Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (69 page)

Versailles responded with a twin-track strategy. While denying its responsibility for Charles Edward – on the ground that the 1717 treaty spoke of James Stuart but not his successors – France secretly brought extreme pressure to bear on the Vatican.
⁴⁶
In desperation, the ministers even promised London to seize the prince and take him to Civitavecchia.
⁴⁷
But the British pressure did not relent. They would not rest until the prince was in Italy.
⁴⁸

It was one thing for the Pope to want Charles Edward out of Avignon. It was another to bow to French pressure. Benedict defied Louis XV to do his worst. Of course, if it came to a showdown, the puny defences of Avignon could not stand against the might of France, but was ‘His Most Christian Majesty’ really going to risk anathema by hostilities against the Pope so soon after the notoriety of the prince’s arrest? Benedict thought not, and his judgment was confirmed. As for England, the Pope expressed his contempt: they did not even enter into his calculations.
⁴⁹

So the stalemate continued. The vice-legate continually stressed the problems accruing to the Holy Father as a result of the prince’s sojourn.
⁵⁰
The prince reacted with indifference. For once he was enjoying himself. On 12 February the festival at which he had hoped to introduce the bull-fighting was opened. There was no longer any question of a
corredo
, partly because the archbishop and vice-legate had worked on public fears about danger to life and limb, partly because they had made sure that neither Aix nor Arles would send
any
bulls.
⁵¹
But there was a shooting competition, lavish illuminations and a spectacular ball. The entire courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville was built over, floored with wood and adorned with tapestries. Free food and wine were distributed to all comers, and a present of a pound each of grain and rice given to each individual – nobody was refused. A fountain of wine was installed in the place St Didier.
⁵²

Such reckless expenditure of money that was not his seemed almost to anger the heavens against Charles Edward. The festival was originally scheduled for 11 February, but a storm, not unlike the ‘Protestant wind’ of exactly five years earlier, wrecked the decorations.
⁵³
The fête was postponed to the 12th. When it took place, the fiesta staggered even those used to the hedonism of daily life in the papal states. At 6 p.m. the city fathers gathered. The vice-legate went to the house of Dunbar’s sister Lady Inverness (Clementina Sobieska’s old
bête noire
) to fetch the prince in the official carriage. Preceded by the light cavalry of the city, the prince then made a tour of the walls before proceeding to the papal palace. A vast supper had been prepared. After the groaning board had been swept clean by the city’s free-loaders, the prince made the tour of the best-illuminated houses before going on to the Grand Ball.
⁵⁴

All his old talents as a dancer were in evidence that night. It was eight o’clock next morning before the prince retired. The other revellers kept going until 4 p.m. To commemorate this unique manifestation of the pleasure principle, the citizens set up an equestrian statue of Charles Edward (on 24 February) in the place St Didier, opposite the house occupied by the exiled James in 1716.
⁵⁵

This fresh drain on his resources – so obviously a calculated insult to His Holiness – brought Benedict as close to vindictive rage as any event in his life.
⁵⁶
The great ‘Charles Edward festival’ brought the Apostolic Chamber close to bankruptcy. They had already been forced to ask for a supplementary budget of several thousand écus to pay for the junketings.
⁵⁷
On top of this came the horrifying news that Charles Edward’s baggage and effects had now all arrived in Avignon. It seemed certain he was set for a long stay.
⁵⁸
Nor was the Pope’s temper improved by a series of long letters from Dunbar, purporting to justify the prince’s every action from leaving Rome in 1744 to his present sybaritism in Avignon.
⁵⁹
The Pope’s anger and frustration found an outlet in expressions of contempt for Dunbar’s intellectual capacity and his ‘pathetic’ epistles.
⁶⁰

The Vatican now had to implement two strategies. The first was somehow to winkle the prince and his entourage out of the Apostolic Palace. The second was to persuade him to move on permanently.
Getting
him out of the palace in the interests of economy was vitiated by the prince’s insistence that the vice-legate pay the rent for any alternative accommodation.
⁶¹
But the prince was finally persuaded to move to an imposing house on the outskirts of Avignon.
⁶²

The strategy adopted for getting him to move permanently involved stressing the security problems of an open society like Avignon. Secretary of State Valenti advised the vice-legate to keep a constant drip-drip of disconcerting news going, stressing the many dangers of assassination and abduction in the papal enclave. He was to advance the argument that these dangers augmented geometrically as the number of balls increased arithmetically, simply because the revellers went masked.
⁶³

The upshot was curious. When the prince finally quit Avignon, not long after moving into his new house, all parties took the credit on themselves. The Vatican congratulated itself on its ‘security’ disinformation campaign.
⁶⁴
The French felt that their unrelenting pressure had finally paid off. The British thought that the trick had been achieved by their threat to bombard Civitavecchia.
⁶⁵

None of this was the case. The truth was that the prince had all along wanted to cock a snook at France while humiliating the Pope at the same time. In this way the twin wounds of Henry’s defection and the French expulsion could be assuaged. When the round of pleasure in Avignon became boring, the prince intended to move on to Phase Two of his defiance of Louis XV.

All of this was hidden at the time. Shortly after the erection of the statue there came a dramatic and mysterious sequence of events. The Pope was fretting about the approach of Lent, determined that the prince be prevented from flouting religious scruple by continuing his festivities into the season of penance.
⁶⁶
Suddenly it was announced that Charles was ill and would not be seen in society for a while.
⁶⁷
The vice-legate stayed with the prince until midnight on the first day of his ‘cold’. On returning next morning, he was not admitted. The pretence was kept up that the prince was indisposed and, later, that he was out taking the air.
⁶⁸

March came, and still there was no sign of the prince. At last Dunbar admitted to the vice-legate that the prince would not be seen again, for he had left on 25 February, taking with him just a single gentleman and no servants. The story about his illness had been a fiction. No one knew where he was going or what his intentions were.
⁶⁹

The vice-legate set his spies to work. The prince was traced as far
as
Orange. He had taken a post-chaise there and asked the driver to wait to take him back to Avignon. Then he had vanished.
⁷⁰

At first the Pope and the vice-legate waited nervously for their scourge to return. But he did not. Gradually their confidence built up. God had heard their prayers and delivered them. But where was the prince? This was a question that was to baffle the whole of Europe for the next nine years.

(1749–51)

WHEN THE PRINCE
vanished from public view at Orange, he was very clear in his own mind what his next step would be. He had already told Kelly that the reason he was to stay in Paris was that he, the prince, would be seeing him shortly.
¹
Now Charles made good his boast. Travelling via Lyons – where he was momentarily spotted by a papal agent
²
– the prince arrived in Paris in heavy disguise, less than three months after he had given his solemn word not to set foot on French territory.

The plan had been concerted closely with the Princesse de Talmont, who remained in Paris to put the final touches to the masterpiece of deception.
³
When the prince arrived in the French capital, he was hidden away in the utmost secrecy in the convent of St Joseph in the rue Saint-Dominique. The convent had long boasted a ‘profane’ quarter where ladies of quality could take refuge from the outside world at moderate prices. No proof of religious commitment was required. It was accepted that the great ladies came there simply to look for a quiet retreat.
⁴
The convent was a favourite haunt of the Princesse de Talmont and her friends Elisabeth Ferrand and the comtesse de Vasse (Antoinette-Louise-Gabrielle des Gentils du Bessay).

For the next two months – and intermittently for the next three years, whenever he visited Paris – Charles Edward lived the life of a fugitive, sometimes cramped in alcoves and niches no bigger than priest holes.
⁵
There were false walls behind the rooms occupied by Mlle Ferrand and the comtesse de Vasse. The routine was that the prince spent the mornings in the infra-mural hideout in the former’s chamber, then transferred to the room of the latter for the afternoon. In the evening, when all visitors were locked out of the convent, the
prince
would descend from the comtesse de Vasse’s by a hidden staircase to the Princesse de Talmont’s bedroom below.
⁶
There the lovers would spend the night.

At first all went well. From his eyrie during the daytime the prince played eavesdropper, listening to snippets of gossip about the court and personalities of Versailles relayed to the ladies Ferrand and Vasse by their aristocratic visitors. On one occasion he was highly amused to overhear a long conversation about himself, which included ‘informed’ speculation on his whereabouts.
⁷

But as time went on, the prince began to grow bored and to chafe at his cramped lifestyle. He began to row with the Princesse de Talmont. These were no ordinary rows. The prince by now was accustomed to fall into volcanic rages if people opposed their will to his, crossed him, or even disagreed with him. The small change of verbal sniping between intimate couples was conflated by the prince into part of the general mosaic of rejection the world had foisted upon him. His subsequent rage frequently took a physical form and he would beat his mistress.

The battered Princesse de Talmont’s legendary wit and repartee availed her little against a man who was not ashamed to use violence if thwarted, or simply worsted in a verbal encounter. More to the point, the two ladies Ferrand and Vasse, who were bound together by gentle bonds (probably unconscious lesbianism)
⁸
were deeply shocked by the outbursts of physical violence and the ferocious altercations between the lovers which they could not fail to overhear.

Tactfully the two ladies put it to the prince that it might be time to move on.
⁹
After two months of huddled daytime privation, Charles Edward felt he had made his point. He had bearded Louis XV in his own lair and thrown all the assassins and secret agents of Europe off his trail. Besides, he had decided where he would make his permanent home. On 20 April the prince wrote to Earl Marischal, asking him to meet him in Venice.
¹⁰
Charles Edward was still absurdly hoping to recruit this man (who, unknown to him, hated him vehemently) as his secretary of state. In hopes of assembling a skeleton court, Charles also asked Harrington (then at Dijon with Graeme) to join him in Venice.
¹¹
If possible, Graeme should accompany him.

There was no reply from Marischal. The prince wrote again to the same effect on 5 May. Back came the lame old excuse about ‘broken health’.
¹²

The prince set out in early May 1749, intending to avoid all French garrison towns. He was not a moment too soon. By now the French
had
got wind of his presence in their capital – probably because the prince told John Waters his banker that he would be ‘calling’ for his mail. The French instituted an intensive search. This time, if they found Charles, they were going to take him all the way to Civitavecchia and deposit him there.
¹³

The prince’s itinerary took him through Luneville and Lorraine. Then he headed south into Switzerland, passing through Lucerne, the Mt St Goddard pass and the vale of Bellinzona to Lugano. Then he crossed lake Como and rested at Bergamo before pressing on to Venice.
¹⁴

On 17 May Charles Edward wrote in sanguine spirits from the Most Serene Republic to his father. He was very hopeful of being allowed to stay in Venice, ‘a place that next to France is the best for my interest’.
¹⁵
He decided to use the papal nuncio as his go-between to the doge’s council. The nuncio was deeply sympathetic to the prince, but warned him that the most consideration he was likely to receive was tacit consent to remain a few days incognito.
¹⁶
But at least this time the prince did send on a formal compliment to the Pope – the first time he had done so since leaving Rome in January 1744. Benedict wrote back by special courier to tell Charles that he was free to reside anywhere in papal Italy, but would not be welcome if he returned to Avignon. Bologna was proposed as a suitable haven. But Charles Edward told the nuncio that in an open town like Bologna he would go in fear of his life – a very neat twist on the Pope’s own arguments about Avignon.
¹⁷

It gradually became clear why the prince had chosen to make his base in Venice. The city of masked revellers and shadowy secret agents was the perfect milieu for a man to whom disguise and cloak and dagger had become second nature. The prince dismissed Benedict’s countervailing argument: that a city based on the incognito, where so many went masked, provided the perfect locale for assassins and was thus the worst possible bet for the prince.
¹⁸