Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  So far was the prince from showing any signs of leaving the coast that he was talking of going to Scotland by canoe. He had also prepared a formal protest against the abandonment of the expedition for Sempill to present to Amelot.46 From allegedly pro-Jacobite ministers like Tencin the prince was demanding a full explanation for French actions. Tencin was now under fire from two directions: from Louis XV for having allegedly invited the Stuart prince; and from the latter for being lukewarm in his interests. He could do no more than limply protest his continuing devotion to the House of Stuart.47

  The French ministers were already under great pressure to do something about the prince’s defiance. It was in vain that they protested, as they had earlier to the English, that the prince was a creature of whim, who was not under their control and who acted entirely on his own initiative.48 His appearance in France was good enough proof for most people that he came there at the express invitation of Versailles. Although the earlier pressure from the British for his expulsion49 had been shrugged off with the open French declaration of war on England (as soon as the invasion project foundered), there was German opinion to appease. For the time being France had to keep the prince under wraps, in a strict incognito.

  It did not take long for the collective patience of the council of state to run out. The ministers at Versailles had never encountered a phenomenon like Charles Edward before. Maurepas expressed stupefaction that the prince had been written to three times with explicit instructions to proceed to Soissons, but had ignored all three letters.50 This was only the beginning. France was to see much more such behaviour in the next four years.

  The Jacobite representative Daniel O’Brien was prevailed on to write to James, stressing the serious consequences if the prince continued to snub the French court.51 But James had already acted. Knowing his son of old and alarmed at his silence, he decided to send Sheridan, Stafford and two valets-de-chambre into France to join him.52 At the same time he advised Charles to bow his head to the dictates of France.53

  We know from his later correspondence the contempt the prince felt for his father on receiving this advice. It seemed to him, not for the last time, that his father was always prepared to side with his enemies and those who injured him; always to be polite, deferential and diplomatic, never to take a stand of principle. The conflation of his father with Marischal was too easy to resist: both automatically sided with France, took the easy realpolitik view, never contrasted what was with what ought to be. For the moment he was alone; he had not yet hardened himself to oppose his will to that of all comers. He had prepared to be stoical and enduring, expecting that James would support him, especially as he was about his father’s business.54 The disappointment at finding this was not so was acute.

  Faced with the unanimous verdict of all around him that he should yield to France, the prince did so, but with a bad grace. Using the pretext of the duke of Ormonde’s advice – that he would disgust his English friends if he was seen residing at the house of a Roman Catholic bishop55 – Charles Edward did not go to Soissons. Instead he left Gravelines in disguise, making his way slowly to Paris.

  For the first time he experienced the thrill of being a genuine incognito; he was later to acquire a taste for it, to the point where deception and subterfuge became second nature. As he rode south, he took delight in hearing the various rumours about the vanished prince’s whereabouts: ‘Some think him in one place, and some in another, but nobody knows where he is really, and sometimes he is told news of himself to his face, which is very diverting.’56

  Yet if the prince was enjoying himself and saving face (sometimes literally), his father fretted anxiously about his ‘invisibility’.57 Believing, wrongly, that Marischal was now his son’s closest adviser, James sent Sir John Graeme to Paris as a counterweight, in hopes of pulling Charles back on to the path of straightforward duty.58

  At last, having teased his father and the French long enough, the prince threw off the mask and announced to the world that he was in Paris, disingenuously claiming that he was thereby obeying the king of France’s orders.59

  Anyone who queries why Charles Edward should eventually have gone to Scotland alone in 1745 should ponder the prince’s nightmare experience in France in 1744. Proponents of the ‘rash adventurer’ theory should contemplate the chaos into which Charles descended, just weeks after expecting to enter London in triumph. It says much for the prince’s willpower at this period that he did not crack under the strain.

  On any analysis, French treatment of the prince during 1744–5 was despicable. They did not have the political excuses of the 1746–8 period. The ministers made promises and broke them; set deadlines and failed to meet them. They could not even agree on a settled location for the prince’s abode.

  Louis began by making a half-promise that the prince would be allowed to serve with the French army in Flanders, provided he agreed to remain incognito a little longer, perhaps six weeks in all.60 Finance Minister Orry was made the chief conduit for Jacobite affairs. In an interview with Charles, he confirmed that the incognito would cease at the end of July.61 As a consequence the prince passed up an invitation from the Prince de Conti to serve on campaign with him.62 This was an intelligent decision; at this stage Charles had to play for higher stakes.63

  By the end of June the ministers had backtracked. Tencin told O’Brien there was almost no chance that the prince would be allowed to make a public campaign.64 Charles expressed his impatience, ascribing French dithering to a mixture of stupidity, tight-fistedness and downright dishonourable behaviour.65 The end of July came, but there was no lifting of the incognito. Sempill was told by Louis’s personal secretary that the king wanted things to continue as before; the king again made a vague promise of future troop commitments against England.66 Charles Edward replied with a request for a definite commitment: either a realistic pledge of another invasion of England or written permission to be allowed to campaign.67

  Still Louis stalled, mystifying and obfuscating the issue by shunting the Jacobite emissaries from minister to minister, spokesman to spokesman, hoping to cover his disingenuous tracks under the mantle of the notoriously fragmented decision-making at Versailles. The Jacobites made it easier for him by their excessive factionalism, and by employing at least half a dozen different channels of communication. But the argument that it was divided counsels among the ministers of state that led to the unconscionable dithering and prevarication over Charles Edward’s future will not hold up. Tencin was excluded from all influence and was reported to see the king only at council meetings. Orry was the minister delegated to deal with Jacobite affairs, and he was a faithful mirror of his master’s deceit, procrastination and tergiversation.68 Maurepas and comte d’Argenson were heard from rarely, but faithfully echoed the official line, that it was merely a matter of time before an enterprise against England was revived.69 But it was always difficult to make physical contact with the Ministers of War and Marine, as they spent long periods in 1744 away from the court at the theatre of war.70

  For all that, by September 1744 Orry had made his unsympathetic attitude sufficiently plain for Jacobite lobbying to be concentrating consciously on d’Argenson, Maurepas and Tencin.71 On one occasion Orry’s notorious parsimony led him into barefaced lies about the amount of money given by France to the Jacobites. Fortunately, the prince had chapter and verse to hand and forced the Finance Minister to retract. Orry created such animosity in Jacobite circles that Bailli de Tencin, no firebrand, advised the prince to allow him no respite and to continue bombarding him with memoranda even when the minister had retired to his country home.72

  By October even Louis XV admitted that relations between Orry and the Jacobites were impossible. He put Tencin in charge of Stuart affairs.73 This was exactly the pretext the other ministers needed to wash their hands of the prince. Comte d’Argenson sent back all Jacobite memoirs, with the terse comment that Tencin was now the one and only channel for their affairs.74 Louis’s Machiavellianism was e
vinced by this manoeuvre, since it was an open secret that Tencin had the least influence on the king of any of the six ministers of state.

  French treatment of the prince provoked public incredulity and private anger in Jacobite circles.75 Even the Pope, never one to rush to judgment, agreed.76 In Rome James spent long hours puzzling over it. Could the apparent volte-face have something to do with Amelot’s fall in spring 1744, since the former Foreign Secretary was the prime mover of the enterprise against England?77 It was true that Amelot had been made the sacrificial victim after the English débâcle but, as Sempill reassured James, his disgrace followed a court intrigue and had no connection with the prince’s fortunes.78

  In that case, reasoned James, perhaps Charles Edward’s failure to go from Gravelines to Soissons immediately had been a tactical error: if he had gone there, might it not have been impossible for Louis XV to insist on the incognito?79 Charles Edward soon put his father right on that score. From the point of view of personal ease, Soissons would have been an ideal base, especially with its extensive hunting acreage, but it was an obvious snare. Too far from the centre of political gravity, Charles Edward would have been a permanent backnumber. The prince made the telling point that acceptance of Soissons made sense only if he had already concluded that the French were insincere; at the time he still believed their assurances.80

  The more James worried away at French treatment of his son, the plainer became the dishonesty and duplicity of Louis XV. Balhaldy had warned him of this as early as June,81 but it was not until December that, on receipt of correspondence from Tencin, James finally saw the full dimensions of the problem. Tencin put it to him that at bottom Louis XV disclaimed all responsibility for the prince, on the ground that he had never invited him to France.82 For once James concurred with his son. Both men hit the nail on the head by agreeing independently to a cogent answer: if that was the case, they urged, what was Saxe doing at Dunkirk corresponding with someone who, according to his king, was on French soil illegally?83

  It took O’Brien, long out of favour with James but now making a comeback as the star of Balhaldy and Sempill faded, to point up the real French motivation. In brief, they feared the impact on their German allies of too strong an association with the Stuarts. Although this fear should have lessened once Austria and Prussia were at each other’s throats, the French, rightly, did not trust Frederick of Prussia and were determined not to sacrifice their German policy just for the Jacobites.84 The other factor in French minds was the Dutch. France did not want to play the Jacobite card until the States General of Holland had committed themselves to an open declaration of war.85

  Whatever the reasons for his treatment by the French, the prince remained in limbo throughout 1744. The uncertainty in his life even extended to where he lived. At the beginning of June he rented a house in Montmartre.86 He chafed at his sedentary life, so different from what he was used to.87 By September his crabbed existence was already intolerable to him. Moreover, the rental on the house was eating up his substance at an alarming rate. He began to prowl through Marly and Versailles in search of something cheaper and more convenient.88 The upshot was vividly and bitterly related by the prince to his father on 14 September: ‘M. Orry not having got a home for me, where I would not be obliged to be wet for to get to it, and where I would be more at my ease, I was forced to take a few rooms in town, which I hired and which is but a hole.’89

  Yet already the incompatibility between his status as incognito and his frequent public appearances in and around Paris was irking Louis XV.90 The French king decided it was time to keep Charles at a physical as well as diplomatic distance. While the question of his future abode was debated, the prince went into the country to stay at the estate of the archbishop of Cambrai, which that cleric made over to him for an indefinite period.91 The prince, it seemed, had waived his objection to accepting hospitality from Catholic clergy. Then, suddenly, his cousin the bishop of Soissons added another twist to the clerical skein.

  8

  ‘Chaos of thought and passion’

  (October–December 1744)

  AT METZ IN September Louis XV fell dangerously ill and was thought on the point of death.1 With his morbid fear of Hell, the king confessed all his sins to the bishop and promised to make a firm purpose of amendment if God spared him. The new-found surge of religiosity did not long survive the monarch’s recovery, but meanwhile the bishop of Soissons had extracted an important concession from him. Soissons had been out of favour in Stuart circles and was anxious to reinstate himself.2 He put it to the king that his treatment of Charles Edward had been unjust. Louis promised to regularise the footing on which his allegedly uninvited guest was in his kingdom.3

  As his strength recovered, Louis XV pondered this pledge. He was not prepared to lift the incognito because of fear of alienating Prussia. But if Charles Edward would take up his abode well away from Paris, Louis would look into the tangled question of his finances, and also examine the plethora of Jacobite memoranda more closely. For the time being the prince was content to stay in the archbishop of Cambrai’s house because of the good hunting.4 When his financial situation eased, he still hoped to base himself somewhere within a day’s hard ride of Paris.5 Meanwhile, in order to fall in with the spirit of the promised ‘new deal’ with the court, he would reluctantly retire to Fitzjames, the bishop of Soissons’s estate on the Calais road – the exact locale for which Louis XV had destined him in March. After nine months, the prince was in more senses than one back at his starting point.

  To understand the prince’s financial situation, it is necessary to go back a few years to the era of waiting and preparation in Rome. In principle, the death of the prince’s grandfather Prince James Sobieski in February 1737 had left the House of Stuart wealthy. His father, John Sobieski, the Polish hero, had made a fortune from his loans to the Polish crown. But like many rich men, he bequeathed more problems than benefits to his heirs. The kingdom of Poland had made over its crown jewels to the Sobieski family in return for a huge loan. Another massive sum of 400,000 Rhenish florins was raised by Poland from the Sobieskis on the security of the duchy of Ohlau. The Sobieski inheritance was thus a twofold one: the jewels themselves and the mortgage on the duchy of Ohlau.6

  The jewels had been deposited at the Monte di Pietà in Rome, a deposit account bank, and redeemed by the Stuarts out of the sale of their undisputed property rights in Poland.7 But the mortgage, the so-called ‘Fund of Ohlau’ proved a liability. In 1739 the two legatees (Charles Edward and Henry) were persuaded to deed the Fund of Ohlau to the Vatican. Because of the political situation, the Stuarts could not actually take possession of the real estate in Austria that was rightly theirs. It was thought best to process the sale through an intermediary, in this case the papal nuncio. The nuncio was just about to take possession of the real estate when the Prussian invasion of Silesia threw everything in Ohlau into confusion.8

  The confusion did not end there. In 1741 the duchess of Bouillon, Clementina Sobieska’s sister, disputed the Ohlau part of her father’s will by making a claim on the fund. Although the Chancery of Bohemia decided in favour of the nuncio and against the Bouillons, complications over arrears in interest meant that there was no realistic hope of a settlement before a general European peace.9

  That part of the Sobieski legacy, then, remained a dead letter. There remained the Sobieski jewels, both the Polish crown jewels at the Monte di Pietà, and Clementina’s personal pieces. According to the terms of the will, these had to be divided equally between the two Stuart princes. This too was complicated, since part of the jewellery had already been sold, some was saleable, but most, including the Polish crown jewels, could not be touched for another fifty years, giving Poland the chance to redeem them or forfeit title for ever.10 The jewels were given to Charles Edward to be held by him until Poland redeemed them (in which case the redemption money would be divided between him and Henry) or the redemption period elapsed.

  The net result of all
this was that when the division of the remaining assets between the two Stuart princes had been agreed, they possessed a paper fortune but little in liquid assets. Hence the disparity between the claims made by Mann and other Stuart-watchers that the denizens of the Palazzo Muti were as rich as Croesus and their own frequent protestations of penury. The fact was that in day-to-day terms James relied on his pensions from the Vatican, France and Spain, the last two of which were frequently in arrears.11 When Charles Edward was sent into France in early 1744, it was in the confident expectation that he would soon be entering London in triumph. Only his campaign expenses needed to be thought of. Neither James nor his son had considered what would happen if Charles had to spend a long period of time in France.

  As soon as the prince came to Paris, he alerted his father that he was penniless and would soon run into debt, whatever economies he exercised.12 From the time of his arrival until October he was paid just 35,000 livres by the French court.13 This sum, thought disgracefully low by his Jacobite associates, was the consequence of Orry’s notorious frugality.14

  This parsimony brought the inevitable results. While Orry doled out money in niggardly amounts of 3,000 livres a time, the prince’s debts mounted.15 The gap between income and outgoings steadily widened. In July 1744, the pension made by France to Charles Edward amounted, in English money, to the decidedly unprincely sum of £1,800 a year.16