Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (10 page)

Late in June of 1743, the Anglo-Hanoverian force under George IPs command—the so-called Pragmatic Army—left its camp at Aschaffenburg on the Main and marched out to engage the French.

King George had some thirty thousand men, while the French army of Marshal Noailles, marching parallel to the British force on the other side of the river and watching its every move, was some fifty thousand strong. Ahead of the British was a low area of marshy ground, and beyond it the village of Dettingen. Thirty thousand of the French crossed the river and occupied the village, where they waited for the British to attack. Instead, King George brought his troops to a halt and waited patiently for several hours. Eventually the French commander, discontent with the stalemate, ordered his men to abandon their advantageous position and advance across the marsh, where the waiting English routed the French cavalry and faced the oncoming infantry bravely. George, on foot and "sword in hand," led his men so resolutely that they drove the French back across the marsh into the river, where many of them drowned. In all the French lost nearly five thousand men, the British barely half that number.

The British victory of Dettingen infuriated Louis XV. The British had already provoked him by giving Maria Theresa 500,000 pounds to finance her defense against his armies; now King George himself was waging war on her behalf. He wanted revenge. And he no longer had Cardinal Fleury at hand to restrain him in that desire and to counsel peace, for Fleury had died the previous January. Cardinal Tencin, who replaced Fleury, was less pacific. Moreover, Tencin had close ties to the Stuarts, owing his advancement to the cardinalate in part to James's influence. And a number of Jacobite agents, including not only Balhaldie but the more solid and reliable Murray of Broughton, were on hand in Paris when the news of the British victory at Dettingen arrived. They pressed their case, and King Louis was more than ready to listen.

In August he sent an agent of his own, his equerry James Butler, to London, ostensibly to buy horses for the royal stables but in fact to discover at first-hand how many of the English were likely to come out for James in the event of a rising. Butler was impressed by what he found, and came back to his master with a report that a great majority of the most influential Londoners were for James, including the lord mayor and ten aldermen. Outside the capital, there were hundreds of reliable Jacobites, Butler said, and he had a partial list of them which included more than three hundred names.

Had Louis realized how gullible his envoy Butler was, and how indiscreet (he talked so freely while on his mission in London that he revealed its true purpose to more than one government spy), he might have hesitated before going ahead with a plan to aid the Stuarts. He might have changed his mind entirely had he realized just how divided and mutually suspicious the Stuart conspirators were, with Murray of Broughton contemptuous of Balhaldie, many of the Scottish Jacobites highly critical of one another, and the English Jacobites at cross purposes from the rest, and too self-protective to commit their pledges of support to writing.

But these handicaps were not immediately apparent, and so an invasion plan was drawn up, designed to be carried out in the following year of 1744.

The plan called for nothing short of a French invasion of England, with a Jacobite rising timed to coincide with it and to cause chaos while the government troops tried to deal with the invading army. Marshal Saxe, France's most brilliant general, was to command the main body of troops—twelve thousand men—who were to land at Maldon in Essex, not far from London. Three thousand more troops were to land in Scotland, half at Inverness and half on the western coast. It was expected that a number of the Highland clans would come out in force to augment the French armies, but their numbers would be relatively insignificant compared with Marshal Saxe's very sizable body of men.

The moment James had hoped for for so many years was finally drawing closer. Troops were beginning to gather at the Channel ports, and an invasion fleet was being assembled at Brest and Rochefort. This time there would be no equivocation on the part of the French, for the king was committed to the undertaking. And this time the Jacobites would rally behind a new leader, whose youth and energy would inspire and vitalize them. Charles had been summoned to France to sail with the fleet, and he could not wait to be on his way. For years he had "felt his situation acutely," trapped in the narrow confines of the pope's domains. He was as confident as his friend Murray of Broughton that he had been born for something extraordinary, and now it appeared that his extraordinary endowments were not to be wasted. His dynamic vitality had a focus; he had a definite purpose at last. "If he does not come to the fore," wrote the admiring Des Brosses, "it will not be owing to lack of energy."

Chapter 6

I am not at all ashamed to say I am in fear of the Pretender," Robert Walpole declared frequently during his twenty-one years as principal minister of George I and George II, "It is a danger I shall never be ashamed to say I am afraid of, because it is a danger we shall always be more or less exposed to."

Walpole was deeply and sincerely fearful that Britain might be invaded by a foreign power acting on behalf of James, and he never let his countrymen forget how alarmingly easy it would be for a well-equipped force to land, gather local support, and eventually take over.

'Five or six thousand men may be embarked in such a small number of ships, and so speedily, that it is impossible to guard against it by means of our fleet," he told the House of Commons in the late 1730s. "Such a number may be landed in some part of the island, with the Pretender at their head, there is no question that they would meet with many, especially the meaner sort, to join them."i

Walpole was almost as worried about the "meaner sort" as he was about the invaders. In the event of a landing, he conjectured, the government could not afford to send the entire army against the foreigners, lest some counties be left without any troops at all; without troops to guard them, "the disaffected would rise" and turn against the forces of order. As long as there was a Pretender, the Protestant monarchy was potentially in peril. Only "peace and tranquility" could assure its secure continuation.

For two decades Walpole had been warning his countrymen about the Pretender and his secret followers. They were everywhere, spinning out their intrigues behind locked doors, in cellars, at clandestine midnight meetings. They were plotting to assassinate the king, to destroy the Protestant religion and install Catholicism, just as Bloody Queen Mary had done two hundred years earlier, to make all English men and women worship the pope. They were winning over the weak and the discontented, claiming to be champions of liberty when in truth they wanted a return to enslavement under Stuart rule.

"Your right Jacobite, Sir," Walpole maintained, "disguises his true sentiments. He roars out for revolution principles, he pretends to be a great friend to liberty, and a great admirer of our ancient constitution, and under this pretense there are numbers who every day endeavor to sow discontents among the people by persuading them that the constitution is in danger, and that they are unnecessarily loaded with many and heavy taxes." Of course, no Jacobite in his right mind would call himself such; that would do injury to the cause. Therefore no one could be trusted, and the more vehement a man might be in his expression of loyalty to the nation, the more suspect he ought to be.

No large-scale Jacobite plot had been unearthed since the early 1720s, but Walpole was certain that conspiracies were constantly being carried on and that only his vigilance and that of his colleagues and his informers stood between Britain and disaster. "These lower sorts of Jacobites appear at this time more busy than they have for a great while," he wrote in 1736. "They are very industrious, and taking advantage of everything that offers, to raise tumult and disorders among the people." When Westminster Hall was damaged by a gunpowder explosion he was sure he knew who was behind the "vile transaction." "There is no reason to doubt but the whole was projected and executed by a set of low Jacobites," he insisted. One of his agents had brought him word concerning it, and he trusted in his intelligence system.

Walpole's view of the precarious situation of the Hanoverian monarchy was widely shared. People recognized the possibility that Spain or France—or perhaps even Russia or Sweden—might supply money, arms and men to the Stuarts and realized too that, given how slowly news traveled, a small landing force might have a chance to conquer the country. Britain's army was relatively small, and scattered, and the militia could not be expected to stand for long against foreign soldiery. A good many people remembered what had happened in 1715, when in response to James's landing in Scotland the government had set up a military camp in Hyde Park and had brought down the heavy guns from the Tower, expecting to have to use them to defend the capital. No one had put much faith in the army then, especially when it was discovered that there were Jacobites serving in the Horse Guards and that at least one officer in the Foot Guards had a commission from James as colonel of a cavalry regiment and was busily enlisting men to serve under him in the Stuart army. The ministers, meeting in an emergency session, had come to unanimous agreement that, if James or one of his generals attacked London, the army could not be relied on to defend the king. He would have to flee to Holland.

Nor was the military threat the only thing to be feared. Once word reached London that a rebellion had begun or an invasion force had landed, there was certain to be a financial panic. There would be a run on the National Bank, stocks would fall until they became virtually worthless. Gold would be the only asset worth having, and with public credit collapsed, the government itself would soon come to a halt.

It was a horrifying prospect, particularly to the substantial Whigs who owed their wealth to investment. And as Walpole hoped, the more he increased the public's fear of plots and plotters, the more they would tend to forget how much they disliked the aloof, prosaic kings from Hanover. Anything was better, they were inclined to think, than the ''popish Pretender." The constant fear of a "wicked Jacobite conspiracy" also had the effect of turning public opinion toward the government, which kept them informed about and protected against the danger from abroad. The City, which had been a center of opposition to Walpole, became loyal to him; the London crowd, which had been known to storm the lobby and corridors of the House of Commons, tearing the coats of officials and threatening M.P.'s, turned its fury against the Jacobites instead.

Walpole used the situation to make a profit for the government. He taxed the estates of Roman Catholics, taking in a hundred thousand pounds which otherwise, he claimed, would have been used to finance rebellion. According to Walpole, English Catholics were in the habit of making "ill use" of their savings, laying out money "in maintaining the Pretender and his adherents abroad, and fomenting discord and rebellion at home." It was far better that the money go into government coffers.

And in fact James did ask his supporters in England to send as much money as they could spare to help his cause, soliciting twenty or thirty thousand pounds apiece from the wealthiest of them. He supplied his agents with signed receipts, with the amount of the contribution and the interest to be paid on it left blank, to be given out in return for cash.

The government's first line of defense against having large sums of money leave the country was to search the mails, and warrants were issued to postmasters telling them to open all "suspected treasonable correspondence," read it, copy it and then reseal it so that the tampering could not be detected. Copies of all diplomatic correspondence, all letters in the French and Flanders mails, anything going to or from a suspicious person were to be transmitted immediately to the authorities for evaluation. Boxes, packages and chests were opened—even coffins were not spared. When the body of the Bishop of Rochester, Francis Atterbury, exiled for his role in the 1722 Jacobite conspiracy, was returned to England from France for burial in Westminster Abbey, the government ordered the coffin opened. Only the bishop's corpse was found in it, but as an extra precaution the body was slit open and searched to make certain no important documents had been slipped inside.

Suspect correspondence was forwarded to the Deciphering Branch, where a highly paid chief decipherer and four assistants combed through it, breaking codes that were at times intricate and complex. One foreign minister sent his dispatches abroad from London written in a code employing at least two thousand different characters—and even the simpler codes were challenging, especially as they were altered frequently. The Jacobites had a private nomenclature, referring in their documents to "N" (Lord Lovat), or 'T" (Lord Nairne), "Lord of the Manor" (the Earl of Strathmore) and "Mr. Piercy" (the Duke of Argyll). The decipherers were kept busy scratching their heads over who "Mr. Acorn" was, or "The Sexton," or "Jack Caesar," and when symbols were used in lieu of false names their puzzlement deepened.

In
Gulliver's Travels
, published at the height of the anxiety over "wicked Jacobite conspiracies" in 1726, Jonathan Swift made fun of the Deciphering Branch, calling the decipherers "a set of Artists, very dexterous in finding out the mysterious Meanings of Words, Syllables and Letters." They recognized in "a Flock of Geese, a Senate; a lame Dog, an Invader; the Plague, a standing Army; a Buzzard, a Minister; ... a bottomless Pit, the Treasury; a running Sore, the Administration," and so on.'* In fact the experts were skilled at what they did, with the result that the government was kept well informed about what its opponents were planning, with reports reaching the Deciphering Branch from post offices throughout Europe, from Danzig to Hamburg to Brussels to Calais.

The cornerstone of the government's intelligence system was its network of paid informers. Several of these had held positions of trust in Jacobite households, or belonged to an inner circle surrounding an important Jacobite personage. John Sempill (not to be confused with the Jacobite agent Lord Francis Sempill), Walpole's principal agent, was at the heart of the exile community in Paris, and conveyed news of the comings and goings of the principal conspirators there. Also in Paris were two Sicilian abbots, Carracciolo and Platania, who had been privy to James's dealings with the Spanish court until sent into exile by the queen, Elizabeth Farnese. The colorful antiquarian Baron von Stosch, who had given the English court so much information about what went on at the Palazzo Muti, became less useful after 1731, when his carriage was attacked by masked brigands who told him to leave Rome and frightened him so thoroughly that he moved to Florence. From there he continued to send weekly dispatches to London—based in part on the reports of informers who worked for him in Rome—but because he no longer had personal access to highly placed individuals, his information was not of much value—except, as Walpole remarked, to amuse King George.
⁵
To be sure, Cardinal Alessandro Albani, nephew of Clement XI, continued to be a useful source of news, and there were others, particularly British connoisseurs traveling to Rome to collect antiquities, who were willing to collect information as well.