his Polish princess-mother, set against the multi-cultural upbringing of his father's exiled British court in Rome and the international network of his pan-European cousins, friends, freemasons and bankers who throughout his life financed and tried to further his ever-more doomed cause. Pininski's new life of Charles also vividly relates the story of the prince's only child and heir and three hidden grandchildren whose previously untold lives were described by the Daily Mail as 'one of the best-kept secrets in Scottish history'.