Disappointed in his main hopes, the prince made a tour of London strongholds with Colonel Brett, a veteran Jacobite agent who had acted as envoy between Fleury and the English Jacobites in 1739.25 The Tower of London, the obvious target in any coup, particularly interested the prince. Like Cumberland with Carlisle Castle, Charles had no great opinion of its defensive potential. He remarked to Brett that one of the gates could be easily broken down with a petard.26
Frustrated in his primary intentions, the prince still had one essential task to perform in London. It had long been in his mind that the key to Jacobite restoration lay in England. If the work was to be done by English Jacobites alone, and this largely meant Protestant Jacobites, they had to be given a very great incentive. This incentive the prince now intended to provide in the form of a public abjuration of Catholicism and the embrace of Anglicanism.27
At a ceremony in an Anglican church in the Strand, the prince went through a formal apostasy from the faith of his forefathers.28 With his contempt for organised religion, Charles Edward failed to understand what a sensation this change of allegiance would eventually cause. As an intelligent man, he found the tenets of Christianity either humbug or self-evidently absurd. He did not realise that religion was still life and death to many people.
It was clear, though, that the prince’s hopes for a coup de main in London needed much more careful planning. It was time to depart to safety. Before he left, Charles spent an evening with William King, later to be an acidulous enemy. King found the prince naturally intelligent but lacking in formal education. At this stage in his career King was not in the business of rewriting history, so he freely admitted the prince’s charm, remarking particularly on his handsome face and good eyes.29 Only later did King rationalise his own disappointments in a character-sketch that was self-evidently absurd in its vindictiveness.30 No such reading of a personality as King provided would have been available, even to a Freud, on the basis of a few hours’ drinking tea in the good doctor’s lodgings. Yet it was clear that the prince’s decision to decamp was a prudent one. Dr King’s servant remarked on the extreme likeness between the visitor and the busts of the ‘Young Pretender’ on sale in Red Lion Street.31
On 22 September the prince left London. He and Holker went by post to Dover, where they arrived in the small hours of the 23rd.32 In the morning they crossed to Boulogne. Another stretch of hard-driving travel got them to Paris on the evening of 24 September.33
The prince remained in Paris until the 28th, then made for Lunéville post-haste, arriving on 30 September.34 The entire excursion from Lorraine had taken just twenty-eight days. Apart from Dr King’s perceptive servant, there had been no danger. The prince had been under the Whigs’ noses without their having had the slightest suspicion.35
Yet the London trip, however superficially unsuccessful, had sparked in the prince ideas for a grand design within which a London coup could be carried out. His first task was to find foreign allies. He had vowed never again to collaborate with France. He had perforce to look elsewhere. One obvious possibility was Germany. The prince spent much of late 1750 scurrying from Lunéville to secret meetings with Goring in Worms and Mainz.36
As we have seen, the first notion Charles Edward toyed with was marriage to the duke of Daremberg’s daughter in return for an army of invasion 12,000 strong, destined for England.37 A secret meeting of representatives from both sides took place in Basle, but the proposal was not successful – hardly surprising, given the prince’s premises.
Nothing daunted, Charles simply moved his sights higher. His next target was the daughter of Frederick of Prussia. Through the good offices of Earl Marischal, now Frederick’s confidant, a meeting was arranged in Berlin in February 1751 between Charles Edward and the Prussian king.38 Frederick would not entertain the prince’s suit for his daughter’s hand, but promised to think carefully about supporting another Jacobite rising. He advised Charles to live in the remotest part of Europe he could find – Silesia was mentioned. Meanwhile he should collect 6,000 Swedes, either as mercenaries or ‘on loan’. When all the preparations in London were complete, the expedition should depart from Gothenburg for a landfall in north-east England.39
Charles Edward did not care for Frederick’s suggestion that France be kept informed of all his plans. But he went away from the meeting animated with thoughts of a grand northern alliance, embracing Russia, Sweden and Prussia.40 Finally, after much lucubration, he sent Goring back to Berlin to liaise with Marischal. The two of them were to lobby Frederick strongly for military assistance, stressing both the prince’s personal esteem for the Prussian monarch and his determination to help the king’s infant navy on to its feet if restored to the English throne.41
But at this point a number of dramatic events took place in quick succession. Early 1751 brought a crop of deaths. First there was the demise of the king of Sweden, which seemed to increase the likelihood of a general European war.42 Then George II’s son Frederick died.43 If George II had succumbed at this time, the perennial Jacobite cliché about a ‘favourable conjuncture’ would at last have become fact.44 Further Jacobite excitement was aroused by the false rumour that the duke of Cumberland had died. Alas for the Jacobites, further investigation revealed that it was a horse of that name, not the ‘Butcher’ himself, that had expired!45
Any hopes of exploiting the new situation were unexpectedly dashed with the announcement that Frederick the Great was to send Earl Marischal as his minister to Paris.46 Superficially, this seemed to favour the Jacobites. The development seemed particularly ominous to the jittery English, since Lord Tyrconnel, who had been ‘out’ in the ’45, had just been appointed French minister to Prussia.47 From the English point of view, France and Prussia were now represented in each other’s courts by rebels. The dismissal of the notorious anti-Jacobite Puysieux from the post of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and his replacement by the more pliable St Contest who, it was felt, would complement Marischal neatly, seemed to provide the clinching argument for a pro-Jacobite plot being hatched by France and Prussia.48 English politicians in their private correspondence ruefully congratulated Frederick on a Machiavellian masterstroke.49
But Charles Edward, with the insight characteristic of cynicism, did not see things at all this way. Frederick had been Machiavellian, yes, but in a quite different sense. ‘Lord Marischal’s coming here [Paris] is a great politique [sic]: on one side to bully the Court of England, on the other to hinder our friends from doing the thing by themselves, bamboozling them with hopes.’50
The prince had always urged the English Jacobites to carry out an initiative on their own account. They had always insisted they needed a foreign ally. Now they seemed to have one. Yet Charles Edward knew from Prussian policy in the past and his personal acquaintance with Frederick that Prussia would draw back from outright Stuart restoration; they would, however, be quite happy to stir the pot betimes. If the English Jacobites handed Frederick a controlling interest in their affairs, they would be putting their heads in a noose. All the signs pointed to an anti-British alliance with France; yet he himself had sworn a mighty oath never to have anything to do with France.
Besides, there was the personality of Earl Marischal. Puzzlingly, however great his detachment from the Stuart cause and his general indolence on the Jacobite behalf, Marischal never lost credibility as he should have done. He, much more than either James or Charles Edward, was the high priest of the English Jacobite sect. They would not move a muscle without his approval. Yet the reality was that Marischal was already the type of ‘Jacobite’ – like Lord Clare in France or the old Marshal Duke of Berwick in James’s heyday – who cared far more for his own career than for the restoration of the Stuarts.
Anyone who doubts this should look at Marischal’s record. After the ’45, every time James or Charles Edward asked him to undertake a commission on their behalf, he would decline on the grounds of ‘old age’ or ‘broken health’. Yet in the service of Frederick of Prussia
he exhibited the most remarkable vigour and enthusiasm. Charles Edward knew his man. He saw clearly enough that Marischal’s appointment to Paris was in reality a disaster for his own plans. But because of Marischal’s unassailable prestige with the English Jacobites, the prince had no choice but to work with him and through him.
Accordingly, Charles changed his instructions to Goring. Goring was told to seek out Marischal at Versailles; his brief was to wrest from him an assurance that his embassy had nothing to do with any Jacobite plots, and that the English should therefore look to their own salvation.51
But Marischal was determined to play dog in the manger. He had no enthusiasm for a coup in England. At the same time, he did not want such an enterprise to be undertaken by people not under his direction. He therefore decided to drag a red herring or two across the trail. Just before leaving Berlin, he wrote to Goring about the proposed northern alliance – which Charles Edward had now largely abandoned anyway, once he saw the way Frederick’s mind was working. Marischal’s point was that the prince’s proposed alliance offended against balance of power considerations: if troops from Sweden were used against England, Russia would retaliate by occupying Finland.52 Sweden knew that its best defence against Russia was Frederick of Prussia, so would take its cue from him. The deviousness of Frederick the Great thus comes through clearly. By encouraging Charles Edward to solicit Swedish help, while sending Marischal to Paris, Frederick aimed to control both ends of the Jacobite movement. He would keep his puppet dancing on the string until he had brought England to heel.
Charles Edward was already cynical about Frederick. As far as he was concerned, the only acceptable proof of the king’s sincerity was to allow him to marry his sister and ‘acknowledging me at Berlin for what I am’.53 But he was now locked into an intolerable impasse. The English Jacobites would co-operate only if they received the go-ahead from Marischal. Marischal would give this only if he won the nod from Frederick. Frederick would make no move without France. Yet Charles Edward himself refused to work with the French. One of the most profound problems about the intrigues that went on during 1751–3 was that there was no way to square this circle. When there was added to this the personal animosity entertained by Marischal for the prince, and the presence of a Hanoverian spy (Pickle) at the very heart of Jacobite deliberations, the recipe for disaster was complete.
The full extent of the deep endemic factors working against Charles Edward’s designs was not immediately apparent. What later became known as the ‘Elibank Plot’ commenced with a series of meetings in Paris. Actually, the so-called Elibank plot is a portmanteau term for the entire class of very different projects that were adumbrated and discarded during 1751–3. After a lot of fussy pedantry from Marischal about the correct venue for their meetings,54 the conspirators got down to business. Among those involved from the very beginning were Sir John Graeme, Goring, Lochgarry and Alexander Murray of Elibank.
Murray of Elibank was brother to the Lord Elibank who was a friend of Dr Johnson. He was typical of the adventurers attracted to the prince, and for whom he had a decided weakness. Early in 1751 he was charged with violence and intimidation in the Westminster by-election and was then imprisoned for refusing to beg pardon of the House of Commons on his knees.55 This was not his only claim to notoriety. Though high-born, he possessed little money until a marriage of convenience secured him £3,000 a year, ironically all interest payments on bonds paid by the National Debt. A renowned miser and usurer, Murray lent the impoverished prince several hundred pounds at a high rate of interest. This secured him an entrée into Charles Edward’s inner circles.56 To the prince what counted was liquidity, not its provenance or the interest charged on it. In other respects, too, Murray was a nonentity. He had never risen above the rank of lieutenant in military service. But significantly, the man he had supported in the disputed Westminster by-election was a Whig. The prince was now close to making a fetish out of disgruntled Whigs as the pure type of English supporter he wanted.57
The first part of the plot, the coup in London, now took shape. The original idea of this part of the plan was that George II and other members of the ‘Elector’s family’ be kidnapped and spirited away to France in a fast cutter waiting on the Thames. To this end, minute analyses of the sentry system at St James’s Palace were undertaken. Two or three hundred hand-picked men were to assemble in Westminster. To avoid arousing suspicion, they would all take lodgings in different houses. On the night fixed for the abduction they would assemble at pre-selected locations. Then the Palace would be seized, the Tower gates thrown open, the guards overpowered, and the luckless scions of the House of Hanover taken to France, there perhaps to suffer a long house arrest in the same way as Mary Queen of Scots.58
Marischal listened glumly to the details of the plot. In his view, there was not the slightest chance that the conspiracy could succeed. The entire project was chimerical, worthless.59 He later described the Elibank plot as being as impracticable as an attempt to seize the moon with one’s teeth.60 But, characteristically, Marischal did not veto the intrigue outright. He feared that if he did so, he would simply be cut out of the conspiracy. That would diminish his worth to Frederick the Great, and it was by the Prussian lodestone alone that Marischal now steered. So he expressed merely half-hearted opposition to the abduction. He did not full-bloodedly set his authority against the very principle of the scheme. This was read by the other conspirators as typical Marischal circumspection and defeatism. They went ahead, blithely telling their counterparts in England that Marischal had given the plot his imprimatur.
Gradually more and more pieces fitted into the complex mosaic. The circle of conspirators widened. Apart from Lady Primrose, the most important English Jacobite to be mixed up in the plot was Jeremy Dawkins, lately a Middle East explorer. In the City of London Jacobite movements were to be co-ordinated by Alderman George Heathcote.61 Other aldermen mentioned as his acolytes were Benn, Blachford and Blakistoun.62 Further names frequently encountered as the plot matured were Messrs Trant, Fleetwood, Charles Hepburn of Keith and Sir John Douglas.63
Much against Charles Edward’s wish, French Jacobites were also drawn in. Dominique O’Heguerty, brother of the prince’s biographer, drew attention in 1751 to the high level of unrest and tension in England, which could be turned to French advantage in an attempt to undo some of the damage of the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.64 Immediately the marquise de Mézières sent her trusted lieutenant Father Cruise to England. He confirmed O’Heguerty’s analysis.65 But he had further muddied the already turbid waters of the Elibank conspiracy.
The situation at the beginning of 1752, then, was this. There was a four-way traffic between Charles Edward and his clique, Marischal and the Prussians, the English Jacobites, and the French Jacobites of the diaspora. Lord Clare had been apprised in general terms that there was a project afoot.66 Thomas Carte and the Mézières coterie were reluctantly accepted as conduits to the English Jacobites, since Mézières enjoyed the confidence of Marischal.67
The development of the Elibank plot is notoriously hard to unravel in detail. Hardly surprisingly in the case of such a desperate endeavour, most of the incriminating evidence was later destroyed. But there seem to have been three main stages. First, the abduction of the Hanoverian royal family, so as to create a power vacuum that Charles Edward could exploit. The difficulties in the path of the implementation of such a daring escapade were legion. So a second stage was reached in which the English Jacobites inclined towards a once-and-for-all solution that would not expose them to such grave risks. Alexander Murray of Elibank proposed that the Hanoverian family be murdered, possibly by poison. But the prince vetoed this suggestion.68 He always felt repugnance towards schemes of assassination.
The third stage arrived when a compromise between abduction and homicidal action was proposed. The final version of the plot called for the seizure of the Tower and the Palace. The Hanoverian royals would be held as hostages. Once word of the coup reached the
prince, who would be waiting on the Belgian coast, he would cross to consolidate the Jacobite position. Perhaps George II and his family would be forced to sign articles of abdication. Perhaps they would be shipped out to France as in the original plan. All these details are shadowy. But it is clear that the prince had lengthened the odds against himself by his morally commendable (if politically inexpedient) refusal to countenance assassination.
Since the final version of the Elibank plot was an extremely perilous undertaking, the clamour grew for a diversionary project that would take some of the heat off the London conspirators. Various possibilities were canvassed. There was the old idea of landing Swedish troops from Gothenburg, but as no one had yet approached Sweden, this seemed the purest fantasy. More promising was the idea of using Irish malcontents to stage a diversionary ‘invasion’ of England. The Irish Jacobites felt guilty about their quiescence during the ’45. Apparently some of their more vociferous spokesmen offered to land a force of between 11,000 and 14,000 either in north Wales or Scotland.69 This landing would be the signal for the London operation to commence.
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