by Frank McLynn
Thirsting for action, Charles welcomed the coming of a general European conflict in 1740, when the War of Austrian Succession broke out. For three years he waited patiently for England to be sucked into warfare with France, which would give him the chance he was waiting for. The opportunity came in the winter of 1743–4. In January 1743 Cardinal Fleury died, and the 32-year-old Louis XV, at last emerging from his shadow, made it clear that from now on he was the prime decision-maker in France. Piqued by English provocations both in Europe and around the world, Louis laid a master plan for a surprise invasion of England without a declaration of war. He began by sending his master of horse James Butler on a reconnaissance tour of England to gauge the strength of the Stuart party there. Butler reported favourably.13 Louis now had to implement the most difficult part of his plan. He had somehow to incite the Jacobites in Britain to rise simultaneously with the landing of French troops, but faced the dilemma that if he involved James and his son, known to be agog for military glory, this would alert the government in England to his hostile intentions. He therefore asked James in Rome for copies of manifestos and declarations of intent, plus a commission of regency for Charles Edward, against the day he finally decided to give the green light to the cross-Channel invasion; he hinted that this was still about a year in the future. He then intended to land his troops, publish the various Jacobite manifestos and then summon Charles Edward to come to England as Regent. Unfortunately for him, there was more than a whiff of ‘too clever by half’ about this plan and, as often happens in such cases, he became tangled up in the coils of his own deceit. He used a Scottish Jacobite, William MacGregor of Balhaldy, as his go-between for the messages conveyed from Versailles to Rome, informing James that he could not send him a formal letter because of security considerations. James partially took the bait, but Balhaldy had smelt a rat and told Charles Edward of his suspicions.14 The prince had been champing at the bit for months, vainly pleading with his father to let him escape from the Palazzo Muti to the wider world to organise another Jacobite rebellion. He now re-exhorted his father, cajoling Balhaldy to plead on his behalf that that was what Louis XV really wanted. Reluctantly James signed the commission of regency and allowed his son to depart. On 8 January, using a series of elaborate subterfuges to throw Hanoverian spies off the scent (the Palazzo Muti was under permanent surveillance by agents of the British government),15 Charles Edward slipped out of Rome. He would never see his father again and would return to the Eternal City only when James died in 1766.
After a month of incredible adventures in deep midwinter in Italy, on the Mediterranean coast and in France, the prince reached Paris on 8 February. His arrival came like a thunderbolt and seriously disconcerted the French ministers, whose elaborate planning for the invasion of England was already running into difficulties. 15,000 troops had been assigned to the task, under the command of France’s greatest soldier, Maurice, Comte de Saxe. The invasion force was assembling in the northern ports of Gravelines and Dunkirk, ready to cross the Channel in flat-bottomed boats as soon as it was certain that the Royal Navy could not intervene, and the English Jacobites had sent pilots to guide the French armada through the tricky Thames estuary. To ensure success French Admiral Roquefeuil was given the task of sortieing from Brest and luring the British fleet under Admiral Sir John Norris down the Channel towards the western approaches; the invasion force would then proceed to a landfall at Maldon in Essex.16
Everything then seemed to go wrong at once. First the English Jacobites switched their desired landfall from Maldon to Blackwall a few miles from London, which meant that extra pilots had to be found. Then the first pilot sent to France to coordinate operations unaccountably got lost and landed further down the coast from Dunkirk; unable to speak any French he floundered around hopelessly for a few days before returning to England. Then Saxe decided that even if the Brest fleet was successful he still needed an escort of warships across the Channel, leading Roquefeuil to divide his forces and send one squadron back to Saxe. Next Admiral Roquefeuil notified Saxe that he had successfully decoyed the Royal Navy and the coast was clear, but immediately countermanded the signal to say that he had not been able to dupe Norris, who was now retreating towards Gravelines. Almost incredibly, while this welter of confusion was taking place, the prince suddenly arrived in Paris. The victim of his own Machiavellianism, Louis XV was forced to treat the uninvited interloper as an honoured guest. But the British government was not deceived. So far Saxe had had the element of surprise on his side, and the authorities in London had not had an inkling that an invasion was afoot.17 The arrival of the Stuart prince let the cat out of the bag, for his advent could mean only one thing. Both Saxe and the ministers fumed that the Stuart prince’s blundering onto the scene at that precise moment effectively destroyed their plans, and ever afterwards claimed that the Jacobites themselves by their ineptitude had destroyed the best-ever chance of a Stuart restoration.
None of this weighed with Charles Edward. He barely took the time to recover his strength before he was on the road to Gravelines. Once on the coast he became involved in furious altercations both with Saxe and the Earl Marischal, who had never liked the prince. Marischal additionally was a prima donna and a defeatist. When Charles Edward furiously denounced Saxe to what he thought was a cabal of sympathisers, Marischal spoke up for Saxe. Meanwhile events in the Channel seemed to be reaching a crisis as Roquefeuil and Norris prepared to give battle. Suddenly, on the afternoon of 7 March, both fleets were hit by a force-twelve storm; the wind speeds were of hurricane strength. Eighteen of Norris’s warships were badly damaged, but Roquefeuil managed to slip anchor and run before the wind to Brest, sustaining only minor damage. The real devastation occurred in Gravelines and Dunkirk. Eleven transports and many smaller craft were wrecked and, worse, six months’ supplies and materiel destroyed, along with anchors and tackle. Saxe wrote to Versailles to request permission to abandon the invasion, which obviously could not now take place. Even as he awaited the answer, a second ferocious storm on 11 March delivered the coup de grâce to his shipping. Saxe coldly informed the Stuart prince that the expedition had been cancelled.18
It was now that the prince revealed one of his most serious weaknesses: he was no diplomat or politician, and never learned to take no for an answer once he had set his mind on something. The abandonment of the invasion scheme was the only sensible course in the circumstances, but Charles chose to see it as an example of French perfidy and treachery; never afterwards would he trust Louis XV and his ministers. The French were far from blameless: they had been tardy, inept and incompetent, with even the great Saxe scarcely appearing to advantage. Yet, as Saxe reasonably pointed out, he was no Aeolus who could command the winds. The prince would have none of it. Learning that Norris’s fleet had reformed and was again barring the way across the Channel, he asked Saxe and the ministers in Versailles how even a so-called ‘Protestant wind’ could disperse the French armada yet leave the Royal Navy intact.19 His angry missives caused serious embarrassment at Versailles. Louis XV ‘solved’ the problem by ordering the prince away from the coast to live incognito in France, pending a possible second chance at the invasion of England. Charles wrote to his father, fuming at the shabby treatment meted out to him; this time James, who habitually took the side of caution and expediency, agreed that the French behaviour was shoddy. In his internal exile and forced to remain incognito, the prince fumed at French double-dealing and rationalised his rage by visiting Paris on many occasions, though strictly forbidden by Louis from doing so. For more than a year (March 1744–July 1745), he fumed impotently in France, dependent on French money for his very subsistence but loathing everything about the French king and his ministers.20 Gradually Charles Edward convinced himself that he should look for nothing from France and should go it alone. It was now that he revealed himself a most modern figure, a born revolutionary in his thinking. There were three aspects to this. The first was his understanding that the Whig/Hanoverian/Protestant asce
ndancy rested on far too narrow a base; there was a handful of major beneficiaries, but the majority of people in all classes were excluded and alienated. Second there was his voluntarism, the belief that willpower could move mountains and that elan, enterprise and initiative could overcome what looked like insurmountable obstacles. In modern revolutionary terminology we might say that Charles Edward was a believer in ‘subjective conditions’ while his father believed in ‘objective conditions’ (that elusive ‘favourable conjuncture’).21 As the prince rightly saw, one could wait a lifetime for objective conditions and even when they occurred, as in 1743–4, a series of casual chances could still ruin everything; better by far to trust in one’s own star and devise a rolling strategy, a snowball of accelerating momentum. The second original facet of the prince’s thinking anticipated some of Lenin’s thinking. Lenin believed that revolution had to take place in the most advanced European countries, but later modified his theories to accommodate the situation in Russia in 1917 and then posited that it did not matter if the revolution broke out first in a backward country as long as the advanced nations then joined in the revolutionary moment.22 Similarly, Charles Edward accepted that a French invasion followed by a Jacobite rising in Britain was the best-case scenario. It followed that his destination must be Scotland, for in the Highlands the tradition of bearing arms was an everyday business, and many of the clan chiefs were Jacobite, so that he would have a ready-made army. However, he saw no reason why a rising in Britain first should not then trigger the hoped-for French intervention. It is a travesty of his thinking – and really would make him the blockhead some allege him to have been – if he thought a rising in the Highlands unaided would secure him his dreams.
Using the services of a shady Scots banker Aeneas MacDonald, and through him the Paris-based firm of Waters and Son, depending ultimately on the family (Sobieski) jewels in the deposit bank of the Monte de Pietà in Rome, the prince assembled a cache of arms in a warehouse in Nantes amounting to twenty small field pieces, 11,000 guns, 2,000 broadswords and a good quantity of powder, plus a war chest of 4,000 louis d’or in cash. But how to clear it from French ports without alerting the authorities? Charles Edward solved this by recruiting a clique of rich Jacobite exiled ship-owners based in Nantes and St Malo, unscrupulous men who had made fortunes from slave-trading and piracy.23 With their aid, he double-bluffed the Minister of Marine, Comte de Maurepas, into thinking he had rented a ship to convey messages to and from Scotland. Having secured the necessary paperwork to enable him to sail from the port of St Nazaire, he had his secret cache loaded on board and embarked himself with about a dozen retainers, including the famous ‘Seven Men of Moidart’ – actually an assemblage of ne’er-do-well adventurers, crooked counsellors and irresponsible drunks (one of them Aeneas MacDonald).24 At the last moment the doyen of the Jacobite ship-owners, Antoine Walsh, who had pledged himself to convey the prince to Scotland, announced a great coup. He had secured Maurepas’s permission to take 700 of Lord Clare’s regiment of Irish exiles on a privateering expedition – Versailles often authorised such use of manpower to its freebooters who operated under letters of marque; as in all eras the dividing line between privateering and piracy was thin. Walsh agreed that Charles Edward could take the 700 to Scotland as the nucleus of an army and an earnest of the French government’s good faith.25 He had gulled the French government and now proposed gulling the Scottish leaders as well. Walsh and Charles Edward laid their final plans. The adventurers would rendezvous at Nantes under assumed names, proceed to St Nazaire and board the frigate Doutelle. They would then sail to the island of Belle-Isle near Quiberon in Brittany, where a more powerful warship, the Elisabeth, would be waiting to embark Clare’s regiment. Together the two ships would then stand away for Scotland on a north-westerly track. All went smoothly, and after the rendezvous at Belle-Isle on 12 July and final preparations, the two vessels put to sea on 16 July. So far luck had been with the adventurers, but on 20 July came a near-fatal blow to the enterprise. A British warship, HMS Lion, intercepted them, and a dreadful, pounding battle raged for four hours until sunset. Technically, the Elisabeth was the victor, as she forced the stricken Lion to return to Plymouth, but she herself was disabled and unable to continue. Even worse, she was listing so badly that she was unable to heave to to allow Walsh to transfer the men of Clare’s regiment to the Doutelle, which had lain out of range of the English guns during the battle and was thus unscathed. Forced to return to Brest, she bore away with her not only Charles Edward’s embryonic army but 1,500 muskets and ammunition and 1,800 broadswords.26 A lesser spirit than Charles Edward would have abandoned the enterprise there and then.
The prince persevered, and pressed on to Scotland. He had originally intended to land on Mull to be acclaimed by the pro-Jacobite Maclean clan, but the clan chief Sir Hector had been suddenly arrested by the government on suspicion earlier in 1745. It was therefore decided to make landfall in the country of the Clanranald MacDonalds, a Catholic clan in the remote western Highlands. After surviving two bad storms, the prince and party landed on the island of Eriskay on 3 August, one of the most impoverished of all Hebridean islands. Here Charles was visited by MacDonald of Boisdale, brother of the Clanranald clan chief, who advised him that the great Skye chiefs would not rise for him and that he had better therefore return home. ‘I am come home,’ the prince replied.27 Boisdale shrugged and stressed that none of the Clanranalds would ever serve under the Stuart banner, then curtly departed. There was a clamour among the prince’s supporters for him to cut his losses and return to France, which he was able to beat off mainly with Walsh’s help. Instead, he crossed to the mainland, making a famous landfall at Loch-nan-Uamh in Arisaig. Here young Clanranald, son of the clan leader, visited him and was as discouraging as Boisdale had been. Charles blunted his defeatism by sending him on a mission to the great Skye chiefs to urge them to reconsider. But when they reiterated their refusal to ‘come out’, even Walsh lost heart; the prince was now alone in his desire to continue. It was now that Charles displayed that cunning which always, confusingly, coexisted with his general political naivety. He, so to speak, went under young Clanranald’s head to his younger kinsman Ranald MacDonald. This rash youth declared he would follow the Stuart prince to the ends of the earth even if no other Scotsman drew his sword. The prisoner of traditional clan notions of honour, young Clanranald had no choice but to declare himself also a volunteer. His adherence in turn persuaded the lesser MacDonald chiefs Keppoch and Glencoe to sign on.28 The rolling strategy was beginning to work, but to attain credibility Charles needed the backing of a major clan chief. This he obtained with Donald Cameron of Lochiel. Legend says that Lochiel, a sobersided, ‘improving’ capitalist was seduced by the siren-like magnetism of the prince, but the truth was that Charles Edward persuaded him that France was just waiting to intervene, that Louis XV just needed the flicker of a rebellion in Scotland to win over his recalcitrant ministers. After much soul-searching, Lochiel allowed himself to be persuaded, but he took the precaution of taking security for his estate. The prince gave him an IOU, pledged against the Sobieski jewels (which, unknown to him, his father had already mortgaged). Charles had reached first base, and it was agreed that the Stuart standard would be raised at Glenfinnan on 19 August. Walsh was sent back to France to report the prince’s success.29
After the gathering of the clans at Glenfinnan on the banks of Loch Shiel, Charles and his tiny army of 3,000 men set out to conquer Scotland. He had to jettison his original strategy of capturing all forts and castles because the artillery to accomplish this had gone back to France on the Elisabeth. The untalented John William O’Sullivan, one of the ‘Seven Men of Moidart’, was appointed major-general. Encouraged by messages from the head of the Fraser clan, Lord Lovat (who was playing a double game), Charles decided on the earliest possible battle with the forces of the commander-in-chief in Scotland, Sir John Cope, who had been ordered north from Edinburgh to seek out and destroy the inchoate rebellion. Like sh
ips passing each other in the night, the two small armies (Cope had no more than 3,000 troops) both traversed Corriearack but did not meet. Surprised not to find the enemy in possession of the defile, Cope pressed on north to try to pacify any wavering clans who might be thinking of joining the Jacobites. The Highland army arrived, advanced cautiously, expecting to find Cope waiting for them, reached the other side of the pass and realised, to their great joy, that they were thereby masters of central Scotland.30 From then until the end of the month there was nothing but good news for the Jacobites. One of Charles’s ‘Seven Men’ the de jure Duke of Atholl and titular Marquis of Tullibardine, put his pro-Hanoverian brother (the de facto duke) to shame, and raised the numerous Atholl sept for the Stuarts. Lord Nairne, an important Atholl scion, joined the prince, as did John Roy Stewart, warrior, poet and adventurer, whom Charles commissioned to raise a regiment from among the discontented in the slums of Edinburgh. Another recruit, ambivalent and reluctant at first but later true gold, was Cluny MacPherson, head of the eponymous clan, but he agreed to serve only when the prince granted him the same terms as Lochiel, i.e. full security for his estates.31 On the evening of 4 September, Charles Edward entered Perth and proclaimed his father King James (and himself prince regent). At Perth he was joined by David, Lord Elcho, one of the first of the Lowland lairds to come out, but Elcho donated a shirt of Nessus that would bedevil all future relations with the prince when he made him a loan of 1,500 guineas to tide him over his immediate financial problems. The prince always took the line that this was a variant of a stock-exchange investment, that Elcho stood to gain hugely in the event of a Stuart restoration, but could not expect to be repaid if this failed to occur; Elcho, by contrast, regarded the loan as a commercial transaction, pure and simple.32 While the Jacobite army rested at Perth, more high-profile aristocratic recruits came in with their levies: the Duke of Perth, Robertson of Struan, Lord Strathallan, Oliphant of Gask, Lord Ogilvy (who was immediately made a regimental commander). Finally there arrived the prince’s evil genius: Lord George Murray. An inspired military tactician but a plodding by-the-book strategist, Murray also possessed the most fatal of flaws: he could never get on with the prince. The clash of personalities was of an ancient type: a dour, cold, aloof, blunt-spoken oligarch who prized the truth (as he saw it) above all things and found it impossible to defer like a true courtier was ranged against an extrovert, charismatic, charmer. Murray, like Marischal, had the disadvantage that he was in the same age range as James Francis and the Earl Marischal and, in the prince’s mind, became conflated as a despised authority figure of the kind who could always point out the flaws in any plan and forever see the negative side, while seemingly temperamentally averse to sanguine prospects, geniality and eupeptic optimism. Where the prince was the avatar of ‘subjective conditions’, Murray had an almost pedantic and pedagogic commitment to objective conditions. It was a match made in hell.33
