Occasionally Jacobites like General Francis Bulkeley or Lord Clare would come out to spend a week or two.27 In April the prince renewed his contacts with the Prince and Princesse de Conti.28 But even this was against the strict provisions of the incognito, which stipulated a maximum of three visitors at any one time.29 The incognito also required him to be called M. le Baron. Often Charles chose to assume a German name.30 On paper, the French conditions for his continuing to remain in their land were stiff.31
The prince cared nothing for the protocol of perfidious France. The roads from Fitzjames to Paris were good; the journey could be made on horseback in six hours.32 This encouraged Charles in his defiance. The pre-Lent days of 1745 were a halcyon period for masked balls, at Versailles, the Hotel de Ville, at the Opera. The prince made a point of attending the opera and theatre in Paris masked, but dressed in such a way that it was obvious who he was.33 On one occasion he was publicly recognised by Madame de Mézières. On another he attracted the attention of the queen.34
Angered by this, Louis XV passed on via comte d’Argenson the message that the prince should not appear in Paris, even masked.35 The prince’s response was typical. He made a point of going to the capital in March and staying for a couple of weeks on ‘urgent business’. While there he again ostentatiously attended the Comédie and went to a number of balls.36
The French riposte was to stall on the payment of his pension and to inform him that he would definitely not be allowed to campaign with their armies in 1745.37 There is no question but that the prince was foolish to provoke the French at this time, even though James admitted that his son was being pushed to the limits of reasonable patience.38 French attitudes to Charles Edward were by no means as uniformly hostile as the suspicious and prickly prince imagined. Roughly speaking, those ministers who wanted to prosecute the war vigorously saw a future role for the Stuart pretender. These were Tencin and the two d’Argensons, who had the influential backing of the royal favourite duc de Richelieu. Those who favoured a quick peace or disentanglement from continental commitments (Noailles, Orry, Maurepas) were unregenerate enemies of the prince and would like to have seen the back of him.39
Charles Edward was never one to be cowed. His response to French intransigence was to give another twist to the spiral of escalating tension between him and Versailles. On 17 April the prince returned to Paris for another sojourn, piquing the French by attending a masked ball at which all the ministers of state were present.40
Meanwhile the Fitzjames interlude was drawing to a close. The prince’s preference for the duc de Bouillon and the Prince de Turenne irked the Berwick family, especially when Charles Edward wrote to his father to veto the award of the Garter to the duc de Fitzjames, on the ground that Bouillon was more deserving of the honour.41 The sour state of relations with the Berwicks was underlined by petty meannesses practised by the duc de Fitzjames. Not only did he instruct his châtelaine to charge the prince’s entourage Paris prices for all their needs but, knowing Charles’s fondness for the chase, he had her hide away the extra bridles.42 The prince was never one to take such insults calmly. He ordered his party to move on to the estates of a more generous patron, his uncle the duc de Bouillon. After spending Holy Week 1745 at the Bouillon estate at Pontoise, the prince’s ‘court’ took up residence at Navarre, Bouillon’s chateau near Evreux in Normandy.43
The superficial round of social life at Fitzjames, interspersed with frequent visits to Paris, gave an impression of quiescence. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Day and night the prince toiled away at his Scottish project. His thinking had now concentrated on two points. It was clear to him that the French would never invade England, nor even Scotland, without being given a powerful incentive to do so. It was equally clear that the English Jacobites would not (and conceivably could not) rise until a French army was actually on English soil. The only place where an unaided rising could be initiated was Scotland, where the tradition of the use of arms was still strong, where the Jacobite clans could provide an army. If Scotland could be set alight with rebellion, the French would have to come over. It would be an opportunity too good to miss.
It is important to be clear that the prince never imagined a rising in Scotland alone would suffice to effect a restoration. The point was to induce France to send an army to Scotland. Since they would always find a reason not to make the first move, an incentive had to be offered. Even a small rising of the Jacobite clans might be enough to persuade Versailles to send, say, 3,000 men. A tiny French army would be an earnest of Louis XV’s intentions. It would have a multiplier effect in the Highlands, drawing doubtful or wavering clans into the net of revolt.
Obviously the best way to arrange matters was to have a French landing in Scotland followed by the rising of the clans. But no serious problem arose if the sequence was reversed and the clans rose first, provided that the French then intervened. It did not occur to Charles Edward that, for various reasons, the French might not lend a hand and he and the Scots would be left high and dry. Only very late in the 1745 rising did this dreadful possibility dawn on the Jacobite leaders.
French reluctance to make the first move was, then, a key element in Charles Edward’s thinking in the early months of 1745. There was a further problem. The excessive caution at Versailles meant that the ministers of state would never allow him to set out for Scotland alone to foment a rising. Moreover, if they would not send troops, they would certainly not entrust a large cache of arms to the prince either.44 It followed that if Charles wanted to light the spark in Scotland that would eventually draw the French in, he not only had to go to Scotland without their foreknowledge; he had also to take his own arsenal for the arming and equipping of the clans. But how could he buy thousands of guns and broadswords if he was struggling to make ends meet on an inadequate French pension?45 This was the principal problem he wrestled with in the crucial first six months of 1745.
The problem soon became urgent. The duke of Perth, one of the original ‘Associators’, wrote from Scotland to say that broadswords were urgently needed. Immediately the prince borrowed 40,000 livres from Waters, the Paris banker. To cover the debt he wrote to Rome to ask his father to pawn his jewels at the Monte di Pietà.46 He explained that he needed the money to buy broadswords in case the French ever decided on a sudden invasion. The last time there was talk of a descent on Scotland, the French said they had no money for arms.47 At the same time Charles Edward asked his father for an open letter of credit on the Waters firm.48
James proved singularly reluctant to help him. In a sharply worded letter on 13 April 1745 he reminded his son that his mother’s jewels had been made over to him against the day of his marriage; he therefore urged him not to pawn them. If, however, he insisted, then he (Charles Edward) must find another agent to carry out the transaction. Reluctantly he sent an order to Waters to cover the 40,000 livres.49
One of the factors in James’s lukewarm support for his son may have been a vague suspicion of what was running through his mind. By this time all James’s agents (O’Brien, Sempill and Balhaldy) had been edged out of the prince’s inner circle, so that James was in the dark about his son’s thoughts and actions, dependent solely on what Charles told him. The ‘prince’s party’ was now led by Kelly and Sheridan. Colonel John O’Sullivan was a new recruit to the growing ‘Irish faction’ and a rising star in the prince’s entourage.50 Sempill and Balhaldy had had the tables turned on them in dramatic fashion. They railed against the prince and his new cabinet with a venom only biters bitten can muster.51
Yet something must have leaked out, for in February we suddenly read the following in a dispatch from James to O’Brien:
As regards sending the Prince to Scotland without troops, that is something I will never agree to, for as the Scots as well as the English have repeatedly said, they can make no headway without foreign troops.52
James forgot that as a young man of Charles Edward’s age he had been more than willing to travel to Scotland wit
hout foreign assistance to head a Jacobite rising.53
The pace of events was much too fast for the circumspect Old Pretender. In January he had refused to countenance a French expedition to Scotland alone, insisting on a descent on England. One month later he was having to face the possibility that not even a French landing in Scotland would materialise. But with or without his father, Charles Edward was making progress on the financial front. The payment of the original instalment of debt to Waters by James encouraged the former to extend further credit lines, and 120,000 livres were made available from the Waters firm.54 Moreover, Charles Edward had now made contact with an expatriate Scot, Aeneas MacDonald, operating as a banker in Paris. MacDonald was prepared to gamble on the prince. At worst he had the security of the Sobieski jewels to fall back on. At best, his rewards in the event of a Stuart restoration could be incalculable. So the list of swords, saddles, bridles and spurs purchased at the firm of Geraldins and Bouques and sent on to secret storage at Nantes mounted steadily.55 By June the prince had assembled in a warehouse at Nantes no less than 20 small field pieces, 11,000 guns, 2,000 broadswords, and a good quantity of powder. There was also a war chest of 4,000 louis d’ors in cash.56
The obvious questions arise. How could Charles Edward purchase all this without arousing the suspicions of the French authorities? And how did the prince propose to get himself and the matériel to Scotland without French foreknowledge? The answer lay in the contacts the prince had made with the expatriate Jacobite ship-owning clique: men like Walter Ruttlidge and, especially, Antoine Walsh. Based at Nantes and St Malo, these were men prepared to seek fortune and honours by all means possible: piracy, slave-trading, political intrigue.57 They also possessed a most valuable attribute: years of experience in outwitting French bureaucracy plus a close knowledge of how the key French minister Maurepas’s mind worked. Together the trio of Walsh, Ruttlidge and O’Heguerty concocted with the prince and his Irish advisers an ingenious scheme to secure an open channel of communication to Scotland.58 Charles Edward did not yet reveal the full dimensions of his scheme.
This was the most secret part of the prince’s preparations. Walsh and Ruttlidge specialised in privateering and buccaneering under letters of marque from the French government. They provided ideal cover for a cruise to Scotland. At Navarre, while the prince got himself back into peak physical fitness with hunting, he held extensive discussions with Walsh.59
The prince next applied to Maurepas for permission for Walsh and Ruttlidge to carry messages for him to and from England, in addition to their other official privileges, such as taking prize crews on the Downs.60 The idea was that open passports or laissez-passer authorisations would be issued empowering privateers to act as Jacobite agents. This would give the privateers freedom from official checks at French ports and customs houses. Predictably, Maurepas turned down the request, on the understandable ground that if such passports came into the wrong hands, they could be used for their own purposes by smugglers and other adventurers.61 Feigning openness, Charles Edward kept his father in the picture about all this.62
When the expected refusal was received, Charles Edward asked permission for a single ship, the Elisabeth, to cruise in Scottish waters, acting as a go-between for French intelligence and the Scottish Jacobites: Having turned down the larger request, Maurepas was disposed to grant this. The prince’s plan worked.63 To Charles’s natural tendency to indirectness and even deviousness was added the skill and cunning of professionals like Walsh and Ruttlidge. The whole scheme had been carefully mulled over with them in April. On the 12th of that month Charles Edward finally revealed the full scope of his plans and asked Ruttlidge to secure Walsh’s agreement in principle. This was readily forthcoming. On 27 April the prince wrote to Walsh: ‘What you have engaged to do is the most important service anyone could ever do me.’64 He immediately sent Sheridan to put Walsh fully in the picture; Kelly meanwhile was to work closely with Walsh on the task of loading the broadswords on board ship.65
The prince’s plans were now progressing more favourably than he had dared hope. Not a word of what was really afoot was breathed to those outside the inner circle: James, Tencin, O’Brien, Marischal, Sempill and Balhaldy were all expressly excluded.66 The French had not the slightest idea of what was going on.67
As the prospect of a voyage to Scotland ascended the scale of probability, from dream to vague project to strong possibility, the prince distracted himself at Navarre by hunting stags in the great forest there. Now he had to decide whom he could take with him.
The Irish trio of Kelly, Sheridan and O’Sullivan had to be taken, since they had been in on the secret from the very beginning. O’Sullivan further commended himself by some slight (though much-exaggerated) military experience in Italy.68 The decision to take the old and ailing Sheridan was controversial, but Sheridan had used all his prima donna wiles on the prince: begging, weeping, cajoling.69 James never forgave the old tutor for this. The man he had sent into France to restrain the prince’s excesses had ended, as he saw it, by throwing in his lot with a madcap adventure. Underlying James’s feelings for Sheridan was a resentment that Charles Edward preferred this substitute father, who had never disciplined his charge like a good and dutiful parent, but merely indulged him shamelessly.
The motive in taking Sheridan along was certainly in part a desire on Charles’s part to snub his father. And no other explanation is possible in the case of Francis Strickland, the fourth Irishman to make the trip to Scotland. Strickland, an old hunting crony of the prince’s, his brother Henry’s ex-tutor, and friend of Dunbar, was dismissed from James’s service early in 1745. He promptly sought out the prince in France and was taken into his entourage. This further enraged James and incidentally finished off Dunbar’s already faltering career at the Palazzo Muti.70
With four Irishmen in his party, but outward bound for Scotland, the prince felt the need to ‘balance the ticket’. He had already decided to take the marquis of Tullibardine (the ‘duke of Atholl’ in Jacobite eyes) as a pretender to the key Atholl holdings in and around Blair Castle.71 Aeneas MacDonald, who had contacts in the Clanranald country, was prepared to go along to protect his investment.72 Finally, the prince chose Sir John MacDonald, a bibulous, cross-grained ex-soldier with contacts among the ship-owning fraternity, to accompany him on the basis of personal liking.73 These four Irishmen and three Scots made up the far from magnificent ‘Seven Men of Moidart’ of later legend.
The prince also had to decide his strategy. This had been the subject of a veritable essay-writing contest between Scottish Jacobites in France and their counterparts in the Highlands. Old Lochiel, chief of the Camerons, had originally proposed making landfall at Inverlochy, but this was considered too far away from the main population centres.74 Sir James Campbell of Auchinbreck, another of the many Jacobites by bankruptcy, proposed landing at Loch Fine, three days’ march from Glasgow.75 Lord Lovat had favoured a simultaneous seizure of Inverlochy and Fort Augustus.76
But Charles Edward had been greatly impressed with Sir Hector Maclean, who was in France during the winter of 1744–5.77 Sending Maclean on ahead to prepare his clan, the prince made plans to land on the island of Mull.78 In addition to the Macleans, the prince hoped to have under his standard within weeks the combined forces of Cameron of Lochiel and Cluny MacPherson, plus the MacGregors, Appin Stewarts, and MacDonalds of Glengarry, Glencoe and Clanranald.79 The immediate target would be all the castles and forts in Scotland garrisoned by Hanoverian troops.80 Unfortunately, the plan to land on Mull aborted when Sir Hector Maclean was taken prisoner soon after reaching Scotland and incarcerated in Edinburgh Castle.81
Last minute preparations were now made. The prince had given letters for Perth and Murray of Broughton to Sir Hector Maclean, but sent on separate messages for them in the changed circumstances, plus his manifestoes and Commission of Regency, with instructions that both be published together.82 He next sent Sir John MacDonald secretly to Nantes to co-ordinate the shipping wit
h Walsh.83
Immediately a major snag was uncovered. The Elisabeth, though having received her commission to cruise in Scottish waters, was being detained in Brest by the Marine Commissary, pending further orders about the future uses of the Brest fleet. Walsh knew what to do in such a situation. A bribe of 1,500 livres was paid over; the Elisabeth was released.84 Ruttlidge weighed anchor to take the warship to the rendezvous at Belle-Isle.
At Navarre the prince laid down a smokescreen to cover his tracks. He informed O’Brien that he was going on a sightseeing excursion to the monastery of La Trappe, where his grandfather James II spent his last pious years; from there he and his party would stop over at Paris.85 The departure of his entourage would not then occasion any surprise. He then sent Sir Thomas Geraldin to Spain to lobby for support. Letters explaining his actions were sent to his father and other Jacobites in Rome. The courier had instructions to make a leisurely journey and tarry awhile at Avignon, seeking support from Ormonde and Marischal, before proceeding to Rome, so that there could be no possibility of James’s recalling them.86
The prince and his companions sped to Nantes, each taking a different route to conceal the design. When they arrived they lodged in different hotels and pretended to meet by accident.87 The prince went down to the quayside in disguise. All ‘Seven Men of Moidart’ went under assumed names.88 Joining up with Walsh and MacDonald, they left the city in two boats and proceeded down the Loire to St Nazaire.89
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