Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography

Bonnie Prince Charlie:

A BIOGRAPHY

Carolly Erickson

Copyright ©1989 by Carolly Erickson

All rights reserved.

William Morrow and Company, Inc.: New York

Chapter 1

The small boat that approached Peterhead harbor on the east coast of Scotland toward the end of December, 1715, foundered badly in rough seas. High winds and towering waves had tossed it mercilessly up and down for a week in its crossing from Dunkirk, leaving the crew and the handful of passengers aboard ill and miserable. To be sure, the violent weather had helped to protect the ship and the men from being captured by one of the English men-of-war patrolling the Channel. But this single piece of good fortune hardly compensated for the overwhelming bad luck that seemed to follow the ship's most important passenger, James Francis Edward Stuart, wherever he went.

James was accustomed to meeting his misfortunes stoically, yet year by year they weighed him down more and more, turning the corners of his mouth downward and leaving his regal yet vapid features bereft of animation or enthusiasm. At twenty-seven his tall, thin figure seemed to be growing leaner instead of filling out; his black eyes were sad, even woeful; he sighed, and on occasion wept, for his lot in life, which was so far from being the destiny to which he was born.

James had no doubt that he, and not the short, popeyed Elector of Hanover, whom the English perversely recognized as King George I, was the rightful King of England. James was, as he phrased it, "the only born Englishman now left of the royal family." His father, James II, had been ousted from his throne in 1688 by a selfish clique of political opportunists. Since then England had been ruled by the ousted king's two daughters—first Mary, who had ruled jointly with her husband William, and then Anne, who had died without an heir in August of 1714. He, James, the only surviving legitimate son of James II, believed himself to be Anne's only true successor. The Elector of Hanover was a usurper, and it was James's duty to remove him and restore the Stuart dynasty.

This much was clear to James, as he prepared to go ashore at Peterhead and put himself at the head of the army that awaited him. What was not clear was why, so far, life had conspired to thwart his efforts to recover his throne.

He had always been unlucky. As an infant he had been weak and sickly, blue at the lips from lack of oxygen and covered with an unsightly rash. Severe colic nearly killed him, and the royal doctors who dosed him with concoctions made from herbs, dried vipers and the skull of a hanged criminal would surely have finished him off had his father not intervened. While still a tiny baby he had been taken to live at St.-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, where his father, deprived of his crown, maintained an embittered shadow court. James's childhood had been spent under the eye of his father's quarrelsome advisers, who thought of little else but how to restore their master to his throne. To them James had been "the Blackbird," the undersized and unnaturally quiet child whose black hair and eyes and dark complexion made him look like a gypsy. He had been sheltered, kept away from other children, his delicate health guarded by his hovering mother and his mind formed by choleric tutors. Few children would have flourished in such an environment; the grave young James was driven deeper inward and absorbed his father's mood of somber resignation in the face of adversity. He was dutiful but cheerless, and on reaching young manhood he appeared to observers to be utterly lacking in vigor and resilience.

By the time he was nineteen, in 1707, his father had died and James himself inherited the burden of kingship in exile. He called himself James III and VIII (his father had been James II of England and VII of Scotland), and he listened, gravely, to his father's advisers when they counseled him to invade his kingdoms and right the wrong that had been done in 1688. James believed, with some reason, that his subjects would abandon their loyalty to his half-sister Queen Anne and support their true king once he appeared before them in person. Reports reaching St.-Germain-en-Laye indicated that James's Scottish subjects were particularly eager to welcome him, for many Scots resented the recent union with England that had left Scotland deprived of sovereignty and under-represented, so they argued, in the English Parliament. (Ever since James VI of Scotland became King of England as James I, in 1603, the two kingdoms had been ruled by the same monarch. In 1707, by a Treaty of Union ratified by both governments, the two kingdoms became one and Scotland lost its political autonomy.)

Encouraged by the state of affairs in Scotland, and by the fleet of ships and six thousand soldiers provided by Louis XIV—then at war with England, and eager to take a hand in stirring up civil war there—James set off for the coast early in 1708 to lead the invasion force. But even before he set foot on board his flagship things began to go wrong. The admiral in charge of the thirty privateers and five men-of-war, the Comte de Forbin, quarreled with the commander of the soldiers, the Comte de Gace. The weather was forbidding. And James contracted measles, forcing the vast assemblage of ships and men to wait idly for days until he recovered sufficiently to be carried on board.

At last the expedition got under way, at James's tremulous insistence, only to be forced back by a gale which did damage to the fleet and to the general morale. A second attempt brought James and his soldiers safely to Scotland, but Forbin, who was convinced that the entire enterprise was ill-advised, could not be persuaded to land there and risk the lives of the French troops. The fleet was harried by an English force with thirty-eight men-of-war; beyond this, the thousands of faithful subjects James had expected to greet him once he came in sight of the coast were nowhere to be seen.

Dejected, James returned to France, mournfully blaming the failure of the mission on his own ill health, the foul weather, and mistakes in provisioning and navigation. (His ever-suspicious advisers murmured that Admiral Forbin had been acting under secret orders from King Louis not to land at all.)

"We saw the person called the Pretender land on the shore," wrote an English prisoner captured during the expedition, after seeing James come ashore at Dunkirk, "being a tall, slight young man, pale smooth face, with a blue feather in his hat, and a star on his cloak." There were no shouts of "Vive le Roi" to welcome him back, the Englishman noted.
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Everyone was "very mute," and the pale young man with the blue-feathered hat most silent of all.

James had begun to call himself the Chevalier de St. George, a romantic appellation with crusading overtones, and for the next several years he devoted his energies to building a military reputation. He was a brave young man, his bravery all the more admirable in that he was unimposing physically and emotionally withdrawn. At the battle of Malplaquet in 1710 he fought with the elite French household cavalry, the Maison du Roi, charging the English enemy twelve times and retiring wounded from the field. Nor was it the French alone who admired his bravery; the enemy English, far from despising the chevalier for fighting against the men he aspired one day to rule, drank James's health in their camp and at times held their fire when he rode within range of their guns.

He was behaving like a king, but politics were against him. King Louis, heretofore his patron and supporter, bound himself by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 not to harbor James within his realm any longer. And so the Chevalier de St. George became a royal vagrant for a time, coming to rest at last in Lorraine, at the château of Bar-le-Duc. It was there that news reached him, in August of 1714, that Queen Anne was dead.

Now, if ever, was his opportunity. Parliament had determined that the Elector of Hanover should succeed Anne,* but the people were, to say the least, unenthusiastic about their new king. [*The Act of Settlement of 1701 provided that Sophia, Electress of Hanover (a granddaughter of James I) and her heirs should succeed Anne. Sophia died shortly before Anne, and the succession passed to her son George.] "Behold he comes to make thy people groan," one poem about him began.

And with their curses to attend thy throne;

A clod-pate, base, inhuman, jealous Fool,

The jest of Europe, and the faction's tool.
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George was reputed to be dull, stupid and provincial—no fit ruler for the English, whom he neither liked nor understood. Scurrilous gossip condemned his barbarous manners and his immorality—it was said that he kept his two Turkish servants, Mohamed and Mustapha, "for abominable purposes"—and deplored his treatment of his wife. (To punish her for infidelity he shut her away in a tower and kept her there for years on end.) In Scotland the "wee German lairdie" commanded little respect, and people told one another that James would be over from France before long to end the Hanoverian fiasco once and for all.

King George's coronation day was marred by riots in favor of James, and as his reign went on the popular reaction against him gathered force. In some towns James was proclaimed king. At Oxford students roamed through the colleges, parading their loyalty to the Stuart dynasty and drinking James's health. Jacobites, or "Jacks" (as the adherents of James were called from his Latin name "Jacobus") in London "insulted those that were passing the streets about their lawful occasions, robbing them of their hats, wigs, etc." and threatening to do worse unless they gave a shout for the Stuarts.
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Week by week through the summer of 1715, the incidents multiplied: rioting at Peterborough, Burton-on-Trent, Sheffield, Lichfield, Wolverhampton and a dozen other towns; street brawling at Manchester, where angry crowds got out of hand and troops had to be called in; demonstrations and shouts of "A Stuart! A Stuart!" and "No King George!" whenever officials of the crown appeared.

On June 10, James's birthday, church bells rang out in celebration and there were well attended birthday dinners in many parts of the country. The wine flowed, people sang "drunken tumultuous songs" and raised their glasses to their champion, and afterward reeled out into the streets to bawl out "vile seditious words against the King." Some of the Jacobites were arrested, but most were not, for often the town magistrates shared their political sentiments and were reluctant to interfere. At Bath, the first steps toward revolution were taken when several cannon and chests of arms were collected for the use of James's followers once he arrived to lead them.

That he would arrive, and ultimately succeed in his aim of wresting the crown from the Hanoverian, one man felt absolutely certain. This was the Earl of Mar, a high-hearted and rather high-strung Scots nobleman who was an experienced politician and who had served Queen Anne as secretary of state for Scotland. Mar would have gone on to serve King George—and would have used his considerable influence to promote loyalty to the new dynasty—but the king spurned his offer of fidelity and turned him out of office. So Mar had offered his talents and influence to James, and James had gladly accepted his service.

While the Jacobite ferment was at its height in England, Mar called together those Scots willing to declare themselves for James, who. Mar assured them, was about to set sail from France. In the first week of September, 1715, Mar proclaimed "our rightful and natural King James the 8th by the Grace of God" and displayed his blue and gold banner. Two ribbon pendants declared the mottoes "For Our Wronged King and Oppressed Country" and "For Our Lives and Liberties." The words "No Union" were spelled out on the banner itself below the Scottish thistle.

Twelve thousand men responded to Mar's call on behalf of James that "all his faithful and loving subjects and lovers of their country should, with all possible speed, put themselves into arms."
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Mar marched them to Perth, seized the town, and by October was poised to attack Edinburgh.

It was time for James to act, and at the end of the month he left Bar-le-Duc disguised as one of his own servants. Agents of the British ambassador in Paris waited on the road to waylay and kill him, but he eluded them and rode on to St. Malo, now dressed as a servant, now as a priest. James and his advisers expected that Mar and his Scots would capture Edinburgh and that soon the Stuart supporters in Northumbria and the Borders would rise as well. Meanwhile James would land at Plymouth and rally the West Country, where he believed his strongest support was to be found, and then march on London.

Once in St. Malo, however, James discovered that the embryonic West Country revolt had been crushed. Government troops controlled Bristol and Bath; the Jacobite arsenal had been seized, and the key men he had counted on to serve as his lieutenants had been arrested. He thought of landing in Cornwall but that too, he was informed, was out of the question. This was not his first disappointment. Two months earlier the twelve ships, two thousand soldiers and substantial store of muskets, field guns and powder the French had promised him had been withdrawn. He had only two choices: to give up and return to Bar-le-Duc or to gamble everything on the Earl of Mar and his twelve thousand Scotsmen. On December 16 James embarked for Scotland.