Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (14 page)

Then too, Kelly was Irish, and Charles was coming more and more to feel a kinship of spirit and personality with the Irish he met.

There was a large Irish contingent in France, made up of soldiers in the French army, merchants, down-at-heels adventurers and Gallicized Irish, some of whom came from families that had been living in France for several generations, and had prospered greatly there. Charles met the soldiers first, through the good offices of Lord Clare, commander of the Irish brigade in the service of Louis XV. Clare introduced him to Lord Tyrconnel, Colonel Dillon, and others who impressed him with their daring and boldness. Among these men was John William O'Sullivan, a Kerryman who had had a long and distinguished military career. O'Sullivan had been sent to Rome to study for the priesthood as a boy of fifteen, and later, after entering holy orders, he had become a tutor in a French military family. His employer. Marshal Maillebois, had glimpsed his military promise and had taken him along on campaign in Corsica. It was a harsh baptism in the science of war, for Maillebois drank heavily and increasingly left strategic decisions to his young protégé. By the time the Corsican campaign ended O'Sullivan had laid aside his priestly identity permanently and gone on to serve as an officer in Italy and elsewhere. He was an expert, his colleague said, "in the irregular art of war," and was not inferior to seasoned generals in commanding troops.

Men such as Kelly and O'Sullivan were as different as could be from Balhaldie, Sempill, and the slippery French. When he left for the château of Fitzjames, Charles took O'Sullivan with him.

Charles gravitated toward the Irish soldiers because they told him what he wanted to hear: that he ought to make a bold bid for success on his own, without waiting any longer for French military support. To his father he might write that he felt keenly his "want of experience" and that, being "very young," it was hard for him to keep his perspective, but in truth he knew his intentions and was working to fulfill them.

Sometime in the early months of 1745 he composed a list of tasks for Murray to carry out, a list which reveals that he was doing a good deal of detailed planning toward what he called his "resolution of going to Scotland without forces."
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He required of Murray, first, that he endeavor to procure "a considerable sum of money for arms and in as short a time as possible," and that he send a reliable person to Holland to buy them. Next he was to gather more funds for use on Charles's arrival, contacting an English Jacobite agent in London, Dr. Barry, for this purpose. Next he relied on Murray to recommend the most advantageous landing site for Charles and his party. Murray was to send Lord Traquair to "concert with the English," but his most urgent task, apart from raising money, was to rouse the Highland Scots to gather broadswords and kilts and the Lowland Scots to "provide as many horses as they can without suspicion."

Money, arms, and horses: without these there would be no semblance of a Stuart army. Charles was doing his best to raise money himself. In the first week of March he informed James that he had taken it upon himself to borrow forty thousand livres from James's Paris banker Waters, to be used to buy broadswords for the Scots. The money, he told James, was "the only comfort" he could give them, and rather than deny them this comfort he "would have pawned his shirt." He asked his father to pawn his jewels—part of his Sobieski inheritance—and to forward the proceeds to him to repay the loan, assuring James that he would use the money for nothing but arms and ammunition, "or other things that tend to what I am come about in this country." "In an urgent necessity," he added, the money might come in handy "for the cause."
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James disapproved. "I cannot but tell you freely that I am sorry you have given the money in question," he replied, and he did not pawn the jewels—though he did repay Waters. James was disturbed by letters he was receiving from Paris, letters that revealed how bitterly his supporters were divided. He hated to see his people "all in pieces," he said, and he was particularly concerned about the changes Charles had made in his own inner circle. A letter from an opinionated Englishwoman, Lady Clifford, informed James that Charles had surrounded himself with "unknown, low-born" men, "of no credit or weight, and so useless." These unknowns were keeping others away who might benefit the cause. "Don't you see plainly," she wrote to James, "that till the Prince has proper people about him, he may go on years and ages in the same fruitless way he has passed days and months, since he has been in France." Without "people of quality" around him he would never be able to rally the English to his support. As it was. Lady Clifford went on, Charles's behavior was attracting ridicule. English Jacobites had recently had to suppress a pamphlet titled "The conduct of a young Hero, his Court, and amusements" which made fun of Charles's unprincely behavior.
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Back in Paris after his stay in Picardy, Charles was faced once more with the familiar problems of finding lodging, raising loans and setting up housekeeping. Tradesmen were unwilling to deliver groceries to the rooms of "Baron Renfrew"—Charles's current pseudonym—and for a time this caused a minor crisis.
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Yet he was able to rise above these nuisances because, thanks to Lord Clare, a major element in his plan of going to Scotland was falling into place.

Besides money, arms and horses, Charles needed transport, and for this he looked to the Irish privateers who operated out of Nantes and St. Malo.

Many of these privateers were Jacobites, and all of them were eager to play a role in a Stuart restoration, not only because they stood to profit from backing the victors, but because as licensed marauders assaulting British ships they were in effect in the employ of France. Rather than mount a costly and elaborate military invasion, the French had decided to give Charles indirect support. Maurepas, the navy minister, authorized the gathering of arms and ammunition, the recruitment of marines, and the use of a French warship by Antoine Walsh, a former French naval officer operating as a privateer. Charles had approached Walsh through an intermediary, Walter Ruttledge, a Dunkirk banker and shipowner who had been born in the shadow of James IPs exile court at St.-Germain and had never lost his Jacobite loyalty. Ruttledge told Walsh what Charles had in mind—to sail to Scotland and land where he could assure himself of raising an army.

The negotiations went well. "My zeal for your cause has no limits," Walsh wrote to Charles in March, "and I am prepared to undertake anything where the service of your Royal Highness is concerned." Walsh's father Philip had been captain of the ship that had taken James II to France after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. There would be a strong historical symmetry in operation if his son Antoine delivered James's grandson Charles to Britain to begin his conquest. To be sure, the undertaking would be very dangerous, and Walsh was in the best possible position to realize the dangers. Still, as he told Charles, he was willing to do his part. "If, after my representations, your Royal Highness persists in wishing to undertake the passage, I will willingly give him a little frigate, a good sailor, which I will cause to be ready as soon as possible but on condition your Royal Highness will allow me to accompany him and share all the perils to which he may wish to expose himself."
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In addition to the little frigate, the
Du Teillay
—named for the French naval commissary at Nantes, M. Du Teillay—the expedition would require a fighting escort, a gunship to protect her in the event of a British attack. Here Maurepas's cooperation was crucial. He allowed Walsh to charter a sixty-four-gun line-of-battle ship, the
Elisabeth
, and to man her with sixty officers and at least several hundred men. (One volunteer company of French cadets aboard was called the "Compagnie Maurepas.")
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The
Elisabeth
was well over thirty years old, though still sturdy. She was in origin an English ship, christened the Elizabeth, and she had been captured by the French in the reign of Queen Anne and refitted to serve in the French navy. In 1745 she was one of many ships leased to privateers attacking British merchant fleets. Her diversion to Scotland would indirectly benefit both the French and the privateers, for if Charles succeeded in raising a rebellion in Scotland, the British would have to respond by ordering naval ships northward, weakening their convoys and patrols, and thus making their merchant shipping more vulnerable to attack.

The war was not going well for the British. During 1744 the Pragmatic Army, which had distinguished itself under George II at Dettingen, was commanded by the gouty septuagenarian Marshall Wade, whose health was so poor he could barely sit his horse for more than a few hours at a time. The English, Dutch, Austrian and Hanoverian soldiers who made up Wade's heterogeneous fighting force quarreled among themselves and barely held their own in the Low Countries while Britain's ally Austria challenged the French in Alsace. In the spring of 1745, as campaign season began again, command of the Pragmatic Army passed to King George's twenty-four-year-old second son William, Duke of Cumberland. But Cumberland and his motley army were overmatched by the French forces of Marshal Saxe, all picked men and with twice the numerical strength of the British. At Fontenoy the two armies met on May 11, and though the British infantry made a remarkable stand in the end they were forced to give way and Saxe's men were victorious. Fontenoy was merely the first of a string of French victories in Flanders, culminating in the taking of the British base at Nieuport.

From Charles's point of view all this was to the good, for the weaker the British became on the continent the more reinforcements would have to be sent there, leaving Britain denuded of troops. Even before he received word of the British defeats he had written to Murray of Broughton in Scotland telling him that he expected to arrive there in July, and would probably land on Mull or one of the other islands off the western coast. "I venture myself," Charles had written, ''and hope to find friends enough among you to do the same and I am persuaded if we can make ourselves masters of the Highlands, and of both or even one of the castles you mention, we shall be able to make such a stand as will encourage those abroad to give us the succours we want.''
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Once they made a stand, both foreign support and money— specifically, the money from his pawned jewels and another "large sum which has been ready these many years past for such an occasion" in Rome—would be forthcoming. He had had to act quickly, and secretly, for to do otherwise would have meant gossip, delays, and eventual inaction. He asked Murray to ''prepare for his reception" and to have copies printed of the Commission of Regency James had given him to be published "'the moment hostilities are begun."

The timing of the adventure he was about to undertake was crucial, for although the French victories in Flanders were welcome, they threatened to shorten or even to end the war—which would mean a peace treaty between France and England, and no further chance of French help for the Stuarts. Charles had to sail before the British were utterly defeated, but not before his own preparations were complete and his Scots supporters were in readiness for his landing.

At the same time he had to choose carefully when to reveal his plan to his father, who had to be kept in the dark until it was too late for him to interfere. Charles wrote to James in June, but did not dispatch his courier with the letter until the eve of his embarkation in July. "I have, above six months ago, been invited by our friends to go to Scotland," he began, "and to carry what money and arms I could conveniently get; this being, they are fully persuaded, the only way of restoring you to the crown, and them to their liberties."
¹¹
He explained that, having found his situation in Paris unendurable, honor demanded that he either return to Rome, "which would be just giving up all hopes," or "fling himself into the arms of his friends, and die with them." The time had come to show his mettle, to take daring action or risk losing the respect of all those who looked to him for leadership. "If a horse which is to be sold if spurred does not skip, nobody would care to have him, even for nothing; 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 I have life in me."

He was like a young, spirited horse impatient to slip its reins and he oft. His enthusiasm was unbounded. He was doing what James himself had done thirty years earlier, only now, as he told James, "circumstances are indeed very different by being much more encouraging, there being a certainty of succeeding with the least help.'" He advised James to come at once to Avignon, in order to be nearer to England when the hour arrived for him to enter London as king.

"Let what will happen," he wrote confidently, "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."

There was less bravado, and more detail, in the letter Charles wrote to his father's secretary James Edgar at the same time. In it he asked for immediate repayment of the loans he had taken— a total of a hundred and eighty thousand livres—and described the arms he had bought with the money: fifteen hundred muskets, eighteen hundred broadswords, powder, balls and flints, dirks, brandy and twenty small field pieces ("two of which a mule may carry") and four thousand gold
louis
in cash.
¹²

There were hundreds of last-minute arrangements to be made. Besides coordinating the embarkation, and keeping Murray in Scotland abreast of all that was happening, Charles had to decide on his precise landing point, ensure that pilots would be available to guide the large ships through the dangerous Hebridean coasts, keep up with his mail—packets still arrived for him frequently, and had to be read and answered—and send out last-minute appeals for aid from all his continental supporters. He wrote to the King and Queen of Spain asking for arms, munitions, and money. Through Antoine Walsh he arranged for money and goods to be sent to Scotland via business firms in Hamburg and Amsterdam, and through Ruttledge's bank in Dunkirk. He made certain new ciphers were issued. And he decided which of his personal companions to take with him, along with the sixty specially chosen, brightly uniformed cadets of the "Compagnie Maurepas" who would form his personal guard once he landed.