Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (9 page)

From the time he got up in the morning, at five forty-five, until he went to bed at night—still thinking guiltily about all that he had left undone that day—Henry was governed by his unforgiving regimen. He allotted himself fifteen minutes to pray in bed, then time to dress, then an hour to pray in his bedroom, his prayers said so loudly that his attendants outside could hear him through the closed door. He allowed only seven to ten minutes for breakfast, after which his confessor. Father Ildefonso, arrived and heard his confession for another hour. Twice a week he had two confessors visit him, one after the other. Dancing and fencing lessons then intervened, but Henry hurried through these, watch in hand, so that he could get to mass in the chapel of the Palazzo Muti. Often one mass did not suffice; on Sundays and holy days he liked to hear three or four masses if he could, and when the last of these ended he remained in the chapel, on his knees in prayer.

He kept his eyes on his watch all through dinner, in order to have another forty-five minutes in which to pray before going out for the afternoon. His afternoon sojourns gave him no respite from his devotions, however, for he usually went to a church to pray for another half-hour there. By this time it was four o'clock, and now Henry spent another hour and a half in the chapel of the Palazzo Muti, reciting his rosary with such passion that he alarmed his governor.

"It deserves serious attention," wrote Murray, who recorded Henry's excessive behavior, "that he undergoes much greater application of mind than his delicate health can bear."
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In reciting his prayers he "puts his mind in agitation, pronounces his words aloud, and crowds them with great precipitation one upon another." Murray often saw him in the middle of the day "with a blackness about his eyes, his head quite fatigued and his hands hot and the same thing when he comes from his prayers at night." Praying had become his only pleasure; in fact, the prospect of spending an evening at a social gathering instead of in chapel actually gave him pain. His whole "temper and inclination" had changed, Murray thought, and he was so fervently attached to his unhealthy way of life that were he to be deprived of his constant devotions "it would have a very violent effect on him." Furthermore, his devotions were interfering with his studies, and with his acquiring the habits of a gentleman.

The contrast between the brothers, the one outgoing and athletic, the other preoccupied with his rosary and his watch, must have been startling.
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Yet they were on perfectly congenial terms, and were together often enough to elicit joint comment from visitors to the palazzo. "The elder is more worthwhile and has a sweeter disposition," Des Brosses commented. "He has a large heart and is full of courage." Both brothers, he added, were "of mediocre intelligence and less developed than princes of their age ought to be." And despite Henry's sudden aversion for society, both he and Charles continued to be the focus of attention for many Englishmen spending time in Rome. The English could not, without compromising their professed loyalty to George II, have any contact with James. But they could greet and admire his sons, and even show them a degree of "tenderness and compassion" which the English agents believed was damaging to the Hanoverians.

In the winter of 1740 a wellborn young Scotsman arrived in Rome, eager to see the man he had always called "King Jamie." He was Lord Elcho, the twenty-year-old son of the Earl of Wemyss, a Jacobite partisan living in Paris. The earl was a strong enough Jacobite to have refused to take the oath of allegiance to King George, but he had not taken part in any of the risings, and was living in a kind of cosmopolitan limbo in France. Lord Elcho had been sent to Winchester for his education and there he had allied himself with the Stuart faction among the boys, taking "King Jamie's" part against the favorers of the ''wee German lairdie" George II. It was natural enough that in leaving Winchester he should begin his Grand Tour by traveling to Rome to see the man he considered to be his rightful sovereign.

Once installed in the papal city he had no difficulty in arranging an audience with James, and the latter received him with his customary graciousness. James told young Elcho that he was aware of his father's loyalty, and that he hoped to show his appreciation in a concrete way once he became King of England. He then summoned Charles and Henry to meet the visitor.

Elcho took to Henry at once, recalling afterward that he was "very affable, well-informed and sensible," and that they conversed agreeably. With Charles he was put slightly on the defensive when James, observing that he and Charles were about the same age and nearly the same height, had them stand back to back to see which one was taller. Charles won the contest, but was too preoccupied with his favorite pastimes of shooting thrushes and blackbirds and playing golf in the Borghese gardens to care very much—or to pay very much attention to his guests. Despite this lukewarm beginning, however, Elcho attached himself to the Stuart court and was in constant attendance there.

Another young Scotsman, John Murray of Broughton, arrived at the Palazzo Muti at about the same time and was received more warmly than Elcho. Murray of Broughton, whose father was a minor laird, was handsome and personable and had been educated at Edinburgh and Leyden. He and Charles took to one another at once, and James too was so impressed with him that he appointed him secretary of state for Scotland. Murray of Broughton seems to have had the sort of personality that energized people and galvanized them to action, and his reactions were strong and his admiration easily engaged. He admired Charles enormously.

"Charles Edward, the eldest son of the Chevalier de St. George," he wrote in a letter to his sister, "is tall, above the common stature, his limbs are cast in the most exact mold, his complexion has in it somewhat of an uncommon delicacy; all his features are perfectly regular and well turned, and his eyes the finest I ever saw. But that which shines most in him," the young Scotsman went on, "and renders him without exception the most surprisingly handsome person of the age, is the dignity that accompanies his every gesture; there is indeed such an unspeakable majesty diffused through his whole mien as it is impossible to have any idea without seeing, and strikes those that do with such an awe as will not suffer them to look upon him for any time, unless he emboldens them to it by his excessive amiability."
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The panegyric did not end there, but went on to praise Charles's well-balanced nature, which made him "equally qualified to preside in peace and war," his courage, and—contrary to the opinions of most others—his "extensive learning." According to Murray of Broughton, Charles had a mastery of Latin and Greek, was "not altogether ignorant of Hebrew," and was well versed in history and philosophy. "What he is ordained for we must leave to the Almighty," he concluded, "who alone disposes all; but he appears to be born and endowed for something extraordinary."

Elcho and Murray of Broughton were, in their youth and idealistic adherence to the Stuart cause, typical of a new generation of Jacobites. They were too young to have experienced the failures of the past; to them James was not an unsuccessful would-be conqueror but a patriarch, a venerable and benign figure whose rights were to be upheld by a younger champion in the person of his peerless son. They had little in common with the quarrelsome, aging and penurious exiles who crowded James's court clamoring for money and attention. Nor had they known the frustrations these querulous and embittered men had endured, their hopes alternately raised and lowered by the on-again, off-again attitudes of the French and Spanish toward the Jacobite cause.

Besides, the situation was changing. In 1739 Britain went to war with Spain, once again raising hopes that the Spanish might finance a Jacobite invasion. The conflict arose over Britain's illicit trade with Spanish colonies—a trade that went on despite explicit prohibitions.

Throughout the 1720s and 1730s British ships had continued to run the risk of capture by Spanish coast guards in order to pursue the enormous profits to be made in the colonial trade, but a great many of them were lost, leading to increased tension between the two countries. Sometimes atrocities were committed. One English captain, Robert Jenkins, claimed that a Spanish sailor had cut off his ear—and he caused a sensation when he brought the severed ear, pickled in a bottle, into the chamber of the House of Commons. Negotiations over compensation to the injured British broke down, and war ensued.

The outbreak of war was symptomatic of broader changes in Britain, where the leadership of the peace-loving Whig prime minister Robert Walpole was being eroded. The Englishmen who were coming to maturity in the 1730s and early 1740s had never lived through a major war. They associated warfare with heroism and glory, not with economic dislocation, political strains and social unrest, and they welcomed the conflict with Spain. Walpole's government was discredited by an incident in Edinburgh, where a crowd of some four thousand people broke into the prison and executed a captain of the city guard who had ordered his troops to fire on a crowd of demonstrators. The government could not keep order, it seemed, nor could Walpole keep his majority in the Commons—which depended in part on its ability to control the votes of the Scottish Members. Early in 1742 Walpole resigned.

By this time most of Europe was embroiled in warfare. In 1740 Emperor Charles VI had died, leaving to his daughter Maria Theresa sovereignty over his immense and lucrative domain. Almost at once Prussia, Bavaria, Poland and France moved against Austria, and Britain, where sympathy for the hapless Maria Theresa was strong, prepared to go to Austria's aid. A joint British and Hanoverian force was put into the field, under the command of George II, and a British fleet was sent into the Mediterranean to prevent the King of Naples from supporting the Spanish.

The turmoil delighted the Jacobites, who believed that it could only work to their advantage. James's agents were everywhere, holding clandestine meetings with supporters in England and Scotland, talking with ministers in Madrid and Versailles, intriguing to obtain money and troops, arms and transport.

Though Britain and France were not yet at war, it could not be long before France's close alliance with Spain drew her into the conflict—or so the Jacobites hoped. They approached Cardinal Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, proposing that seven or eight thousand French troops be landed in Scotland, where, they assured him, twenty thousand Highland clansmen would be waiting to join in an invasion. The cardinal, while recognizing that even a small Jacobite force might cause enough havoc in Britain to tip the balance against the English on the continent, was reluctant to lend any support to James and his men beyond money and arms. To do more would be to invite open warfare with Britain, which he was not yet prepared to undertake. It was not the first rebuff Fleury had given the Jacobites, nor would it be the last. But in the current climate of excitement and uncertainty, even the skeptical cardinal might be persuaded to change his mind.

Hopes were beginning to run high, especially in Scotland, where if the raising of twenty thousand troops was not yet practicable, a number of influential men thought it soon might be. A group of these men had come together to form a "Concert" or "Association," pledged to further the Stuart cause. Among them were the young and daring Duke of Perth, his uncle John Drummond, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, chief of Clan Fraser, and Donald Cameron the younger of Lochiel, chief of Clan Cameron and a minor Highland magnate greatly admired for his loyalty and courage. Not all the members of the Association were equally sanguine about the potential for a successful rising—Lochiel in particular was dubious, and with good reason—but the very existence of the group was encouraging. The secretary of the Association, William Macgregor of Balhaldie, spent many months traveling from Scotland to Rome to Madrid to Versailles to London and back to Scotland, meeting with James, Fleury, and most of the prominent Jacobites in London and abroad.

Balhaldie was a colorful, aggressive figure, with something of Shakespeare's "poor, decayed, ingenious, foolish, rascally knave" about him if the accusations of his fellow conspirators are to be believed. That James trusted him indicates that he was more rogue than criminal, but one of his colleagues complained that he was "always in a passion, a mere bully, the most forbidding air imaginable, and master of as much bad French as to procure himself a whore and a dinner." He was clearly unreliable when it came to money. It was rumored that he had had to leave Scotland because of a dispute over a note for fifty pounds, and that he had embezzled Jacobite funds set aside for buying arms.

Clearly Balhaldie was not the sort of man to understand or manipulate government ministers, who saw through his boastfulness and became more skeptical than ever about the actual numbers of Jacobites in Scotland committed to fight under the Stuart banner.

This skepticism had always been the Jacobites' problem. Ministers as capable as Fleury were too hardheaded not to realize how precarious any Pretender's support must be. James's supposed adherents might promise to stand with him in the event of an invasion, but loyal words were one thing, bellicose action quite another. Rebel armies were slow to coalesce and quick to melt away when threatened by firm and well equipped authority. And even under the best circumstances, with a sizable Jacobite force at his disposal, James could do relatively little to advance French interests, apart from providing a distraction to draw Hanoverian troops away from other battlefronts.

No one knew this better than James himself, who for decades had had to swallow his humiliation and repeatedly entreat foreign courts for assistance, knowing that in all likelihood they would eventually disappoint him. "We have been now more than fifty years out of our Country," he wrote in a melancholy vein, "we have been bred and lived in the School of Adversity . . . long experience teaches us how little we can depend on the friendship of foreign Powers." Still, as long as there was a chance that one of the powers might, for reasons of its own, actually provide troops and money, the entreaties had to be made. And so the Jacobite representatives continued to make the rounds of Europe, hoping that the widening warfare would throw opportunity their way.