Behind the Palace Doors (25 page)

The first two Hanoverian kings of Britain faced regular threats from the Catholic heirs of the previous Stuart dynasty, who had been barred from the throne by the Act of Settlement in 1701. The most dangerous of these periodic uprisings was the one led by Charles Edward Stuart in 1745
.

George II had a far greater cause for concern than his despised son, Frederick, when, in 1745, a dashing remnant of the old Stuart royal dynasty—popularly known as Bonnie Prince Charlie—rose up and came dangerously close to capturing his kingdom. Though the enterprise ultimately ended in a bloody massacre (overseen by the one son King George actually did like), it was filled with enough daring and adventure to make the charismatic Stuart claimant a legend.

Charles Edward Stuart, the would-be conqueror, also
known as the Young Pretender,
^*
was the grandson of James II, the Catholic king with autocratic tendencies, and the son of James Edward Stuart, or the Old Pretender, whose birth in 1688 helped precipitate the Glorious Revolution that swept King James off his throne (see
Chapter 14
).

The exiled Stuarts had made numerous attempts to reclaim the crown since James II’s ignominious flight from England in 1688, all of which had been spectacular failures. This left the Old Pretender—or King James III, as he called himself after the death of his father in 1701—utterly dejected and in a near constant state of melancholy as he tried to maintain the pretense of majesty in his shadow court. “For me,” the Old Pretender groaned to his officers after one of his many failed attempts to capture the crown, “it is no new thing to be unfortunate, since my whole life from my cradle has been a constant series of misfortunes.” It was an honest assessment, but hardly an inspiring one.

In contrast to his brooding, morose father, Charles Edward Stuart practically pulsated with vigor and was driven to take up the cause the demoralized Old Pretender had all but abandoned. The Young Pretender’s infectious spirit and bold ambition rallied people around him and left them in awe of his princely qualities. “There is … such an unspeakable majesty diffused through his whole mien as it is impossible to have any idea without seeing,” one young Scot enthused after meeting Charles in Rome. “He appears to be born and endowed for something extraordinary.”

Another of the Young Pretender’s supporters, Arthur Elphinstone, Lord Balmerino, praised him effusively, even as he faced the executioner’s axe for having supported the Stuart cause: “I am not a fit hand to draw his character. I shall leave
that to others. But I must beg leave to tell you the incomparable sweetness of his nature, his affability, his compassion, his justice, his temperance, his patience, and his courage are virtues seldom to be found in the person. In short he wants [lacks] no qualifications requisite to make a great man.”

Greatness was the Young Pretender’s most ardent desire, because he believed it was his birthright as a Stuart prince. But the chances of achieving it looked dismal in 1744, when Charles, aged twenty-three, began his quest to capture King George II’s throne for his father. Early that January he had slipped away from a hunting party outside Rome, where “James III” had his court-in-exile, and secretly made his way to France, all the while evading agents of King George who would be eager to capture or kill him. The French were to be his allies in the effort to restore the Stuart monarchy, but just as preparations for the invasion of England neared completion, wicked storms destroyed much of the French fleet and prompted King Louis XV to withdraw his support.

Charles was stuck in France, “imprisoned,” as he put it, without money or prospects—and saddled with a fractious group of supporters. “You may well imagine how out of humour I am,” the Young Pretender wrote to his father in Rome, “when for comfort I am plagued out of my life with
tracasseries
[petty bickering] from our own people, who as it would seem would rather sacrifice me and my affairs than fail in any private view.” It was a rare display of pique for the normally exuberant youth.

Rather than endure enforced idleness in France, and all its attendant miseries, Charles decided to invade on his own, declaring that he was “determined to come the following summer to Scotland, though with a single footman.” It was an audacious plan for the penniless Pretender, the kind of “rash or ill-conceived project,” his father warned, that “would end in your ruin and that of all those who would join with you in it.” Charles, however, would not be deterred.

“I have, above six months ago, been invited by our friends to go to Scotland,” the Young Pretender wrote to the Old, “and to carry what money and arms I could conveniently get; this being, they are persuaded, the only way of restoring you to the crown, and them to their liberties.” The challenge would be daunting, Charles conceded, but the time had come for action lest their Stuart supporters, or Jacobites, lose faith in his ability to lead. “If a horse which is to be sold if spurred does not skip, nobody would care to have him, even for nothing,” Charles argued; “just so my friends would care very little to have me, if after such usage as all the world is sensible of, I should not show that I have life in me.”

With some covert help from the French government, the Young Pretender was able to amass arms, several hundred men, and two ships, and, on July 16, 1745, the tiny invasion force set out for Scotland. “Let what will happen,” Charles boldly declared to his father. “The stroke is struck, and I have taken a firm resolution to conquer or to die, and stand my ground as long as I shall have a man remaining with me.”

That stout resolution would serve Charles well when, en route to Scotland, an English warship attacked and left him without the French gunship that carried most of the men, arms, and provisions he had planned to use in his quest to conquer Britain. The ragtag remnants of his invasion party would hardly be enough now to rally much support in Scotland. Indeed, soon after landing in the midst of what was described as “a very wet dirty night,” without shelter, Charles learned that the promised assistance of several clan chiefs from the Highlands would not be forthcoming.

Undaunted by this sorry state of affairs, Charles dismissed suggestions that he return to France until such a time as his prospects improved. “I am come home, sir,” he said to one skeptical Scot, “and I will entertain no notion at all of returning to that place from whence I came, for that I am persuaded my faithful Highlanders will stand by me.”

His faith was gradually vindicated as some Highlanders came to recognize his unshakable determination and gathered in ever increasing numbers under his banner. Charles seemed to understand the soul of the Scots, especially of the fierce clansmen of the north, and spoke to it. He appealed to their native pride, which had been severely battered by the hated Hanoverians since the union of Scotland with England in 1707. He presented himself as
their
prince; the heir of an ancient line of Scots kings, who had come, despite all odds, to fight that bulgy-eyed foreign usurper, George II.

For this, Bonnie Prince Charlie was rewarded with astonishing loyalty, even though many Scots were still not prepared to follow him. Clan chiefs pledged never to abandon him, while soldiers became so devoted that, according to one contemporary, “there was scarce a man among them that would not have readily run on certain death if his [Charles’s] cause might have received any advantage.”

The growing support the Young Pretender amassed behind him was entirely unexpected, and the British government was woefully unprepared for it. War on the Continent diverted many troops, but there had also been a casual indifference to the potential threat the exiled Stuarts posed.
^†
In fact, George II was enjoying one of his extended sojourns in his Hanoverian homeland, frolicking with his mistress, when Charles Stuart arrived in Scotland.

The Young Pretender’s path was largely cleared for him, and within the first month of landing in Scotland, he was able to capture the capital of Edinburgh with little resistance. Then, in
what he described to his father as “one of the most surprising actions that ever was,” Charles’s army smashed the ill-prepared government force that finally gathered to challenge them at Prestonpans, outside of Edinburgh. “The field of battle presented a spectacle of horror,” one British officer reported, “being covered with heads, legs, arms and mutilated bodies, for the killed all fell by the sword.”

With such rapid success, the fall of London no longer seemed like a remote possibility. “I leave for England in eight days,” Charles announced confidently to France’s special envoy, Alexandre Jean Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Éguilles. “England will be ours in two months.” Such bravado was necessary to spur needed support from Louis XV, who was still noncommittal, but it also reflected the Young Pretender’s unwavering belief in his destiny. “As matters stand,” he wrote to his father, “I must either conquer or perish in a little while.”

Early in November 1745, the Jacobite army of about five thousand foot soldiers—many of them teenaged boys—and five hundred cavalry crossed the border into England and assembled outside the city of Carlisle. Charles delivered a message to the mayor: “Being come to recover the King our Father’s just right, for which we arrived with all his authority, we are sorry to find that you should prepare to obstruct our passage. We, therefore, to avoid the effusion of blood, hereby require you to open your gates, and let us enter.”

The mayor was unwilling to concede quite so easily, though, and so began the siege of Carlisle. A week later the city surrendered.
^‡
The Young Pretender’s army next received a rousing
welcome in Manchester, before blowing through Leek, then Ashbourne, and finally to Derby—all without encountering a single government troop. “We are now within a hundred miles of London,” one Jacobite soldier wrote home from Derby, “without seeing the face of one enemy, so that in a short time I hope to write to you from London, where if we get safe, the whole of our story and even what has happened already must appear to posterity more like a romance than anything of truth.”

Panic erupted in London as news of the Young Pretender’s unlikely successes spread. “There was never so melancholy a town,” wrote Robert Walpole. “Nobody but has some fear for themselves, for their money, or for their friends in the army.” Rumors were rife about the size of the invading army, and of its savagery. The city was all but shut down in anticipation of a massive invasion. Catholics and Jacobites were put under strict surveillance, priests were seized, and antigovernment literature and speech were ruthlessly suppressed. In
The True Patriot
, playwright Henry Fielding warned of a menacing swarm of terrorists, who would, if the Catholic Stuarts prevailed, persecute Protestants “with all the fury which rape, zeal, lust and wanton fierceness could inspire into the bloody hearts of Popish priests, bigots, and barbarians.”

What the frightened Londoners did not know was that Bonnie Prince Charlie had already reached the pinnacle of his success, and that his fortunes were soon to take a terrible turn.

While Charles Stuart’s forces were celebrating their triumph in Derby, King George II’s favored son, the porcine-faced William, Duke of Cumberland, was thirty miles away in the town of Stone—at the head of a ten-thousand-strong government force. A clash was coming, the Pretender’s men believed, and they were eager for it. “They were to be seen,” one officer wrote, “during the whole day [December 5], in crowds before the shops of the cutlers, quarreling about who should be
the first to sharpen and give a proper edge to his sword.” But, as it turned out, there would be no encounter the next day.

Charles had received news in Derby that eight hundred Irish and Scots troops fighting in the French army had arrived in Scotland to supplement his forces, and two thousand more Scots had been recruited as well. Plus, he was told, King Louis was sending an even larger French force that was to embark in two or three weeks. This kind of encouragement should have been the spur forward; instead, it actually destroyed the Young Pretender’s momentum.

The various leaders and clan chiefs within Charles’s army determined that it would be wiser to retreat back to Scotland and join with the reinforcements there before confronting Cumberland. This was the better way, they argued, and they were united in their opposition to pushing forward to London. It was a stunning blow to Charles, who believed the crown was within his grasp. His men were with him—now—and turning back on the cusp of victory would utterly deflate them. It made no sense—indeed, it was an outrage—but there was nothing he could do in the face of such resistance. “You ruin, abandon, and betray me if you do not march on,” he raged, ineffectively, before reluctantly ordering the retreat.

“In future,” he said sullenly, “I shall summon no more councils, since I am accountable to nobody for my actions but to God and my father and therefore I shall no longer either ask or accept advice.”

The next morning Charles’s men rose with the full expectation that they were about to fight King George’s son William. When they learned otherwise, their good cheer turned to “expressions of rage and lamentation,” as one officer reported, adding that even if they had been beaten in battle, “the grief could not have been greater.”

The Young Pretender’s prospects were bleak when he and his demoralized men recrossed the Scottish border on December
20. The Jacobites controlled only a few pockets of Scotland; much of the rest was either loyal to the Hanoverian regime or under its control. And though Charles was unaware of it at the time, the French fleet he expected—poorly provisioned and plagued by the attacks of British privateers—would never sail.

Confronted with the dismal situation in Scotland, Charles decided to lay siege to Stirling—the fortified town and castle on a bluff above the plains northwest of Edinburgh, where James VI and I spent his unhappy childhood (see
Chapter 7
). There he hoped to base his operations for the total conquest of Scotland. But by the middle of January, little progress had been made.