Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (57 page)

In October 1746, at any rate, Charles Edward’s appeal was well nigh universal. Even Frederick the Great, who had earlier offered troops to George II to suppress the rising, momentarily fell under the spell. At Dresden in May 1746 he delivered a public encomium on the Stuart prince before a crowded dinner table.
⁴
He followed this up with an effusive letter of adulation to the prince, asking for his portrait.
⁵
In private correspondence he described Charles as the ‘Trenck’ of Scotland.
⁶
Even Marshal Saxe, no particular friend to the prince after their encounter in 1744, called him the ‘hero of the century’.
⁷

That this was not hyperbole can be seen from the statements of
those
who had everything to gain from denouncing him: the luckless Jacobite captives in England facing the gibbet or the executioner’s block. Before mounting the scaffold, Lord Balmerino, taken prisoner at Culloden, spoke as follows:

I am at a loss when I come to speak of the Prince. I am not a fit hand to draw his character. I shall leave that to others. But I must beg leave to tell you of the incomparable sweetness of his nature, his affability, his compassion, his justice, his temperance, his patience and his courage, which are virtues seldom to be found in one person. In short, he wants no qualifications requisite to make a great man.
⁸

Lest this be thought aristocratic solidarity by a perfervid divine righter, the testimony of prisoners lower in the social scale can also be adduced. The Manchester Jacobites contrasted the Stuart prince’s unfailing mercy with Cumberland’s barbarity.
⁹
And David Morgan, a weak man who had tried to lie his way out of execution and who might have hoped for mercy through denigration of the prince, said: ‘His character exceeds anything I could have imagined or conceived. An attempt to describe him would seem gross flattery.’
¹⁰

The truth was that for the most part during the ’45 and its aftermath, the prince had shown the bright side of his ambiguous face to his followers. He had proved himself not just singularly compassionate but capable of humour and gentle self-ridicule.
¹¹
In his darkest hour he had charmed the dour Highlanders. His preference for the native whisky and oatbread above the more palatable brandy and wheatbread on the grounds that ‘these are my own country’s bread and drink’
¹²
was fondly remembered. As Bulkeley commented on the flight in the heather:

Whatever his education had been before, in this trial he had surely learned what few princes can ever have been taught, he had learnt the worth of individuals, he had learnt to admire the disinterestedness of peasants as well as higher persons. He had learnt to love virtue in all orders of men and to know the temper as well as the power of his country.
¹³

To date only Lord George Murray, the failed father-figure, had really seen the dark side of the prince’s nature that was ultimately to destroy him.

The prince, then, was at his zenith in October 1746. His star had reached its apogee. He was the talk of Europe and the toast of every palace. Everyone, king to peasant, had heard of the fabulous ‘Prince
Edouard
’. Already his five months in the heather had attained legendary status.
¹⁴
The
philosophes
were drawn to this exploit, as illustrating supposed truths about man in the state of nature. Diderot’s comments have already been noted. Helvétius was fascinated by the stubborn loyalty to the prince of Donald Macleod and the others. He felt this was a cultural matter: such sturdiness and independence of principle would not be practised among the Turks.
¹⁵

It was therefore in a state of euphoria and high excitement that the prince arrived in Paris. The duc de Luynes, who saw him soon after his arrival, thought he detected signs of scurvy and remarked on his short hair. But for all that Charles had just emerged from a gruelling five months and did not look his best, Luynes had to admit that the tall prince with the noble figure irresistibly reminded him of Charles XII of Sweden, the archetypal model of warrior-prince.
¹⁶

On the morning of 17 October (NS) Charles and Henry had their first meeting. The prince did not at first recognise his brother, and this fact nearly led to tragedy. Overjoyed to see his brother, Henry leapt forward to greet him. One of the prince’s Highlanders, thinking this was an assassin, drew his claymore. Just in time the true situation was recognised.
¹⁷

Henry found Charles broader and fatter, ‘which is incomprehensible after all the fatigues he has endured’.
¹⁸
The reunion was joyful. There was no hint of the trouble to come. Henry professed himself ready to follow his brother to the ends of the earth.
¹⁹

At first, too, the French seemed likely to cherish their hero-prince. On Wednesday 19 October the two Stuart princes arrived at Fontainebleau to begin a round of social engagements designed to show the esteem in which France held Charles Edward. There was an immediate audience with Louis XV, followed by receptions given by the queen and dauphin. The dauphin, in particular, immediately came under the prince’s spell. There was a further three-quarter-of-an-hour interview with the king during their sojourn at Fontainebleau, and further informal talks with the queen and dauphin.
²⁰

There followed a succession of lavish dinners. On 19 October the two princes supped with the marquis d’Argenson. On the 20th they took dinner with Tencin and supper with Maurepas. On the 21st it was the turn of comte d’Argenson to treat them to dinner; supper was with the duc d’Huescar, the Spanish ambassador.
²¹

By now, entertaining the princes was developing into a contest among the ministers of state as to who could lay on the most lavish spread. On 22 October the duc de Noailles gave a sumptuous dinner, attended by all the princesses and great ladies of the court. The duc
de
Luynes, their host that night, found himself upstaged. He professed himself mightily disappointed for the turn-out for his supper party. Of the notables, only Noailles, comte d’Argenson and St Florentin attended. But the prince, who was a consummate charmer when he chose, made up to his host by giving with Henry an impromptu concert on cello and harpsichord. Luynes found Henry a much better virtuoso, overlooking that the opportunities for cello-playing in the heather had not been abundant.
²²

The crowning achievement of the princes’ visit to Fontainebleau came on the evening of 23 October. After a dinner earlier in the day with Machault, the Comptroller-General (he had replaced Orry in December 1745), they went in the evening to supper with Madame Pompadour. There was a splendid guest list including (on the French side) the dukes of Richelieu and Bouillon and the Princesse de Conti and (on the Jacobite side), Lord John Drummond, Tyrconnel and O’Brien. The king himself put in an appearance at 11 p.m. and stayed until 1 a.m. – an unwonted honour.
²³
Louis spoke of his intention to lodge the prince in one of his own houses at Vincennes. On 24 October the Stuart brothers returned to Henry’s house in Clichy until such time as the promised accommodation was ready for them.

At Clichy Charles Edward set up a miniature court. Lochiel, Kelly and Sir James Stewart were his most visible advisers at this time. Crowds of the French nobility flocked out to Clichy to pay court.
²⁴
And on Friday 28 October the prince scored a social triumph in some ways greater than the reception at Fontainebleau. His attendance at the Opera was the occasion for the sort of public lionising he had never known before. The crowd at the Opera went wild with enthusiasm. The prince was clapped and cheered on entering and leaving and was obliged to take more bows at the end than the performers.
²⁵
Charles Edward was the darling of Paris. Possibly from this incident dated the prince’s mistaken notion that he could use French public opinion to mould Louis XV to his will.

The honeymoon period with the French court lasted just two weeks. At the beginning of November tension between Charles Edward and Louis XV and between the prince and his brother became evident. In retrospect the signs had all been there at Fontainebleau. Charles had informed Louis that he would not discuss high politics in front of his brother and asked for a secret meeting. Louis refused.
²⁶
A peace conference was in session at Breda and the king wanted to await the outcome. Already his ministers of state had advised against the public reception of the prince that Louis in fact provided at Fontainebleau.
²⁷
The
circumspect French king drew back at the idea of secret negotiations with the prince, in which Charles Edward might extract a promise on which Louis could not deliver.

Doubtless this ‘new realism’ dictated the king’s next move. There was no more talk of Vincennes or any of the other royal residences. Instead, the princes were to be given the use of the financier Paris de Montmartel’s house at Bercy plus a monthly allowance of 12,000 livres.

The prince was stupefied at the news, more especially as it was not even conveyed to him by one of the ministers of state but by Le Dran,
premier commis
in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
²⁸
Charles had assumed from the reception Louis had given him at Fontainebleau that the bad old days of 1744–5 were over. Now he learned to his horror that Louis was not after all prepared to acknowledge him openly as an ally. Louis had been all sweetness and light at Fontainebleau. The Vincennes idea had come from him personally. Now, once again, this neurasthenic ditherer had allowed himself to be overruled by his ministers. Charles Edward was once more expected to keep a low profile. What was barely tolerable before his great exploits was certainly out of the question now that he was the toast of Paris.

The prince’s reactions were typical. First the stress caused by the bad news brought on a fever. Charles had to spring up from the table at the archbishop of Cambrai’s house, where he was supping, and take to his bed, where he remained for three days.
²⁹
Next he sought a scapegoat. After no more than two weeks, the mask of cordiality he had shown to his brother was cast aside. He began to chide Henry for his lack of sparkle and forcefulness.
³⁰
Why was it that he had not been able to compel the French to do more for him during the ’45? Why had he alienated the duc de Richelieu and others with his sickening piety?

The prince ran true to form in another way. As always when under stress, his self-destructive side asserted itself. In the struggle for supremacy between the good angel Lochiel and the bad spirit Kelly, it was Kelly who won.
³¹
Lochiel could have been the good father, succeeding where Marischal and Lord George Murray had failed. But perhaps in the prince’s mind he was always indelibly associated with Derby, where he had supported Lord George in counselling retreat. At any rate, in the struggle to influence the prince it was Kelly who prevailed, Kelly who was one of the few truly evil men among the Jacobites.

These three factors – the prince’s disenchantment with France, the friction between him and his brother, and the ascendancy of Kelly –
were
to become intertwined in the months ahead. Kelly urged the prince on to greater and greater defiance of France; Louis XV became more and more disinclined to oblige the prince because of the ‘low people’ (principally Kelly) around him; Henry, who pushed James’s line of diplomacy and conciliation towards France on his brother, was progressively discredited in Charles’s eyes by Kelly’s insidious whisperings and innuendoes.

At first James did not see that Kelly was the real threat to his son’s future. All his efforts were bent to bringing Sheridan to heel. At the conscious level James was furious with Sheridan for having (as the king saw it) deserted Charles Edward in Scotland. At an unconscious level, it is likely that he resented Sheridan’s too-obvious attempt to usurp the paternal role and play the loving father. At any rate, he curtly summoned Sheridan to Rome to explain himself.
³²
The reprimand from his royal master was the last straw for the ailing Sheridan. He collapsed and died before he could make the journey to Rome. Since James’s
bête noire
Strickland had also died in England during the ’45, James chose to interpret the two deaths as God’s judgment on the false prophets who would seduce his son from the paths of righteousness.
³³
But the more James lectured his son, the more Charles despised him.

In the closing months of 1746 James made repeated efforts to get Charles to deal with France in a realistic way and to amend his criticism of Henry.
³⁴
At this stage James was still receiving first-rate intelligence on his elder son from Daniel O’Brien. O’Brien predicted a major clash between the prince and Henry because of temperamental differences; he also warned that Charles would refuse to accept the pension from France until he received ‘proper’ treatment.
³⁵
Further grievance was offered the prince by Louis XV when, against Charles’s specific request, the king released the English Lady Morton from custody and refused to arrest her husband.
³⁶
The prince wanted the Mortons incarcerated until the Hanoverian government was prepared to strike a civilised deal over the treatment of the Jacobite prisoners of the ’45.

By December 1746, relations between the prince and the French court on one hand, and Henry on the other, had reached a very low point. The heady days at Fontainebleau in late October already seemed light years away. Charles Edward still retained his huge following with the Paris crowd. At Versailles it was a very different matter. To the bones of contention over the prince’s residence and his refusal of the pension were added more specific discontents. France seemed to have no inclination for launching an expedition
against
Britain. In the prince’s eyes, this meant that precious time was slipping away.