Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (35 page)

Wearing a monk's robes, with a black patch over one eye and blackened eyebrows, Charles embarked for England on September 12, 1750. With him was Colonel Brett, then the leader of the English Jacobites, and sometime secretary to James IPs illegitimate daughter the Duchess of Buckingham. Evading the scrutiny of customs officials on the English coast, Charles and Brett traveled to London where, presumably, they were harbored by Jacobite sympathizers. Some fifty of these sympathizers gathered in a lodging in Pall Mall to welcome Charles and shake his hand.

It must have been a solemn moment, with Charles (now shorn of his disguise) looking for the first time into the faces of those who would have joined him had he marched to London four years earlier instead of halting at Derby. They in turn got their first look at the remarkable young hero whose lightning advance southward had put London into panic. They were not disappointed. ''He is tall and well made," noted William King, principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford and another prominent Jacobite, "but stoops a little. He has a handsome face and good eyes."

On another occasion King learned from Charles that he had come to London at the urging of some of the more hotheaded and impatient of the exiles, who "had formed a scheme which was impracticable." Once in the capital he discovered just how impracticable it was, as "no preparation had been made, nor was anything ready to carry it into execution." Charles told Dr. King that "he had been deceived"—and not for the first time. Still, fifty men were fifty men, and when he recalled the event many years later Charles insisted that if those fifty would have assembled a mere four thousand from among their tenants and retainers and by hiring troops, he would have led them in a rebellion.
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"The great affair of L" came to nothing. Charles, presumably in disguise once again, had the pleasure of walking through the streets of his capital with Colonel Brett, seeing the parks and new fashionable squares, skirting the narrow, twisted lanes of medieval Westminster, and admiring the City monuments. No one challenged the two men as they made their way to the Tower, and stood studying its fortifications. Ultimately they concluded that it could be seized after one gate was blown in with an explosive charge.

This information Charles kept in mind for another time, as it was clear he could not hope to achieve anything during the present visit. Nothing military, that is: he did achieve something of political significance. Privately and still incognito, he renounced the Roman faith into which he had been born and was admitted to the Church of England. Thus he became the first (and only) Protestant Stuart claimant to the throne, a step which removed him further from his father and brother and brought him closer, at least in theory, to the majority of the British. This accomplished, he returned to Paris after a stay of no more than a week.
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What the nature of the "impracticable scheme" of 1750 was is impossible to say. But very likely it involved fomenting a riot, then taking advantage of the confusion to bring Jacobite soldiers out of carefully concealed hiding places to assault the Tower and St. James's. With these secured, more troops could be brought from Scotland to consolidate the coup and prepare to withstand any possible counterattack.

Virtually all of the Jacobite schemes put forward in the early 1750s followed this outline. London was the focus: fighting men loyal to the Stuarts were to be situated there in large numbers, then unleashed at a predetermined signal to seize the Tower, the palace, and—depending on the plot variant—the royal family. Once London was in Stuart hands, more troops would be led south from Scotland to secure the new government and Charles would arrive from the continent to lead it.

In one colorful version of this plan, fifteen hundred Irish chairmen—porters who carried the sedan chairs supported on poles in which the more affluent Londoners had themselves transported— were to be called on to assemble in Lincoln's Inn Fields "the instant they heard any particular news relative to the Pretender." A detachment of the Irishmen was to ""seize the person of the King as he returned from the play, . . . knock the servants from behind his coach, extinguish the lights, and create a confusion while a party carried the King to the water side, and hurried him away to France."
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The proponents of these schemes, in addition to Charles himself, were adventurous exiles such as Alexander Murray, younger brother of the Jacobite Lord Elibank and a man "vastly vain and full of himself in James Edgar's phrase, and one Mr. Seagrave, an Irish officer with only one arm, who frequented Paris cafes and claimed to have been through the 1745 campaign by Charles's side. Unfortunately for Charles, one of the adventurers was Alistair Macdonald, son of John Macdonald of Glengarry, who had become a Hanoverian spy. Young Glengarry posed as an eager conspirator while in fact sending dispatches to the government in London giving detailed accounts of everything the Jacobites were planning. As a result of Glengarry's treachery, the most ambitious of the schemes—the "Elibank Plot" which was set to come to fruition in November of 1752—went awry, and was never successfully revived.

By then, however, Charles was making major changes in his personal life which in time were to have an even greater impact on the political future of his cause.

He had continued to keep up his relationship with the Princesse de Talmont for several years, despite their quarrels and despite her growing disillusionment with him. ("You don't need friends," she wrote to him near the end of their affair, "you need victims.") He depended on her, and trusted her not to let him down emotionally, and at the same time he took comfort from her influence with the French queen and from the fact that she provided him with an entree to ex-King Stanislas of Poland, who was her neighbor at Luneville, and who might be expected to prove useful to the Jacobite cause. By 1751 the relationship had become troublesome. Louise was affronted when Charles, who was becoming insecure and frightened, accused her of plotting to betray him to his enemies. He, for his part, either was or professed to be suffering the pangs of unrequited love. ("I'm dying!" he wrote in one anxious billet-doux. "I love you too much and you love me too little. . . . I've spent a horrible night!")
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By the early months of 1752, if not before, Charles and Louise had parted, and the separation was proving to be costly. Without Mme. de Talmont's lodgings to use, and without her influence to rely on, Charles found it hard to borrow money, even from Waters, yet his personal expenses were higher than ever. He decided to abandon the residence he had maintained in Avignon since 1749, selling off his horses and coach, dismissing all his French servants, and putting his furnishings into storage. Some of the French servants had already left voluntarily, for in Charles's absence, it seems, his feisty Irish valet Daniel O'Brien had taken to ruling the household with an iron fist, shouting and swearing at the tether servants and abusing them, especially when they accused him of appropriating his master's clothes. O'Brien was an all-around nuisance: he alienated Stafford and Sheridan, could not remain on civil terms with servants in other households and even managed to cause inconvenience to James in Rome. (A local girl who claimed to be pregnant by O'Brien turned up in Rome, along with her mother, intent on appealing to James to help her financially. He managed to avoid the obligation.)

In May Charles was in Ghent, renting a house in the Place de l’Empereur and hinting about how the house had "a room in it for a friend." He was expecting a guest—none other than Clementina Walkinshaw, who after some vicissitudes had managed to make her presence in the Low Countries known to him. Clementina, still unmarried at thirty-one or so, had convinced her relatives that she meant to become a canoness in one of the convents in the Austrian Netherlands which accepted aristocratic young women and provided a luxurious situation for them without requiring much, if anything, in the way of spiritual discipline. The proposed plan was a ruse, for in fact she intended to join Charles. Yet precisely when and how he had contacted her, and what his message may have said, are unknown.
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Following Charles's instructions, Clementina had made her way to Paris, where she stayed with one M. Arnoud and called herself "Mme. Jackson." There she received a rather peremptory letter from the man for whose sake she had renounced home and family.

"You are to give entire credit to the bearer," Charles instructed Clementina, "and follow exactly what he tells you to do from me. That you need not fear a mistake I have given him for a token your own name written by yourself. I hereby absolutely forbid you from this instant forward never to put pen to paper for anything whatsoever." He enjoined secrecy on her, warning her that no one "must know the least thing about you or what passes betwixt us, under pain of incurring forever my displeasure," He would pose as her brother, Charles said, and she must treat him, when they met, with nothing more than sisterly friendliness.
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Shortly after this Clementina was escorted to Ghent, where she found that Charles had rented a house for her. The pose of sisterly fondness could now be dropped. She was willing, probably eager, to become his mistress. As for Charles, the arrangement suited him. Clementina was neither particularly young nor particularly attractive, but she was dependable and loyal, and somewhat familiar. She would make a home for him of sorts. Everyone around him was certain to disapprove of the liaison, but that was unavoidable. He had no wish to marry at present, having given up on finding a suitably highborn Protestant bride. Clementina was willing to live with him without demanding marriage, and would not throw tantrums the way Louise de Rohan-Guéméné had or leave him alone and unhappy as Mme. de Talmont had. For the time being at least, she would do very well.

Chapter 22

Charles Stuart and Clementina Walkinshaw lived together for eight years, from the summer of 1752 to July of 1760. For much of that time they were spectacularly and often publicly at odds.

To outsiders, Charles and Clementina looked like a couple at war, locked in snarling, bickering, wounding combat in which he inevitably had the upper hand. It was an age when men beat their wives by right and even from necessity, women being perceived as inherently inferior and inclined to degeneracy unless severely disciplined. But even to his hardened contemporaries Charles appeared brutal in his treatment of his mistress, and the spectacle of the tall, good-looking gentleman, somewhat the worse for drink, reviling and striking the fair, sturdily built woman who passed for his wife was an all too common sight in the taverns of
Liège, Ghent, Basel and Paris over the years of their liaison.

Not that Clementina was a passive martyr; she too shouted, goaded, and provoked. In her own way she was as bold a spirit as Charles was, leaving behind family and security to join him in his exile, knowing that her relatives would never take her back or forgive her if the affair went sour, knowing too that Charles would never marry her—for if and when he married, his wife would have to be a woman of princely blood. Or perhaps this is to underestimate Clementina. Perhaps she thought that he would decide to marry her in time, especially if she gave him a son whom he would want to legitimize. Or possibly she believed that he would eventually succeed in his venture, become king of England and Scotland, and shower wealth on her as kings commonly did in rewarding their mistresses.

Clearly Clementina had many facets to her nature: daring, loyalty, and courage, along with a capacity for abject compliance. And endurance. "There is not one woman in the world," she wrote Charles after he had ''pushed her to the greatest extremity" and she left him, "that would have suffered so long as what I have done."
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Early in October of 1753, Charles and Clementina's daughter was born. She was named Charlotte after her father, and baptized in a Catholic parish church. (The baptism was not recorded at the time, for the sake of secrecy.) Strictly speaking, this was appropriate, for as an illegitimate child she would naturally be baptized in her mother's faith, and Clementina was a Catholic. But the event caused friction. Only two weeks after Charlotte's baptism, Charles was writing to Goring announcing that he had decided to dismiss all of his "papist servants" and Clementina with them. "My mistress has behaved so unworthily," he wrote, "she has put me out of all patience, and as she is a papist too, I discard her also."
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Charles may have been ambivalent at first about becoming a father. When asked whether he intended ever to marry, he once responded, "No. Would you have me bring children into the world to be as miserable as I am?" In the year after Charlotte was born he remarked that, the Stuart family having had sufferings enough, he would not marry "as long as in misfortune, which would only conduce to increase misery, and subject any of the family who had the spirit of their father to be tied neck and heels."
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Apart from not wanting to create a life marked for sorrow, Charles may have had reservations about his own skills as a parent. Here his feelings about his own hovering, cautiously overprotective father must have affected him.
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James continued to write him tender, solicitous, sometimes admonitory letters (with the admonitions always surrounded by expressions of sincere love). Charles wrote back less and less often, his letters being what one writer has called "jewels of vacuous concision." The gap between father and son, already wide when Charles was in his twenties, had widened considerably, and it must have caused Charles pain. He was superficially dutiful, and that was all. Looking ahead, he may have dreaded finding himself one day in James's situation, with a child who was unalterably distant from him, and from whom he was alienated.

Whatever his initial feelings about his daughter may have been, he soon became a fond parent. The infant Charlotte was plump and sturdy, with white-blond hair and large eyes in a round, broad little face. To judge from the fiercely protective statements she made about her daughter later, Clementina too adored Charlotte, doting on her all the more in that she proved to be an only child.
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