Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (20 page)

In that case, reasoned James, perhaps Charles Edward’s failure to go from Gravelines to Soissons immediately had been a tactical error: if he had gone there, might it not have been impossible for Louis XV to insist on the incognito?
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Charles Edward soon put his father right on that score. From the point of view of personal ease, Soissons would have been an ideal base, especially with its extensive hunting acreage, but it was an obvious snare. Too far from the centre of political gravity, Charles Edward would have been a permanent backnumber. The prince made the telling point that acceptance of Soissons made sense only if he had already concluded that the French were insincere; at the time he still believed their assurances.
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The more James worried away at French treatment of his son, the plainer became the dishonesty and duplicity of Louis XV. Balhaldy had warned him of this as early as June,
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but it was not until December that, on receipt of correspondence from Tencin, James finally saw the full dimensions of the problem. Tencin put it to him that at bottom Louis XV disclaimed all responsibility for the prince, on the ground that he had never invited him to France.
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For once James concurred with his son. Both men hit the nail on the head by agreeing independently to a cogent answer: if that was the case, they urged, what was Saxe doing at Dunkirk corresponding with someone who, according to his king, was on French soil illegally?
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It took O’Brien, long out of favour with James but now making a comeback as the star of Balhaldy and Sempill faded, to point up the real French motivation. In brief, they feared the impact on their German allies of too strong an association with the Stuarts. Although this fear should have lessened once Austria and Prussia were at each other’s throats, the French, rightly, did not trust Frederick of Prussia and were determined not to sacrifice their German policy just for the Jacobites.
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The other factor in French minds was the Dutch. France did not want to play the Jacobite card until the States General of Holland had committed themselves to an open declaration of war.
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Whatever the reasons for his treatment by the French, the prince remained in limbo throughout 1744. The uncertainty in his life even extended to where he lived. At the beginning of June he rented a house in Montmartre.
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He chafed at his sedentary life, so different from what he was used to.
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By September his crabbed existence was already intolerable to him. Moreover, the rental on the house was eating up his substance at an alarming rate. He began to prowl through Marly and Versailles in search of something cheaper and more convenient.
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The upshot was vividly and bitterly related by the prince to his father on 14 September: ‘M. Orry not having got a home for me, where I would not be obliged to be wet for to get to it, and where I would be more at my ease, I was forced to take a few rooms in town, which I hired and which is but a hole.’
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Yet already the incompatibility between his status as incognito and his frequent public appearances in and around Paris was irking Louis XV.
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The French king decided it was time to keep Charles at a physical as well as diplomatic distance. While the question of his future abode was debated, the prince went into the country to stay at the estate of the archbishop of Cambrai, which that cleric made over to him for an indefinite period.
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The prince, it seemed, had waived his objection to accepting hospitality from Catholic clergy. Then, suddenly, his cousin the bishop of Soissons added another twist to the clerical skein.

(October–December 1744)

AT METZ IN
September Louis XV fell dangerously ill and was thought on the point of death.
¹
With his morbid fear of Hell, the king confessed all his sins to the bishop and promised to make a firm purpose of amendment if God spared him. The new-found surge of religiosity did not long survive the monarch’s recovery, but meanwhile the bishop of Soissons had extracted an important concession from him. Soissons had been out of favour in Stuart circles and was anxious to reinstate himself.
²
He put it to the king that his treatment of Charles Edward had been unjust. Louis promised to regularise the footing on which his allegedly uninvited guest was in his kingdom.
³

As his strength recovered, Louis XV pondered this pledge. He was not prepared to lift the incognito because of fear of alienating Prussia. But if Charles Edward would take up his abode well away from Paris, Louis would look into the tangled question of his finances, and also examine the plethora of Jacobite memoranda more closely. For the time being the prince was content to stay in the archbishop of Cambrai’s house because of the good hunting.
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When his financial situation eased, he still hoped to base himself somewhere within a day’s hard ride of Paris.
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Meanwhile, in order to fall in with the spirit of the promised ‘new deal’ with the court, he would reluctantly retire to Fitzjames, the bishop of Soissons’s estate on the Calais road – the exact locale for which Louis XV had destined him in March. After nine months, the prince was in more senses than one back at his starting point.

To understand the prince’s financial situation, it is necessary to go back a few years to the era of waiting and preparation in Rome. In principle, the death of the prince’s grandfather Prince James Sobieski in February 1737 had left the House of Stuart wealthy. His father,
John
Sobieski, the Polish hero, had made a fortune from his loans to the Polish crown. But like many rich men, he bequeathed more problems than benefits to his heirs. The kingdom of Poland had made over its crown jewels to the Sobieski family in return for a huge loan. Another massive sum of 400,000 Rhenish florins was raised by Poland from the Sobieskis on the security of the duchy of Ohlau. The Sobieski inheritance was thus a twofold one: the jewels themselves and the mortgage on the duchy of Ohlau.
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The jewels had been deposited at the Monte di Pietà in Rome, a deposit account bank, and redeemed by the Stuarts out of the sale of their undisputed property rights in Poland.
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But the mortgage, the so-called ‘Fund of Ohlau’ proved a liability. In 1739 the two legatees (Charles Edward and Henry) were persuaded to deed the Fund of Ohlau to the Vatican. Because of the political situation, the Stuarts could not actually take possession of the real estate in Austria that was rightly theirs. It was thought best to process the sale through an intermediary, in this case the papal nuncio. The nuncio was just about to take possession of the real estate when the Prussian invasion of Silesia threw everything in Ohlau into confusion.
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The confusion did not end there. In 1741 the duchess of Bouillon, Clementina Sobieska’s sister, disputed the Ohlau part of her father’s will by making a claim on the fund. Although the Chancery of Bohemia decided in favour of the nuncio and against the Bouillons, complications over arrears in interest meant that there was no realistic hope of a settlement before a general European peace.
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That part of the Sobieski legacy, then, remained a dead letter. There remained the Sobieski jewels, both the Polish crown jewels at the Monte di Pietà, and Clementina’s personal pieces. According to the terms of the will, these had to be divided equally between the two Stuart princes. This too was complicated, since part of the jewellery had already been sold, some was saleable, but most, including the Polish crown jewels, could not be touched for another fifty years, giving Poland the chance to redeem them or forfeit title for ever.
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The jewels were given to Charles Edward to be held by him until Poland redeemed them (in which case the redemption money would be divided between him and Henry) or the redemption period elapsed.

The net result of all this was that when the division of the remaining assets between the two Stuart princes had been agreed, they possessed a paper fortune but little in liquid assets. Hence the disparity between the claims made by Mann and other Stuart-watchers that the denizens of the Palazzo Muti were as rich as Croesus and their own
frequent
protestations of penury. The fact was that in day-to-day terms James relied on his pensions from the Vatican, France and Spain, the last two of which were frequently in arrears.
¹¹
When Charles Edward was sent into France in early 1744, it was in the confident expectation that he would soon be entering London in triumph. Only his campaign expenses needed to be thought of. Neither James nor his son had considered what would happen if Charles had to spend a long period of time in France.

As soon as the prince came to Paris, he alerted his father that he was penniless and would soon run into debt, whatever economies he exercised.
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From the time of his arrival until October he was paid just 35,000 livres by the French court.
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This sum, thought disgracefully low by his Jacobite associates, was the consequence of Orry’s notorious frugality.
¹⁴

This parsimony brought the inevitable results. While Orry doled out money in niggardly amounts of 3,000 livres a time, the prince’s debts mounted.
¹⁵
The gap between income and outgoings steadily widened. In July 1744, the pension made by France to Charles Edward amounted, in English money, to the decidedly unprincely sum of £1,800 a year.
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The prince hinted to his father that he seemed unaware of the cost of sending couriers and envoys to Rome, Avignon and England. Since he knew James would suspect him of prodigality, he got other Jacobites like Sheridan to vouch for the truth of his statements.
¹⁷
Eventually, worn down by his son’s constant lamentations, James asked for a detailed breakdown of Charles’s debts, so that he could make informed representations to the French court.
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The prince was often at fault for inattention to detail; but not this time. He had Sheridan produce the most meticulous accounting for his father. These confirmed the picture of indebtedness only too well.

The financial troubles of the prince were a real headache for the French court. After a good deal of difficulty persuading his reluctant colleagues, notably Orry, Tencin obtained a pension of 5,000 livres a month for Charles Edward. Yet by now the backlog of royal Stuart debts amounted to some 60,000 livres. Tencin was furious. How could he ask the king to clear such a mountain at a time when stringent war economies were being enforced? Moreover, Louis XV still maintained that he had no moral obligation to the prince, since he had not invited him to France. When these points were put to Charles, he shrugged them off: 60,000 livres was a great sum for an individual, true, but a drop in the ocean to the king of France.
¹⁹

The other main factor in the prince’s chaotic world in 1744 was
his
Jacobite followers. To say that factionalism was endemic would be mild.
²⁰
The inability of the Jacobites in France to make common cause approached the pathological. Andrew Lang once spoke of the partisans of the House of Stuart at this time as being divided into a king’s party (Sempill, Balhaldy, O’Brien) and a prince’s party (Sheridan, Marischal, Kelly). Such a neat bifurcation might have presented a manageable situation. In reality there were at least four faction’s, within which each individual tried to down the others and so emerge as, in effect, the prince’s chief minister. Some account of these factions and individuals and their dynamic interaction with the prince must now be given. Such a recital might appear tedious and esoteric at first sight, but much that is obscure about Charles Edward’s later history becomes clear once we penetrate this labyrinth of personalities.

The four groupings we have mentioned were: first, the Balhaldy/Sempill clique; second, the coterie around Daniel O’Brien and his formidable wife; third, the motley assemblage of disparate individuals Lang identified as the ‘prince’s party’; fourth, a maverick group of Jacobites acting under the direction of the inveterate plotter Eleanor Oglethorpe, marquise de Mézières.

The Mézières group is the easiest to deal with. It was Pluto to the prince’s sun, on the extreme outer edge of influence. Apart from La Mézières herself, its principal members were Thomas Carte and Father Cruise. Conducting independent negotiations in England and at Versailles, this coterie was frequently rebuked both by James and his son for unwarranted meddling.
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Its principal significance was that it was the only Jacobite cadre that had contacts with Noailles.
²²
It also had the best channel of communications to Maurepas.
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O’Brien’s circle had received a crippling blow when James opened up a parallel diplomatic channel to the French court via Sempill and Balhaldy in the first years of the decade. James must take a clear share of the blame for Jacobite factionalism. In addition, O’Brien himself was personally repugnant to Charles Edward, as was Tencin, O’Brien’s principal contact at the French court.
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Yet the prince was forced to bend to the prevailing wind in October, when Tencin began to control his destinies at Versailles. Swallowing his dislike, Charles invited the O’Briens to sup with him and Bailli de Tencin.
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But O’Brien, Tencin and their circle were always at best tolerated by the prince; in their circumspection and regard for protocol, they seemed to him all too much like chips off the paternal block.

That left the prince’s immediate circle of advisers. Only the toughest survived the internecine struggle to be at his right hand.
The
emissary sent by James to be a moderating influence, Sir John Graeme, made no impact at all and retired in disarray to Avignon after five months.
²⁶
Avignon was also the destination of Earl Marischal, who had ruined whatever chances he might have had to influence the prince by his behaviour at Dunkirk. He had since compounded this error by persuading the French court that if Charles Edward campaigned in Flanders, this would ‘disgust’ the English.
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Some of the prince’s most bitter outpourings at this period were directed at Marischal, whom he rated second only to Tencin and O’Brien as an enemy.
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For once James was inclined to agree with him: truly Marischal’s record had been a discreditable one.
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James had appointed Marischal captain-general of all Jacobite forces in Scotland at the time of Saxe’s invasion project. For his behaviour towards the prince, Marischal came within an ace of having his commission rescinded.
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