The Road to Culloden Moor

by Diana Preston

  The next night took them to the ruins of Lochiel’s house at Achnacarry, spectral in the ‘fine moonshine’. The burned-out shell of the once lovely house symbolized the destruction of all their hopes, but there was little time for introspection if the small band of fugitives was to reach the coast in time. Luckily for them the Government had switched their attention to the east coast where an embargo had been laid on all shipping from the ports. So on 19 September they reached their journey’s end without incident. Charles thankfully boarded the Prince de Conti and then transferred to L’Heureux with Lochiel, his brother Dr Cameron and other ‘skulking gentlemen’. In all some ‘Twenty-three gentlemen and a hundred and seven men of common rank’ apparently set sail with him in the two vessels. One newspaper reported the scene and how ‘the gentlemen, as well as the commons, were seen to weep, though they boasted of being soon back with an irresistible force.’

  What were Charles’s feelings? They are not recorded but must have been a strange mixture. There was relief at being rescued but the fact remained that he was a vermin-infested fugitive whose quest had failed, rather than ‘the daring Youth that but a little before made the whole Island of Great Britain tremble at his Motions, and shook the very Throne of one of the greatest Princes in Europe’. This was not the end he had imagined in those summer days of 1745 when he had threaded his way through the western isles to begin the rising. Neither was it the end he had foreseen at Glenfinnan, when the standard fluttered proudly in the breeze to the cheers of the Highlanders, or when he entered Holyrood Palace to the acclaim of the mob, or when he stood victorious on the fields of Preston Pans and Falkirk, or when he crossed into England and penetrated its heartland. As L’Heureux weighed anchor, and slipped out into the Atlantic in the hours before dawn, the ‘rude grandeur’ of Loch nan Uamh and its surrounding hills stood out in the moonlight. Over time the once-bright images of rivers and mountains and glens would become shadows in his memory. Whatever he may have hoped in those last moments as the ship creaked and rolled out into the open sea, his glory days were over and would not come again. His cause was finished and the way of life of the Highlanders was already vanishing as surely as the coast of Scotland was fading from his view.

  ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ the songs would plaintively ask, but he had had his chance and lost.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘What can a bird do that has not found a right nest?’

  On 29 September 1746 the wanderer returned at last to France. Charles went ashore at Roscoff to a twenty-one gun salute, a ragged, weather-beaten figure rather then the handsome Prince of popular imaginings. However, it was not long before, bathed and scented, he was off to Versailles to present himself informally to Louis and plead his cause. The sentiments with which he was greeted were balm to his wounded spirits — he was Louis’s ‘trè cher Prince’ and hailed as the embodiment of everything a hero should be. These gratifying meetings were followed by his formal reception at Versailles in a coat of ‘rose-coloured velvet embroidered with silver and lined with silver tissue’. Again he was caressed and flattered and it was all highly acceptable, except that Louis would make no firm commitments.

  Charles tried to ignore the suspicions he had always had about French motives and decided to remain in France and wait on events. He settled down to a sybaritic existence in a smart part of Paris, very different from the ‘hole’ he had complained about in 1744. He was soon the darling of French society, cosseted by the nobility and cheered by the crowds when he went to the opera or the theatre. Ladies of quality fought for the ragged garments he had been wearing on his voyage from Scotland which were treated like holy relics. One lady insisted on having Charles’s wig which, as O’Sullivan testified, was ‘a most abominable one’. He was amused that ‘She was told it wou’d infect her, that it was full of vermine, as really it was, & never such a one was set to frighten Crows away, but she got it ….’

  However, days turned into weeks and weeks into months and nothing happened. It was not long after his return to France that Charles began to quarrel with his family and friends. There had been an initially affectionate reunion with his brother Henry, but soon, prompted by George Kelly, he was accusing him of not having done enough to pursuade the French to send an invasion force. James intervened to defend his younger son only to find himself the target of Charles’s anger. Charles also argued with his father about whether or not to accept a pension from Louis, setting his face against charity from the ally who should be giving him military help. To Charles it was ‘a most scandalous arrangement’, but to James any refusal would be ‘unchristian, unprincely and impolitic’. He was reaching the end of his tether: ‘Enfin, my dear child, I must tell you plainly that if you don’t alter your ways I see you lost in all respects … I have been already too long in hot water on your occasion ….’ As well as this, Charles was falling out with that most faithful friend Lochiel who was urging him to accept French proposals for a small force to be sent to Scotland, rather than the wholesale invasion of England on which he had set his heart.

  Charles’s hopes received a truly mortal blow in the summer of 1747 with the news that Henry had taken the purple of a Roman Catholic Cardinal. Charles described it as a dagger to his heart, much worse than anything Cumberland could have inflicted on him. After all his careful work to demonstrate religious tolerance the next Stuart heir was now a Catholic prelate and celibate. Not that any heirs were likely to have been forthcoming — Henry was a homosexual with a liking for good-looking young clerics. However, Charles felt betrayed on all sides — his father, brother, Louis and the Pope had all colluded to deceive him and this was something he could never forgive. His disturbed childhood had left its mark and Henry’s act enhanced his feelings of insecurity.

  Charles’s life became a rapid rake’s progress. The more disillusioned he became the more he flung himself into a life of debauchery. He took mistresses whom he treated with a jealous obsessiveness entirely in character. He had a highly-charged sexual relationship with the young Louise de Montbazon, insisting on his right to visit her whenever he wished — day or night — and demanding her promise not to sleep with her husband. When she failed to live up to his standards he flaunted a new amour, the glamorous and highly accomplished Princesse de Talmond, ten years his senior and cousin to the Queen of France.

  Charles began to see himself as some kind of ‘noble savage’ who need not be subject to normal constraints. The ideas of the Paris ‘philosophes’ he met in the salons combined nicely with his experiences with the Highlanders to produce this romantic self-image. His excesses were given a fillip when the War of the Austrian Succession came to an end and France and England made peace at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. For Charles this was his final betrayal by France. The English would only agree to the peace if France would agree to exile the Stuarts. They would. ‘Furious and obstinate in everything’, Charles refused to leave gracefully and the Débâcle came in December 1748 — just two years after the return of the ‘cher prince’ — when Louis signed an order expelling him. Charles was arrested on his way to the opera, tied up with silken cords and bundled out of France to Avignon. Here he managed to alienate the Archbishop by introducing boxing and prize-fighting. When the British applied pressure the exasperated cleric had no compunction about ordering Charles to leave.

  This was the beginning of a rootless and peripatetic existence. Sometimes Charles dropped out of sight altogether, to his father’s despair. Now and then rumours of wild schemes reached his ears but he had no influence over his wayward and unhappy son. Charles’s life had become a caricature of his flight through the isles, devoid of dignity and far from heroic. His Highlanders would not have recognised in this petulant, disillusioned, but still young man their ‘Tearlach’ — the cheerful young prince who had marched at their head and shared their hardships. But what, as he himself demanded, ‘can a bird do that has not found a right nest’?

  In 1750 Charles made a brief and clandestine visit to London in the
hopes that the English Jacobites were at last planning to do something. Once again he was travelling in disguise, according to one account ‘in an Abbe’s dress with a black patch over his eye and his eyebrows black’d’. He later told Gustavus of Sweden that he actually inspected the defences of the Tower of London. He also took the opportunity to be received into the Church of England which was probably as much a blow at James and Henry as an act designed to rally support. He attended a gathering of some fifty Jacobite grandees in Pall Mall, the last time such a formal meeting ever took place to discuss a Stuart Restoration. George II was apparently informed of his presence in the capital but was so little disturbed by it that he simply said: ‘I shall do nothing at all, when he is tired of England he will go abroad again.’ He was quite right. Charles was soon ‘convinced he had been deceived’ and departed to pursue his peripatetic life in a twilight world of spies and intrigue.

  In 1752 came the Elibank plot — a half-baked scheme to attack St James’s Palace and murder the royal family. Charles is unlikely to have approved of it, and it was anyway betrayed by that curious mole in the Jacobite camp, ‘Pickle the Spy’. Dr Archibald Cameron, Lochiel’s brother, was arrested on the Scottish border for his complicity and executed. What he was actually hanged for was his part in the ’45, giving him the dubious distinction of being the last Jacobite to be executed for taking part in the rising.

  As Charles’s grip on reality weakened, he continued plotting busily with Antoine Walsh, writing to him that ‘assurances are requisite from this old aunt Ellis …’, ‘Aunt Ellis’ being his rather disrespectful codename for Louis XV. He still believed in his destiny and his duty to pursue it. ‘No, Sir,’ he wrote, ‘The poor girl in question [himself ] does not live a soft life, that will never be his choice ….’ The hero of Culloden was turning increasingly to the bottle and his instability, drunkenness and paranoia were driving away his supporters. To these unpleasant characteristics he added another — that of wife-beater. By 1752 Clementina Walkinshaw, the gentle freckled girl who had nursed him at Bannockburn House had become his mistress. At first the relationship was a happy one and Pickle was reporting that ‘The Pretender keeps her well and seems to be very fond of her.’ In 1753 she gave birth to a little daughter, Charlotte. However, his obsessive jealousy of Clementina became such that, as she later confided to Lord Elcho, ‘he would surround the bed in which she slept with chairs perched on tables, while on the chairs he would put little bells which would sound if anybody approached during the night.’

  In 1760 Charles received a particularly bitter blow when George III ascended the throne to popular acclaim. He was the first of his line to be seen as an Englishman born and bred and he was proud of it. The days of foreign rulers whose hearts were in Hanover rather than England were over, together with any realistic hope of a Stuart Restoration. In his heart Charles must have known it although there is a romantic myth, repeated by Sir Walter Scott in Redgauntlet, that he attended George’s coronation in 1761 and let fall a white kid glove from the balcony in challenge.

  Whatever the case, his violence towards Clementina had become so intolerable that in 1760 she fled with her little girl to a convent. Charles’s response was that he would sack every convent in Europe until he found them. He never forgave her for this, as he never forgave anyone else who he considered had let him down. He still included his father in this bracket of ‘betrayers’ and it was only on James’s death in 1766 that he returned to Rome. He was at last reconciled with his brother on whom he now relied for financial support. Henry generously gave him half the pension he himself received from the Pope, together with money James had left him in his will. Charles began to go out in Roman society and seems to have tried to put a break on his drinking, ‘the nasty bottle’ as Henry called it, but the handsome young prince of the ’45 was long gone. He was ‘bloated and red in the face’ — a fat, middle-aged man with protuberant eyes and uncertain temper.

  Charles did not redeem himself in the years that followed. He made embarrassing scenes at various fashionable resorts and continued to involve himself in fruitless intrigue. In 1772 it seemed as if his life — and the fortunes of the House of Stuart — might have reached a turning point when he married the young and worldly Louise of Stolberg in order to produce an heir. Yet it was not long before ‘The Queen of Hearts’ as she was known was being unfaithful to her fat, unattractive husband. He probably deserved it, having made little attempt to temper his behaviour. As one Englishman wrote anonymously to Charles: ‘All my countrymen who return from Italy are surprised that your amiable consort stays with you: there is not a single person who would not go to any length to deliver her.’ The final breach came in 1780 when she accused Charles of rape and sought sanctuary in a convent by tricking Charles. As one amused commentator put it: ‘The mould for any more casts of the Royal Stuarts has been broken, or what is equivalent to it, is now shut up in a convent of nuns.’ Not that Louise stayed in the convent for long. She soon ran off with her lover the Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri.

  Charles declined into old age, all passion spent, but his last years were cheered by his daughter Charlotte. She forgave him his abuse of her mother and his neglect of her and came to live with him in the Palazzo Muti in Rome. His relationship with her was probably the only stable one he ever had with a woman. She protected him both from himself and his memories. When a visitor pressed Charles to talk about the ’45 he fell in a fit on the floor. ‘Oh, Sir, what is this?’ Charlotte is said to have chided the visitor. ‘You have been speaking to him about Scotland, and his Highlanders. No one dares speak about such things in his presence.’ According to the stories Charles died in Charlotte’s arms on 30 January 1788. There was no special star in the sky to mark his passing. It was just the death of a disappointed old man in a crumbling palace haunted by the past.

  But what of those others whose lives and destinies had been so closely linked with his? The fate of the Scottish chiefs and grandees had been mixed. Lord George Murray had escaped to the continent after Culloden. He came to Paris in 1747 hoping to see Charles, but the Prince, convinced of his treachery, refused any interview and sent a message to his former commander to be gone. Lord George returned to exile in Holland where he died in 1760 without ever seeing his beloved Scotland again. One of his sons inherited his Hanoverian uncle’s title of Duke of Atholl, another became a British general and a third became an admiral. The Duke of Perth died on board the ship bearing Lord Elcho, Lord John Drummond, Maxwell of Kirkconnell and other fugitives to safety. Lord Ogilvy hid in Angus until he too made his escape to France where he obtained a commission in the French army. The beautiful Lady Ogilvy joined him after escaping from Edinburgh Castle disguised as her own maid. Cluny Macpherson remained skulking in Scotland for a number of years, perhaps motivated by thoughts of the buried treasure at Loch Arkaig, and later fell out bitterly with Charles. The faithful Lochiel who had boarded L’Heureux with Charles was given a regiment in the French army by Louis but, like Lord George, was a very reluctant exile from Scotland. He died of brain-fever in 1748. Chevalier Johnstone also escaped after many adventures disguised as a Scots pedlar, and eventually became aide-de-camp to General Montcalm, fighting against Wolfe at Quebec as he had fought against him at Culloden. Neil Maceachain lived in France and his son became one of Napoleon’s most famous generals.

  Of the ‘seven Men of Moidart’ who had accompanied Charles on his historic voyage to Scotland in 1745, O’Sullivan made his escape back to France after parting from Charles on South Uist, but eventually fell foul of him, married a rich widow and died in about 1761. William, Duke of Atholl, was captured and died in the Tower of London in July 1746, while his Prince was still a fugitive in the Highlands. Aeneas Macdonald, the banker, had been absent in Barra collecting Spanish money at the time of Culloden. He was later captured, tried and eventually released only to perish in the French Revolution. Francis Strickland, the only Englishman, had already died of dropsy in Carlisle thereby escaping an even nast
ier fate at the hands of Cumberland. Poor old Sir Thomas Sheridan died of an apoplectic fit in 1746 after being ordered to Rome to give an account of Charles’s doings to James and apparently being rebuked by the King for giving the Prince bad advice. George Kelly, the parson and intriguer, had been sent to France to spread the news of Charles’s victory at Preston Pans. He later rejoined Charles in Paris but quarrelled with him and died in 1762. Sir John Macdonald surrendered after Culloden, claiming protection as a French subject and was subsequently exchanged for English prisoners.

  Lords Balmerino, Cromarty and Kilmarnock were tried by the Upper House in July 1746 and condemned. Charles read the accounts of their trials in the newspapers while hiding in the heather. Cromarty’s wife managed to secure her husband a reprieve by swooning dramatically at the feet of George II. However, Balmerino and Kilmarnock went to the block and both of them impressed the watching crowd. Balmerino tested the sharpness of the axe with his thumb and made a defiant speech absolutely denying Cumberland’s claim that Charles had ordered no quarter to be given at the battle of Culloden. Lord Kilmarnock behaved with such dignity that even the executioner was in tears and had to be given a strong drink.