Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (2 page)

Now, a week later, he watched the coastline about Peterhead emerge from the clouds, musing on his bad luck and shivering in the freezing cold. He looked pale and ill, and made a poor impression on the men who greeted him when he came ashore. His obvious dejection drained away what enthusiasm they felt about his arrival, and his habitual silence and morose detachment from the people around him made them mutter that he would have done better to send five thousand troops than to come in person.

James's mood darkened still further when he discovered that Mar's army had fought a costly battle with government troops at Sheriffmuir and, instead of advancing southward, had retreated to Perth. A disastrous Jacobite defeat at Preston made matters worse, as did the problem of desertions from Mar's army. From twelve thousand, James learned, it had dwindled down to five thousand, and more and more men were leaving every day. Many of those who remained were poorly armed or otherwise ineffective. And the government troops at Stirling, recently reinforced, now outnumbered the Jacobites three to one.

Another man, faced with such a disheartening situation, might have risen to the challenge, summoning the heart and will to surmount it. But James, expecting bad luck, bowed to it. He had no drive, and little determination. It was only out of a relentless sense of duty that he pursued his failing venture, and his joylessness and lack of spirit were infectious. The men lost hope. The Chevalier de St. George, the leader they had awaited, turned out to be a tragic figure, devoid of manly heartiness and kingly fire. He was correct, he spoke and acted with a heavy chivalry that made him at once noble and pathetic. The black eyes in his thin face were sad, constantly brimming over with tears as he learned of fresh disasters.

"For me," James remarked to his officers, "it is no new thing to be unfortunate, since my whole life from my cradle has been a constant series of misfortunes." There was more somber honor in the statement than self-pity, but to those who had risked their lives and goods, and the safety of their families, to follow him James's defeatist attitude was repellent.

Mar did what he could to reverse the general reaction to the chevalier. "People everywhere . . . are excessively glad to see him," he wrote in a circular letter put about early in January of the New Year. "Set aside his being a prince, he is really the finest gentleman I ever knew. He has a very good presence, and resembles King Charles a great deal." Mar's effort to compare the lugubrious, scrupulous James to his sensual, rakehell uncle King Charles II convinced no one, nor did his insistence that James had "the sweetest temper in the world."
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Those few men who were able to observe James at close range tended to agree with Mar, however. A groom who accompanied him on his hazardous flight to the coast in November, 1715, recorded that he "never knew any have better temper, be more familiar and good, always pleased and in good humor, notwithstanding all the crosses and accidents that happened during his journey; never the least disquieted, but with the greatest courage and firmness resolved to go through with what he had designed on." In James all the qualities of a great prince were combined with those of "a most honest private gentleman."
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There was truth in these assessments, for in his dedication and dogged idealism, and in the enervated rigor with which he pursued his quest, James was princely, even kingly. But the harsher truth was that James was tragically blind to the fact that the average soldier could neither perceive nor appreciate the depth of his character or his sensitive nature, and mistook his triste demeanor for weakness. James thought he was every inch a king, and could not seem to understand that his men needed him to be dashing, energetic and inspiring, to spark them on to overcome their limitations. In their eyes he failed utterly to measure up. They saw him—and they despaired.

For the next six weeks the Chevalier de St. George pursued his melancholy crusade, pale and at times so ill he could not ride, attacked by chills and fever. He met with a number of noblemen but few of the country folk. When pressed by Mar he stopped along the wayside to address a forlorn sentence or two to a handful of villagers, but such attempts at contact with his subjects were rare—and dangerous. For he was a hunted man, the government had offered a reward to anyone who arrested him on British soil. And there were spies and assassins stalking him, he felt sure.

With his entourage he hazarded the bone-chilling cold of an exceptionally severe Scots winter. The rivers froze, the dirt tracks that served as roads were so blocked by deep snow that workmen had to be hired to clear them. Hill tracks were buried under many feet of frozen snow, and were completely impassable; the harshness of the season, many felt, was enough to blunt the force of even the most impassioned rebellion. As the dark, short days succeeded one another the snow continued to fall, piling in drifts so deep they blanketed the villages and brought life to a standstill. Mounting a military campaign in such weather was unthinkable. Transport was hopeless, provisioning a nightmare. As it was, the frost kept the mills from turning, so that no grain could be ground and Perth quickly consumed its scant store of bread. Wood was extremely scarce, and coals unavailable, as the coalpits of Fife were in government hands.
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The season was one thing. Mar's organizational problems another. There was chaos in the camp at Perth, with no orderly billeting of troops and no reliable method of paying them. Mar had ordered the men to form regiments, but had neglected to determine their composition himself. The result was a hodgepodge of units of all sizes, with every petty leader insisting on having a regiment of his own and refusing to defer to any higher authority. No one looked after essentials: for want of powder horns the men's gunpowder was wet and useless, there was a shortage of flints, and the total supply of gunpowder, wet and dry, was pitifully small. Worst of all, the guns the soldiers possessed were many of them "old rusty broken pieces," more fit for ornament than use, and no one bothered to order replacements.

On January 9, James rode into Perth and settled into the old royal palace of Scone, from which he issued written orders "given at our court of Scone ... in the fifteenth year of our reign, 1715-16." His pride was intact, but all else was virtually in ruins. Privately, his leading supporters had abandoned hope. In his journal, published some time later, Mar wrote that he had never believed he could hold Perth, with or without James's presence.
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Pretenses were kept up, on the chance that by some miracle the cause might be revived. The citizens of Perth were informed that their monarch, James III and VIII, was to be formally crowned on January 23, and a number of aristocratic Jacobite ladies came forward to donate jewels to be set into his crown. But the rebels were living on borrowed time. The government army, commanded by the Duke of Argyll, was making its way slowly northward, hampered, to be sure, by the snowbound roads and by the need to send to Berwick for cannon and mortars. Reprisals had begun, and were certain to spread throughout every district where men had come forward to fight for James. Soon Argyll would reach Perth, and then all would be lost.

In a vain effort to hold off Argyll and his men James was persuaded to order the burning of six villages that lay between the government army and his own forces. Scrupulous to a fault and tenderhearted as he was, James disliked giving the order, but yielded to the argument that to deny Argyll's men the food and forage the villages could provide might make the difference between immediate surrender and rescue thanks to the last-minute arrival of reinforcements—a fiction born of desperation. So, to prevent the inevitable, the six villages were sacrificed.

The villagers were driven out of their homes and into the deep snow. Their houses and barns were set on fire, their horses taken for James's army, their provisions destroyed. The "mournful screeches and frightful cries" of the inhabitants, left foundering in the deep snow in freezing temperatures, were a pitiful epilogue to the failed rising. No exceptions were made for infants, the aged, or the feeble, all were left exposed to the weather, "it being in the midst of a terrible storm of frost and snow, such as was not in Scotland these many years bygone." Some died within hours in the snow-covered fields, others lingered on for a day or two. Most survived, destitute and distracted by their ordeal, and full of hatred for James III and VIII.

By the last day of January James realized that he had no choice but to abandon the city. "I am in despair at finding myself compelled to withdraw from Perth," he confided, "but to offer battle would be to expose brave men for no reason." He wished, he said, to preserve the lives of his men "for a more fitting occasion." He had some hope of joining his "friends in the north," but what friends he had had taken to their heels, and by the time he reached Montrose James saw that he too had to flee if he was to save himself. The remnant of his ragged army was melting away. A few drunken stragglers had remained in Perth, others deserted on the way northward. It was over.

A small ship, the
Maria Theresa
of St. Malo, was pressed into service to take the Chevalier de St. George back to France. His leave-taking had to be secret; to announce it would have meant certain pursuit and capture. Yet it must have galled his sense of honor to sneak away on foot, hurrying down an alley to the waterside, looking over his shoulder like a common thief. He had had to lie to his men, assuring them that he would be with them in Aberdeen "where he assured them a considerable force would soon come from France."
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He had failed them, not once but twice—for the fiasco of 1708 was still lively in his memory. Whether he would have a third opportunity was in the hands of fate—and fate inevitably served him badly.

The
Maria Theresa
remained anchored in the harbor from nine o'clock until well after two o'clock the next morning, waiting for the outgoing tide. Her eminent passenger, wrapped in his own somber thoughts, submitted stoically to this final delay. He was cold and weary, more sick at heart over the harm he had brought to others than over his own profound disappointment. "It is crushing to me," he was to write shortly afterward, "who would have thought myself to some degree content if I were alone in my misfortune but the death and misfortunes of others of which I am the innocent cause pierces my heart."

Chapter 2

In his return to France James found himself in an extremely uncomfortable position. He had nowhere to go, he had very little money, indeed the only thing he had in abundance was the loyalty of the hungry followers who lived at his court and looked to him to support them.

And now those followers were growing in numbers, as the leaders of the Scots who had rebelled made their way via the Orkneys to France to join their king in exile. By April of 1716 there were some five hundred of them, uprooted and restless, waiting in quarrelsome impatience for James to take the initiative and launch another invasion. James was himself responsible for bringing quite a few of these men across the Channel. He felt obligated to them and responsible for them, and sent ships to pick them up and transport them to France where, he assumed, he would be able to offer them his protection.

France had after all been the exiled Stuarts' haven for decades. James had lived at St.-Germain-en-Laye most of his life; the opulent baroque palace with its hundreds of rooms, its elegant gardens and air of serene regality was still home to him. His father had died there, and was buried at the convent church of Chaillot. His mother still lived at St. Germain—where James went to see her shortly after his return from Scotland—and fully expected to live out her life at the palace. Culturally, James was a Frenchman, albeit a Frenchman with an acquired nostalgia for England.

Yet his lifelong connection with France was about to be permanently severed. Louis XIV, who had always sheltered the Stuarts, had died the previous year. France was ruled by a regency, with the pragmatic, shrewd Due d’Orléans at its head. Orleans was indifferent to the Stuarts, except for their potential value as a weapon to be used against King George of England. For the time being he had no use for James (though he allowed James's mother, Mary of Modena, to continue to live at St. Germain), and had no intention of harboring him. On the contrary, James's presence in France was an embarrassment, for Orleans was just then favorably inclined toward the English and was negotiating a rapprochement with King George. So James had to leave, and immediately.

Where was he to take his ragged court? Sweden was one possibility. The Swedish king, Charles XH, was at odds with King George— in his role as Elector of Hanover—over some disputed territories on the continent. He was eager to assist any enemy of the elector's, and indeed had entertained the idea of supporting James with troops and money. But Sweden was remote, and the intrigues under way there on James's behalf were not yet ripe. Spain was another possibility, but though James wrote to King Philip V asking for support, he got no response. Hard-pressed, and with the regent uncompromising in his hostility, James took the easiest course and accepted the hospitality of Pope Clement XI at Avignon. Here he took up residence in April of 1716, trailed by his horde of servitors and hangers-on.

James's position was especially difficult in that his abortive invasion of Scotland had provoked a crisis among his chief supporters.

Until recently his principal supporter had been his half-brother James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, bastard son of James II and Arabella Churchill. Berwick was, like his uncle the Duke of Marlborough, a military genius and had been created Marshal of France.

With his achievements on the battlefield and his bluff, unbuttoned personality he completely overshadowed his younger half-brother, but as a boy James, far from feeling jealous, looked up to Berwick and relied on him completely. Berwick carried weight, people were impressed by him—if not always favorably. (The Queen of Spain judged him to be "a great "dry devil of an Englishman, who always goes his own way.")