Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (19 page)

It seemed that to Marischal all paths to Britain were ineluctably barred, that the Hanoverian regime was as unassailable as the angel with the flaming sword who barred the return to Eden. Faced with this monumental defeatism, Charles Edward was fully justified in concluding bitterly: ‘Nothing can ever gain my heart to a man who finds faults and difficulties in everything, but never removed any.’
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The bruising treatment the prince had received both from Saxe and Marischal made a profound impact on his fragile personal equilibrium. Charles Edward could only draw sustenance from success and forward momentum. Failure, particularly a débâcle when on the very brink of success, triggered the self-destructive side of the prince. A wise man would now have bowed to the inevitable. But Charles plugged away at his theme that sickness and weather could not have affected the French alone, that he therefore expected to see Louis XV take up the gauntlet again.
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Turning his back on Marischal as a hopeless pessimist, the prince addressed himself to Sempill. Urging him not to relax his efforts at Versailles, he proposed, if necessary, a switch of efforts from an English to a Scottish landing. For this he would need, in addition to the Irish brigade, two French battalions and a regiment of dismounted dragoons.
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Predictably, the Earl Marischal poured cold water on this idea too when he heard of it. The news that he was returning to Paris was more than welcome to the prince.
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Fully convinced that the Scottish expedition would very soon take shape and hoping too to revive the cross-Channel project, the prince dispatched Buchanan (his old aide from Rome) to England to spy out the situation. Inevitably, Buchanan reported that the English Jacobites would not move a muscle until a French army had landed.
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But he did recount a serious level of disaffection among the English
Tories
. The prince was about to send this corroborating evidence to Versailles when he received the clearest indication yet of Louis XV’s true intentions. Charles Edward was ordered to leave the coast and proceed, still incognito, to residence at the house of the bishop of Soissons.
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Only then did the floodgates of paranoia fully open. Charles Edward was left permanently scarred by French treatment of him. As he later remarked bitterly: ‘A blind man could see that France was only making sport of him.’
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The French, it now seemed, had never been serious. Saxe had been playing with him. Marischal had humoured him, secretly delighted at his failure. There had been collusion to prevent an excellent enterprise from being successful. None of the arguments put to him had been adduced in good faith. So be it, France would learn they had no pliant and deferential James to deal with this time. Pointedly Charles Edward ignored the summons to leave the coast. Instead, he wrote a long missive for Sempill to send to Louis XV, setting out in detail the reasons why the English enterprise should be revitalised. The implication was that he had no intention of leaving Gravelines.
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At this low ebb in his fortunes, the prince had to put up with his father’s mournful and depressed letters, full of regret about the failure of the expedition, and once again chiding him for being a poor correspondent.
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The gloomy atmosphere in the Palazzo Muti at this time was attested to by the Pope. Benedict XIV admitted that when the bad news came in, he avoided James for a week, unable to face him.
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Putting on a bold front, the prince excused his failure to write on the grounds of a lack of a cipher.
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A week later he touched on more realistic issues, initiating the series of complaints about money that were to punctuate 1744: ‘You would laugh heartily if you saw me going about with a single servant, buying fish and other things and squabbling for a penny more or less.’
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Meanwhile the French had somewhat played into the prince’s hands. A memorandum from the comte d’Argenson to Saxe, demanding Charles Edward’s removal from Gravelines to the bishop of Soissons’s house, two leagues from the town of Soissons, arrived after Saxe had left the coast.
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Even better, among the meticulously detailed instructions concerning the prince (including a specification that he should approach his new abode via Compiègne rather than Soissons) was a stipulation that Charles should have Marischal at his side as adviser. But Marischal, after a few days in his Boulogne house, had also departed for Paris.

So far was the prince from showing any signs of leaving the coast that he was talking of going to Scotland by canoe. He had also prepared a formal protest against the abandonment of the expedition for Sempill to present to Amelot.
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From allegedly pro-Jacobite ministers like Tencin the prince was demanding a full explanation for French actions. Tencin was now under fire from two directions: from Louis XV for having allegedly invited the Stuart prince; and from the latter for being lukewarm in his interests. He could do no more than limply protest his continuing devotion to the House of Stuart.
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The French ministers were already under great pressure to do something about the prince’s defiance. It was in vain that they protested, as they had earlier to the English, that the prince was a creature of whim, who was not under their control and who acted entirely on his own initiative.
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His appearance in France was good enough proof for most people that he came there at the express invitation of Versailles. Although the earlier pressure from the British for his expulsion
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had been shrugged off with the open French declaration of war on England (as soon as the invasion project foundered), there was German opinion to appease. For the time being France had to keep the prince under wraps, in a strict incognito.

It did not take long for the collective patience of the council of state to run out. The ministers at Versailles had never encountered a phenomenon like Charles Edward before. Maurepas expressed stupefaction that the prince had been written to three times with explicit instructions to proceed to Soissons, but had ignored all three letters.
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This was only the beginning. France was to see much more such behaviour in the next four years.

The Jacobite representative Daniel O’Brien was prevailed on to write to James, stressing the serious consequences if the prince continued to snub the French court.
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But James had already acted. Knowing his son of old and alarmed at his silence, he decided to send Sheridan, Stafford and two valets-de-chambre into France to join him.
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At the same time he advised Charles to bow his head to the dictates of France.
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We know from his later correspondence the contempt the prince felt for his father on receiving this advice. It seemed to him, not for the last time, that his father was always prepared to side with his enemies and those who injured him; always to be polite, deferential and diplomatic, never to take a stand of principle. The conflation of his father with Marischal was too easy to resist: both automatically sided with France, took the easy
realpolitik
view, never contrasted what was with what ought to be. For the moment he was alone; he
had
not yet hardened himself to oppose his will to that of all comers. He had prepared to be stoical and enduring, expecting that James would support him, especially as he was about his father’s business.
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The disappointment at finding this was not so was acute.

Faced with the unanimous verdict of all around him that he should yield to France, the prince did so, but with a bad grace. Using the pretext of the duke of Ormonde’s advice – that he would disgust his English friends if he was seen residing at the house of a Roman Catholic bishop
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– Charles Edward did not go to Soissons. Instead he left Gravelines in disguise, making his way slowly to Paris.

For the first time he experienced the thrill of being a genuine incognito; he was later to acquire a taste for it, to the point where deception and subterfuge became second nature. As he rode south, he took delight in hearing the various rumours about the vanished prince’s whereabouts: ‘Some think him in one place, and some in another, but nobody knows where he is really, and sometimes he is told news of himself to his face, which is very diverting.’
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Yet if the prince was enjoying himself and saving face (sometimes literally), his father fretted anxiously about his ‘invisibility’.
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Believing, wrongly, that Marischal was now his son’s closest adviser, James sent Sir John Graeme to Paris as a counterweight, in hopes of pulling Charles back on to the path of straightforward duty.
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At last, having teased his father and the French long enough, the prince threw off the mask and announced to the world that he was in Paris, disingenuously claiming that he was thereby obeying the king of France’s orders.
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Anyone who queries why Charles Edward should eventually have gone to Scotland alone in 1745 should ponder the prince’s nightmare experience in France in 1744. Proponents of the ‘rash adventurer’ theory should contemplate the chaos into which Charles descended, just weeks after expecting to enter London in triumph. It says much for the prince’s willpower at this period that he did not crack under the strain.

On any analysis, French treatment of the prince during 1744–5 was despicable. They did not have the political excuses of the 1746–8 period. The ministers made promises and broke them; set deadlines and failed to meet them. They could not even agree on a settled location for the prince’s abode.

Louis began by making a half-promise that the prince would be allowed to serve with the French army in Flanders, provided he agreed to remain incognito a little longer, perhaps six weeks in all.
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Finance Minister Orry was made the chief conduit for Jacobite affairs.
In
an interview with Charles, he confirmed that the incognito would cease at the end of July.
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As a consequence the prince passed up an invitation from the Prince de Conti to serve on campaign with him.
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This was an intelligent decision; at this stage Charles had to play for higher stakes.
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By the end of June the ministers had backtracked. Tencin told O’Brien there was almost no chance that the prince would be allowed to make a public campaign.
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Charles expressed his impatience, ascribing French dithering to a mixture of stupidity, tight-fistedness and downright dishonourable behaviour.
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The end of July came, but there was no lifting of the incognito. Sempill was told by Louis’s personal secretary that the king wanted things to continue as before; the king again made a vague promise of future troop commitments against England.
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Charles Edward replied with a request for a definite commitment: either a realistic pledge of another invasion of England or written permission to be allowed to campaign.
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Still Louis stalled, mystifying and obfuscating the issue by shunting the Jacobite emissaries from minister to minister, spokesman to spokesman, hoping to cover his disingenuous tracks under the mantle of the notoriously fragmented decision-making at Versailles. The Jacobites made it easier for him by their excessive factionalism, and by employing at least half a dozen different channels of communication. But the argument that it was divided counsels among the ministers of state that led to the unconscionable dithering and prevarication over Charles Edward’s future will not hold up. Tencin was excluded from all influence and was reported to see the king only at council meetings. Orry was the minister delegated to deal with Jacobite affairs, and he was a faithful mirror of his master’s deceit, procrastination and tergiversation.
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Maurepas and comte d’Argenson were heard from rarely, but faithfully echoed the official line, that it was merely a matter of time before an enterprise against England was revived.
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But it was always difficult to make physical contact with the Ministers of War and Marine, as they spent long periods in 1744 away from the court at the theatre of war.
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For all that, by September 1744 Orry had made his unsympathetic attitude sufficiently plain for Jacobite lobbying to be concentrating consciously on d’Argenson, Maurepas and Tencin.
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On one occasion Orry’s notorious parsimony led him into barefaced lies about the amount of money given by France to the Jacobites. Fortunately, the prince had chapter and verse to hand and forced the Finance Minister to retract. Orry created such animosity in Jacobite circles that Bailli de Tencin, no firebrand, advised the prince to allow him no respite
and
to continue bombarding him with memoranda even when the minister had retired to his country home.
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By October even Louis XV admitted that relations between Orry and the Jacobites were impossible. He put Tencin in charge of Stuart affairs.
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This was exactly the pretext the other ministers needed to wash their hands of the prince. Comte d’Argenson sent back all Jacobite memoirs, with the terse comment that Tencin was now the one and only channel for their affairs.
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Louis’s Machiavellianism was evinced by this manoeuvre, since it was an open secret that Tencin had the least influence on the king of any of the six ministers of state.

French treatment of the prince provoked public incredulity and private anger in Jacobite circles.
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Even the Pope, never one to rush to judgment, agreed.
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In Rome James spent long hours puzzling over it. Could the apparent volte-face have something to do with Amelot’s fall in spring 1744, since the former Foreign Secretary was the prime mover of the enterprise against England?
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It was true that Amelot had been made the sacrificial victim after the English débâcle but, as Sempill reassured James, his disgrace followed a court intrigue and had no connection with the prince’s fortunes.
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