Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

Not surprisingly, Paris erupted on all sides. As soon as he heard the news, comte d’Argenson, Minister of War, complained to Louis XV that this would ruin everything.80 Recriminations flew thick and fast among the French ministers about who was responsible for inviting the prince. The blame was largely laid at Tencin’s door though, as he truthfully protested, he knew nothing of the invasion project.81 The English, too, seem to have scented something in the wind. The very next day after Charles Edward’s arrival, British minister Thompson reported the possibility of a descent on the English coast, though not until 18 February did he know of the prince’s presence in France.82

  Something of the coolness of the French response to his arrival was borne in on the prince when the court informed him that he was to remain in the strictest incognito.83 Lord Elcho went with the Earl Marischal to see the prince at Sempill’s house on the Estrapade (where Charles was lodging). They found him alone, drinking tea, depressed about his incognito.84 Conversation turned to the French invasion. The prince ordered Elcho and Marischal to follow him to Dunkirk. Yet within days these orders proved otiose. The French issued instructions of their own. Marischal and Elcho were to accompany the main invasion force at Dunkirk. Charles Edward himself was to embark with Saxe on the Dauphin Royal, Barrailh’s flagship, but to remain incognito meanwhile at Gravelines.85 Saxe showed just how much contact he wanted with the Stuart prince by stationing himself at Dunkirk, keeping Charles at arm’s length and away from the open preparations.86

  On 15 February Lord Sempill received from the French the first instalment of the prince’s expenses, 10,000 livres.87 Although the official stance at Versailles was that the young Stuart was an uninvited guest, they decided to make the best of things. An extraordinary payment, for the duration of the expedition only, was authorised. There was now nothing to keep Charles Edward in Paris. He journeyed up to Gravelines, confident that the hour of his destiny had struck.88

  7

  The New Byzantium

  (March–September 1744)

  CHARLES EDWARD ARRIVED at Gravelines to find a situation very different from his sanguine imaginings. His own presence on the coast was now widely known.1 Bussy’s ciphered revelations had done their work all too well. The secret was out. Once the combined threat from Young Pretender and French invasion was realised, the English authorities sprang into action. George II addressed Parliament on the subject.2 Wholesale arrests of the leading English Jacobites took place; troop reinforcements were ordered from Ireland and the Netherlands.3

  All this was bad enough from Saxe’s point of view, but the naval aspect was if anything even more discouraging. On 26 February 1744 Saxe wrote to d’Argenson and Amelot that he would already have landed in England if Barrailh had arrived.4 Moreover, there was no sign of the promised English pilots that Henry Read (‘Mr Red’) was supposed to be bringing over to Dunkirk to guide the French flotilla to landfall.

  On 27 February Barrailh arrived, having successfully detached from Roquefeuil. But there was still no sign of Read and the pilots. The unbelievable farce in which Read had become entangled only became clear later. It transpired that the English Jacobites had taken fright after George II’s call to arms on 25 February. Fearing to entrust the secret of the expedition to English pilots, they sent Read on to France alone, with instructions to pick up suitable pilots in the Picardy ports.5 Read arrived in France on 3 March. With little knowledge of French, and unable to find either the prince or any English contact, he wandered aimlessly around for a few days and then returned to England, his mission unaccomplished.6

  By this time the French were already faltering in their resolve. On 6 March comte d’Argenson told Saxe that he should prepare for a possible abandonment of the expedition, since Charles Edward’s arrival had ruined everything.7 There was real bitterness in d’Argenson’s letter: Louis XV, he said, wished to put it on record as strongly as possible that the secret enterprise was destroyed by the Stuart prince’s contumacious folly in arriving in Paris at that juncture. What d’Argenson did not realise was that Louis XV, under pressure from those like Noailles who stressed the paramountcy of France’s German policy, was already having second thoughts and looking for an excuse to abandon the English project without loss of face.8

  The Roquefeuil part of the invasion project was an even bigger disaster. The French admiral left Brest with twenty-two ships of the line, but found no English squadron at Spithead – Admiral Norris had slipped out two days earlier.9 After telling Saxe it would be safe to cross the Channel, Roquefeuil realised his error and followed Norris up the Channel. On 7 March the fwo fleets came in sight of each other, Roquefeuil at Dungeness, Norris at Hythe. Slightly outnumbered, with fifteen men o’ war to Norris’s nineteen (for by now Barrailh’s seven vessels had been detached), Roquefeuil prepared to give battle.

  But before the rival fleets could close, at about 3 p.m., the first of the two great storms of March 1744 swept upon the combatants.10 All that night and next day the tempest blew, stripping masts and spars, driving ships into each other. Eighteen of Norris’s ships were damaged, five incapacitated; one was accidentally rammed and went down with all hands. Roquefeuil meanwhile slipped anchor and ran before the wind to Brest, sustaining only minor damage.11

  The real devastation came at Dunkirk, where the transports were already loading Saxe’s troops. Loss of life was slight, but eleven transports and many smaller ships were smashed and six months’ supplies and materiel destroyed, along with anchors and tackle.12 It was now obvious that the expedition could not sail. Saxe wrote angrily to the War Minister on 8 March, lashing out in all directions: at Barrailh, the English Jacobites, at Charles Edward himself.13 The last straw was when he discovered that Norris’s battered ships had reformed in line on the Downs, without a word to him (Saxe) about this from Lord Barrymore and his friends.14

  A second storm on 11 March, causing further damage, put the issue beyond doubt. That very day Saxe wrote to the prince to tell him that the expedition had been abandoned.15

  By this single communication the French awoke the sleeping tiger. Charles Edward’s communications to Saxe hitherto had been models of tact and charm.16 That he was in good spirits can be seen from a letter to his father while he was waiting to see if Roquefeuil would successfully decoy Norris: ‘The king would laugh heartily and be mightily diverted to see us often disputing the idiom of the French language and the proper turn of words to express the idea we would have them take.’17

  The first sign of gathering clouds came on 5 March when the prince learned of Saxe’s latest orders. Incensed by the incompetence of their English Jacobite partners, the French court sent the commander instructions that if he was not met at the Hope, he was not to proceed into the Thames but to return to Dunkirk.18 After the storm on 7 March, Saxe threw out a broad hint that the expedition would not proceed, but used the supineness of the English Jacobites as the likely reason.

  Immediately and in all good faith the prince sent an emissary to smooth Saxe’s ruffled feathers.19 This messenger crossed with Saxe’s letter of the 11th, telling him that all was over. Angrily the prince returned to the fray. How was it, he asked Saxe, that the weather had so devastated the French yet left Norris unscathed? If the destruction was as great as Saxe now claimed, how was it possible for the English fleet to be still on station in the Downs? This must be a ‘Protestant wind’ with a vengeance, capable of inflicting selective damage.20

  At the same time the prince wrote to Earl Marischal, requesting him to seek an interview with Saxe and lay certain facts before him. He was to point out that two of the captains in Norris’s fleet had already been suborned by the Jacobites. Marischal should further urge the immediate use of the Brest fleet as the sole means of retrieving the situation.21 In private remarks to Marischal, the prince expressed his anger clearly, accusing the French of incompetence and cowardice in the face of Norris.22

  Saxe’s reply to these representations was cold and ironical. After explaining that the second storm on 11 March ha
d destroyed a further three transports and one warship, and had left the fleet without cables or anchors, Saxe commented tartly that he himself could neither command the winds nor be responsible for them. If the prince wanted to fasten the blame on someone, he should consider Dame Fortune as the candidate.23 Further stung by Marischal’s lobbying for action from Roquefeuil, Saxe claimed disingenuously (and self-contradictorily) not to know where Roquefeuil was, but that since he was certainly at sea on 11 March, the extent of damage to his ships could be readily imagined.

  The prince riposted in similar ironical tone. He welcomed the fact that Saxe professed himself not discouraged and added that what was needed now was more adamantine spirit like the commander’s. To make his contempt palpable, Charles Edward tried to reduce Saxe to the level of a banker; he asked for 500 louis d’or of the money the commander had been given for the Stuart prince’s use.24

  The cold exchange continued. Saxe claimed that Roquefeuil’s fleet was hors de combat, having lost nine ships in the storm. He had no money available, since the only funds at his disposal were letters of credit on a London bank.25 Then, in true de haut en bas style, he announced that the correspondence was closed, since he had been ordered to return to court.

  The prince was left in a cold fury, with no focus for his rage. From this day on he was always to distrust and loathe the French. The débâcle, and the insensitive way Versailles and Saxe had dealt with him, tapped a deep vein of pain and rejection in the prince. It would have been better if someone in authority in France could have admitted candidly that there had been misunderstandings and problems on both sides, had frankly conceded that, whereas the French were annoyed with Charles Edward for breaching their secrecy and wrecking the invasion, they were scarcely blameless themselves. Such statesmanship called for the skills of a Benedict XIV; it was completely beyond the instinctively duplicitous Louis XV, quite apart from the consideration that he would have had to reveal his own chicanery over the Balhaldy mission.

  The full force of the prince’s anger comes across in his letters to his father. Inveighing against the incompetence of the octogenarian Roquefeuil, he asked, justifiiably, how it was possible for Norris to emerge from Spithead on 26 February and be on the Downs two days later if Roquefeuil’s decoying tactic was meant to be the hinge on which the whole enterprise turned?26 The prince added bitterly that but for the storm he would now be a prisoner in Norris’s hands.

  It was at this moment in his life above all that Charles Edward needed a true father, someone like his erstwhile protector the duke of Berwick, someone who could sympathise with his justifiable complaints while helping him to see the complex political situation steadily and in the round. What the prince got was the worst possible counsellor for him: the Earl Marischal. Aged fifty at the time of the invasion attempt, a veteran of the 1715 and 1719 risings, Marischal should have been the ideal guide and mentor for the prince. In reality the prince’s worst enemies could not have provided a more ill-matched confidant. Proud, aloof and imperious, Marischal was like Bolingbroke in that he wanted a Stuart restoration solely on his own terms. All Jacobite plots had to be under his direction, and he had in effect to be Jacobite Prime Minister, or he would react with sullen peevishness. He would serve in great affairs but never in small ones. These qualities had already led him into bitter clashes with James himself and were, ironically, precisely the reason James had not appointed him as his Secretary of State.

  There were, moreover, more profound reasons for the irremediable personality clash between Marischal and Charles Edward that first became obvious in March 1744. Marischal managed to combine the patronising aspects of James that most infuriated the prince with personality traits similar to Charles Edward’s; this especially made accommodation between them impossible, since they were in a sense in competition for the same space. Marischal disliked Charles on sight when he saw him in Rome in 1732. This kind of ‘hate at first sight’ is as difficult to explain as its existence is undeniable. The clash between the two men was now and later to yield bitter fruit.

  What Charles Edward needed during the lonely days at Gravelines were qualities of empathy and understanding from a trusted counsellor, someone who would immediately appreciate the force of his criticism of the French. What Marischal provided was endless quibbling with the prince’s opinions, infinitely elastic justifications of the French and, worst of all, gloomy and pessimistic jeremiads to counterpoint Charles’s exuberance.27 Where the prince could see only the opportunities Saxe and Roquefeuil were wasting, Marischal saw only the many barriers and obstacles to a successful French invasion.28

  Besides finding copious excuses for Saxe and Roquefeuil, Marischal was amazingly quick to find reasons why the enterprise could not now succeed. He mentioned the suspension of Habeas Corpus in England, the withdrawal of troops from Ireland and Holland, and the unfavourable publicity given to the recent sneak French naval attack at Toulon, as reasons to hope for little from English Jacobitism. It was no wonder that the prince remarked acidly that Marischal made heaps of difficulties ‘but is not of a mind perhaps to find remedies for them’.29

  Even when the prince steeled himself to accept that the English expedition had been abandoned, and looked around for alternatives or palliatives, he found Marischal more than useless. What about sending the Irish brigade to Scotland, he suggested? Would Marischal undertake a mission to Scotland to keep the flames of Jacobitism alive and not lose the impetus engendered by the recent invasion fever? No, Marischal replied, he would not. He doubted French sincerity. Whoever told the prince that Louis XV was willing to press on despite the reverse to the Saxe expedition was telling him a pack of lies.30

  Very well, the prince concluded, he would go to Scotland alone. The clans had assured him they would be willing to receive him on whatever basis. This would be singularly unwise, counselled Marischal. Scotland alone could not unlock the door to a Stuart restoration. And if the English Jacobites were chary about joining in a rising with the support of sixteen battalions of French troops, could anything seriously be expected of them if the prince went alone?31 To round off his achievements, Marischal made a mess of liaison with the prince’s second choice of emissary for Scotland, Nicholas Wogan.32

  It seemed that to Marischal all paths to Britain were ineluctably barred, that the Hanoverian regime was as unassailable as the angel with the flaming sword who barred the return to Eden. Faced with this monumental defeatism, Charles Edward was fully justified in concluding bitterly: ‘Nothing can ever gain my heart to a man who finds faults and difficulties in everything, but never removed any.’33

  The bruising treatment the prince had received both from Saxe and Marischal made a profound impact on his fragile personal equilibrium. Charles Edward could only draw sustenance from success and forward momentum. Failure, particularly a débâcle when on the very brink of success, triggered the self-destructive side of the prince. A wise man would now have bowed to the inevitable. But Charles plugged away at his theme that sickness and weather could not have affected the French alone, that he therefore expected to see Louis XV take up the gauntlet again.34

  Turning his back on Marischal as a hopeless pessimist, the prince addressed himself to Sempill. Urging him not to relax his efforts at Versailles, he proposed, if necessary, a switch of efforts from an English to a Scottish landing. For this he would need, in addition to the Irish brigade, two French battalions and a regiment of dismounted dragoons.35 Predictably, the Earl Marischal poured cold water on this idea too when he heard of it. The news that he was returning to Paris was more than welcome to the prince.36

  Fully convinced that the Scottish expedition would very soon take shape and hoping too to revive the cross-Channel project, the prince dispatched Buchanan (his old aide from Rome) to England to spy out the situation. Inevitably, Buchanan reported that the English Jacobites would not move a muscle until a French army had landed.37 But he did recount a serious level of disaffection among the English Tories. The prince was about to send
this corroborating evidence to Versailles when he received the clearest indication yet of Louis XV’s true intentions. Charles Edward was ordered to leave the coast and proceed, still incognito, to residence at the house of the bishop of Soissons.38

  Only then did the floodgates of paranoia fully open. Charles Edward was left permanently scarred by French treatment of him. As he later remarked bitterly: ‘A blind man could see that France was only making sport of him.’39 The French, it now seemed, had never been serious. Saxe had been playing with him. Marischal had humoured him, secretly delighted at his failure. There had been collusion to prevent an excellent enterprise from being successful. None of the arguments put to him had been adduced in good faith. So be it, France would learn they had no pliant and deferential James to deal with this time. Pointedly Charles Edward ignored the summons to leave the coast. Instead, he wrote a long missive for Sempill to send to Louis XV, setting out in detail the reasons why the English enterprise should be revitalised. The implication was that he had no intention of leaving Gravelines.40

  At this low ebb in his fortunes, the prince had to put up with his father’s mournful and depressed letters, full of regret about the failure of the expedition, and once again chiding him for being a poor correspondent.41 The gloomy atmosphere in the Palazzo Muti at this time was attested to by the Pope. Benedict XIV admitted that when the bad news came in, he avoided James for a week, unable to face him.42 Putting on a bold front, the prince excused his failure to write on the grounds of a lack of a cipher.43

  A week later he touched on more realistic issues, initiating the series of complaints about money that were to punctuate 1744: ‘You would laugh heartily if you saw me going about with a single servant, buying fish and other things and squabbling for a penny more or less.’44

  Meanwhile the French had somewhat played into the prince’s hands. A memorandum from the comte d’Argenson to Saxe, demanding Charles Edward’s removal from Gravelines to the bishop of Soissons’s house, two leagues from the town of Soissons, arrived after Saxe had left the coast.45 Even better, among the meticulously detailed instructions concerning the prince (including a specification that he should approach his new abode via Compiègne rather than Soissons) was a stipulation that Charles should have Marischal at his side as adviser. But Marischal, after a few days in his Boulogne house, had also departed for Paris.