Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (27 page)

On December 19, King George sent a message to Parliament. "'His Majesty having received undoubted intelligence, that preparations are making at Dunkirk, and other parts of France, which are now in great forwardness, for invading this kingdom with a considerable number of forces," the message said, ''in support of the rebellion carrying on here, in favor of the Pretender to his Crown . . . His Majesty having the last summer taken into his service six thousand Hessian troops . . . has judged it necessary to direct the said Hessians to be brought into these kingdoms." For once the usual parliamentary outcry against denuding the continent of troops was not heard. In view of the crisis, the importation of the Hessians was welcomed.

In Paris, where the calendar was eleven days ahead of the English reckoning, it was the Christmas season. While the soldiers were marching into position from Flanders and the shipwrights and carpenters were fitting out the transports, Versailles was brightly lit every night for the Christmas festivities. The king and queen presided at a series of holiday balls, the guests' excitement heightened by their knowledge that within days England would be at their king's mercy. In Paris, it was said that the fleet would sail on Christmas Eve; the taverns and cafes buzzed with news of the impending departure. When Christmas came, and the day after, and still there was no word that the ships had left Boulogne and Calais, people attributed the delay to the weather.

And in fact the winds, which had been harsh and unfavorable for two weeks, turned favorable two days after Christmas. On the following day Richelieu arrived at Dunkirk, intending to embark immediately. The king had promised him the rank of marshal of France if the invasion succeeded. He had nerved himself to succeed.

Almost as soon as he arrived, however, disconcerting reports began to reach him. Some of the troops were found to be unsuitable for marine operations. There was an unforeseen difficulty in equipping the transport ships with mangers for the horses, and carpenters were working night and day to get the mangers finished. Walsh, who was battling manfully to assemble some three hundred transports, discovered that the naval minister was unable to inform him precisely how many soldiers there would be in all—which made Walsh's former estimate of needed transport invalid. Walsh was also having a problem with provisions, he informed Richelieu. The officials at Versailles insisted that six months’ supply of food and other necessities be carried to England—far too much in Walsh's view—and it was proving to be impossible to buy this amount of foodstores in the dead of winter. It was impossible not only to buy them, but to move them: the army at Dunkirk was receiving its goods by canal from Bourbourg some ten miles inland, but the sluices froze in the cold weather, and nothing could move along the canal for days at a time. Worse still, the artillery, which had been due to arrive at Calais early in December, had yet to be loaded on the boats that would carry it to Dunkirk. Meanwhile Walsh was short of ships—and some of those he had were found to be un-seaworthy.

With problems like these mounting, word arrived from England that Charles and his army had not gone on toward London from Derby but were in retreat. This was startling news, completely unexpected and demoralizing, Richelieu needed more information, and learned, via the Kentish smugglers, that the English were building up their troop strength in the capital and on the southeastern coast. So not only would the French invaders have to take London on their own, without the aid of the Jacobite troops attacking from the northwest, but they would have to take the city in spite of an increasingly large, increasingly entrenched opposing army. Briefly Richelieu considered changing his plans and landing the men somewhere in Wales. Here too, he was told, "circumstances were sadly changed." With Charles's army in retreat, the Welsh Jacobites would be less inclined to welcome a French landing and rise against the Hanoverian king.

The duke's courage, never the staunchest, began to fail him. And at the same time, his irritation with Henry Stuart rose.

Henry was no less devout in France than he had been in his father's Roman palace. He made his devotions, he confessed his sins, he went to mass. Sometimes his attendance at mass conflicted with his attendance at Richelieu's council of war. And being who he was, he gave the religious service first priority. Richelieu warned him icily that he might conquer the kingdom of heaven by attending mass, but never England—a remark whose edge of scorn even the naive Henry could not fail to perceive. Whether Henry reprimanded the duke for his notorious and flagrant licentiousness is not recorded.

Vexed by his titular co-commander, exasperated at the incomplete preparations and the seemingly unavoidable delays, Richelieu nonetheless determined to carry on with the expedition. If the original deadline for departure could not be met, then a later one would be decided on. He would work toward this goal.

Then a series of disasters at sea further demoralized him. Two English privateers, the
Eagle
and the
Carlisle
, sprayed one of the French convoys with gunfire. One ship, loaded with much-needed artillery, was sunk, and another was seized while still at anchor, her captain not having had enough warning of the attack to cut her cables. The next day the same two privateers met a much larger artillery convoy from Dunkirk. Seventeen of the ships were either sunk or taken as prizes. And on the following day, yet another convoy was attacked, this time by royal navy ships, and considerable damage was done.

The delays were proving costly indeed. When gales blew up and made the Channel impassable, Richelieu declared that only a miracle could save the expedition. There were now eight thousand tons of shipping at Boulogne and another four thousand at Calais, but instead of marveling at the impressive size of the armada, the members of the war council fell to quarreling over the suitability of Boulogne as an embarkation point, given the nature of the tides and the size of the harbor mouth. The same favorable winds and calm seas that were hoped for to make the departure from the French coast possible were expected to result in high seas off Dungeness— which might wreck the entire flotilla.

Another departure date was set, then another. Each time the presence of English warships, or weather difficulties, or simple tergiversation prevented the launching. By the time Richelieu had been at the coast two weeks and more, it was clear that the enterprise had lost its political momentum, and even Henry was urging Richelieu not to invade England but Scotland—a project which, if feasible at all, would have to wait until spring when an escort of warships could be made available to support it.

The road north from Derby seemed endless. The dispirited men kept up a brisk pace, knowing that Cumberland and his army were not far away, but they were grim-faced and hard-eyed, their resentment evident. Their way led back through Leek and Macclesfield to Manchester, where the advance guard was stoned by the hostile populace and the Jacobite cavalry had to be called in to break up a dangerous mob. Even to obtain billets in the town was very difficult, and to prevent violence Charles ordered a curfew which forbade any two persons to walk together after the hour of nine o'clock on pain of death. There were ugly incidents. Jacobites were fired on, stragglers were seized and beaten, and in some cases killed. Militiamen opened fire and bloody skirmishes resulted. Roads that had been bad enough on the journey southward now appeared to be impassable, yet somehow the army passed along them, given added impetus by the information that a troop of cavalry under the Hanoverian Major-General Oglethorpe was in hot pursuit.

Charles, thoroughly put out at having been thwarted in his burning desire to march his men to London, was peevish and petty. He opposed Murray at every turn, refusing to issue marching orders in a timely fashion, arguing against Murray's proposed schedule, and being notably less visible and vigorous in his leadership. He no longer rose before dawn to set off on foot at the head of his soldiers. Now he slept late, rose long after the vanguard had left, and went on horseback to the next destination. He took his meals with Sheridan or O'Sullivan, dining on fresh fowls or mutton washed down, on at least one occasion, with "mountain Malaga."

After about a week his disposition improved, and he returned to his customary exertions, setting an example to the men by marching on hour after hour in heavy rain, fording swollen streams on foot, refusing to ride even when the roads were at their worst and the exhausted soldiers, soaked to the skin and miserably cold, had to struggle with baggage carts stuck in deep mud.

His unbreakable will strengthened theirs, until at last, on December 20, he led them across the River Esk. The river was four feet deep, and rising by the hour, with a swift and dangerous current. Taking all the available cavalry, he rode in, braking the current as much as possible so that the men could try to get across. They went in, O'Sullivan recalled later, "six in a breast [i.e., six abreast], in as good order, as if they were marching in a field, holding one another by the collars, everybody, and everything past, without any loss."
⁵
The sight of some two thousand men, their arms linked, marching in orderly fashion across a raging torrent impressed onlookers; d'Eguilles was particularly astonished. There were some near-drownings. Charles saved one man by grabbing his hair and crying "Help! Help!" in Gaelic until help came.

Once across the river, they were back in Scotland again. They lit fires to warm themselves, and as night fell the pipers played and the men, more relieved than tired, danced themselves dry. They had made it safely through the hostile territory of England—to face an increasingly hostile Scotland.

One of the first sights the Jacobites saw as they gained the far shore of the Esk was burning bonfires, bonfires lit by Scots loyal to the Hanoverian crown to celebrate the retreat of the rebels from England. In Glasgow, where loyalists were a solid majority, the Stuart army was received coolly, Charles's celebrated charm had no effect, and only sixty new recruits were enlisted, in contrast to the entire regiment which had been recruited for the government and which was now in Edinburgh. The Jacobites stayed in Glasgow for about a week, giving the Glaswegians time to supply the six thousand coats, shirts, bonnets, hose and pairs of shoes Charles required of them. The soldiers were badly in need of new clothes, as their own were ragged and filthy after months of dust and mud, foul weather and battle.

Early in the new year the Jacobites moved on. Charles gave the order to march to Stirling, the fortified town high on its commanding bluff overlooking the broad plain northwest of Edinburgh. At the same time he sent a message to Drummond and his men at Perth ordering them to join the rest of the army at Stirling. Drummond's French troops had artillery with them, French cannon and a dozen gunners. Again, as at Carlisle, Charles envisioned besieging Stirling Castle and, once in possession of it, using the castle as a base from which to conquer the rest of Scotland. It was a sensible strategy, at least in the abstract. One of the chief weaknesses of the campaign so far had been the Jacobites' inability to hold any of the towns they had captured. Even Carlisle had been lost when Cumberland recaptured it on December 30. If Stirling could be reduced, then strongly garrisoned, and strengthened with the army's newly acquired artillery, not only could it control a good part of the Lowlands but it could provide a safe zone of retreat for the Stuart soldiers as they progressively widened the scope of their campaigns.

Very little of Scotland was actually under Jacobite control. For the moment, the recently arrived French troops and the sizable Highland contingents that had joined them (including some Mackintoshes, some Mackenzies, Erasers and Farquharsons) dominated Perth, but as we have seen, Glasgow was hostile, Edinburgh was occupied by substantial numbers of government troops, Argyll was currently being stirred to Hanoverian loyalty, Inverness was staunchly Hanoverian, and the Highland forts—Fort William, Fort George, and Fort Augustus—were in government hands. A squadron of the royal navy lay off the ports on the east coast to intercept any French ships that might arrive with men and arms.

It would be an uphill battle to subdue all of Scotland, or even a major part of it. Yet now Charles had at hand upwards of eight thousand troops (though men were deserting by the hundreds), men who knew the terrain and could cross it at high speed, men who had accomplished marvelous feats in England and who had not known defeat. The Hanoverian army was at a great disadvantage in winter campaigning. And there was always the possibility that the French might land in the south and take London.

The orders were given, the armies marched. But before many days passed, Charles and his chief general were again at an impasse.

As always, the issue was authority, and specifically Charles's authority. This had been the sorest of sore points ever since the day Charles deferred, with a bad grace, to the prevailing opinion among the chiefs and agreed to order the retreat from Derby. For the past month he had called no councils of war, and had taken advice principally from his preferred advisers, Murray of Broughton— who, when the Derby deliberations were over, professed himself in favor of going on to London—and Sheridan. Neither man was in favor with the chiefs, which only increased the tension between them and their leader. Finally the chiefs met, and drew up a memorial in which they recommended to Charles that future decisions be made by a group of five or seven men, chosen from a larger body of fifteen or sixteen, the decisions to be made in his presence and presumably with his concurrence—though this was not stated. On the battlefield, they added, authority should reside in those in command, which, they said, "is the method of all armies."

"Had not a Council," the memorial read, "determined the retreat from Derby, what a catastrophe might have followed in two or three days? Had a Council of War been held when the army came to Lancaster, a day had [
sic
] not been lost. Had a Council of War been consulted as to the leaving a garrison at Carlisle, it would never have been agreed to, the place not being tenable, and so many brave men would not have been sacrificed, besides the reputation of his Royal Highness's arms." The document ended with a reminder that the Jacobite army was a force of volunteers, not of mercenaries who could be ordered about at will.