Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  The prince took the advice and sent the letter.96 It was partly to talk over further ways of manipulating James that Charles went to Paris in the winter of 1756.

  Predictably, James was delighted with what he read as a change of heart by the prodigal son.97 Then Kelly callously played the prince’s next card. The following communication to Rome embodied his poisonous advice. Before he made the journey to Italy, he wrote, there were certain ‘outrages’ to be cleared up. For instance, there was the ‘overbearing and despotic’ cardinal, his brother. And why, incidentally, had James told Charles Edward not to return to Rome after the imbroglio in Venice in 1749?98

  Forewarned by his Jesuit contacts in Paris of what was afoot, James did not fall into Charles’s (and Kelly’s) trap. Ignoring the burden of his son’s complaint, he turned his flank by blandly remarking that he understood that delicate diplomatic negotiations with France required his son’s continuing presence in Paris.99 Since substantive negotiations with the French were the last thing the prince had in mind, and by the time he got his father’s letter he was back in Liège, the advantage had once again swung James’s way.

  James now moved over on to the attack. His first target was Charles Edward’s cherished principle that he would not marry until a restoration. Was this not simply advertising Stuart pessimism and announcing to the world a lack of faith in God’s providence?100 French interest would be quickened in a Stuart prince with heirs; as proof of this, he revealed that Versailles had often in the past urged him to remarry.

  Charles Edward’s reply was lame. Suddenly, it seemed, the state of affairs in England and the pace of his negotiations with France were all-important.101 That was the reason he could not go to Rome at present.

  Ingenuously believing that serious negotiations between the prince and the ministers of state really were on foot, James agreed that by all means his son’s trip to Rome should be postponed.102 Then he revealed the oceanic depths of his lack of understanding of Charles Edward. Ever the stoical pessimist, James exhorted the prince to get an assurance of a high-born wife and a good pension out of France, even if the invasion project foundered.103

  James had unwittingly touched a raw nerve. Stung by his father’s constant emphasis on France, the prince revealed his continuing bitterness about his arrest in 1748. Too close an association with Versailles, he taunted his father, was inconsistent with true patriotism.104

  James was deeply wounded by the aspersions on his patriotism. Peevishly he wrote back:

  What I comprehend least of all is how you can bring in patriotism to support your opinion, while I think I can bring it in with a great deal of reason to support mine, and though I do not pretend to be a hero, I think myself as good a patriot as you and will not yield to you in that particular.105

  The vast reserves of hostility are suddenly on open view in that letter, right down to the ironical taunt about heroes. The prince riposted with one of his favourite coldly contemptuous ploys. He wrote to Edgar the royal secretary, not to his father, requesting a renewal of the powers of Regent.106 James granted the Commission of Regency107 but continued on the attack, determined to bring his son to bay. Charles’s way of life meant no permanent residence and no wife. If he, James, had embraced such principles, he would by now have been wandering the face of Europe for forty years. Was it not obvious that, however unpopular the Hanoverians were, no one would want to restore a dynasty whose leading scion had no heir? That would mean resurrecting the nightmare of a disputed succession on Charles’s death.

  James moved on to the arguments that had given him particular offence. When James had argued that all he had ever received from France he got because he had a son, Charles retorted that he did not want children who would be slaves to France and in a prison in Rome into the bargain. Rome was not a prison, James snapped back angrily, as witness his journeys to Spain in 1719 and to Lorraine in 1727. Moreover, ‘if you call it slavery to be beholden to another prince, there are now few in Europe who might not be termed slaves in that sense, for you do not, to be sure, pretend to be self-sufficient and to want and depend on nobody, which are attributes of God alone’.108

  The temperature of the exchange was rising. Smarting under this rebuke, the prince loosed his most deadly shaft at his father. His pointed reply, rejecting all idea of marriage, struck at James at his two most vulnerable points: his failures with his wife and with his son. In the first place, the prince purred maliciously, marriages were known to go wrong. In the second, history demonstrated that the Jacobites always waited to see how the son would turn out. That was why the Jacobite movement was moribund between 1719 and 1745.109

  The prince had used this argument about twenty-six wasted years before and James had ignored it. Not this time. Since there was nearly a Jacobite rising in 1727, before Fleury got cold feet, it was simply not true to say that nothing happened between 1719 and 1745.110 Still, James evidently felt himself the loser on points in this exchange, for in his next letter he asked sardonically what had happened to those famous English Jacobites who had supplied him with money since 1749 and led him into his ‘painful and, I might say, ignominious life’.111

  Charles Edward reverted to truculence. He insisted that if the French were serious about a descent on England, they must approach him, not he them.112 Apparently he forgot that such a reply exposed the mendacity of his previous excuse for not going to Rome: that he was negotiating with the French. To James’s horror, it now emerged that there had never been any negotiations.

  The correspondence was now reaching into raw places. James inveighed against his son’s favourite dictum ‘all or nothing’: ‘What advantage has the Prince reaped hitherto from the maxims he has formed himself by?’113 At last, James was coming close to the heart of the problem, which was located more in Charles Edward’s psyche than in the corridors of Versailles. As layer after layer of the prince’s defences were stripped away, he finally revealed himself in all his wounded despair. Charles Edward told his father he would never take the initiative in approaching the French court. They must first wipe out the infamy of the gross insult offered to him in December 1748. The only way they could do this was by undertaking a serious invasion of England on his behalf without his requesting it.114

  At this point the exhausted verbal combatants paused for breath. An interlude was provided by another of James’s dangerous illnesses.115 When he recovered, it was to find that circumstances had altered radically.

  31

  ‘Never to hope again’

  (1758–60)

  IN MID-MAY 1758 the prince moved his abode from Liège to Bouillon. After travelling through Sedan, he took up residence at the Chateau de Carlsbourg, rented from the duc de Bouillon and nine miles from the town of that name.1 Here Charles at last found a faithful friend. The president of the sovereign court of Bouillon, Monsieur Thibault, had been deputed by the duc de Bouillon to see that everything in the chateau was to the prince’s liking. He became a close friend and great admirer.2 This made up for the disappointing hunting and shooting Charles Edward found on the Bouillon estate.

  In early July the prince rode south along the Meuse, through Verdun, to meet Stanislas in Commercy. Evidently he had expected something more concrete than the platitudes Stanislas proceeded to dispense. He returned to Bouillon disappointed.3

  Now he began to hit the bottle harder than ever, despite the pleas from Murray of Elibank and others not to prove Lady Primrose’s case for her by revealing himself openly as a drunkard.4 In one of his inebriate rages the prince gave Sheridan (his servant from Avignon, fourteen years in his employ), such a verbal lashing that Sheridan resigned.5 Lord Clancarty, another former toady of the prince but now openly critical of him, approved of Sheridan’s action: ‘whilst he drinks in that desperate manner, no man’s life is safe.’6

  This was the situation when James wrote to tell his son that he was sending Andrew Lumisden to Bouillon on a mission of reconciliation.7 Lumisden, a Scottish Jacobite who had been out in the ’
45, currently held a position as under-secretary to Edgar and had the general trust of the Stuarts, both father and sons.

  James gave Lumisden detailed instructions on the arguments he was to use on the prince. He was to impress on him the absolute necessity of co-operation with France, and of James’s desire to abdicate in his favour as soon as possible, which was not yet. Thus far James’s instructions did indeed seem conciliatory, but the king introduced a quite unnecessary element of tension by bringing up openly for the first time the subject of Clementina Walkinshaw: ‘You will also explain to the Prince the comfort and satisfaction it has been to me to hope from some accounts I have received that Mrs Walkinshaw [sic] is, or will be soon, separated from him.’8 There followed a homily on the extent to which Charles’s mistress had prejudiced the Stuart cause and the Jacobite movement.

  Once again James revealed the depths of his lack of understanding of his son. Even if Charles had been considering getting rid of Clementina – and it is quite clear that by this time the couple gave each other nothing but pain and were together only because of their shared love of Charlotte – such a message would have been counterproductive. The prince would never be seen to accept ‘laws’ given by someone else. He would immediately have stood his ground as a matter of principle. By this gratuitous intrusion into his son’s private life, James doomed the Lumisden mission before it began.

  The king’s instructions to Lumisden could not have been worse conceived or more badly timed. That autumn of 1758 the prince seriously seemed to be considering visiting Rome.9 Since winter ended any serious military initiatives by France, James was continually urging his son to take the opportunity for a quick trip to the Palazzo Muti.10 At last it seemed that father and son, who had not seen each other for fifteen years, would meet. The arrival of Lumisden at Bouillon, conveying James’s heavy exhortations on wisdom and duty, plus his unwelcome remarks on Clementina, ruined any chance of that. Nor were the prince’s ruffled feelings assuaged when Lumisden began patiently to argue James’s case to him. He could accept James’s stricture that he was being unphilosophical about the perfidy of the French, since none of the same ministers who expelled him in 1748 remained on the council of state.11 But the proposition that Charles Edward had pushed the French into the arrest merely reawakened in the prince the feeling that James and Louis XV could be seen as similarly oppressive authorities. Charles was disgusted, too, by his father’s defeatism. James seemed more interested in the details of the financial settlement Charles could wrest from Versailles in the event of failure of a French descent than in the possibility that a restoration could succeed. The lecture on Clementina Walkinshaw simply made him angry.

  The prince hit back. He demanded to know why James was jeopardising all his negotiations with the French by not abdicating. All Lumisden could do was parrot James’s line that ‘now is not the time’.12 Charles pointed out the sheer destructiveness of this. Perfidious Versailles would, if it could, find a loophole to evade its solemn commitments, and here was James providing it for them. All the French had to do, whenever they wanted to jettison the Stuarts, was to say that it was impossible to deal with two separate parties, the prince’s and the king’s.

  James’s case was not helped by Lumisden’s secret agreement with the prince on this point, nor by the fact that he got on remarkably well with the prince. Charles cajoled and charmed Lumisden and prevailed on him to stay on at Bouillon. This spiked his father’s guns while he prepared a counterstroke. For recent events at Versailles seemed to be tilting the French court in his direction. He sensed a chance to cut his father out of the whole French connection.

  Ever since the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, desultory Jacobite negotiations had gone on with one or other of the ministers of state, especially War Minister Maréchal de Belle-Isle. But while the Abbé (and from 1758 Cardinal) Bernis was Foreign Minister, the French concentrated on continental warfare. In December 1758 Louis XV dismissed Bernis and replaced him with the duc de Choiseul.

  Choiseul saw clearly that the European cockpit masked the real struggle for mastery in the war and the true theatre where that struggle went on: north America. He estimated that Canada would very soon be lost to France unless drastic action was taken. Correctly identifying England as France’s most deadly enemy, Choiseul threw resources into the most ambitious scheme yet devised for the invasion of the British Isles. The only question he had not answered in his mind was what role the Stuarts, and especially Charles Edward, should play in his great enterprise.13

  With Choiseul’s accession, the pressure on the prince to collaborate with France became intense. Stonewalling frenetically, Charles repeatedly asserted that both for security reasons and because of the pledges he had given the English Jacobites, he could not go to Paris to confer with Choiseul.14 It was also his view that such a conference should come at the very end of French preparations, when their invasion fleet was ready to sail, not as a prelude to such preparations.

  But Choiseul very soon backed Charles Edward into a corner. It was borne in on the prince by assiduous correspondence, especially from the special agent Colonel Wall whom he had sent to Versailles, that he could not pass up this opportunity and still retain a vestige of credibility.15 With a man as stubborn as Charles Edward, even this might not have been enough to make him change his mind. But the thought of scoring a diplomatic coup over the French and cutting James out at the same time was too much to resist. After much adamant blustering that he would never go to Paris, the prince performed another of his lightning changes of mind. He prepared to avail himself of Choiseul’s special offer: an apartment in the Hôtel Choiseul which he could enter by the garden and where he could maintain himself in the strictest incognito.16

  The faithful Thibault was left to keep an eye on Clementina and Charlotte.17 At the beginning of February 1759 the prince set out for his rendezvous in Paris. On the night of 5 February he arrived at Choiseul’s house, very late and very drunk. There to confer with him were Choiseul and Belle-Isle.18

  Choiseul assured him that Louis XV was deadly serious about an invasion of Britain and that he desired ardently to restore the Stuarts. The prince stated his requirements as to ships and men. Choiseul assured him that this created no problems; the French had already earmarked 50,000 men for the expedition. Having been bitten before by false French promises, the prince made it a point of understanding that the preparations had to be complete before he was summoned to join the embarkation. He wanted no repeat of 1744. He would never again be a mere ‘scarecrow’ to frighten the English.

  Again Choiseul did not demur. He explained the complex French strategy for the invasion. The Prince de Soubise was to cross the Channel in flat-bottoms, while two separate expeditions made landfall in Scotland and Ireland. Since the Soubise preparations would take longest, Choiseul asked the prince if he would consider accompanying the forces invading Scotland or Ireland.19

  All the prince’s old suspicions about French duplicity were aroused by this proposal. Flushed by drink he became agitated and repeated that he was interested only in a landing in England. Fearing that he was in some subtle way being outmanoeuvred, the prince asked for the conversation to be minuted. This too was agreed.20 The famous formula was concocted, to be repeated ad nauseam throughout 1759 in correspondence between Versailles and the Jacobites, that everything was to be done for and with the prince and nothing done without him.21

  Without waiting to see the results of his other agents’ (Murray of Elibank and Mackenzie Douglas) efforts to set up private meetings with Soubise and Madame de Pompadour, the prince sped back to Bouillon, travelling via Rheims.22 He remained unconvinced by the sincerity of French intentions, but felt reasonably pleased with himself. As he saw it, his insistence that French preparations be complete before he joined the expeditionary force had backed Choiseul into a corner. In fact it had done precisely the opposite. It provided Choiseul with the opportunity to carry on with his invasion preparations without reference to the prince, whi
le keeping the Jacobite fifth column alive by constantly pointing out to it that at the last minute Charles Edward would appear in the Channel ports as agreed.23

  The truth was that the meeting at his house had disillusioned Choiseul with the prince. He could put up with the drunkenness and the security problems attendant on Clementina Walkinshaw’s presence at Bouillon. But the sheer dogmatic inflexibility of Charles Edward in refusing to go to Scotland was a poor trading counter to set against the expected hostile Dutch reaction when they learned that Choiseul was involved in a scheme to restore ‘the Pretender.’24 From this moment on, Choiseul decided in effect to press on with his invasion schemes without taking the prince into serious account. If and when the invasion was successfully completed, it would be time enough for France to decide what to do about Charles Edward.25

  Any doubts Choiseul might have had of his new policy of excluding the Stuarts were laid to rest when the prince sent him a highly querulous letter later in February. Consultation with Lumisden had prompted second thoughts. Charles now felt aggrieved at having to wait until August (Choiseul’s target date for the Channel crossing). He claimed to have come to Paris on the understanding that the meeting was the last phase of the invasion process, not the first. He now felt that he had been lured to the conference on false pretences.26

  The receipt of this missive more than ever determined Choiseul to press on with his preparations without taking the Stuarts into account.27 This decision was reflected in the scale of the preparations. Where Richelieu in 1745–6 had intended to land in England with no more than 15,000 men, counting on massive pro-Jacobite support from the English Tories, Choiseul laid his plans on the assumption that he could expect nothing from the Jacobites. A fourth invasionary force under Chevert was added to the grand design. Altogether in the four separate expeditionary armies 100,000 men were assembled.28