Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  That James’s action was contentious and controversial can be seen from Edgar’s comments a week later. It was ever Edgar’s role to pour oil on troubled waters and even to rewrite history for his master’s benefit, but there is a definite air of protesting too much in his letter to Kelly on the subject.53 Why else should he have found an apparently trivial matter so troublesome?

  The anticlimactic and even depressing sequel to the prince’s grand tour was reinforced the following year with the death from consumption of the duke of Berwick (June 1738).54 Berwick was the only Jacobite of the first rank, both socially and politically, who was a genuine admirer of the prince, who both loved and respected him. Berwick made an admirable father/authority figure for Charles Edward and his loss was incalculable. He might have filled the gap that James could never fill. The inability of the prince to form a proper relationship with his father was to have profound and disastrous consequences in the future. Because he could not ‘have it out’ with aloof and forbidding James, the prince was unable to find a middle path between anger and submission. This meant that he was later incapable, at moments of crisis, of the patient argumentation and reasoning that might have won over doubters. As Derby and Falkirk were later to show, the prince had just two gears: rage or dumb capitulation. At moments of extreme stress it was usually the former that prevailed. Yet the prince can scarcely be blamed for his father’s failure as a parent. Faced with the same sheer cliff wall of cold duty, Henry solved the problem by internalisation through religious mania.

  Charles Edward continued to hone his physical faculties to a fine point against the day when he would be called on to play a great part in the world. His dedication on this point, amid the competing temptations of the Roman fleshpots, shows him at his strongest, almost the morality of strenuousness personified. According to the Jesuit Julio Cordara who knew him well, the prince disliked Rome precisely because only the arts of peace and pleasure were practised there.55 This was no place for the aspiring warrior.

  So the prince steeled himself for war by the rigours of the chase. He made it a point of honour to penetrate the densest wood or the most desolate heath in all weathers. At sunset he would return, scorched by the sun or frozen by the cold. In conscious emulation of the Ancient Romans, he trained himself to endure all hardships. So skilled did the prince become in woodcraft that later, while a fugitive in Scotland, he amazed his followers by being able to lure plovers within the range of his guns by imitating the bird’s call.56

  His companion on many of these expeditions was Father Vinciguerra, later Bendict XIV’s secret chaplain. Vinciguerra encouraged the prince to believe that the Christian warrior had to undergo the hardships of wind, rain, snow, poor food, sleeping on straw, etc. to gain God’s support for his mission.57 One might be tempted to call Charles Edward’s monomania a ‘Galahad complex’ but for the unwarranted connotation of virginity. Of the prince’s sexual career during these years, or even if there was one, we know nothing. His private life in Rome is a total blank.58

  So Charles Edward’s late teens and early twenties dissolve into a succession of hunting parties: at Palo, at Lamentana, and especially on the duke of Caserta’s estates at Cisterna.59 Some of the tallies for the caccia make the prince seem a veritable Nimrod; certainly his ability as a marksman was never in doubt.60 The only Achilles heel in this body of physical accomplishments was that the prince never learned to swim, much to his cost later in Scotland. This was wholly a cultural matter: sea-bathing had not yet come into vogue in Italy.61

  There is no question but that Charles Edward thrived on his Spartan regime. James, proud of being taller than Dunbar, noted with a mixture of pride and misgiving that his son was already as tall as his tutor and bidding fair to overtop him.62 When Lord Elcho (born 1721) came to Rome on the Grand Tour in October 1740, James made him stand back-to-back with his son; to his delight James found Charles Edward much taller.63

  In view of the prince’s later problems with his health, it may be instructive to ask at this point how his constitution stood up to this rigorous testing. In April 1739 James claimed that his son had inherited his weak stomach, but it is clear that the slight disorder suffered on that occasion was the advance guard of the virus that brought him and his brother out in chickenpox the following month.64 Apart from minor ailments and a bad toothache in August 1741, the chickenpox comprised the sum total of illness in the period 1737–44.65 Given the many illnesses the prince was to suffer during the ’45, there is at least a prima facie case for saying that his physical constitution was naturally very robust, and that he succumbed to illness mainly in times of stress.66

  But if the prince was keying himself to concert pitch in physicality, his mental life was not developing at an equal pace. After 1737 the sole reference to intellectual interests comes in the form of an order for a book of Ancient History, doubtless to read up on the heroes of antiquity he wished to emulate.67 The sole ‘civilised’ pursuit in which Charles the mighty hunter took an interest was music, both as listener and performer.68 He was an accomplished cellist. One of his favourite pieces was Corelli’s Notte di Natale (the Christmas Concerto, Concerto Grosso No. 8 in G Minor) which he and Henry (on violin) played for the French traveller Charles de Brosses in 1740.69 And the prince clearly enjoyed the theatre and the opera.70 His theatre-going became particularly assiduous in the period 1741–3, after his majority, when his patronage of a particular theatre would help to make it popular. One of his favourites (and Henry’s too) was the Teatro Aliberti. Four operas there were dedicated to the Stuart princes and enjoyed great popularity.71 More rarely, the Stuarts would commission fresh settings of an opera. This involved new arrangements and libretti, with original arias expressly written for the local singers, and the entire work adapted to fit local conditions; in extreme cases new music would be written to accommodate a famous prima donna or an idiosyncratic local conductor.72 In addition, the exiled Stuarts were alone in Rome in enjoying the privilege of having an aria repeated during the opera, a privilege they exercised in the case of their favourite pieces at the Aliberti.73

  Charles Edward’s other much-loved social activity was dancing. The great reputation he had acquired on the 1737 Italian tour followed him to Rome. The early months of 1739, when the prince was eighteen, were a vintage period. Within a seven-day period Charles Edward attended two sumptuous balls, for the princes of Saxony and Poland (at the latter he danced until 6 a.m.).74 The rest of the evenings in the same week he spent at the Clementi theatre.75 In 1740 his terpsichorean skills were observed by a number of foreign visitors. On the 14th of May both Horace Walpole and the poet Thomas Gray attended an élite ball in Rome where James and his two sons were the guests of honour.76 Music was provided by the contemporary celebrities La Diamantina, Giovanni and Pasqualini.77

  Two months later Gray was at the Villa Patrizi for a ball given to Prince and Princess Craon.78 Gray was impressed, rather against his will by both the Pretender’s sons: ‘They are good fine boys, especially the younger, who has the more spirit of the two, and both danced incessantly all night long.’79

  But perhaps the prince’s finest moment in Roman society was the great ball given in Cardinal Rohan’s summer palace, the Palazzo Pamphili in the Piazza Navona, in February 1741. This was on a vast scale. The usual boundaries between the three drawing rooms and the three playing rooms were discarded. There was a sixty-piece orchestra; the Cardinal himself held court in a hall of mirrors.80 Roman high society was out in force for the (literally) glittering occasion. Their fine ladies dripped with precious stones. Yet the show was stolen by Charles Edward, attired in Highland dress and sporting a cluster of jewels that dimmed the lustre of the many fine pieces already there.81 These jewels were valued at 40,000 scudi and were alleged to have been part of a sumptuary courtship display aimed at winning the hand of the Princess of Massa. Jewels of this quality were unavailable in Italy, and there was a subtle symbolism involved in their display on this occasion, since it suggested that the S
tuarts had access to wealth and craftsmanship beyond the reach of the Roman nobility.82 Just as the jewels surpassed in beauty anything made in Italy, so were the Stuarts meant to overtop the local grandees. There could be no doubting their success that evening.

  5

  Falling backward

  (1739–42)

  HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY IS a seductive doctrine. From the standpoint of the twentieth century it is easy to make the mistake of seeing the Jacobite movement as inevitably doomed, and the Jacobite risings as mere ‘local difficulties’ along the line of march of a triumphant Hanoverian succession. Both the ‘Whig theory of history’, championed by Macaulay and his successors, and the Namierite orthodoxy that supplanted it in the twentieth century, consigned Jacobitism to the waste bin of history, the former explicitly, the latter by implication. It is only in very recent years that scholars have come to appreciate the gravity of the threat posed to the Whig/Hanover system by the exiled Stuarts.1

  The revisionist view depends largely on shedding preconceptions and judgments by hindsight and returning to the original sources. If we view the period up to 1750 not through the distorting lens of nearly two hundred and fifty years of later history but as seen by contemporaries, a very different picture of the importance of Jacobitism emerges. From politicians at the apex of the élite, like Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Chesterfield and Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, we discern an anxiety about the Jacobite threat amounting at times almost to hysteria. This is reflected in the work of the literary jackals who paid deference to these lions, especially Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe.

  The Hanoverian dynasty, and its unflinching ally in Parliament from 1715–61, the Whigs – the party of Walpole, the Pelhams and the elder Pitt – knew that it was vulnerable to the Jacobite challenge on a number of grounds. The German kings were widely unpopular, their culture alien, their interests continental. It was the received opinion of the time that English foreign policy was almost entirely a function of the interests of the German state of Hanover. Walpole’s system of patronage – ‘Old Corruption’ – bought off some critics, but not nearly enough. Its benefits were restricted to a small élite. Excluded was not just the gentry but the mass of the ‘middling sort’ of people. The social basis of the Whig/Hanoverian ascendancy was tenuous and precarious.

  Moreover, on ideological grounds the supporters of the Hanoverian status quo could not discredit Jacobitism effectively.2 The Whig prescription of political quietism recommended to its critics was refuted by the behaviour of the founding fathers of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688. The very powerful ‘Country’ critique of Whig corruption used by the Tories and other political dissidents inside England was endorsed and co-opted by the Jacobites. The Jacobites, too, had the attraction that they advanced beyond merely abstract denunciation of the Walpole political system and held out the hope that they might actually destroy it. The one trump card Walpole and the Hanoverian kings held was the Stuarts’ religion. Anti-Catholicism was a powerful bugbear which Walpole’s propagandists never ceased to exploit, even though one of the more ingenious black propagandists, Defoe, himself admitted that he knew of ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would shed the last drop of their blood against popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.3

  The older historical view held that Walpole cynically played the Jacobite card for his own ends throughout the twenty years of his hegemony (1721–42), that he had no real fear of Jacobitism, that, moreover, the Whigs genuinely feared the ‘popery’ and ‘arbitrary tyranny’ of the Stuarts. The newer ‘revisionist’ view demonstrates that Walpole was not bluffing: he really did fear the Jacobites and all their works, and his fear had a much more solid basis than the religious scruples to which he and his acolytes paid lip-service.

  Walpole’s state was poised between an older landed class declining in power and a new rising aristocracy of money. It was thus in that limbo later memorably dubbed the ‘half-state’, not yet strong enough to beat off all challengers. The peculiar fear held by all beneficiaries of this inchoate capitalist system was that the Stuarts, if restored to power, would dismantle it in all three of its aspects, agrarian, financial and commercial. Not only would a triumphant Catholic dynasty have to do something about former church lands. It would surely also cancel the national debt, thus ruining fundholders, and would make commercial concessions to France in India and America as the price of Bourbon help in the Jacobite restoration.4

  The fears entertained by the Hanoverian élite had a firm basis in fact. It was no secret that Scotland had been extraordinarily discontented ever since the 1707 Act of Union, especially since the expected benefits of opening colonial trade to Scottish merchants had not yet materialised. Ireland was a simmering cauldron, controlled by a mixture of carrot and stick: draconian penal laws whose importance was in their bite rather than their bark, since the Catholic gentry was co-opted by the very lax implementation of those penal laws.5 Add to this the endemic riots and discontents of mainland England – disturbances which were often legitimised by reference to ‘King James’6 – and it can well be appreciated that Walpole and his followers often felt themselves to be perched on the edge of a rumbling volcano. Those who supported the Hanoverian dynasty genuinely feared the Jacobite threat, and they were right to do so.

  But the Jacobites in turn threw away most of their chances. The failure of the 1715 rising was followed by an even greater fiasco in the rising of 1719. The year 1722 saw the failure of the important Layer/Atterbury plot in England. And any chance of constructing a grand European alliance against England was ruined for James in 1725 when Clementina left him. The credibility of the Jacobite movement was in tatters.

  Then 1726 brought further problems for the Jacobites. France was always the key to restoration of the Stuarts, yet for seventeen years (1726–43) French policy was dominated by Cardinal Fleury, whose foreign policy can be summed up as ‘peace at any price’. André Hercule de Fleury, bishop of Fréjus had been the infant Louis XV’s tutor since 1715. The astute restraint with which he opposed the duc de Bourbon during the latter’s tenure of supreme power in France (1723–6) assured his succession as first minister, as also his elevation to the purple. Fleury’s pacific policies were echoed across the Channel by Walpole’s cautious approach to foreign affairs. After 1727 there was no longer any hope for the Stuarts from Austria, or, after 1730, from Russia.

  Yet, though moribund, Jacobitism did not die. In the years when Charles Edward was growing to manhood, it performed three extremely important functions. For the Tories in England it provided a countervailing ideology and source of inspiration. The proscription of the Tory party after 1715 and the barring of office-holding to its luminaries produced a sense of desperation that could be assuaged with hopes of a Stuart restoration. Walpole’s branding of the Tory party as crypto-Jacobite became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Increasingly the English Tories saw Jacobite rescue as the only way out of an apparently endless sentence in the political wilderness.7

  Second, in the first half of the eighteenth century it was the Jacobite movement that provided the checks and balances against the Whig/Hanoverian system. Curiously, in this way Jacobitism may have helped to head off revolution in England. With no internal brake, French absolutism careered unchecked towards catastrophe at the end of the century. The Hanoverian state, at least until 1760, had to rein in the worst excesses of executive power for fear of the political alternative across the water.8

  Third, Jacobitism as an international force provided the ‘ultimate deterrent’ by means of which continental powers could obstruct British expansionism. It was bad luck for the Jacobites that France was unwilling to confront England during the 1720s and 1730s because England was not yet clearly perceived as the major threat to French global interests.9

  Yet by the late 1730s rumours of war abounded. At the same time, for quite other reasons, discontent began to build in the Highlands, always the Jacobites’ military nucleus. Charles Edward undoubtedly seemed to be the ri
ght man in the right place at the right time.

  The Glenbucket mission to Rome in 1737–8 is sometimes credited with being the first cause in a chain of events that eventually precipitated the 1745 rising.10 John Gordon of Glenbucket brought James word that the Highlands were in a ferment, that now was the time for a combined operation: a Jacobite rising in Scotland and a French invasion of England. James responded by sending one of his aides, William Hay, to Scotland on an intelligence mission. Hay was introduced into Scottish Jacobite circles by John Murray of Broughton (who had met Charles Edward in Rome in 1737 and was later to be his secretary during the ’45). An association of Scottish Jacobites was formed, including Lord John Drummond senior, the duke of Perth, Lord Lovat, Lord Linton (later earl of Traquair), Donald Cameron of Lochiel and William MacGregor of Balhaldy. In the early 1740s the most important of these was Balhaldy, for on instructions from James he went to Paris to work in harness with the Stuart agent Lord Sempill.

  James, who had always complained bitterly about Jacobite factionalism, helped to compound it by employing O’Brien and Sempill as parallel agents, now confiding his most secret dealings with the French to one, now to the other. But it is clear that Sempill and Balhaldy, largely by ‘expedient exaggerations’ forced the pace of Jacobite negotiations with Fleury along more forcefully than the sobersided and diplomatic O’Brien. Under their prompting, Fleury’s first instinct was to trigger a Jacobite rising in the Highlands, using Spanish troops.