Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (9 page)

Meanwhile Dunbar and Liria plotted how they could extract the maximum propaganda advantage from the Prince’s presence at Gaeta. Since the Infanta Don Carlos cautiously refrained from entering the trenches of the besiegers, they had to be careful not to upstage him with Charles Edward’s exploits. For all that, Liria was determined that the prince should be seen in the trenches for, as he pointed out, Charles Edward had to impress his personality on the world, ‘having no fortune … but what he must gain by the point of his sword’. Liria reckoned that if the prince craftily went into the trenches at the right time of day, he could secure within a few days a great reputation for courage while incurring minimal risk.

Such was the strategy decided on. On 5 August the prince spent some six hours with Liria in the trenches during the siesta hours. He was mounted on a little horse. The excursion was not quite so risk-free as Liria had hoped, but the young prince showed remarkable coolness under fire, ‘even when the balls were whistling about his ears’.
²³

At court meanwhile the Stuart charm was as pronounced as ever. On one occasion the prince’s cockade fell from his hat and one of the courtiers replaced it wrongly. Seeing this, the Infanta fixed it in the correct position. Charles thanked Don Carlos and said he would keep the cockade for ever in memory of the incident.
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Already the prince was learning the art of reading men and saying the things they wanted to hear.

The prince quickly made a lot of admirers. Dunbar admitted that his charge’s diplomatic skills exceeded his expectations.
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Don Carlos especially expressed himself surprised at his maturity. Liria confided to James that the said Infanta was completely outclassed by the young prince in every department; education, breeding, wit, repartee.
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Moreover, Charles Edward was already a great favourite with the troops. Quickly mastering the art of being all things to all men, the prince impressed the soldiers by speaking French to the Walloons, Spanish to the Spaniards, and Italian to the Italians. The men flocked around him, crowding in to catch his attention or beg a word with him, amazed at such a phenomenon. The prince joked with them in a familiar way. To Liria’s astonishment he was able to charm them as easily as he had charmed the Neapolitan court, and with all the aplomb of an experienced military officer. Liria
commented
to his brother: ‘His manner of conversation is really bewitching, and you may lay to your account that if it were otherwise, I would not have kept it a secret from you.’
²⁷

Having scored such a hit on his one day in the trenches, the prince wanted to plunge deeper into the thick of the action. He plagued Liria to be able to take up station with the forward batteries. Liria was at his wits’ end to know how to refuse him. The prince’s great popularity with the troops, and the fact that he had already ventured into the trenches where the Infanta feared to tread, was already sufficiently embarrassing. It was a delicate situation. If Charles Edward went any farther into the press of the fighting, Don Carlos would be publicly humiliated.
²⁸

Fortunately for Liria, his problem was solved in the most unexpected way. On 6 August the defenders of Gaeta suddenly and unexpectedly gave up the ghost; whether through the treachery of their Catalan mercenaries, as was alleged, or because of the sheer destructive power of the Spanish floating battery, was uncertain.
²⁹

The sudden collapse of Gaeta left the prince free to explore Naples. On the Sunday after the surrender of Gaeta he was entertained on board the Capetano galley by Prince Campo-Florido’s brother, the captain-general of Spanish galleys. Unfortunately Charles suffered sea-sickness from the rocking motion of the ship; he was never to be a great sailor.
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When he got back to his lodgings, he needed ten hours’ sleep to get over this malady. When he got up, he found he had regained all his old resilience. He ate more in one day in Naples than in two at Rome.

The round of social engagements continued: dinner with count Estemar one day, with the Grand Prior of France the next. The Infanta put his own private galley at the prince’s disposal. Charles went to bed late every night. By the time he arose in the morning, the cool house he shared with Liria was full of distinguished company, waiting to pay him compliments.
³¹

There can be no doubt that the Gaeta excursion, though it actually involved no more than one day in the trenches, was a propaganda triumph for the prince. Liria was ecstatic about his charge and cousin: ‘In a word this Prince discovers that in great princes whom nature has marked out for heroes valour does not wait for the number of years.’
³²
The Infanta was particularly impressed with him and gave a prestigious position in his army to a Jacobite officer as a mark of his regard for the prince. As Liria remarked: ‘The king of Naples was struck with wonder to find in the dawn of years such ripe thought
and
so much prudence, which are rarely to be met with in Princes arrived at the full maturity of age.’
³³
Moreover, Charles had successfully refuted those who said he was too young as yet to make a mark on the world.

The prince decided to make the most of his few precious days of freedom before returning to James’s oppressive regime. Despite the nagging letters he received from his father,
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while in Naples he ate and drank whatever he fancied and put on weight. As the helpless Dunbar reported to James: ‘He eats a great deal more and with less rule as to choice of it than he used to, which gives me some apprehension, but this air is more favourable to the digestion than that of Rome.’
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Meanwhile the political consequences of Charles Edward’s first campaign continued to reverberate around Europe. Keene, the British Minister in Madrid, protested vociferously to Foreign Minister Patiño about this ‘unfriendly action’ by Spain.
³⁶
The Spanish initiative was considered particularly dangerous in that it seemed to set a precedent. It was felt that France could not after this very well refuse the prince a campaign in her own army.
³⁷
Fleury, apprehensive of English reaction, was particularly concerned at this development. He started lobbying at Madrid to ensure that Charles Edward did not serve with the Spaniards in next year’s Lombardy campaign.
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But not even the Jacobites’ enemies cared to deny the wonderful fillip given the prince’s reputation by the Gaeta campaign. ‘Everyone agrees he will be with time a much more dangerous enemy to the present regime in England than his father has been,’ Walton reported grudgingly.
³⁹
From all sides the plaudits for the prince’s success poured in. Dunbar confided to James that the Neapolitan ministers would be glad to see the back of him, since in public opinion Charles Edward far outshone the Infanta Don Carlos.
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It was at this precise moment, when the prince was winning golden opinions on all sides and basking in the attention of the Neapolitan nobility, that James showed himself at his most crassly insensitive. The occasion was the two short notes his son had dashed off to him in the general excitement, and for whose brevity he had Dunbar’s sanction.
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Bridling at what he took to be lack of filial deference, James on 27 August sent his son a blistering letter of rebuke. He complained of the insolent curtness of the letters and the fact that they were incorrectly copied:

But what makes these particulars give me the more concern is that I am sensible these omissions proceed from your too natural
aversion
to all application and constraint and that if you do not get the better of yourself and endeavour to cultivate the talents which Providence has given you, you will soon lose that good character which your present behaviour is beginning to gain you. Your great youth at present makes the smallest things be approved of and even admired in you, but as you grow older, every year, may I say every month, more will be expected from you and that more will never come without some pains and application on your side … if you will not so much be at the trouble of writing a letter of reasonable length on indifferent subjects, what can be expected from you in greater matters? What a figure will you make in the world? And above all, how highly responsible will you be to God Almighty for burying the talents he has given you and for not making yourself capable of performing the duties he requires of you?
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This letter is more eloquent on the true state of relations between father and son than a dozen routine, formulaic letters about ‘dearest Carluccio’. What can have induced James to send off such a hurtful screed at the height of his son’s triumph? It is difficult not to see some resentment or jealousy at work here. Quite apart from the brilliant figure his son had cut in Naples – contrasting so strongly with the débâcle in Scotland in 1716, the only time James had attempted to put his own personal appeal to the test – the whispers James heard around him that the son was already supplanting the father would have revived the hurt feelings over the 1733 Bolingbroke scheme to use Charles Edward to edge out the ‘Old Pretender’. It will be remembered that the peculiar cunning of Bolingbroke’s idea was the insinuation that Charles Edward could be restored by Parliament or by internal unrest in England, whereas James’s restoration would take a French invasion.
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Moreover, James had recently received striking testimony of the desire of the English Jacobites to go over (or under) his head to Charles Edward. The disgraced Church of England parson Zeckie Hamilton (confidant of Earl Marischal and Ormonde) had, the month before Gaeta, surpassed all his previous mad insolence to the king by writing to Charles Edward to ask him to disavow his father’s authority.
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So strong were the pressures from certain factions of the English Jacobites to detach the prince from his father that Walton at first thought this, not the siege of Gaeta, was the true explanation for Charles’s departure from Albano at the end of July.
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There is, moreover, a disturbing hint of ‘I told you so’ gloating in
James’s
response to the news that his son had fallen mildly ill at Naples at the end of August.
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Nor did the tension end there, but carried on into the period of what should have been the triumphal homecoming. Dunbar planned to set out on 12 September, resting a night at Mola before putting in a bruising day’s travel from 2 a.m. on the 13th until nightfall so as to get to Albano on the third night out from Naples.
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The original intention was that Liria would accompany them; he was now the 2nd duke of Berwick, following his father the marshal-duke’s death on campaign at Phillipsburg. Accordingly James went out to Albano on 14 September and pushed on to Genzano to meet the returning party.
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But there was no Berwick with them. The 2nd duke lay ill at Naples, in the first stages of the consumption that would carry him off four years later. This was unfortunate for Charles Edward, since Berwick was one man capable of getting James to see sense. Dunbar and Sheridan were both too far in the king’s debt to be capable of pointing out his insensitivity.

The upshot was a pointed contrast between the prince as the idol of Naples and the delinquent son of James’s perception. Charles Edward returned home after being fêted and lionised in Naples, loaded down with honours. He brought back two fine horses, magnificently equipped, as a present from Don Carlos, plus gifts of diamonds and precious jewels.
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He was already both rich and famous. The Pope was so pleased with his protégé that there was talk of making the prince a cardinal.
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On the return from Gaeta the Pontiff provided a papal honour guard of fifty men to escort him.
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All James could see, however, was an unruly and competitive son who had failed to live by the rules his father had inculcated in him for so many years. The stress caused by the chasm between these two views of him was almost bound to cause the prince to erupt. It is therefore not surprising to read in a letter from James to Clementina who had dragged her pathetic invalid body out to Albano on 16 September to see her beloved son,
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very soon after the prince’s return, that their son had twice been ‘in penance’.
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James continued his sniping campaign against his son in correspondence with O’Brien, pointedly contrasting him with Henry to the latter’s advantage.
⁵⁴
Nor did Henry help his own cause with his brother. To add to the wound caused by James’s obvious partiality for his second son, Henry rubbed salt in the wound himself. It seems that both princes had designs on a puppy that secretary Edgar had been given. Henry outwitted his brother by waiting in the inner room next to the chamber where Edgar was closeted with James, then
waylaying
the secretary and extracting a solemn promise from him that the puppy would be Henry’s.
⁵⁵

Yet sibling rivalry and James’s insensitivity faded into insignificance alongside the crushing blow that fell next. The queen’s health had long given cause for concern. The first indication that she might be entering a critical new stage was the alarm sounded by James at the end of October, when he reported a cough, ominously at the start of winter.
⁵⁶
By the first week in November Clementina was already seriously ill.
⁵⁷
On the advice of her physicians, the queen stayed indoors for a month. It was now suspected that she was suffering from acute scurvy, but as ever Clementina would take no medical advice nor any preventive action.
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She was very weak and skeletal in appearance, but persisted in regarding her sickness as the judgment of God.
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It was in some anguish that James wrote on 20 December 1734: