Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  After a night spent at an inn, they embarked next morning (22 June OS; 3 July NS) in fine weather on the Doutelle (sometimes known as Du Teillay), a 16-gun frigate.90 Contrary winds held them up at the mouth of the Loire, but eventually they stood away for Belle-Isle.91 The prince was not a good sailor. Even on the short leg to Belle-Isle he suffered from sea-sickness.92 There were other matters to make them all nervous. Two French ships, inbound for Nantes, crossed their track and recognised Walsh’s colours. This increased fears among the nervous (Sheridan especially) that their secret would be out before they were properly seaborne.93

  They made rendezvous with the Elisabeth on 12 July.94 The Elisabeth was a 64-gun man o’ war. Ruttlidge had done a superb job of fitting her out. In addition to the arms cache, 700 men from Clare’s regiment (from the Irish brigade in the service of France) were on board as volunteers for an ostensible privateering mission.95 The contemporary practice of taking ships out of regular commission into privateering and back again extended to men like those in Clare’s, who on this occasion were to be used as marines.96

  Ruttlidge was sent back to Paris with the prince’s letters of explanation for Louis XV and the ministers of state.97 With Walsh as captain, Charles Edward’s party on the Doutelle settled into their quarters. Apart from the ‘Seven Men’, they included the prince’s chaplain Abbé Butler, his valet Michele Vezzozi, Donald Cameron (one of old Lochiel’s retainers) who was to act as pilot in Scottish waters, and Aeneas MacDonald’s clerk Duncan Buchanan. On 16 July the two ships stood away into the open Atlantic.

  What was in Charles Edward’s mind as the shores of Belle-Isle merged with the horizon? What did he think he was doing? Why did he conceal his mission from his father and the French? Was his enterprise a rational one, or was it a mad, quixotic, juvenile scheme worthy only of a Polish blockhead?

  We must look first at his own account of his motivation. The most extended version of this is in the long letter Charles sent his father from Navarre on 12 June, in which he revealed for the first time the true reason he wanted his jewels pawned. After complaining of the ‘scandalous usage’ he had had from the French for the past eighteen months, he went on to make the obvious and telling point that Versailles would never make the first move towards a Stuart restoration. Even when they seriously intended to invade England, they had merely wanted to use the Jacobites for their own ends. So the choice before the prince was clear. He could remain in misery in France, in permanent limbo; he could admit defeat and return to Rome; or he could force the French to act by giving them an opportunity too good to miss.98 Only the last choice was a feasible one for the hero:

  I cannot but mention a parable here which is: a horse that is to be sold, if spurred does not skip or show some signs of life, nobody would care to have him for nothing; just so my friends would care very little to have me, if after such usage, which all the world is sensible of, I should not show that I have life in me.99

  As for James’s trust in patient diplomacy, this was a forlorn hope. Twenty-six years had gone by since the last Jacobite rising. All that time Jacobite diplomacy had beaten in vain against the cliff-face of the powers’ self-interest. Spain, Austria, Russia, France, all had been courted with great skill and punctiliousness, and all with no result. Even now, when France was at war with England, the combination of Louis XV’s fecklessness and the divisions among ministers of state meant that no firm, spontaneous decision to support the Stuarts would ever be made. The prince poured scorn on his father’s hopes of Tencin: the cardinal was both useless and powerless; Louis XV despised and disliked him but, characteristically, was too lazy to replace him.

  Finally, the prince pointed out, reasonably enough, that if he had alerted either Versailles or the Palazzo Muti to what he intended, he would have been prevented. The French would have taken particular delight in currying favour with the Hanoverians (with whom they intermittently contemplated peace) and in presenting themselves to James as statesmanlike in having scotched such a rash adventure.

  In other correspondence the prince revealed the things he could not say to James. Here he laid bare his disenchantment with his father as well as with France.100 There would have been problems even if France or Spain had sincerely wanted to help him. Because of his anomalous position as leader of the Jacobite movement but not its official head (in Bagehot’s terms its efficient but not dignified aspect), he would have been compelled to go to Rome to get his father to sign a formal treaty. In the meantime the summer of 1745 would have slipped away while diplomats in Versailles and Madrid dickered and wrangled over the fine print. The opportunity would be lost. By the time all was ready, the power (or powers) could plead the advent of winter as an excuse to pull out from the enterprise.

  Already we can see here the resentment against his father’s seniority and the hatred of French supineness that the prince was eventually to conflate as one single oppressive authority. Yet the prince’s reasons were cogent enough and, given his own premises of action or death, unassailable. The prince was driven onwards out of France by one set of powerful forces and drawn towards Scotland by another.101

  Jame’s reaction, when he eventually read his son’s apologia, was one of shocked horror. To the public world he put up a show of bravado. The tenor of his correspondence to Louis XV and the French ministers was: the prince was wrong to go, but now that he has gone we must support him with all our power.102 But in private he inveighed against Sheridan, Strickland and Dunbar, and commented bitterly on his son’s penchant for bad company, wild amusements, and above all, his over-fondness for wine.103 Those, like Benedict XIV, who saw him at really close quarters, were appalled at the physical and psychological deterioration in the Stuart monarch. Frantically, James asked the Pope for a loan of 100,000 crowns (£25,000 approx.) against the jewels in the Monte di Pietà.104 Feeling genuine compassion for a man who ‘bore his misfortunes like a saint’, Benedict authorised the loan, even though the market value of the jewels had declined and they were no longer worth that much.105

  If on the basis of outer propulsion Charles Edward had a strong case, did he have a valid one in terms of Scotland’s own gravitational pull? One of the strongest indictments against Charles Edward Stuart has always been the charge that he sacrificed thousands of Scottish lives and destroyed an entire way of life on a mindless whim.106 The hidden premiss of this argument is that the 1745 rising was bound to fail. Either, then, Charles Edward was extremely stupid in that he failed to see what everyone else could perceive clearly, or he was morally vicious in that he too perceived it but pressed ahead none the less, driven by who knows what demon.

  But it is abundantly clear that none of the actors in the drama of the 1745 rising saw it as bound to fail. Such a view is the extrapolation of the historian working with hindsight and, in many cases, worshipping the god of historical inevitability. The indictment against the prince can therefore be dealt with at two levels.

  All revolutionaries, especially failed ones, are liable to the charge that in pursuing their aims they throw up unintended consequences. This view has usually been received with rapture by the conservative or counter-revolutionary persuasion.107 It has less often been seen that the argument leads logically to political quietism, in which any demand for change can be countered with the accusation that it may engender unintended consequences. It is strange how readily a political theory that amounts to a demand for guarantees for one’s future actions has been embraced by people who would never dream of demanding the same standard of proof in any other sphere of their lives.

  If Charles Edward is arraigned for not having foreseen all the possible consequences of his actions, one can only retort that nobody ever can. In this case there is the additional consideration that none of the available evidence warranted the conclusion that a failed Jacobite rising would lead to the ferocious and draconian backlash that actually transpired. The 1715 rebels had been treated mildly. Executions were few; the authorities had connived at the reacquisition by proxy of
the forfeited estates of the great Jacobite families. Nobody in August 1745 could have predicted that another failure by the Stuarts would lead inevitably to the barbarities of ‘butcher Cumberland’, the savagery of ‘hangman Hawley’; and still less to the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions, the banning of the plaid and the breakdown of social relations between chieftains and clansmen.

  The 1745 campaign always looked winnable without enormous bloodshed. The ease with which the initial conquest of Scotland was achieved shows this clearly. Where Charles Edward can be faulted is in his too-ready assumption that France would be easily drawn in to administer the coup de gace to the tottering Hanoverians. As we have seen, rebellion in Scotland first as an incentive to French invasion was every bit as rational an assumption as revolution first in Russia as a precursor to general European revolution after 1917. It was hardly Charles Edward’s fault that he eventually confronted the equivalent of ‘socialism in one country’, i.e a Jacobite rising without the French. He could not have foreseen the singular French incompetence in response to the rising during 1745–6, nor the inept way they squandered a unique opportunity to disable their chief competitor for world supremacy.108

  Could Scotland be detached from England? Many factors made it rational to assume that this conquest could be achieved. Widespread dislike of the Act of Union combined with economic grievances over the Malt Tax and the Excise (which had led to the notorious Porteous riots) kept the big cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow volatile. The ideological support of the Episcopalian Church was another important element in Jacobite support on which the prince could count. Meanwhile the much-diluted Jacobite loyalty of the Highland clans was stiffened by the attacks on the traditional system of land-holding essayed by the government after 1737.

  The outbreak of a general European war was a necessary condition for the 1745 rising, but the peculiar circumstances of Scotland in the early 1740s made it much more likely that an attempt like the prince’s would catch fire. These circumstances can be conveniently classified as military and political. In the military sphere two trends were noticeable: the denuding of Scotland of regular troops, and the military eclipse of clan Campbell. With the outbreak of a general European war in 1740, many of the regular army units were sent to fight in Flanders, leaving exiguous forces at the disposal of Sir John Cope, Commander in Chief, Scotland. Despite Cope’s warnings on the appalling state of Scottish defences, the London government took no action. Meanwhile the 2nd duke of Argyll’s attempt to switch from feudalism to capitalism by eliminating the tacksmen or Campbell gentry, and letting farms directly to their former tenants, bade fair to extinguish the Campbell fighting machine. The 3rd duke grasped the military implications of the demise of the tacksmen, the muscle and sinews of clan Campbell. By 1744 he had started to put his brother’s policies into reverse.109

  Politically, Scotland by 1745 displayed two ominous signs. The English government was vastly unpopular even among non-Jacobite Scots. This meant there would be little enthusiasm for rallying to the defence of the House of Hanover. At the same time a kind of political ossification had taken place among the élite as a result of the stalemate between the Squadrone faction, led by Lord Tweeddale, Secretary of State for Scotland, supported by George II and containing all the anti-Argyll nobility, and the Argyll faction, supported by the most powerful law officers, including Lord President Duncan Forbes, and backed by the Pelhams in London. To make matters worse, both factions disliked Cope, the Commander in Chief.

  Scotland by 1745, then, presented many features favourable to Charles Edward’s adventure: a virulent nationalism, opposed to the Act of Union; an Episcopalian and Catholic north-east committed a priori to the House of Stuart; and the Jacobite clans of the Highlands, determined to preserve their way of life but confronted with both a short-term and a long-term threat. The short-term menace was personified by the Campbells; the long-term by the growth of Scottish capitalism after the 1707 Act of Union.110 The political leadership in Scotland was in disarray, although by 1745 Duncan Forbes and the 3rd duke of Argyll had repaired some of the damage of the late 1730s. It is unquestionable that their conciliatory policies kept loyal some of the Jacobite sympathisers who would have risen for Charles Edward if the Squadrone party had been in power.

  To energise all this Jacobite potential and weld it into a Stuart Scotland that could then be reinforced from France does not at all look like the political programme of a madman, blockhead or rash adventurer.

  One final piece of good fortune attended the prince’s departure and seemed a singularly good omen both for his future success and for French co-operation. On 11 May 1745 the Jacobite Irish brigade snatched victory from the maw of defeat at Fontenoy. The result was a great triumph for Marshal Saxe and a serious reverse for the duke of Cumberland and his British forces. Although the prince at first claimed to find in Fontenoy an ambiguous result for his own future,111 it was clear that its effects were twofold. More troops would be sent from England to Flanders, thus weakening the opposition to a rising in Scotland. Then, once the standard of revolt was raised, the London administration would be faced with a ticklish choice of Scotland or the Netherlands on which to concentrate their military resources.

  In more ways than one, then, the key to the success of a rising in Scotland lay with France. This was to be a recurring motif in the prince’s high adventures that now followed.

  10

  The News from Moidart

  July–August 1745

  SETTING SAIL ON a fair wind, the Elisabeth and Doutelle bore away on a north-westerly track. For two days the seas were moderate. Then came a brisk gale on the 18th, followed by a dead calm on the 19th.1 At noon on 20 July there occurred a near-fatal blow to the enterprise. At latitude 47 degrees 57 minutes, one hundred miles west of the Lizard, they came upon an English ship that had the wind of them.2

  This was HMS Lion under Captain Brett, secured for action. All afternoon the Lion and the Elisabeth, both premier class warships, tacked for advantage. By 5 p.m. they came to close quarters. A dreadful pounding battle ensued. The two warships tore each other to pieces; both sides took heavy casualties.3 At sunset the grim combatants broke off the carnage. The Lion was dismasted and forty-five of her men were dead. She limped back to Plymouth, her captain wounded, her master-of-arms minus a limb.4

  Technically the Elisabeth was the victor, but she had taken severe punishment and was in no state to continue the voyage. Throughout the combat the Doutelle had lain out of range of the big English guns.5 Now, putting out lanterns to signal his position to the Elisabeth, Walsh conferred by loud-hailer with Captain Conway, who commanded the contingent from Clare’s. Conway told him that there were so many dead and wounded aboard that there was nothing for it but to return to Brest. Knowing that on board the Elisabeth was the nucleus of the Jacobite army, plus 1,500 muskets with matching ammunition and 1,800 broadswords, Walsh offered to take the matériel on to the Doutelle. But he had reckoned without the severe damage to the Elisabeth. The warship was listing so badly that its captain dared not heave to for the transfer of arms and supplies to the Doutelle.6 Bidding farewell to the stricken Elisabeth at 11 p.m., the Doutelle pursued its track to Scotland.

  The loss of so many men and weapons was a bad blow to morale. This was tested still further in the following days by the notoriously treacherous seas around the British Isles and by a series of scares. On the 22nd the Doutelle was again spotted and chased by enemy warships.7 Fortunately she was a fast and weatherly frigate and threw off her pursuers. But it had been a narrow escape. Thenceforth all lights were extinguished at night except for the compass.

  Next came the battering by the storm winds. A two-day gale raged on the 26th and 27th.8 Mercifully, this was followed by a period of exceptionally fine and calm weather. Yet the same serene sea brought its own dangers. The horizon was dotted with ships. As they passed the coast of northern Ireland, they could make out eight separate sail.9

  August came in like a lion. At midnight on
31 July the seas began to make up again. By daybreak a full storm was blowing.10 Fortunately this blew itself out with the short-lived fury of a typhoon. By now Walsh’s dead reckoning told them they should be off the Outer Hebrides. They took soundings and struck the sea-bed at 108 fathoms. Shortly afterwards the Isle of Barra was sighted.11

  Moving close in to land, Walsh lowered a boat so that Kelly and Aeneas MacDonald could reconnoitre. They quickly ascertained that the laird of Barra was not on the island. But even as the Doutelle lay off the coast, another ship came up. This proved to be a merchantman ferrying cattle between the islands. Walsh took off the pilot to guide him. They proceeded to Eriskay, which was reached on 3 August (NS).12

  Why this particular approach to Scotland, it may be asked? With the capture of Sir Hector Maclean, Mull, the original destination, no longer made sense. But a landfall in the Catholic Clanranald country, remote, inaccessible and solidly pro-Jacobite, was a good bet from the security point of view. And although it would be difficult for government forces to reach Moidart quickly, clansmen could by forced marches easily get to the Jacobite heartland at the southern end of the Great Glen.

  The green and grey island of Eriskay, with its blanched white sands, racked by violent winds and rain even in summer, would have daunted and demoralised ninety-nine out of every hundred men born and raised in Rome. The cruel climate alone would have been too much for the average Roman. Here too was poverty on a scale that would have shocked the citizens of the papal states, cushioned as they were against life’s worst buffets by an advanced system of public doles. The impoverished clansmen lived on a diet of milk and whey, eked out with fish and sea food. The dark and dank bothies were windowless and suffused with smoke from the damp peat on the hearth.13 If Charles Edward really had been the petty Italian princeling of Whig (and some later) propaganda, he would instantly have wilted under the impact of this most profound culture shock.