Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (18 page)

On 15 February Lord Sempill received from the French the first instalment of the prince’s expenses, 10,000 livres.
⁸⁷
Although the official stance at Versailles was that the young Stuart was an uninvited guest, they decided to make the best of things. An extraordinary
payment
, for the duration of the expedition only, was authorised. There was now nothing to keep Charles Edward in Paris. He journeyed up to Gravelines, confident that the hour of his destiny had struck.
⁸⁸

(March–September 1744)

CHARLES EDWARD ARRIVED
at Gravelines to find a situation very different from his sanguine imaginings. His own presence on the coast was now widely known.
¹
Bussy’s ciphered revelations had done their work all too well. The secret was out. Once the combined threat from Young Pretender and French invasion was realised, the English authorities sprang into action. George II addressed Parliament on the subject.
²
Wholesale arrests of the leading English Jacobites took place; troop reinforcements were ordered from Ireland and the Netherlands.
³

All this was bad enough from Saxe’s point of view, but the naval aspect was if anything even more discouraging. On 26 February 1744 Saxe wrote to d’Argenson and Amelot that he would already have landed in England if Barrailh had arrived.
⁴
Moreover, there was no sign of the promised English pilots that Henry Read (‘Mr Red’) was supposed to be bringing over to Dunkirk to guide the French flotilla to landfall.

On 27 February Barrailh arrived, having successfully detached from Roquefeuil. But there was still no sign of Read and the pilots. The unbelievable farce in which Read had become entangled only became clear later. It transpired that the English Jacobites had taken fright after George II’s call to arms on 25 February. Fearing to entrust the secret of the expedition to English pilots, they sent Read on to France alone, with instructions to pick up suitable pilots in the Picardy ports.
⁵
Read arrived in France on 3 March. With little knowledge of French, and unable to find either the prince or any English contact, he wandered aimlessly around for a few days and then returned to England, his mission unaccomplished.
⁶

By this time the French were already faltering in their resolve. On
6
March comte d’Argenson told Saxe that he should prepare for a possible abandonment of the expedition, since Charles Edward’s arrival had ruined everything.
⁷
There was real bitterness in d’Argenson’s letter: Louis XV, he said, wished to put it on record as strongly as possible that the secret enterprise was destroyed by the Stuart prince’s contumacious folly in arriving in Paris at that juncture. What d’Argenson did not realise was that Louis XV, under pressure from those like Noailles who stressed the paramountcy of France’s German policy, was already having second thoughts and looking for an excuse to abandon the English project without loss of face.
⁸

The Roquefeuil part of the invasion project was an even bigger disaster. The French admiral left Brest with twenty-two ships of the line, but found no English squadron at Spithead – Admiral Norris had slipped out two days earlier.
⁹
After telling Saxe it would be safe to cross the Channel, Roquefeuil realised his error and followed Norris up the Channel. On 7 March the fwo fleets came in sight of each other, Roquefeuil at Dungeness, Norris at Hythe. Slightly outnumbered, with fifteen men o’ war to Norris’s nineteen (for by now Barrailh’s seven vessels had been detached), Roquefeuil prepared to give battle.

But before the rival fleets could close, at about 3 p.m., the first of the two great storms of March 1744 swept upon the combatants.
¹⁰
All that night and next day the tempest blew, stripping masts and spars, driving ships into each other. Eighteen of Norris’s ships were damaged, five incapacitated; one was accidentally rammed and went down with all hands. Roquefeuil meanwhile slipped anchor and ran before the wind to Brest, sustaining only minor damage.
¹¹

The real devastation came at Dunkirk, where the transports were already loading Saxe’s troops. Loss of life was slight, but eleven transports and many smaller ships were smashed and six months’ supplies and materiel destroyed, along with anchors and tackle.
¹²
It was now obvious that the expedition could not sail. Saxe wrote angrily to the War Minister on 8 March, lashing out in all directions: at Barrailh, the English Jacobites, at Charles Edward himself.
¹³
The last straw was when he discovered that Norris’s battered ships had reformed in line on the Downs, without a word to him (Saxe) about this from Lord Barrymore and his friends.
¹⁴

A second storm on 11 March, causing further damage, put the issue beyond doubt. That very day Saxe wrote to the prince to tell him that the expedition had been abandoned.
¹⁵

By this single communication the French awoke the sleeping tiger. Charles Edward’s communications to Saxe hitherto had been models
of
tact and charm.
¹⁶
That he was in good spirits can be seen from a letter to his father while he was waiting to see if Roquefeuil would successfully decoy Norris: ‘The king would laugh heartily and be mightily diverted to see us often disputing the idiom of the French language and the proper turn of words to express the idea we would have them take.’
¹⁷

The first sign of gathering clouds came on 5 March when the prince learned of Saxe’s latest orders. Incensed by the incompetence of their English Jacobite partners, the French court sent the commander instructions that if he was not met at the Hope, he was not to proceed into the Thames but to return to Dunkirk.
¹⁸
After the storm on 7 March, Saxe threw out a broad hint that the expedition would not proceed, but used the supineness of the English Jacobites as the likely reason.

Immediately and in all good faith the prince sent an emissary to smooth Saxe’s ruffled feathers.
¹⁹
This messenger crossed with Saxe’s letter of the 11th, telling him that all was over. Angrily the prince returned to the fray. How was it, he asked Saxe, that the weather had so devastated the French yet left Norris unscathed? If the destruction was as great as Saxe now claimed, how was it possible for the English fleet to be still on station in the Downs? This must be a ‘Protestant wind’ with a vengeance, capable of inflicting selective damage.
²⁰

At the same time the prince wrote to Earl Marischal, requesting him to seek an interview with Saxe and lay certain facts before him. He was to point out that two of the captains in Norris’s fleet had already been suborned by the Jacobites. Marischal should further urge the immediate use of the Brest fleet as the sole means of retrieving the situation.
²¹
In private remarks to Marischal, the prince expressed his anger clearly, accusing the French of incompetence and cowardice in the face of Norris.
²²

Saxe’s reply to these representations was cold and ironical. After explaining that the second storm on 11 March had destroyed a further three transports and one warship, and had left the fleet without cables or anchors, Saxe commented tartly that he himself could neither command the winds nor be responsible for them. If the prince wanted to fasten the blame on someone, he should consider Dame Fortune as the candidate.
²³
Further stung by Marischal’s lobbying for action from Roquefeuil, Saxe claimed disingenuously (and self-contradictorily) not to know where Roquefeuil was, but that since he was certainly at sea on 11 March, the extent of damage to his ships could be readily imagined.

The prince riposted in similar ironical tone. He welcomed the fact that Saxe professed himself not discouraged and added that what was needed now was more adamantine spirit like the commander’s. To make his contempt palpable, Charles Edward tried to reduce Saxe to the level of a banker; he asked for 500
louis d’or
of the money the commander had been given for the Stuart prince’s use.
²⁴

The cold exchange continued. Saxe claimed that Roquefeuil’s fleet was
hors de combat
, having lost nine ships in the storm. He had no money available, since the only funds at his disposal were letters of credit on a London bank.
²⁵
Then, in true
de haut en bas
style, he announced that the correspondence was closed, since he had been ordered to return to court.

The prince was left in a cold fury, with no focus for his rage. From this day on he was always to distrust and loathe the French. The débâcle, and the insensitive way Versailles and Saxe had dealt with him, tapped a deep vein of pain and rejection in the prince. It would have been better if someone in authority in France could have admitted candidly that there had been misunderstandings and problems on both sides, had frankly conceded that, whereas the French were annoyed with Charles Edward for breaching their secrecy and wrecking the invasion, they were scarcely blameless themselves. Such statesmanship called for the skills of a Benedict XIV; it was completely beyond the instinctively duplicitous Louis XV, quite apart from the consideration that he would have had to reveal his own chicanery over the Balhaldy mission.

The full force of the prince’s anger comes across in his letters to his father. Inveighing against the incompetence of the octogenarian Roquefeuil, he asked, justifiiably, how it was possible for Norris to emerge from Spithead on 26 February and be on the Downs two days later if Roquefeuil’s decoying tactic was meant to be the hinge on which the whole enterprise turned?
²⁶
The prince added bitterly that but for the storm he would now be a prisoner in Norris’s hands.

It was at this moment in his life above all that Charles Edward needed a true father, someone like his erstwhile protector the duke of Berwick, someone who could sympathise with his justifiable complaints while helping him to see the complex political situation steadily and in the round. What the prince got was the worst possible counsellor for him: the Earl Marischal. Aged fifty at the time of the invasion attempt, a veteran of the 1715 and 1719 risings, Marischal should have been the ideal guide and mentor for the prince. In reality the prince’s worst enemies could not have provided a more ill-matched confidant. Proud, aloof and imperious, Marischal was like
Bolingbroke
in that he wanted a Stuart restoration solely on his own terms. All Jacobite plots had to be under his direction, and he had in effect to be Jacobite Prime Minister, or he would react with sullen peevishness. He would serve in great affairs but never in small ones. These qualities had already led him into bitter clashes with James himself and were, ironically, precisely the reason James had not appointed him as his Secretary of State.

There were, moreover, more profound reasons for the irremediable personality clash between Marischal and Charles Edward that first became obvious in March 1744. Marischal managed to combine the patronising aspects of James that most infuriated the prince with personality traits similar to Charles Edward’s; this especially made accommodation between them impossible, since they were in a sense in competition for the same space. Marischal disliked Charles on sight when he saw him in Rome in 1732. This kind of ‘hate at first sight’ is as difficult to explain as its existence is undeniable. The clash between the two men was now and later to yield bitter fruit.

What Charles Edward needed during the lonely days at Gravelines were qualities of empathy and understanding from a trusted counsellor, someone who would immediately appreciate the force of his criticism of the French. What Marischal provided was endless quibbling with the prince’s opinions, infinitely elastic justifications of the French and, worst of all, gloomy and pessimistic jeremiads to counterpoint Charles’s exuberance.
²⁷
Where the prince could see only the opportunities Saxe and Roquefeuil were wasting, Marischal saw only the many barriers and obstacles to a successful French invasion.
²⁸

Besides finding copious excuses for Saxe and Roquefeuil, Marischal was amazingly quick to find reasons why the enterprise could not now succeed. He mentioned the suspension of Habeas Corpus in England, the withdrawal of troops from Ireland and Holland, and the unfavourable publicity given to the recent sneak French naval attack at Toulon, as reasons to hope for little from English Jacobitism. It was no wonder that the prince remarked acidly that Marischal made heaps of difficulties ‘but is not of a mind perhaps to find remedies for them’.
²⁹

Even when the prince steeled himself to accept that the English expedition had been abandoned, and looked around for alternatives or palliatives, he found Marischal more than useless. What about sending the Irish brigade to Scotland, he suggested? Would Marischal undertake a mission to Scotland to keep the flames of Jacobitism alive and not lose the impetus engendered by the recent invasion
fever
? No, Marischal replied, he would not. He doubted French sincerity. Whoever told the prince that Louis XV was willing to press on despite the reverse to the Saxe expedition was telling him a pack of lies.
³⁰

Very well, the prince concluded, he would go to Scotland alone. The clans had assured him they would be willing to receive him on whatever basis. This would be singularly unwise, counselled Marischal. Scotland alone could not unlock the door to a Stuart restoration. And if the English Jacobites were chary about joining in a rising with the support of sixteen battalions of French troops, could anything seriously be expected of them if the prince went alone?
³¹
To round off his achievements, Marischal made a mess of liaison with the prince’s second choice of emissary for Scotland, Nicholas Wogan.
³²