Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (23 page)

It was not only the size of the army that was terrifying, but its reputed savagery. The playwright and pamphleteer Henry Fielding, who with the outbreak of the rebellion found himself in the unaccustomed role of government propagandist, described in his
True Patriot
what horrors the invading army would be likely to commit. Houses would be burned to the ground, defenseless citizens slain, women raped. No one would dare venture into the streets save priests. "The Banditti," as he called Charles's supporters, would not stop at massacre, but would add to it religious persecution, roasting Protestants alive and murdering them "with all the fury which rape, zeal, lust and wanton fierceness could inspire into the bloody hearts of Popish priestly bigots and barbarians."
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The English newspapers spread atrocity stories, telling how the rebels kidnapped and hanged anyone who opposed them, and set their savage dogs on people who tried to defend their towns. In order to capture Carlisle Castle, it was said, the Jacobites had seized women and children and chained them together, hand and foot, forcing the garrison to surrender lest they be harmed.

With these rumors widespread, it was understandable that the capture and display of stragglers from the Stuart army caused great excitement in the northern towns. The captured soldiers were marched in or transported in carts, their appearance drawing large crowds. Barefooted, with long unkempt hair which overhung their foreheads, unwashed, and smelling of the road and the open fields, the men looked to the English like savages, and their rough manners added to the frightening effect. Their outlandish dress was in itself enough to make them suspect. They ''had no breeches, nor stockings that came up to the knees," the
Chester Courant
reported of one group of Highlanders, ''but a short kind of petticoat about a foot deep which they call a fillibeg." The spectacle was unnerving, even though the prisoners were more cheerful than menacing and were in fact harmless, having been relieved of their weapons and put behind bars.
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Even before Charles and his men crossed the border into England the merchants of the north had begun to be alarmed. They shut up their shops, hid their goods and sent their wives and children away. The roads were full of families fleeing southward, their possessions piled on top-heavy carts. Trade was at a standstill, and little or no business of any kind was done. Employment dried up, and the laboring poor, who lived from hand to mouth, suffered greatly. When word arrived that Carlisle had fallen to the rebels, evacuation began in earnest. The surrender of the fortress "cast a great damp on people's spirits," one newspaper reported, and made them distrust the capabilities of their own local militias and of the regular government troops. Nearly everywhere, friction between the lords lieutenant and town officials created chaos, as it was unclear who had primary responsibility for attending to such urgent matters as fortifying the town walls, bricking up the gates, requisitioning provisions and providing the defenders with sufficient arms and ammunition.

No one knew for certain the intended destination of the rebel army, but government intelligence suggested that it might be Wales. Fear of "a rising in the West" was added to the already great fear of the invaders from Scotland. Officials in Chester were instructed by the cabinet in London to break any bridges that might be used by the enemy, and obstruct the roads; soon afterward the orders were rescinded, however, when it was recalled that the Hanoverian troops would themselves be relying on the roads and bridges.

Rumors flew: the rebels were headed for Bristol, where they would set fire to the town and destroy its valuable shipping; they were already in the south, and the entire countryside was in arms; a French squadron was about to land on the Lancashire coast; the rebels had the government troops surrounded and were about to defeat them. In Newcastle, where there were some twenty thousand colliers who were always ripe for insurrection, the presence of thousands of regular troops gave some sense of stability, but preparations were made nonetheless to withstand a siege. In Liverpool the mayor raised a voluntary force, the "Liverpool Blues," but this did nothing to prevent panic. Shopkeepers loaded their goods onto ships and sent them out into the channel, then abandoned the town, thinking that they would be safer seeking shelter in the countryside.

The confusion was worst in Chester, where evacuees from the town ran into hordes of people from outlying districts trying to get inside the walls for protection. Many of the municipal officials had fled, and food was too scarce to provide for the influx of newcomers. Still, the substantial landowners of Cheshire assembled at Chester Castle and undertook to raise a volunteer force twenty-five hundred strong, many of them pledging as much as a year's income from their estates to maintain it.
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Londoners read of the crisis in the north in their newspapers, and had only to look out their windows to see evidence that the country was being roused to arms. The six City militias mustered each morning and marched to their appointed postings. Cartloads of artillery rumbled through the streets, destined for Preston and other northern towns. There were soldiers on guard at every gate and along every major avenue. And as more and more regiments of Horse and Foot Guards and Horse Grenadiers arrived from Flanders, they were encamped in the London suburbs, and swarmed through the surrounding neighborhoods, conspicuous in their regimental dress and soldierly swagger. With the streets full of soldiers, inevitably there were brawls; in the taverns and gin shops, drunken artisans assaulted soldiers with cries of "Damn you and your king too and God bless the Pretender!" before being carted off to face the magistrates. Throughout the day and long into the night, there were loud explosions as inexpert militiamen let off their firearms, the reports resounding along the narrow, dark streets and keeping the populace wakeful.

London had been on alert for several years, ever since the first alarms spread of an imminent French invasion. For two years and more the guards at the Tower and St. James's had been kept at triple strength, the parish watchmen working longer hours than usual to inform themselves of suspicious events in their parishes. Foreigners were kept under particular surveillance, as were all Catholics, foreign and native-born, and known Jacobite sympathizers. Spies kept watch at the City coffeehouses and reported to the authorities what they saw and heard there. And all expressions of disloyalty, from drunken mutterings against the king to the printing of seditious posters and pamphlets, were recorded and whenever possible rewarded with punishment.

Policing the capital was a monumental task, for its huge sprawl extended from the fashionable West End eastward through the City to the acres of crowded, warren-like slums beyond the Tower and northward toward Islington and Hoxton. There were not enough spies or watchmen to ferret out what went on in the narrow alleys of Holborn or in the dockyards, or in the rat-infested, rubbish-strewn emigrant neighborhoods where jerrybuilt sheds and stalls blocked the streets and broken pavements fronted ruinous houses. In some areas of the city the authorities were in collusion with the criminal underworld; elsewhere they turned a blind eye to what went on in the known haunts of thieves and political conspirators.
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The vast areas where the Irish emigrants congregated were at once the most difficult to police and the most likely to nourish treasonable activity. Westminster, St. Giles and Marylebone, Holborn and Bloomsbury, Tower Hamlets and parts of the East End, Southwark and the docklands—all were populated by poor Irish laborers, their large families squeezed into tiny rooms or odd corners or doorways. Here, the authorities feared, the frustrations and grievances of poverty would combine with the natural preference of the Irish for the Catholic Stuart Pretender to incite rebellion. And with every passing month more Irish came into the capital, a seemingly endless stream of destitute men, women and children—so much tinder to be ignited by the Jacobite spark.
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From day to day, fresh alarms were sounded. Late in September, merchants began to reassure their customers that they would not for any reason refuse to accept payment in bank notes—immediately creating fear that there might be a run on the Bank of England. In the third week of October, one of the aldermen, Robert Ladbroke, reported receiving an anonymous letter warning that the Jacobites were about to set fire to the capital, and shortly afterward a rumor spread that the Catholics were plotting a massacre of Protestants. There was widespread apprehension, and immediately all the guards were ordered out to keep the peace. Two days later warrants were issued authorizing searches to be made of empty houses, which might be used as storehouses for illegal arms. Some caches of arms came to light, although some, like the store of two thousand cutlasses seized at the Saracen's Head tavern on Snow Hill, proved to be legitimate, in this instance part of the inventory of a Birmingham merchant.
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In the last week of October the king was reviewing the City troops. Suddenly a man darted out of the crowd and approached him, throwing a paper in his direction. The man was seized and arrested. He was a priest, and the paper was one of many broadsheets then circulating, attacking the government and upholding the rights of James HI. It was a bizarre incident, as there were presumably few priests in the capital (a bounty of a hundred pounds having been offered for every priest seized within ten miles of London or its environs). Yet it demonstrated the ineffectiveness of official attempts to control the population and eliminate suspicious characters, and underscored the magnitude of the Jacobite threat. The king might easily have been assassinated, while his troops looked on in horror.

Perhaps in reaction to this frightening incident, there were loyalist demonstrations in the following weeks, and on October 30, George IPs birthday, bonfires were lit in the streets and houses and public buildings were illuminated in celebration. Barrels of beer were broken open for the populace, who drank noisily to the king's health.
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Two weeks later, as the army of Charles Stuart was settling in to besiege Carlisle, a crowd gathered at the Royal Exchange to witness the burning of James's declaration. An effigy of James, hanging on a gibbet, was carried through the city, with six butchers in attendance as executioners. It was a virulently anti-Catholic crowd that followed the effigy, a crowd mindful of the sermons and pamphlets warning of a return to the days of Bloody Mary and the fires of Smithfield if James Stuart were to be restored to the throne. It was not, however, a particularly pro-Hanoverian crowd, and it drew its strength from outside the mercantile City proper, where the Whig government was despised. And in the outlying areas where James's declaration was passed from hand to hand and read with eager anticipation, people continued to drink quiet toasts to the Pretender's health and to wait impatiently for more news from the north.

Chapter 14

On November 19 the parole, or password, in the Stuart army was "Charles and London." On previous nights it had been ''Fortune and Carlisle," 'Taffy and Wales," "Patrick and Ireland," and a dozen other variants. But there was something symbolic about the army's departure from Carlisle on the nineteenth, after the victorious siege of the town and the castle's humiliating surrender. The road from Carlisle led to London, and the ultimate victory. Many in the army were sure of it, and Charles surest of all.

He was thriving on the campaigning life. Its schedule was one he had been familiar with for years: early to bed, fully clothed, up long before dawn, at four o'clock or earlier, then off" on the march, leading his men on foot, setting them an energetic example, until at the end of the long day it was time for a light supper and another short night's rest. It was the life of the seasoned hunter, the life Charles had enjoyed in Italy more than any other. There he had tramped the hills and marshes, his gun over his arm, winter and summer, for days at a time. Now he tramped the icy, snowbound roads of northern England, wearing thick brogues on his feet and outpacing the rugged, barefooted Highlanders who had difficulty keeping up with him.

He not only marched with the men, talking with them in his smattering of recently acquired Gaelic and dividing his time among the various regiments, moving backward and forward along the column as the day wore on, but he worked alongside them when there was work to be done, throwing off his jacket and cutting timber, wading into streams and rivers to reconnoiter the fords, making certain the men were adequately quartered at the end of the day, dispensing praise when deserved and mild blame where necessary.

His own comfort appeared to be his least concern. Even on the longest marches, after thirty grueling miles or more of walking in the freezing wind and stinging snow, he waited to assure himself of the men's safety before seeking his own quarters. To the soldiers he appeared indefatigable and so lacking in hauteur that he spoke affably to any of them who approached him, winning their loyalty and astonishing them by his even temper and moderation.
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It was not that Charles was superhuman, or particularly self-disciplined or self-sacrificing, merely that there was a lucky fit between his congenial, coarse-fibered hardihood and eager enjoyment of the bracing outdoors and the situation in which he found himself. He was ebullient and forward-thrusting, even cocky, by nature; he reveled in competition and adventure; and this was the ultimate adventure, the adventure of invasion, and the ultimate competition, the competition for the crown. No doubts darkened his sunny outlook. He and his men were London-bound, it was only a matter of time.

His naturalness was winning, but it had a disadvantage. He did not attempt to disguise his likes and dislikes, which were pronounced. Tact and politic behavior were foreign to him. His liking for the French and Irish officers who had come to Scotland with the Marquis d'Eguilles was obvious, and very much resented by the volunteer officers of the Lowland regiments. And his tense relationship with the man the Lowlanders revered as "the true man," Lord George Murray, precipitated a crisis.