A Desperate Fortune

by Susanna Kearsley

  An ardent Freemason—as were many of the leading Jacobites—he was also the Secretary of the Mine Adventurers Company, and whether on his own initiative or at the company’s behest he appears to have been working to establish mines as part of a larger and organized Jacobite effort to find a steady source of income for King James VIII.

  James, as a king in exile, was in the difficult position of having all the expenses of maintaining a court and government without any of the usual resources for raising the money to do so. He couldn’t collect taxes, and most of the people who followed him were in no position to contribute to his cause. In fact, many of them—particularly in the wake of the disastrous 1715 rebellion—had lost their own estates and crossed over the Channel as refugees, looking to King James for pensions and financial aid. James repeatedly wrote in his letters of his desire to help them and his frustration at not being able to fulfill what he felt to be an obligation to assist those who had suffered because of their loyalty to him, but “the truth is,” he wrote to the Duke of Ormonde in 1719, “we are in a terrible way as to money matters.”

  Well aware of this, his supporters continued to search for new avenues of income, and while permanent and sustainable ones—such as mines—were highly desirable, no stone was left unturned, and various schemes were proposed.

  The idea of using the stock market was a recurring one. As early as October 20, 1717, Father Graeme (whom any readers of my book The Firebird may recognize as being the son of Colonel Patrick Graeme, who featured in both that book and in The Winter Sea) was writing from Calais to King James’s chief adviser, “Will you only allow a well-wisher to the good cause to put a trick on the stockjobbers by sending over a counterfeit Paris Gazette with news in it to make their stocks either rise or fall, as shall be found most convenient, and you may have a million sterling in a week or two without running any risk?”

  I came across several other examples of similar offers in the correspondence I was reading, but the king invariably turned them down. Nonetheless, his followers continued to intrigue, at times without his knowledge, let alone his blessing.

  By the summer of 1731, it had become apparent to one of the British informers placed in the household of a prominent Jacobite in France that some new plot was in the wind. Several people, including Martin O’Connor, had been traveling with regularity between London and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where they were meeting with General Dillon, who, although he was no longer part of King James’s inner circle, was still a loyal Jacobite and viewed by both the king and those around him as an honest man.

  Whatever General Dillon and O’Connor and his friends were up to, it pushed the bounds of honesty enough that the informer’s Jacobite employer was concerned, and King James—when he learned of it that summer—reportedly wrote to the general himself and instructed him not to proceed with the plan.

  That this plan involved the stock swindle that would give rise to the Charitable Corporation scandal is certainly suggested by the fact that the informer repeated this detail in almost the same words the following April, while writing to his British spymasters about the affair of the Charitable Corporation. “O’Connor and others,” he told them, “have assured me that the Pretender had writ some months ago to the principal people concerned, in a very great Secret, that he could not condescend to such proposals…”

  At any rate, the king’s instructions came too late. The wheels of the scheme were already in motion.

  There were so many people involved in the scandal, and their interconnections and dealings were so intricate and well-concealed, that I could probably spend decades trying to work my way through that labyrinth without ever finding my way to its center. Even now, when I have reached a basic working understanding of the things they did and how they did them, I can’t claim to fully understand their motivation.

  Of the two men who shouldered the bulk of the blame for it—the banker, George Robinson, and the warehouse keeper, John Thomson—I chose to write about Thomson, not only because he left behind a greater wealth of correspondence, but also because the more I read of it, the greater an enigma he became.

  Each time he recounted his role in the Charitable Corporation affair—in his personal correspondence, or in conversation with people he trusted, or in his official testimony to the Parliament committee investigating the scandal—he told a different version of the tale, and I found it increasingly impossible to tell which one, if any, was the truth. With three centuries between us, and without a better knowledge of his character, I could not say with certainty if Thomson was a victim, zealous Jacobite, or fraudster. I chose instead to have him, in this novel, give the varied explanations that he gave in life, pulling his dialogue in those scenes directly from his letters and conversations and leaving it up to the readers to judge, from his own words, which story they ought to believe.

  While I may not know Thomson’s true reasons for getting involved in the stock fraud, I do know for a fact that in October of 1731, reportedly accompanied by Martin O’Connor, he fled London, crossing to France.

  There was, in France, a long established Jacobite network extending from the old court of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to most of the primary cities and towns—Boulogne, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lyon—and of course Paris, where the body of King James VII lay in state at the Church of the English Benedictines in the rue Saint-Jacques, still unburied years after his death, awaiting the restoration of his son to the British throne so the dead king’s body could be given a proper state funeral at Westminster Abbey, within his own kingdom.

  I have no direct evidence Sir Redmond Everard played any part in the move to assist and conceal Thomson that winter, but he was closely connected to some of the people who did, and I found the coincidence of his house being at Chatou—the same town where I’d placed my modern-day characters—too great to let it pass by without using it, just as my discovery of the real-life arrest, imprisonment, and examination of Mrs. Elizabeth Farrand, the Jacobite courier carrying messages between Paris and London, seemed to me the perfect opportunity to give a walk-on part to Anna Jamieson, a favorite fictional character of mine from my novel The Firebird, whose nature made it likely she’d have stepped in to take up the dropped baton of Mrs. Farrand. It was also in keeping with Anna’s nature that, once on the page, she decided to turn that walk-on part into a proper cameo appearance and leave a more meaningful stamp on the story line.

  By the time of Mrs. Farrand’s arrest by the British, John Thomson had been hiding in France for three months, and the British ambassador in Paris, James Waldegrave, had been doing what he could to have him found and brought to justice.

  Waldegrave was, interestingly enough, a grandson of King James VII by one of his mistresses, which made Waldegrave’s mother King James VIII’s half sister—but while he was not above using his family connections to gain information, paying visits to his uncle the Duke of Berwick at Saint-Germain-en-Laye from time to time, there is no indication he felt sympathetic at all to the Jacobite cause. On the contrary, he had a far-reaching web of informers and spies used to counter their efforts. He put them to use in hunting for Thomson.

  There were, in that winter, no certain reports of where Thomson was actually staying. Waldegrave’s spies reported having seen him in a hired coach in November and speculated that he was staying with the Jacobite Abbé Dunn at Boynes, south of Paris—which he probably was, since some of his papers were later discovered there and in January one of his associates claimed to have visited him in a little village outside Paris.

  But by the thirtieth of January, Thomson was writing to a colleague in London: “Write but seldom for three months, and expect to hear but seldom from me in that time…” And a letter he wrote to his cousin in Edinburgh, dated that same day, was written from Paris.

  So I put him in Paris.

  One of the difficulties of doing research in this period, incidentally, is that at the time, England was still using the Old Sty
le calendar while France and Italy used the New Style, so when the newspapers in England announce on the ninth of the month that someone is setting out for France, that person is actually setting out on the twentieth in the New Style, which adds eleven days. For the sake of simplicity I kept all the dates in this novel in New Style, as my characters would have used them on the Continent.

  In Paris, I chose to put Thomson on the rue du Coeur Volant for three reasons. First, that particular street had changed little since 1732, allowing me to visit it, stand where my characters would have been standing, and gain what impressions I could, which is always an integral part of my research. Second, because the real-life timing of that part of the story meant events would be happening at the same time as the annual Fair—the old Foire Saint-Germain—I deliberately chose a street close to the Fair site, so it could be used in the story. And finally, the rue du Coeur Volant was very close to where George Robinson—John Thomson’s fellow fugitive—had stayed while he was hiding out in Paris (at the Petit Hôtel de Normandy in the rue Taranne).

  For descriptions of the city at the time, I turned primarily to memoirs of the travelers who stayed in Paris in the early eighteenth century and who thoughtfully recorded all the fascinating details they observed, from public executions to the lamps that hung above the streets. As is my custom, I tried when I could to move my characters within existing dates and real events—the pantomime they go to watch (the evening Mary’s gloves are stolen, when she first encounters Hugh) was actually performed on that one evening: Wednesday, February 13, and its plot is detailed in a French newspaper of that month. While such minor things might be of little importance to most of my readers, they help me to anchor my characters, real and imagined, within their historical landscape.

  Because Thomson, whenever he’d been spotted somewhere in France by the British ambassador’s spies, had been always in company with noted Jacobites, never alone, I considered it very unlikely he would have been left on his own while in Paris.

  I gave him Mary, with her imagined former nurse, Effie, to help with his camouflage and, for added protection, created a bodyguard for him in the person of the fictional Hugh MacPherson.

  Just as Mary Dundas stands, in part, as an example of the displaced second generation of Jacobites, born in exile and without a land to truly call their own, so Hugh MacPherson represents the many Highlanders who left their homes to fight for James, and paid a higher price than most.

  Hugh’s story, as told by the Earl Marischal, is entirely true, in its various parts. It was drawn, down to the burning of the cottage and the loom, from the memoirs and letters and firsthand accounts I read in my research, and while I cannot say with certainty that all those things happened to one man, I can say in honesty all of them happened.

  Hugh’s surname was intentionally chosen to place him with a family of MacPhersons from near Inverness whose names are recorded as being among those men captured at Preston and transported to the Americas and the West Indies for seven years’ slavery.

  As for Hugh’s Highland dress, worn to the meeting with King James in Rome, although standard clan tartans weren’t used in those days, I made Hugh’s plaid, in pattern and colors, identical to the one worn by a previous MacPherson chief, in a portrait painted a few years earlier.

  Finally, since Highlanders were known to go everywhere heavily armed—it was common for a visitor to the Highlands in those years to see a man “walking with a dirk and pistol at his side and a gun in his hand”—I allowed Hugh to do likewise, giving him the best gun he would have been able to find on the Continent in 1732.

  I was surprised to find in my research that the first rifle was reportedly invented by Gaspard Zollner of Vienna as early as the fifteenth century. In 1498, at a Leipzig competition, most of the marksmen reportedly used rifles—guns with grooves cut into the inside of the barrels to improve accuracy—although those grooves appear to have remained straight until the use of spiral rifling began to take hold around 1620. By the mid-1600s, companies of chasseurs, or riflemen, had been incorporated into most of the armies of what is now Germany, and by the end of that century their use had begun to spread, but in 1742, they were still enough of a novelty outside mainland Europe that Benjamin Robins, writing in his book The New Principles of Gunnery, felt it necessary to write of rifles: “…these pieces, though well-known on the Continent, being but little used in England; it is necessary to give a short description of their make…”

  Robins’s book makes fascinating reading, as he tries to figure out the scientific reasons why such rifling might make guns shoot with more accuracy. At the end of his book, Robins makes the prescient statement that:

  “Whatever State shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages of rifled barrel pieces, and…shall introduce into their armies their general use with a dexterity in the management of them; they will by this means acquire a superiority, which will…perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects which histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors of firearms.”

  The English army didn’t formally adopt the use of the rifle until 1794.

  The rifle Hugh carries is a duplicate of an actual circa 1730 sporting rifle sold at auction at Christie’s in 2009.

  It might have proven useful while he was guarding Thomson in Paris, as the danger I describe was real. Even though the French police were apparently in the pay of the Jacobites, a fact bemoaned by Waldegrave in his letters to his superiors, the bounty on Thomson was a large one, and attempts were being made to find and capture him.

  I made use of this reality to set them on the road south.

  The journey from Paris to Rome was a commonplace one in those days, part of the established path of the “Grand Tour” many British tourists traveled at the time. Most of them either brought their own coaches across the Channel or hired one when they reached the Continent, but a very few used the public transportation of the diligences, both of land and water, and the coches d’eau.

  Conveniently for me, the routes and schedules of the diligences and their stopping places are preserved within the “Almanach [sic] Royal” for 1732 (a new one was printed each year), which lists also the feast days and saints’ days, the hours the sun and moon rose and set each day, and myriad other small details that helped me re-create the trip as accurately as I could.

  Diligences were built to carry ten people inside, and even in winter it would have been unlikely for my characters to be the only passengers, so I created traveling companions for them.

  I also created a villain.

  It’s one of my personal quirks that I can’t make a person a villain unless I’m convinced, from the records available, that’s what he was. However long dead these people might be, they were—and remain—people first, and as such they deserve to be written about with respect.

  The friend “by the name of Erskine” mentioned by Stevens as planning an attempt to seize Thomson in Paris was in fact William Erskine, accused of planning such an attempt in early March, forcing the British ambassador Waldegrave to reassure the French authorities his government “did not encourage the practice of carrying people off by stealth.”

  But it’s impossible to tell from the surviving documents whether Erskine was indeed working for the British or for the Jacobites or, as he claimed, on behalf of a kinsman owed money by Thomson. I can’t even be sure which William Erskine he was, as there were several men of that name mentioned in the correspondence of the time.

  So instead of making him my villain, I created Stevens.

  But the wolves were real.

  I read about them in Some Observations Made While Travelling through France, Italy, &c., In the Years 1720, 1721, and 1722, In Two Volumes, by Edward Wright, Esq., printed at London in 1730—one of the travel accounts that I read in the course of my research. A bibliography of those accounts would stretch to several pages, but Wright’s was one of my favorit
es, along with The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie (edited by Robert Scott-Moncrieff, WS, and printed at Edinburgh by the University Press for the Scottish Historical Society in 1911), which chronicles a tour that lady made of Europe from 1731 to 1733, meticulously noting the exchange rates between the French louis d’or and the British pound as she went, and giving helpful tips such as how to smuggle your Protestant prayer book past the customs men at Rome.

  These books and many others allowed me to re-create a landscape that, in some cases, no longer exists.

  At Valence, for example, I was able to lodge my characters at the same inn, which was fondly remembered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions and, although long lost, is well described in the Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published in 1905 at Geneva.

  Beyond that point, I remained conscious of the need to keep my travelers away from the common path of the tourists, especially avoiding Avignon—a city under the protection of the pope—where there was a sizable Jacobite community and, consequently, a number of Waldegrave’s spies.

  Beginning in Marseilles, however, I had a written account of what Thomson said and did to go by, provided by the British informer Thomas Cole.

  The aliases I gave to Thomson and the others for their time in Paris and the first part of their journey south were fictional, but from Thomas Cole’s letters I know for a fact that Thomson came to Marseilles that spring traveling under the name “Mr. Symonds.” I also know he met the banker, Mr. Warren, who had been expecting him.

  I altered facts in one regard, by having Thomson meet Mr. Cole at the same time, when in actual fact it appears the two men didn’t meet until later on that summer, when Thomson returned to Marseilles on his way back from Rome. Introduced by Warren, Cole became friendly with Thomson and promptly sold all the information he’d learned (and continued to learn) from their conversations to Waldegrave. Mr. Cole became such a success as a British spy that he went from simply reporting what he’d learned to actively trying to “trap” individuals, a policy that backfired upon him rather spectacularly in 1735, when a man he informed against to the police turned the tables and claimed Cole had been his accomplice. Cole was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to the galleys. I cannot say I did not find that justice.