Ragged Lion

by Allan Massie

  When he became Regent, with Fox dead and Sheridan in decline, he deserted the Whigs, for which they never forgave him. Indeed his support for the Tory ministry and his determination to prosecute the war against Napoleon à l’outrance was the chief cause of the Whig bile which to a great extent accounted for his unpopularity. Thinking they had been deceived by him, they did not scruple to deceive the world concerning him. In old age his Toryism grew more settled, for he feared the levelling tendency of the age, even as I do. The Whigs, by the bye, never lost their initial tenderness for Boney. At Holland House I once heard Lady Holland refer to him as ‘that poor dear man’. Since I was her guest, I kept silent, but with some difficulty.

  His virtues inspired affection, even tepid affection, rather than loyalty, and his vices an easy contempt. Though he had dignity and presence, no one ever feared him. He was denied any opportunity to display martial courage, which I think he would have had, though I am certain that his direction of any army would have been as incompetent as his brother York’s proved to be. His claim to have led a cavalry charge at Waterloo – and I am told, latterly, at Salamanca also – suggests that he felt this denial severely. But he lived when the heroic age of Princes was no more. He was a metropolitan creature.

  He could not inspire devotion as Prince Charles Edward did. In exile he might never have roused himself from self-indulgence, and it is impossible to imagine him leading an adventure like the ’45. Whatever may be said against the Prince, the audacity of his enterprise admirably satisfies the test laid down by the great Marquis in the lines:

  He either fears his fate too much,

  Or his deserts are small,

  That dares not put it to the touch,

  To win or lose it all.

  The Prince was a hero to me in my youth, and I still cannot disengage myself from the Romance of his cause. It is true that those who were closest to him thought least well of him, discerning the faults of character – rashness, obstinacy, unwillingness to take good advice, secrecy, selfishness, and a tendency to despair – that were to combine to make his later life such a wretched mockery of the other qualities he displayed in his great year. There is some justice in the view expressed by one Jacobite chief, that they might have set the Prince’s father back on his throne, if the Prince himself had retired to bed and left the management of the campaign in the hands of Lord George Murray. Even more hostile was the verdict of Lord Elcho, who on the melancholy field of Culloden cursed the Prince for ‘a damn’d cowardly Italian’ – which I think unjust.

  The earlier judgement may be questioned, too, for it is doubtful if Lord George, in the absence of any support from the English Jacobites and of the promised landing of French troops, would have advanced as far as Derby; while it remains one of the great imponderables of history, to speculate on what would have happened had the Prince’s will prevailed, and, instead of turning back at Derby, his army had pressed on to London. Reason and good sense counselled withdrawal; but since reason and good sense counselled that the adventure should never have been embarked on, and yet since they had got so far, with unbroken success, they might have been wiser to continue to disregard these warning and doubting voices, and try one more throw of the dice.

  Certainly there was panic in the capital. George II had packed his bags and was prepared to scuttle off to Hanover. No strong feeling of loyalty bound men to the ruling dynasty, and the great Parliamentary lords would, I fancy, have been as quick to accommodate themselves to a change of regime as their great-grandfathers had been in 1688. The Tory squires, who were dinner-table Jacobites, would have welcomed the Prince, initially at least.

  But there’s the rub. Considering the characters of James VIII & III and of the Prince himself, they might have found it even harder to keep their throne than to win it, for there is nothing that suggests that either had the sense or political skill to play the part of a modern monarch. George IV might resist his ministers, as he long did over the issue of Catholic Emancipation where he was in the wrong, but he knew he had to give way in the end. Even his father, as obstinate a man as could be found – except for the Stuarts in male line of descent – eventually acquiesced in the independence of the rebel American colonists. But the Prince would persist in a course even when it had been demonstrated that it must be against his interest, simply because he had determined on it, and others were bold enough to advise against it. Of all his ill-fated family, he most resembled his grandfather James VII & II, who lost the secure throne he inherited from his brother, because he would have his way, and so ignored the warnings which well-wishers offered. Charles II, after his experience of exile, held to only one fixed point: that he would not go on his travels again. The family have been sad wanderers since his brother ignored the implications of Charles’s determination. In exile, James relapsed into a morbid religious superstition, and his disappointed grandson took to the bottle.

  For that he deserves sympathy rather than blame. He was a man whose whole life was concentrated on one object, who had ventured everything on a bold throw; and having lost the game, cared not what else he lost. So he sought oblivion as release from pain and disappointment, and the crapulous old man in Rome’s Palazzo Muti was a far cry from the gallant hero who raised the standard at Glenfinnan, and who answered Lochiel’s advice that he should go home, with the bold words, ‘I have come home’. Then, having been defeated by the despotism of fact, he retreated into the imaginary world which liquor can create. As he lay dying, a piper played ‘Lochaber No More’ in the courtyard below the window of his chamber. His natural daughter Charlotte once found him in tears during a conversation with a visitor, on whom she turned sharply with the words ‘You have been talking to him about his Highlanders . . .’

  Here I am, in my sixtieth year, a man who has seen much, and achieved enough to have won the respect of his fellows, but when I think of the great adventure of the Rising, I become a lad of fourteen or fifteen again. Jeffrey once said to me, ‘Depend upon it, Sir Walter, we would all have stood by King George and the legitimate government had we been alive then. The true hero of those years was the Lord President,’ – Duncan Forbes of Culloden – ‘who first tried to deter men from joining the Prince, and then, after his defeat, to mitigate the severity with which the rebels were treated.’

  ‘I do not accept the word “rebels”,’ I said. ‘A man can rebel only against a government which he accepts as legitimate.’

  ‘As all the chiefs had done,’ Jeffrey said. ‘At any rate they had all sworn oaths of allegiance. Come, Sir Walter, your attachment to the Jacobite cause is unworthy of your own good sense.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ I replied, ‘but I should think the waur of myself if I reneged now.’

  And so I would. At a time when calculation and rationality were commencing to dominate men’s minds, the Prince threw down the challenge of the irrational. That is where the poetry lies, for the poet must ever bring an alternative vision to the character of mind which deals only in profit and loss. I have a profound admiration for Dr Adam Smith, and yet a world that was formed only on his principles would be a dry and barren place, where all emotions are tepid, but greed.

  Fifteen years after Culloden, and as many before Dr Smith’s Wealth of Nations, James Macpherson gave ‘Ossian’ to the world. It was a largely fraudulent production, for while it seems probable that Macpherson drew some of his materials from Gaelic poetry which he received orally, his contention that he had translated an authentic manuscript cannot be sustained, since he defied every attempt to make him produce the original. The case against him cannot be refuted. Yet in some mysterious fashion, Macpherson gave the world what it was longing for; and our national vanity may be flattered by the fact that a remote and almost barbarous corner of Scotland produced a bard who gave a new tone to poetry throughout Europe; a bard who captivated poets and conquerors alike. Napoleon never travelled without Cesarotti’s Italian version of ‘Ossian’ and it solaced him on his way to St Helena. The imperial apartments in
the Tuileries were decorated with huge murals depicting ‘Ossianic’ scenes, which included the bard himself welcoming the ghosts of Napoleon’s soldiers. Now it seems to me that ‘Ossian’ is the poetic equivalent of Jacobitism and the ’45.

  This is why I have insisted on its importance for Scotland. We live in a mercantile age, which is rapidly becoming an industrial one. The progress of our manufactories is wonderful, and must add – has already added – to the comfort of individual life and the wealth of the nation, but if this is all we subscribe to then we shall be diminished.

  I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fox looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round her head. Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers today; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield. Let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day . . .

  That Romantic and melancholy music moved all Europe. If the day comes when it no longer does so, if the day comes when we forget the Prince and the tragedy of Culloden, if we consign Flodden, and further back the Wars of Independence, to a sort of dry as dust History, of no significance, then our own courts will be empty, desolate as the walls of Balclutha.

  18

  Waterloo and Paris, 1815 (written 1830)

  They have taken to keeping things, which they think disturbing, from me, but they cannot conceal what I would wish, at certain moments, to hide from myself: that I am deteriorating fast. My memory is not what it was, and I have had at least one apoplectic fit. Work, which used to be play to me, has now become drudgery. I grind out my new novel, Count Robert of Paris, doggedly, but with no joy in the enterprise. Indeed, almost my sole satisfaction is to think of the inroads I have made on my debts. Let me live to struggle but two or three years more, and then, all will be well, honour redeemed, and I may dwindle to the grave.

  Meanwhile this summer’s new revolution in France has aroused old fears, though at the moment it would seem as if the former Duc d’Orleans, who has assumed the title of King of the French (not France!), has matters in hand and under control. Yet I cannot help thinking that only a few months after the First Revolution broke out in 1789, something of the same sort might have been said. The truth is that when Demos has been stirred from slumber, he is a rare brute to pacify, a thought that alas cannot be got into a Whig head, the absence of which accounts for the manner in which our own Whigs are agitating the very fabric of the State to achieve their own ends. Well, you require the resolution of the old Earl of Angus to bell-the-cat that is democracy.

  The old Bourbon king, Charles X, whom I knew during his previous exile when he was called the Comte d’Artois, has been foolish, but I believe the French would have been wise to thole his foolishness. Once start tinkering with Constitutions, and you have opened up a game which the De’il himself delights to play. Our Government, I am glad to say, has invited him to take up again his old quarters in Holyroodhouse – a bitter home-coming for him, I fear. To my distress this proposal was greeted with hostility in Edinburgh, a mood engendered, I believe, by an ungenerous article in Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review. I thought it my duty to respond briskly, and appeal to the better feeling of those who had so long been my fellow-citizens. I therefore despatched a letter to James Ballantyne’s newspaper, writing as one who had recently left his native city, never to return as a permanent resident; and I recalled that ‘the Frenchman Melinet, in mentioning the refuge afforded by Edinburgh to Henry VI of England, in his distress, records it as the most hospitable town in Europe. It is a testimony’, I said, ‘to be proud of, and sincerely do I hope there is little danger of forfeiting it upon the present occasion.’

  I believe my words had some effect; at any rate His Majesty thanked me for my intervention on his behalf.

  I could not but reflect, considering his woeful position, on how I had seen him, proudly restored to France, with his brother Louis XVIII, in 1815, and, doing so, recall the expedition I made with Alexander Pringle of Whytbank, Robert Bruce – both fellow members of the Faculty of Advocates – and my young kinsman John Scott of Gala, to the Field of Waterloo, and then Paris, less than two months after the great victory had been won. Happy days, when I had health and vigour and a desire, an insatiable curiosity, to see everything that was to be seen.

  Waterloo made an ineffaceable impression on me. I delighted in plotting the arrangement of the battle, and in collecting souvenirs from the terrible field. Yet even while my heart throbbed with pride as I contemplated the courage and glory of my countrymen, even while I enthusiastically garnered every anecdote and memory that came my way of the great battle, I felt my old boyish enthusiasm for war seep away; and though I have from time to time rekindled it while describing military prowess in my novels, the sight of that field compelled me to feel the misery and brutality of war, far outmatching its splendour. What a business it is that a poor lad from Ettrick or Yarrow should bayonet a peasant boy from Gascony all because a Napoleon must needs be a great man! War is glorious only when seen at a distance; the reality is blood, terror, the screams of the dying, confusion, waste. Of course there is magnificence too, for nothing so surely tests the quality of a man. But now, in tremulous age, I cannot but ask myself whether such tests are necessary. Is war, or the desire for war, an ineradicable part of man’s nature?

  The moral questions it raises cannot be easily answered. There are moments in a nation’s life when there seems to be no alternative. ‘Wha would be a traitor knave, Wha sae base as live a slave?’ And yet, I find myself wondering whether my Quaker ancestor may not have had the wisdom of it. But if so, are good men to submit to evil? I have observed that a sombre look crosses the Duke of Wellington’s face when he talks of battle.

  It was strange to breakfast at an inn on the outskirts of the Forest of Soignes, where the Duke himself had slept the stormy night before the battle. It was near there that his gallant quartermaster, Colonel Sir William de Lancey, recently married to the daughter of an Edinburgh acquaintance of mine, fell, struck by a cannon-ball; then to see the tree, beside which Wellington surveyed some stages of the struggle, also scorched by cannon. The battlefield itself still gave horrid evidence of the fight. I was shown a sort of precipitous gravel-pit into which our heavy dragoons had forced a great number of Napoleon’s cuirassiers who lay there, a still living and struggling mass of men and horses, piled together in common destruction. The shattered state of the neighbouring farmhouses also offered vivid testimony to the desolation caused by war, and around the little chateau of Hougoumont, the stench of putrefying corpses showed us that the burial of the slain had been but imperfectly and hastily performed.

  Yet parts of the ground were already being ploughed by the Flemish peasants – living proof of how the work of the world continues beyond the mischief that men do – and I consoled myself for the evidence of cruel waste by the reflection that the corn which must soon wave there would remove from the face of nature the melancholy traces of war, and so tranquillity would be restored, and even the dead might lie easy in quiet earth. When Byron visited the battlefield the following year, this transformation had been completed, and he acknowledged it in one of the most beautiful of his verses, which I cannot deny myself the pleasure of recalling:

  There have been tears and breaking hearts for thee,

  And mine were nothing had I such to give;

  But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree,

  Which living waves where thou didst cease to live,

  And saw around me the wide field revive

  With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring

  Come forth her work of gladness to contrive,

  With all her reckless birds up on the wing,

  I turned from all she brought to those she could not bring . . .

  As my survey of the
battlefield continued, I found myself victim to a confused admixture of emotions, such as, I believe, the contemplation of war and the field of strife must provoke in anyone who lays claim to intelligence and sensibility. On the one hand I was lost in admiration of man’s courage and ability to endure. On the other I longed for the day when the prophecy of Isaiah shall be fulfilled, and ‘nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’

  ‘O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord.’

  That evening, returned to Brussels, our hostess, Mrs Gordon, presented me with a manuscript collection of French songs found on the battlefield. It still bore traces of blood and clay, and I could not but reflect that it had probably been the possession of a young French officer who – the nature of the songs persuaded me – young and gay and caring little for the merits of the quarrel on which he was engaged, perhaps considered the war which was to determine the fate of Europe as but an agreeable, natural, and animating exchange for the pleasures of Paris, which he should find as a result all the sweeter on his return. But that was not to be, and I was saddened by the contrast between the light and airy quality of the songs, the hours of mirth and ease which they promised, with the circumstances in which the booklet was discovered, trampled in the blood of the writer, and then cast aside by those who had come to despoil and strip him on the field where he lay. I fancied that he was a flower of a French forest, one of the brave, who ‘foucht aye the foremost’, and who now, like the sons of Ettrick and Yarrow, ‘lay cauld in the clay’.

  Of all the remains of Waterloo which came into my possession, I count none more precious than this, or more moving in the involuntary associations it must arouse.