The prince cunningly solved the problem by applying first for a regiment for Lochiel, the least career-minded of the exiles.40 Even with a regiment at his command, ‘gentle Lochiel’ would be willing to return to Scotland at a moment’s notice. But Charles took Lochiel’s advice and delayed processing Lord Ogilvy’s application for a regiment.41 If it became known that Jacobite leaders were settling down in ease and plenty in France, this would be a major disincentive both for Versailles to abet a new rising and for the clansmen in Scotland to rise.
The prince, then, was pressing for swift action at the very time the French, for reasons of their own, wanted to go slow. Charles Edward’s wilfulness, and the poor opinion of his followers entertained at Versailles compounded French desire to tread carefully. Just before Christmas 1746 Louis proposed giving the prince money and 6,000 men for another attempt in the Highlands. The proposal was backed by Tencin and the marquis d’Argenson, but Noailles and Maurepas demurred: in their opinion, judging from the prince’s headstrong behaviour, if restored he would be a more dangerous enemy to France than George II ever was.42 The proposal was quickly shelved.
By the end of December, the prince had lost patience with France and, in the opinion of both James and Tencin, was on a collision course with Louis XV.43 He was also on the worst possible terms with his father and brother. His attacks on Henry for his lacklustre personality and dismal piety continued.44 ‘You cannot believe what hard cards I have to play,’ Henry complained to his father in December.45 In despair he thought of going on a mission to Spain simply to escape his domineering brother.46
There were two sources of sorrow for Henry. One was the accusation, fomented by Kelly but taken up avidly by the prince, that Henry had not done enough at Boulogne in 1745–6 to force or cajole Richelieu into making the crossing of the Channel.47 The other was Charles’s life-style. The clique with which Kelly had surrounded the prince was singularly unsavoury – hence Louis XV’s oft-repeated strictures on ‘low people about the prince’. The one-eyed Lord Clancarty (he had lost the other in a tavern brawl with General Braddock), himself one of the inner circle at this time, noted: ‘if he had searched all the jails in Britain or Ireland, he could not have found such a set of noted, infamous wretches as those H.R.H. had about him.’48 Some of these were officers from regiments of exiles such as the Royal Scots, described by the marquis of Mezières as an undisciplined rabble with no interests except drinking or debauchery.49
Certainly the bills in the prince’s household bore out this story. Within one month at Clichy he spent more than 20,000 livres on entertainment for this unprepossessing entourage, whereas the monthly pension France wanted to settle on both princes was only 12,000 livres.50 The lavish expenditure itself would probably not have been enough to perturb Henry, but the fact that his brother’s followers were ‘bewitched with whoring’51 certainly did. Later in Rome Henry complained bitterly of the orgies held in the Clichy house by his brother and compliant ladies.52 Not content with finding a whoremaster who procured girls for the prince, Kelly openly suggested one day at dinner that Henry use his services as well.53 O’Brien protested that the trade of pander was scarcely fit for an Anglican clergyman. But the prince encouraged the jibe and confided to O’Brien later that Henry’s sanctimonious piety infuriated him.
There were a lot of irritants now: Louis XV, Henry, James, even the voice of Charles’s conscience, ‘gentle Lochiel’. The prince dealt with their unpleasant impact on him by hard drinking of the kind that had amazed the clansmen in the heather. When O’Brien protested about the prince’s bibulous over-indulgence at his twenty-sixth birthday party on 31 December 1746, he was contemptuously waved aside.54
O’Brien was not the right champion of Henry and James, for his position with the prince was also becoming untenable. When he communicated with the marquis d’Argenson in James’s name without clearing it with the prince, Charles Edward gave him a fearsome dressing down.55 Did he not realise that the Prince of Wales still held the powers of Regent and was therefore James’s plenipotentiary? O’Brien would go behind his back again at his peril. The reason for the prince’s sudden hostility to O’Brien, apart from the latter’s loyal support for James and Henry, was his growing conviction that O’Brien, like Henry, had not pushed the French court hard enough during the ’45. Moreover O’Brien’s wife, also mistress of the archbishop of Cambrai, had diverted to her own use sums of money collected from sympathisers during the rising and earmarked for the prince’s use in Scotland.56 She and her husband were now marked persons in the prince’s eyes.
The culmination of the rift between Charles Edward and Henry came with their decision to live apart – virtually a public advertisement of their differences. Clichy, the prince decided, was too cold to spend the winter in. He moved in to Paris, to the Hôtel d’Hollande (formerly Hôtel de Transylvanie). Henry took the house next door, the petit hôtel de Bouillon.57 At the marquis d’Argenson’s urging, the princes decided to accept the French pension provisionally. The prince then went back on this agreement, for fear of appearing to his English supporters as a French stooge. The pension continued to be paid, but the prince did not use it. He maintained himself from contributions from the English Jacobites. O’Brien meanwhile held the monthly pension payments in a kind of informal trust fund.58
At the Christmas season the prince departed to hunt at Navarre while Henry remained in Paris.59 On his return two significant events occurred. First, Louis XV ignored a second plea the prince made for a British expedition.60 The reason for this soon became clear. The marquis d’Argenson, the Stuarts’ great champion, was abruptly dismissed as Foreign Minister in January 1747.61 His place was taken by the anti-Jacobite Puysieux, whose goal was a general European peace at any price.
Second, a heated altercation took place between Henry and Kelly at the prince’s own table. Kelly virtually accused Henry of outright cowardice (again with reference to the 1745–6 Boulogne period) in his brother’s presence. So far from rushing to his defence, Charles remained silent.62 Two things were therefore clear to the prince. One was that he should look for nothing from Louis XV. The other was that Henry was becoming impossible. The prince suggested that Henry find himself a wife.63 His brother recoiled in horror. Noting his embarrassment, Tencin privately advised Henry to return to Rome with all speed.64
Yet Henry had a plan to vindicate himself. He would go to Spain and succeed by patient diplomacy in wresting from Madrid the kind of concessions that Charles had failed to wring from Versailles. This scheme was unwittingly aborted by O’Brien. O’Brien tried to draw the prince out of the orbit of Kelly, Harrington, Clancarty and the others by encouraging Charles’s friendship with the Spanish ambassador the duc d’Huescar.65 Contact with the Spaniard brought on one of Charles Edward’s bright ideas. He would go to Madrid himself and plead his cause. Philip V was dead and there was a new king on the throne. Perhaps the prince could persuade him to steal a march on Louis XV by sanctioning another project against Britain.
Charles also realised that if he went to Spain, he would wrongfoot Henry. This had become an important aim ever since James rushed to his favourite son’s defence in a series of letters.66 Deploring the rift between his sons, he suggested that the solution was to have Henry in Spain while Charles Edward stayed in Paris.67 By February 1747 he was upbraiding Charles bitterly for his treatment of Henry: ‘You are his brother and not his father.’68 Through all the letters ran the motif of condemnation of Kelly, whom James at last identified as his son’s Mephistopheles.
Finally, on 3 February, James reviewed his relations with Charles Edward since 1742. The pattern was one of the son’s bucking against the authority of the father. Always Charles Edward was led astray by evil men: first it was Dunbar (in 1742); then Sheridan (in 1745); finally Kelly and Sir James Stewart. James found three main things to criticise: Charles’s ‘self-defeating’ behaviour over the French pension, his living in a separate house from Henry, and his wild life (‘however dissolute your life,
people will still think of you as a Catholic’). The letter ended in typical style: ‘Enfin, my dear child, I must tell you plainly that if you don’t alter your ways, I see you lost in all respects.’69
Alas for James’s good intentions, Charles Edward was no longer in Paris to receive the lecture. As soon as he heard that James intended to give Henry the go-ahead for his journey to Spain, the prince launched his own venture instead. Typically, he took no one except Kelly into his confidence but gave out that he intended to retire to Avignon as a gesture of protest against French niggardliness over the pension. Since he could not live in a fitting style in Paris, he would set up court in Avignon.
Although the Jacobites did not know that Spain was the prince’s ultimate destination, they were horrified at the thought of his departure even to Avignon. O’Brien warned him of the unfortunate impression his departure would make at Versailles; it was against the rules of congé for a high-born guest to depart the king’s domains without a formal royal leave-taking.70 Charles loftily replied that he expected Henry to make up suitable excuses, since he conceded his younger brother plenipotentiary powers while he was away. This meant, of course, that Henry could not make his own Spanish trip until his brother had returned from ‘Avignon’.71
But no arguments could swerve the prince from his purpose. In the small hours of Wednesday 25 January 1747 he departed for the south.72 On the icy roads the journey to Avignon via Lyons took him a week.73 In Avignon he rested a further week while he laid his final plans and revealed his true intention to his followers. To Henry he wrote that Spain had always been his destination but he had not asked James’s permission for fear of a refusal.74 To James he wrote with a clear statement of his motives. These had nothing to do with the pension but derived from the continued French refusal to reply to the two memoirs he had sent in, requesting an expedition. In sum, his aim in Spain was to get the new king to take up the mantle of Stuart protector that Louis XV had laid aside. More precisely, his aim was a Spanish version of the 1745 Treaty of Fontainebleau and marriage to one of the Spanish king’s sisters.75
This showed how little the prince understood the changing political complexion of Europe. After Noailles’s 1746 mission to Spain the two Bourbon powers acted as one. The dismissal of the marquis d’Argenson had happened partly at Spanish insistence.
Had they known the true scope of the prince’s ambitions on his southward journey, the Jacobites would have been appalled. As it was, even the trip to Avignon caused severe flutterings in Jacobite dovecots. As soon as he heard of the journey, James wrote to condemn it, pointing out that only an expulsion from France could justify such conduct.76
Lochiel took the opportunity to deliver a stinging but dignified rebuke to the prince. The Avignon trip was singularly ill-advised, not just because the French might take the opportunity to conclude a quick peace while the prince was off their territory, but because he seemed to be putting his own pride and pique with France before the interests of Scotland. It behoved him to make some excuse, to say that he had gone to Avignon to throw off British spies who were dogging his footsteps. Finally, Lochiel pleaded, both morality and the prince’s own reputation required that he forthwith abandon his suit at Versailles for a descent on England. He owed it to the Scots to settle for what France was actually prepared to grant: a small expedition to Scotland.77
It is interesting that in the struggle between the good and bad father-figures, it was Lochiel who consistently urged the art of the possible (an expedition to Scotland), and Kelly who encouraged the prince in his ‘all or nothing’ posture (an expedition to England alone).78
Lochiel’s misgivings about the Avignon venture were shared by Benedict XIV, who condemned the prince as a firebrand. The prince had thrown himself into a well, and his father’s friends, like those in the fable, would have to let down a rope.79
It was not just the prince’s friends and supporters who were stupefied by his action. His departure was the talk of Paris.80 That it was foolhardy all agreed. All that remained was to assign it a meaning. Did it portend another unilateral Scottish venture?81 Or was it the prelude to his return to Rome? The almost simultaneous departure of Dunbar from Rome to Avignon seemed to lend credence to the latter conjecture.82 The French ministers were so baffled that they decided to adumbrate contingency plans in the council in case the prince was already launched on another unilateral British venture.83
We have dealt at some length with the degree of stupefaction elicited by the first stage of the prince’s journey in order to underscore the awed incredulity that resulted when Charles Edward continued on to Spain. If the Avignon venture seemed to be the action of a blockhead, the Spanish mission genuinely appeared to seasoned observers like the work of a madman. It was a particular mortification to the prince’s supposed friend the Spanish ambassador. In all their time together Charles had not breathed one word about a mission to Spain. For once the dour and pessimistic O’Brien was not wrong when he reported to James that the prince had now lost all credibility as politician or statesman. He had left France without Louis XV’s permission, then added insult to injury by going to a foreign court for things Versailles had refused him. Moreover, his attitude to Spain was no less insulting. He proposed to enter Spanish territory without official permission, cutting across all James’s careful diplomacy on behalf of Henry. It was now clear to the most purblind Spanish grandee that there was a total lack of rapport between the prince and his father and brother.84
The prince was undaunted. As long as he had Kelly to play the sycophant, he heeded no other voices. With an aplomb completely unwarranted by all political realities, he set out for Spain, travelling by way of Montpellier, Perpignan and Barcelona.85
On 2 March he arrived in Madrid, accompanied by Colonel Nagle (one of Ormonde’s old followers), Dr Cameron and William Vaughan, a Welsh Jacobite who had been out in the ’45.86 He had hoped to meet up with Sir Charles Wogan, long in Spanish military service, but Wogan was now governor of La Mancha and absent from the court. But Sir Thomas Geraldin was there, and the prince at once sent him with a message for Carvajal, the Spanish chief minister.
The prince’s arrival was a deep embarrassment for Carvajal. He had not presented the letter for King Ferdinand that Charles had sent on from Barcelona. Carvajal still thought that he could persuade the prince to depart surreptitiously, before anyone knew he was in the kingdom. In the greatest secrecy he sent a coach to fetch the prince for a parley. This cloak-and-dagger approach excited Charles’s scorn: ‘I find all here like pheasants, that it is enough to hide their heads to cover the rest of their body, as they think.’87
The interview with Carvajal was difficult. The minister repeatedly urged the prince to go back. Doggedly Charles insisted that his letter to the king be delivered. Reluctantly Carvajal agreed. Next morning Carvajal appeared at the door of the prince’s inn with word that Ferdinand and his queen would like to see him.
At the royal audience the prince received the treatment he already knew so well from Louis XV. The Spanish king and queen wished him well, spoke of their personal friendship for the Stuarts, even guaranteed the continuance of a Spanish pension, but stressed that this was not the time to be thinking of large-scale expeditions. In the circumstances, they trusted the prince would not take it amiss if they asked him to return to France as soon as possible.88
These polite courtesies masked the political realities at court. The veils of illusion were lifted to some extent when the prince was refused permission to see the queen dowager Elizabeth Farnese. The prince was bitter about these facile protestations of friendship that had no content. He commented acidly: ‘One finds in old histories that the great proofs of showing such things are to help people in distress; but this, I find, is not now à la mode, according to the French fashion.’89
It was made clear to the prince that all his future dealings in Spain would have to be with Carvajal, a man he despised on sight: ‘a weak man just put in motion like clockwork.’90 That the pri
nce was in a wounded, depressed state is clear from an incident when he was leaving the palace. The well-known singer Farinelli took him by the hand and said that they had met before in Italy. Outraged at this familiarity, the prince glared at the singer for his effrontery.91
The private session with Carvajal that followed was even more painful. The prince put a number of firm questions to the minister. What help would Spain provide if France mounted an expedition? Would Spain agree to store 30,000 muskets and 10,000 sabres for him until the need arose? Would Carvajal grant commissions for raising three regiments in Spain? Most important of all, would he send three large merchant ships laden with corn to Scotland to succour the starving Highlanders, now suffering untold privations after Cumberland’s reign of terror?92 Carvajal promised to consider these points carefully. But on the loftier pretensions he could offer no comfort. Carvajal wound up the interview by dismissing all the prince’s grand designs as chimerical. He then asked him again to leave Spain. The prince insisted on another interview next day. Carvajal agreed, provided Charles left Spain the day after that.
But Carvajal proved just as unyielding at the next interview and again sharply requested him to leave Spain. The prince stalled, claiming that he was awaiting the arrival of his retinue. At this point Carvajal put his foot down. He would allow a period of grace for the ‘retinue’ to come up, but the prince must leave Madrid and wait in Guadalajara.93
Before he left Madrid, the prince visited the aged Lady Mary Herbert, an elderly female eccentric who earlier in life had refused to marry the duc de Bouillon and instead went off to Spain on a madcap scheme to exploit the mines of the Asturias. The prince found her living in a garret, very ill and in rags. He gave her all the money he had with him and his own greatcoat, for she was so reduced in penury that she no longer possessed outdoor clothes.94
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