Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (84 page)

The days slipped by, the intensive search continued. Still there was no sign of the runaways.
¹⁹
Charles Edward raged at the incompetence of his agent who had 1et them slip through his fingers.
²⁰
Though Belle-Isle was certain Clementina had left Paris, the prince, remembering his own experiences in 1749–50, was certain she was in hiding in some obscure convent in the capital.
²¹
With the obsessive energy of monomania, the prince prepared detailed lists of the people who might be sheltering the fugitives. Mrs O’Brien, Madame de Mézières, O’Heguerty, Walsh, Warren, Holker, Lady Ogilvy, Waters, Mme Ramsay: the daily lengthening list soon bade fair to embrace the entire body of Jacobites in France.
²²
Nothing more clearly illustrates the prince’s paranoia than the way in which trusted friends were progressively added to the list of potential betrayers. The prince revealed that at bottom he trusted no one.

At last a shaft of light penetrated the turbid fog of his persecution mania. He remembered O’Sullivan. More and more the prince became convinced that Clementina had returned to her former lover.
²³
He sent out frenzied orders to track down the ageing Irishman. Yet, when caught up with, O’Sullivan had no more idea of Clementina’s whereabouts than anyone else. The best clue came
from
Madame Ramsay. It was now certain that Clementina was in a convent.
²⁴
But where?

By now the search instituted by Belle-Isle and Cremilles had petered out.
²⁵
Charles Edward accused the French of not pulling their weight. How was it that the French were proving so incompetent at finding Clementina after the ruthless efficiency they had displayed towards him in 1748?
²⁶
As so often, there was substance in Charles Edward’s insensate accusations.

Suddenly Gordon found that Cremilles and Belle-Isle were ‘out’ or ‘away’ whenever he called to pursue inquiries.
²⁷
The reason soon became clear. To the prince’s indescribable fury, James revealed that he had taken the runaways under his protection.
²⁸
This ended all French assistance for Charles Edward. They could not be seen to be supporting the son in defiance of the wishes of the father.
²⁹
Quite apart from anything else, the affair was another nail in the coffin of the prince’s reputation. Choiseul felt completely vindicated in his contempt.
³⁰

James had already committed a signal act of betrayal in the prince’s eyes. But the king made things worse by writing to his son to try to justify his actions. His limp excuse that he had asked Clementina to get Charles’s permission before leaving was a threadbare palliative. Once again James evinced his genius for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. In an attempt to justify his decision to have Charlotte educated in a convent, he gave as his reason ‘now that she is of an age incapable of being company to you or of giving you real comfort of any kind’.
³¹

The prince had long suspected that Clementina could not have remained hidden so long without collusion by the French authorities.
³²
He had always half-expected non-co-operation from Versailles. But he was deeply shocked to discover that this was the result of James’s blundering intervention. The conflation of France and his father as oppressive authority became absolute. Absolute too was the veto on further searches for Clementina. Charles could not act on his own, since Gordon and the other Jacobites, once they realised that Clementina was under James’s protection, declared that they could not serve two masters. In the hierarchy of commands from king and prince, James’s will took precedence.
³³

Clementina’s flight, followed by the disclosure that James had abetted it, precipitated the prince into total breakdown. He declared he would neither eat nor drink until the child was returned to him.
³⁴
Nor would he answer any letters addressed to him, no matter who the correspondent, until France made reparation for the gross insult
offered
him. There can be no question but that the psychological blow of Clementina’s desertion was comparable to other great traumata in his life: Derby, Henry’s becoming a cardinal, his arrest in 1748. But before the prince withdrew into himself and maintained an almost catatonic silence towards the outside world, he took a resolution. James’s treachery over Clementina had finished him for all time. Charles would never forgive his father.
³⁵

The débâcle over Clementina brought into the open the mutual unconscious hatred between father and son. What else, other than some deep-seated urge to get even with his son for the various ways in which Charles had supplanted him, can explain James’s extraordinary meddling in his son’s private life? Clementina Sobieska’s over-protective instincts for her son had destroyed James’s marriage. What more fitting than that the second Clementina should likewise flee to a convent, thus visiting on the son the humiliation the father had suffered thirty-five years before? Charles’s jibes about his father’s inability to manage his own marriage – which was why, he alleged, the Jacobites had waited to see how Charles Edward would turn out – could be neutralised if the son was also seen to be a failure in personal relations.

On the other hand, it is quite clear that James was prodded into this self-destructive act of unconscious revenge by the prince’s steadfast refusal to take any notice of his advice. It is plain that, consciously or unconsciously (probably the latter), the prince never had any serious intention of visiting his father in Rome. Any chance of James’s escaping the ‘punishment’ due to him for the ‘horrors’ of the prince’s childhood (whether we see these as real or merely self-assigned by Charles) was almost certainly lost in 1747–8, after James’s behaviour over Henry’s cardinalate and the prince’s expulsion from France. Neither the prince nor his father realised the strength of the bonds of unconscious hatred that linked them.

The two motifs, anger at his father’s treachery and grief for the loss of Charlotte, accounted for the prince’s subsequent actions, found inexplicable by his followers. They assumed that his emotions were affected primarily by Clementina. True, his pride was hurt. Although he cared nothing for Clementina, it was a matter of honour to the prince that
he
should decide when the relationship was to end. But the primary triggers that pushed him into breakdown had nothing to do with Clementina.

The prince’s breakdown went through a number of phases. At first he was momentarily shocked into sobriety.
³⁶
He could neither eat nor sleep.
³⁷
Then he returned to the bottle with even greater vigour. He
would
get drunk by the early afternoon, sleep off the effects, then indulge in another heady round of hard drinking in the evening.
³⁸
For a long time, too, he kept his crazed word, neither writing to anyone nor replying to any message. In his deranged state, he saw his threat to have no communication with the outside world until his child was returned as a kind of punishment, as if he as the source of light were withdrawing his shining beacon to leave the universe in darkness. His alcoholism had an integral relationship with this decision to make himself inaccessible. Alcoholism is one of the classic withdrawal routes from a world that seems to impose over-heavy burdens.

Clementina’s place of refuge was, as he had suspected, a Paris convent – the convent de la Visitation de Sainte Marie in the rue du Bac. When he learned this, the prince’s anger took the form of going out with his musket and firing potshots through the windows of the convents around Bouillon.
³⁹
This obvious manifestation of mental illness was followed by a critical period of organic illness: a severe cold combined with an attack of haemorrhoids led to fever caused, in the language of the time by ‘a plenitude of bile’.
⁴⁰

Bit by bit, as the prince recovered from this illness, his lucid intervals grew more frequent. Murray of Elibank had repeatedly argued that Clementina Walkinshaw was not worth the emotion he was wasting on her; since women were ten-a-penny, why did he not simply take another one?
⁴¹
In September the prince acted on the advice. He asked his secret agents Guérin and Jones to find him a girl aged 20–25, with good bourgeois sentiments. She must be
soignée
, of good health, and be prepared to look after his child and his linen.
⁴²
In a second letter, dated 18 September, the prince amplified his requirements. The girl must be educated, without great property, have good teeth and an agreeable figure. A knowledge of music would be an advantage, and if such a person could be found, money would be no object. That the prince’s thoughts were running on sexual lines is clear from his instruction to Jones, that the affair was to be a close secret and kept from Father Gordon.
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We know little of the upshot, except that a girl answering this description was sent to Bouillon.
⁴⁴

While this piece of business was going through, Murray of Elibank was urging the prince to take up with one of his old mistresses in Paris.
⁴⁵
It is quite clear that on his many clandestine trips to the French capital the prince had not remained faithful to Clementina. Murray had his hands full preventing this mystery woman from paying the prince a visit. ‘I should not be surprised if she sets out for Bouillon, as her passion for you is beyond all manner of
expression
.’
⁴⁶
This passion for the prince evidently endured well into 1762, but was not reciprocated.
⁴⁷
By this time, not even a beautiful mistress could tempt Charles Edward out of Bouillon.

The prince’s hermit-like existence in the Chateau de Carlsbourg, refusing to see or communicate with anyone, was now widely regarded as self-destructive. The English at long last knew exactly where he was and they were content.
⁴⁸
They were delighted to find that, except when hunting, he was almost permanently drunk, forgotten by the French and regarded as hopeless by the Jacobite exiles in Europe.
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Of particular satisfaction to the Hanoverians was his oft-repeated declaration that he would never marry, lest his children be exposed to miseries similar to his own.
⁵⁰

Charles Edward was the despair of his friends and admirers. The contingent absurdity of the world was summed up for Voltaire in 1763 by the thought that George II had deprived the French of Canada at the very time the Stuart prince was aiming kicks and blows at women.
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For Voltaire the three great contemporary (1762) tragedies were the dethronement of the Czar by his wife Catherine, the death through grief of the king of Poland, and the fact that Charles Edward lived in obscure misery at Bouillon.
⁵²

The Jacobite Sholto Douglas put it even more trenchantly, directly to the prince: ‘Your enemies now wantonly exult and express themselves as Peter the Great did of Charles XII of Sweden, that he kept his Swede chained at Bendar. They say they have you in a bottle at Bouillon and have the cork in their pocket.’
⁵³

Such exultation alone would surely by now have put paid to all the legends about subsequent visits by the prince to England, were he not already on the road to being a creature of myth rather than serious history. Even sober scholars have been seduced into accepting that the prince went to England in 1760 on George II’s death.
⁵⁴
And it was Sir Walter Scott who was responsible for popularising the similarly baseless rumour that the prince was present at the coronation of George III in 1761.
⁵⁵
While it is not possible to state definitively that the prince never stirred far from Bouillon in the years 1760–5, all the evidence both direct and indirect – not least his alcoholism – works against the notion.
⁵⁶
All definite ‘sightings’ of the prince outside Bouillon, such as that reported from Berne in 1762, were demonstrably untrue.
⁵⁷

Anyone doubting this should look at the volume of letters from his friends and sympathisers vainly urging just such forays on him. The most significant such advocate was his father. But the prince soon showed that he had been in deadly earnest when he declared that
the
Clementina affair had finished James for good. In April 1761 James wrote to ask his son what were his intentions when peace came.
⁵⁸
Amazingly, he still seemed to have no idea of the damage he had done by sheltering Clementina. Charles Edward did not reply.

In January 1762 James tried again. Spain had just declared war on England and James offered to approach the king of Spain on his son’s behalf to find a safe exile on the Iberian peninsula: ‘My chief aim is to draw you if possible out of the hidden, and I may say, ignominious life you lead … if you make no reply to this letter, I shall take it for granted that … you are not only buried alive … but in effect that you are dead and insensible to everything.’
⁵⁹
Again there was no reply.

In September 1762 James made his final effort. Upbraiding Charles for continuing to rebuff the English Jacobites until his daughter Charlotte was returned. James pointed out the impracticability and lack of Christianity in his son’s project. As his long letter continued, James switched from logic to emotion. He ended with his final appeal, in which heartbreak and guilt seemed mixed in equal measure:

Will you not run straight to your father? … There is no question of the past, but only of saving you from utter destruction for the future. Is it possible you would rather be a vagabond on the face of the earth than return to a Father who is all love and tenderness for you?
⁶⁰

If James had known anything of his son’s stubborn will, he would have realised that such overtures were pointless. There was only one way James could restore himself to Charles Edward’s favour and this was the one he would never take: the return of Charlotte to Bouillon.