But since it was easy to ascertain that the Princess of Hesse had not in fact married the prince, his letter referring to ‘my wife’ and addressed to the king of Poland was taken to be a blind, masking a Polish marriage. The most likely candidate was Princess Teofila Konstancia, daughter of Michael Radziwill.49 The Princess Radziwill rumour seemed plausible and it persisted for years, even though James Stuart himself accurately dismissed it as nonsense on the ground that Teofila was only ten years old in 1749.50 Despite James’s disclaimers, the canard proved remarkably hard to dislodge; its tenacity was proved by its still being current in 1752.51
Only a handful of observers guessed at Lorraine and Lunéville, and most of these included it merely in a shopping-basket of conjectures.52 Puysieux alone, inveterate and brooding Stuart prince watcher, was always convinced his enemy was holed up in Lunéville.53 Hatred, like the prospect of hanging, it seems, concentrates the mind.
Students of the hilarious could do worse than sample the infinite variety of the imaginary adventures of the ‘prince in fairyland’.54 Even sober commentators were seduced into Arabian Nights fantasy. Barbier produced a tale of an extended tour of northern Europe on foot.55 D’Argenson, while incorporating some true material in his sketch of the prince’s movements in 1749, concocted an itinerary that would have taxed a modern ‘shuttle’ diplomat: between Avignon and Venice (less than three months) the prince was supposed to have visited Sweden, Berlin and Dresden as well as Paris and Lorraine.56
The farrago of nonsense written about the prince’s movements in 1749 and after testifies to the superlative skill with which he threw off his would-be pursuers. James and Henry themselves were no wiser than the benighted foreign diplomats. Charles used a cell structure of agents, wherein only the immediate link in the chain (usually Goring, a veteran of the Austrian service, at this stage) knew where he was at any given moment. In the intelligence battle the prince and his enemies used many of the same disinformation techniques against each other. Charles encouraged his supporters to spread rumours that he was dead or gravely ill, especially when he was about to embark on some perilous venture (like the 1750 trip to England).57 His enemies retaliated, trying to winkle him out of hiding by claiming that he was dead at moments when they wanted him to show himself.58
One inevitable result of all this chaos and illusion was that many ‘false princes’ arose, trying to trade on his name and reputation. Sometimes this was just a case of Charles Edward lookalikes or people mistaken for him being taken into custody or reported by spies.59 There were false sightings in Spain and Bordeaux in 1751 and in Corsica in 1753.60 But often the false Charleses were conscious charlatans. In October 1751 an escaped prisoner turned up in Seville, masquerading as the prince.61 A bogus ‘Charles Edward’ swindled his way right down through northern Italy in 1753, leaving IOUs in the prince’s name.62
Poor British intelligence was part of the answer to the prince’s success in these years. One highly-paid agent, supposedly hot on the scent of the prince, produced an ‘exclusive’ report that gave his height as 5 feet 5 inches (6 inches too short).63 British spies also wasted a lot of time on meticulous surveillance of people who turned out not to be Charles Edward.64
But another part of the answer was the prince’s genius for disguise. His favourite garb was that of a priest;65 given his contempt for priestcraft, this is significant in itself. One of the few British agents who actually got close to him in the ‘obscure period’ – Pickle the Spy – dealt with this aspect of the prince at some length in a report to the duke of Newcastle in 1755:
The Young Pretender has an admirable genius for skulking, and is provided with so many disguises that it is not so much to be wondered at that he has hitherto escaped unobserved. Sometimes he wears a long false nose which they call Nez à la Saxe because Marshal Saxe used to give such to his spies whom he employed. At other times he blackens his eyebrows and beard and wears a black wig, by which alteration his most intimate acquaintances would scarce know him, and in these dresses he has mixed often in the company of English gentlemen travelling through Flanders without being suspected.66
Hand in hand with the penchant for disguise went a taste for the use of aliases: Mr Benn, Mr Douglas, Dumont, Cartouche, The Wild Man, Mr Thompson, these are only some of the pseudonyms used by the prince in the first five years of his incognito in ‘imaginary space’ (to use one of his own expressions).67 There was more to this than simple prudence. Taken together, the disguises and aliases point to something central in the prince’s personality. If a man turns to disguise as a way of life, it suggests a savage dissatisfaction with himself. And the use of aliases and pseudonyms even in contexts where the person receiving the letter knew perfectly well who the writer was suggests once again a fragile sense of identity.
This is hardly surprising. The long years of being a prince without a throne, royalty without a kingdom, a man supposedly deriving his right from God but enjoying the devil’s own luck, were now compounded by a further dimension of alienation. It was inexpedient for the prince to have a settled location or a traceable identity. To be a pretender who has to pretend not to be a pretender introduces a Chinese-box sense of chaos. For other men not blessed (or cursed) by a royal heritage, it was possible to choose an identity from a number of available roles defined by parents, teachers, mentors, religious leaders. In a very real sense Charles Edward, by contrast, had to make up his identity as he went along. What else could a defeated pretender who was not resigned to his fate do?
A proud and obstinate refusal to wear the mask painted by others is potentially a sign of greatness. But if this obstinacy is combined with a fragmented or crumbling ego, the ensuing identity problems can produce a morbid fear of intimacy. The binding nature of sexual love can then feed into these problems and produce an even greater sense of alienation.
A priori we should expect the three years of frustrated and embittered exile in Lunéville to have seen the stresses on the prince reach their height. To judge from the passionate, angry and violent relationship with the Princesse de Talmont, this is exactly what happened. Until the prince’s expulsion, the relationship had not been conducted in maximum stress. Thereafter it was; the strain began to show.
The first half of the year 1749 was a frenetic, itinerant time for the prince. The second saw him a recluse in Lunéville. He and the princess saw each other only for brief periods. Not surprisingly, in this year there were many declarations of love and undying passion from both parties.68 ‘Oh my king, where are you?’ Marie-Louise exclaims during the Avignon separation.69 There were similar sentiments while Charles was at Venice.70
But already there are signs of tension. The princess complains of headaches which she cures by taking opium.71 She asks the prince for a signed declaration of his love. But since the prince is now in thrall to pseudonyms at all times, he refuses the request: ask me anything but that, he writes.72
The tensions broke into the open once they were together in Lunéville. Elisabeth Ferrand warned the lovers that Talmont’s Paris maid knew their secret and might be unreliable.73 Marie-Louise’s fear of the Bastille was morbid and profound. The contrast with the prince’s insouciant attitude to the French authorities brought on the first clashes. So as not to attract spies or assassins, they occupied different premises in Lunéville. The prince was fond of making nocturnal forays to Marie-Louise’s house at any hour that took his fancy. She insisted on greater circumspection and regard for security. It was Louise de Montbazon all over again. One night the princess refused to admit him. This threw the prince into a rage. He insisted on his right to call at her house at will. She replied that if he persisted in his obstinacy, she would solve the problem by leaving.74
In the relationship between the two lovers, there was violent oscillation between love and hatred.75 There were times when each recognised the enemy in the other, when the struggle for power between their wills became explicit.76 ‘If you want to help me,’ the prince snarled at her, ‘stop maintaining
that black is white and you are never wrong. If you don’t, why are you meddling in my life?’77
The two manoeuvred for advantage, each trying to wrongfoot the other. The prince would insist on seeing her when she was indisposed. She would insist on a meeting when he was most busy with his political affairs.78 There are indications that the princess’s frequent illnesses prevented her always from fulfilling the role of mistress.79 She claimed her lover owed her something for two years’ fidelity. The prince responded by casual encounters with other women, ‘by night and day’.80 Marie-Louise, faced with the open boasting of some of these ‘conquests’, threatened in despair to reveal the prince’s whereabouts to the courts of Europe.81
Yet there were clearly many tender moments. He called her ‘ma reine’, she called him ‘mon roi’. Two incidents around Easter 1750 revealed the ambivalence in their relationship. Marie-Louise threatened to leave Lunéville on Easter Monday if the prince did not make strenuous attempts to patch up their flagging relationship.82 The reply showed Charles Edward at his most charming. He wrote that, since it was the custom to make wishes for friends and enemies on the stroke of midnight on Easter Saturday, he wished her all possible happiness. He went on to dub her the Queen of Morocco and a tormentress: ‘Have pity on your faithful subjects. They don’t deserve to die of chagrin and despair.’83
Such moments were more and more becoming emotional oases in the middle of a wasteland of mutual destruction. The princess hated the boredom of Lunéville and longed to be allowed to return to Paris for a short holiday; even a fortnight would do. The prince would not hear of it.84 When she insisted that life in Lorraine was driving her to depression and melancholy, Charles compromised. He was prepared for her to take a trip to Vienna. While she was there, she could make herself useful and lobby the court to allow him to reside in the Imperial domains. The tone in which the prince announced her departure (in April 1750) suggested that he did not much care whether she came back.85 It is clear that he did not entirely trust her. He insisted on inditing a letter to his father in the form of an affidavit, which gave the princess’s departure as the reason for his own change of abode.86
It is not possible to follow all the stages of the relationship on a day-by-day basis, but it is clear that Marie-Louise did not after all make the trip to Vienna. Having secured the prince’s agreement in principle to the idea of a parting, she hammered away at a return to Paris. She stressed how useless she had been to him at Lunéville. He asked her to stay on for another couple of months. What point was there in that, she asked? Would she not be just as useless as ever?87
The prince brooded. Then something happened to break the logjam. The princess’s sister fell dangerously ill. Again she asked leave to depart. After five days sullen silence, the prince gave his reply.88 She had sold her idea too well. He was agreeable, provided he too went with her to the French capital. She begged him to reconsider, pointing up the risks of capture in Paris. But Charles was adamant. By June 1750 the pair were back in Paris.89
Before she left Lunéville, the princess poured out a stream of complaints about Charles Edward to Goring. She expressed sadness, disillusionment and disgust with life. The burden of her charge against the prince was, as from so many others, ingratitude: ingratitude for the asylum she had provided, for her good offices with Stanislas, for the way she had neglected her own fortune and interests in France.90 Anything that was done for the prince, she complained, he took as his due. He dwelt exclusively on his misfortunes, never seeing how much worse his plight could be.
Nothing in Paris caused her to change her mind. The prince spent the best part of two months there, frequently changing accommodation, now with Elisabeth Ferrand and the comtesse de Vassé, now incommunicado, pretending to have left.91 For a short while he accepted the hospitality of Helvétius, ‘le philosophe’,92 but his paranoid fear of being trailed and apprehended never allowed him to stay long at any one lodging. He had serious business in Paris, discussing with emissaries from England his plan to visit London and organise a coup d’état there, but he never let the Princesse de Talmont in on the secret.93 Yet he did not cease to torment her. The spectre of the Bastille loomed closer with every one of the 11 p.m. or midnight visits he paid to her house.94 On one occasion she lost her nerve and had him turned away at the door, then apologised next day for her panic and asked him to try again.95 Marie-Louise began to see herself as more and more of a victim. She later complained that she had not slept properly once during her three years’ liaison with Charles Edward. Insomnia is a constant motif in her correspondence.96
The prince for his part despised her ‘weakness’. He announced loftily that he would leave Paris and never bother her again.97 This was later elevated to a formal break with her.98 He did not reveal that he had his own reasons for wanting to be unencumbered in the next few months, but took the precaution of writing letters from Lunéville on his return there, and another from Mons,99 so that if she ever did have a mind to betray him, her intelligence would be useless.
The princess knew nothing of her lover’s trip to England, its failure and its sequel. She would not have been surprised to learn that the prince was once again negotiating a marriage, this time with the daughter of the duke of Daremberg.100 There was no reason why a dynastic marriage should seriously interfere with their relationship. But she might have been on her guard if the prince had admitted that he suggested a renewal of their liaison only after yet another marriage suit had foundered. When the plenipotentiaries met at Basle to arrange the secret marriage with a German princess, the negotiations immediately broke down over the prince’s quixotic demand for a dowry of 12,000 troops for the invasion of England.101 Not a word of this found its way into the letters the prince wrote to Marie-Louise from Lunéville.102
The period October–December 1750, after the prince returned from his unsuccessful foray into England, is one of the most obscure stretches in the ‘obscure years’. When he was not busy on his many political schemes (or fantasies), Charles Edward maintained a steady correspondence with Elisabeth Ferrand, conducted in an elaborate code. Ever since the early days of the St Joseph convent, he had written to her on average once a month, usually to ask her to perform some chore. Now he stepped up the correspondence, obviously revelling in the gossip from Paris. All their friends and acquaintances (and enemies) were given cant names that are very revealing of the prince’s attitude to them: Mme de Mézières was ‘the old lunatic’ (la folle); the hated Puysieux was the imbecile (l’imbecile), and so on.103 Ferrand called Talmont ‘une femme méchante’ and added that she did not understand why the princess bothered to visit her, since all she seemed to want to do was lose her temper.104
It is perhaps indicative of the prince’s general mental state and of his attitude to the Talmont relationship that he encouraged the mutual jealousy between his mistress and Ferrand and Vassé as they vied for his attention. He would egg on either side to keep secrets from the other and would connive at their petty criticisms. Ferrand was particularly critical of Talmont and frequently complained of her meddling in the commissions the prince asked her to perform.105 But it was typical of the prince that he laid down no clear guidelines on the degree and nature of backbiting he would permit. He arrogated to himself the privilege of taking a high moral tone on this mutual criticism when it suited him. Having condoned Ferrand’s animadversions on Talmont in July 1750, Charles decided to object to them in November of that year, about the time he asked Marie-Louise to return to Lunéville.106 This tendency to blow hot and cold was another of the less attractive attributes of the prince. There could be charm one moment, cold anger the next; small wonder that so few of his friends and agents knew from one minute to another where they stood with him.107
At this period in his life, the prince was particularly interested in the thoughts of Helvétius, le philosophe, as he is invariably referred to in the correspondence between Charles and Ferrand.108 Whether Helvétius would have approved of the prince’s literary producti
ons is more doubtful. Charles liked to while away the dead days in Lunéville by composing epigrams and other doggerel. Some of these are thoughtful, if intellectually jejune. Given how difficult it is for a physician to know about the heart, Charles asks, how much more difficult is it to know about the soul?109 Others of the obiter dicta are, to say the least, less memorable.110 But some of the political maxims have a sharp Humean flavour: ‘the people’ is a meaningless term, the prince observes; religion is necessary for good government, but it does not matter which one.111
The boredom found a focus in imagined slights. Some time in the autumn of 1750 the prince temporarily suspended correspondence with Elisabeth Ferrand and the comtesse de Vassé, probably because they had queried one of his instructions, complained of his ingratitude, or failed to fulfil a chore to his complete satisfaction.112 The rift with these two ladies seemed to the prince’s paranoid imagination not unconnected with the Princesse de Talmont’s presence in Paris. He composed a memorandum in which he poured out all his bitterness about her: she was false, low, ungrateful, lacking in respect, she put her own follies and those of her family before devotion to him: ‘the thing is come to such a push [sic] that I am as much incensed at her as ever I loved her … my being accustomed to crosses makes me take this very easy.’113
Yet this was not the whole story. That the relationship was composed of love and hate rather than pure hatred became clear when at the end of 1750 Charles wrote to Talmont to ask her to return to Lunéville. This put the princess on the spot. There were two very good reasons, apart from the prince’s uncertain temper, why it was unwise of her to return to Lunéville. In the first place, the death of her son from smallpox at the age of fifteen while she was in the thick of the affair with Charles Edward seems to have brought on continued attacks of a mysterious illness (almost certainly psychosomatic in origin) characterised by nausea, migraine and vomiting.114 This had been apparent at Lunéville in the early months of 1750; she spoke of her illness as being ‘near mortal’.115 From a vivacious, witty, cynical, amoral social butterfly, the Princesse de Talmont had become a valetudinarian, the former sparkle being doubtless choked off by feelings of guilt about her son. Talmont ought to have known Charles Edward well enough to realise that her semi-invalid state would not go down well if she did return to Lunéville.
Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Page 51