While his future was being (adversely) decided at Versailles, the prince contented himself with firing off letters of complaint about Henry’s absconding.28 It is clear that the younger brother by this action had already pushed the fraught relationship to breaking point even before the cardinal bombshell burst. In this twilight period, both James and Henry showed themselves masters of duplicity, the equal of Charles Edward when they chose, it seems. Until the full truth was revealed, Henry’s tone continued to be that of injured innocence: ‘what have I done?’ is the burden of his letters to his brother.29
Meanwhile Tencin, Puysieux and O’Brien were laughing up their sleeves.30 The prince’s next audience with Louis XV was significant. The king archly asked the prince if he had seen anything of Tencin recently. When the prince said no, Louis looked enquiringly at the duc de Bouillon. Bouillon said that the secret of Tencin could be unlocked by Puysieux better than anyone else.31 There was much mute shrugging of the shoulders, in retrospect a pointer to Tencin’s treachery. And by now Louis had received from James a formal written request for approval of his younger son’s cardinalate.32
The prince departed in mid-June for the Princesse de Conti’s country house, where he went sightseeing in St Germain and environs.33 He returned to find that his carelessness and ingratitude were causing him to move house once again. The prince forgot to write a thank-you note to Madame de Sessac. She retaliated by declaring that the Passy house had been loaned on a one-month basis only. Fortunately for him, the prince was now offered Cardinal Rohan’s country seat at St Ouen, at a riverside location six miles from Paris.34
It was there that the fuse, originally lit three months earlier, finally licked to the end of the gunpowder trail and exploded. In time-honoured fashion, the prince was almost the last person to know of Henry’s elevation to the purple. James planned it that way, for he knew what must surely follow. For all that, his announcement of the fait accompli to Charles Edward is some sort of masterpiece of bland double-speak:
I know not whether you will be surprised, my dearest Carluccio, when I tell you that your brother will be made a Cardinal the first days of next month. Naturally speaking, you should have been consulted about a resolution of that kind before it had been executed, but as the Duke and I were unilaterally determined on the matter, and that we foresaw you might probably not approve of it, we thought it would be showing you more regard, and that it would be even more agreeable to you, that the thing should be done before your answer could come here, and so have it in your power to say that it was done without your knowledge or approbation.35
The arch insinuation in the letter is as astonishing as its illogicality is gross.
It is difficult to convey the anguish in Charles Edward’s heart, and the general consternation in the Jacobite movement, produced by this thunderclap. The prince found himself struck literally speechless when he read the letter. He shut himself up for several hours before penning a brief reply, the gist of which was summed up in the second sentence: ‘Had I got a dagger through my heart, it would not have been more sensible to me than at the contents.’36
By common consent James and Henry had struck a mortal blow at the entire Stuart cause.37 For Henry to accept a cardinal’s hat with James’s connivance was tantamount to admitting that only a fool could any longer believe in a Stuart restoration. James and Henry had conceded that the quest was forlorn, the cause hopeless. Moreover, Henry’s embrace of ‘priestcraft’ seemed to turn the cliché’d dross of Hanoverian propaganda into pure gold. All the insinuations about ‘popish pretenders’ were true after all. Had not the younger Stuart just proved it? Moreover, Henry’s celibacy seemed to condemn the Stuart line to extinction unless Charles Edward married, which he refused to do. Unless Henry was later freed by papal dispensation to renounce Holy Orders, the Stuart dynasty was a heart-beat away from oblivion. What a temptation to prospective assassins that was!
All these points were made with some force by Jacobite supporters. Significantly, the most severe critics of Henry’s actions were members of the Catholic clergy themselves. Father Myles MacDonnell delivered a biting attack on a move he considered actuated purely by Henry’s pique and spite against his brother.38 An even more incisive critique was sent to James by the bishop of Soissons. It seemed to be ever the bishop’s fate to lock horns with rulers, whether de jure or de facto. He pointed out that Henry’s cardinalate was, in effect, a resignation of Stuart pretensions to the throne of England. If Charles Edward died, the English would never accept a cardinal, even an ex-cardinal, as king. Even if the prince lived, he would have the perpetual albatross of a cardinal brother around his neck. To be restored to the throne of England, the Stuarts needed to put as much distance between themselves and Rome as possible without actually abandoning the faith. James and Henry had done the precise opposite. In any case, being a cardinal was a worldly ambition, designed to secure benefices. Surely a duke of York could get these without becoming a cardinal? It followed that the action Stuart père et fils had taken was futile.39
James later admitted he was shattered by the depth and breadth of the opposition to making Henry a cardinal. His tactic was to put the blame on Charles Edward for ‘causing’ Henry’s flight to Rome.40 In later years he rationalised his disastrous action as a Machiavellian ploy to force Louis XV to show his hand and prove that he had no secret agreement with the prince, unknown to the Palazzo Muti.41 In the short run, he wrote a number of disingenuous letters to the prince, of which the burden was that Charles had only himself to blame for what had happened.42
The prince treated these apologies with the contempt which on this occasion they genuinely deserved. He informed his father that thenceforth he had no brother and never wanted to hear his name mentioned again.43 To the bishop of Soissons the prince lifted a corner of his thoughts to reveal the extent to which he despised Henry. He could have admired him grudgingly if he had turned Capuchin out of a desire for spiritual perfection.44 But to become a ‘redcap’ surely excited the contempt of all reasonable men.
The ripples caused by the explosion of the sensational news soon carried beyond the inner circles of the Jacobites. All Paris was stupefied by the tidings.45 The common opinion was that for the ‘Elector of Hanover’ to have scored such a coup, he must have bribed many of the principals, especially Tencin and the Pope.46 Interestingly, Benedict XIV revealed that he had in fact been offered £150,000 by the English to subvert the Stuart cause by making Henry a cardinal, even before James approached him on the subject.47 The scale of the bribe is significant. By their actions James and Henry had handed the Hanoverians a political advantage worth millions of pounds in present-day terms.
We shall often enough have occasion to remark on the prince’s tendency to paranoid delusion. But on this occasion his conviction that he had been uniquely victimised surely has some foundation. Louis XV cynically colluded with James to sink the Jacobite cause at the very moment he was supposedly seriously considering Jacobite military options on the council of state. This is of a piece with his personality. His natural instinct for duplicity would have been whetted by the prince’s refusal to toe his line. Like all genuine tyrants, what Louis XV most detested was someone with the strength of will to stand up to him.
Even Benedict XIV, normally a wise and sagacious pontiff, must be faulted on this occasion. His bland statement that Henry’s becoming a cardinal need not prevent a Stuart restoration if that was what God really wanted48 is exactly the sort of nonsense that has so often gained organised religion a bad name.
Yet the most interesting psychological study is that of the two principal actors in the tragic farce. It is hard to escape the conclusion that both Henry and James were motivated by bad faith. With James it was the desire to, as it were, pull up the drawbridge on Jacobitism, to ensure that his elder son could not succeed where he had failed. With Henry, not only was there general sibling rivalry at play, but there was also the issue of his sexual personality. It is not too much to say, when all the
threads have been unravelled, that the coup de grâce to the Jacobite movement was delivered by Henry’s deviant sexuality, which made the thought of marriage purely horrific. This of course always remained something impossible to say in Jacobite circles.
Charles Edward sank into a profound depression as the impact of Henry’s defection sank in. To Edgar he spoke of making a bonfire of all his ciphers to assuage his drooping spirits.49 To his father he mentioned that he was hunting with Prince Constantin outside Passy ‘so as to dissipate as much as possible my melancholy thoughts’.50 In February the papal vice-legate in Avignon had reported the prince’s depression and his consequent heavy smoking and drinking.51 But that was nothing compared with the trough of despair into which Charles now sank. Hunting with the Rohans alternated with heavy drinking sessions.52 Occasionally he would pen a trivial line to his father, or write a note of congratulation to Louis XV for his victories in Flanders.53 The rest was black despondency.
Almost incredibly, it was a matter of days after the prince had received the ‘dagger through his heart’ that Lord George Murray arrived in Paris to seek a reconciliation with him. Murray had been in Rome with James and had received a magnificent reception.54 James knew his son’s opinion of Lord George and had tried to dissuade Atholl’s worthy scion from courting certain humiliation at the prince’s hands.55 But Murray insisted. He was not to know that Kelly and others had worked Charles Edward up to a rare pitch of hatred against his old lieutenant-general. When news came in that Murray of Broughton had turned king’s evidence in England to save his own skin, Kelly cleverly worked on the prince to persuade him that the frequent clashes between the two Murrays during the ’45 had all been a charade. In reality, behind the false front the two men had been in concert; their aim had always been to betray the prince.56 Charles had already reacted by threatening to have Lord George arrested if he came to Paris. He asked James to do the same in Rome.57
Yet even if the prince had not already been in a state of almost permanent cold fury whenever the name of Lord George Murray was mentioned to him, Murray’s timing was singularly infelicitous. He could not have chosen a worse moment to arrive in Paris. When the prince learned of his presence in the French capital, he sent Stafford round to his lodging to say that he did not wish to see him, either then or ever, and that Murray would be well advised to quit Paris with all speed.58
The arrival of Lord George Murray at such a juncture was particularly infuriating to the prince. At the precise moment he was digesting his father’s treachery, the most troublesome thorn in his side during the ’45 reappeared. Charles knew his father had been treacherous; he was still convinced that Lord George had betrayed him at Culloden. The association of ideas was too powerful. Here in a matter of days was the conjunction of two hated authority figures, his father by letter, and the failed father-figure of the ’45 in the flesh. Always, it seemed, there was this element in the prince’s disappointments. Derby was the work principally of Lochiel and Lord George. Henry’s becoming a cardinal was the work of Louis XV, his own father, and Benedict XIV, the ‘Holy Father’. And just as Louis XV had colluded in James’s treachery over the cardinalate, so would James later collude in French treachery when they expelled the prince in 1748. Already, for Charles Edward, Louis XV and James were birds of a perfidious feather. In his best scathing style the prince later compared and contrasted them: ‘They are both “honest men”. James is blinded by priests and Louis by whores.’59
Pitifully, the prince had not yet learned to discard the most treacherous of all the father-figures. Trying to rationalise the complete break between king’s men and prince’s men, in 1747 he tried to interest Earl Marischal in becoming his secretary of state.60 Marischal, who detested the prince, trundled out his usual excuse of ‘ill-health’.61 It would be another seven years before Charles took the full measure of this man’s hatred.
All through August and September 1747 the prince was in the company of the Rohan family. He expressed his contempt for authority by hunting in an area exclusively reserved for the king of France; not even the great nobility were allowed to venture there. Puysieux, delightedly reporting that Louis XV was very angry about the incident, lost no time in warning off the delinquent prince.62
The Rohans were still devoted to the prince and concerned for his future. Cardinal Rohan tried to arrange his marriage to a ten-year-old daughter of the Prince de Soubise, reportedly a millionairess.63 But the prince wanted none of it; he wanted to be free to act at a moment’s notice if the call came from Britain. With the collapse of French aid, all his hopes were centred on a power vacuum in England following George II’s death. It was expected that there would then be a struggle for power between Cumberland and Prince Frederick, George II’s detested eldest son. It was the prince’s intention, once the two combatants were exhausted in civil war, to play duke William of Normandy to the two Harolds of 1066. When one or other brother emerged victorious, the prince planned to cross the Channel to snatch the prize.64
As he confided to Papal Nuncio Durini, the prince had yet another reason for remaining unmarried. The lack of a Stuart heir might eventually force James to order Henry to renounce his celibate vows and beget legitimate descendants. The refusal to marry continued to be one of the principal ways for the prince to manipulate his father.65
In the summer of 1747 the prince’s depression was remarked on by all observers.66 Suddenly there was a remarkable change both in his fortunes and attitude. A letter of congratulation to Louis XV on Saxe’s great victories secured an invitation to Versailles in early October. There at last the prince secured for Lochiel the regiment which he had promised as collateral for the security the Cameron chief had taken in Lochaber in August 1745 and for which Charles had lobbied assiduously ever since. The regiment, once obtained, was worth three times the annual income from Lochiel’s holdings at Achnacarry.67
At the end of September, too, signs of the old compassionate prince were once more in evidence. Writing to James about the capitulation of Bergen-en-Zoom (he never wrote now on any but public subjects and never mentioned Henry), he said he was very glad, as the surrender had saved the lives of many ‘honest men’.68 After the low point of his mid-summer depression, the prince seemed to have experienced a spiritual rebirth. What had happened? The truth was that Charles had experienced the first sustained love affair of his life. In passionate intensity it was certainly his most significant relationship ever with a woman.
Marie Louise-Henriette-Jeanne de la Tour d’Auvergne was the daughter of the duc de Bouillon. By marriage she was duchesse de Montbazon and Princesse de Rohan. She was also Charles Edward’s first cousin, since her mother was Clementina Sobieska’s sister, Marie Charlotte.69 At the time of her affair with Charles Edward, she was twenty-two and married to the Prince of Rohan-Guémène, one year her junior, with whom she had had a son in 1745. The couple had been married in 1743 in a dynastic union between two Jacobite families, the Bouillons and the Rohans.70
The Rohan-Guémènes were staunch supporters of the Stuart prince. When Richard Warren announced his rescue attempt of the prince in summer 1746, his projected exploit brought him an immediate interview with Louise (duchesse de Montbazon) and her formidable mother-in-law the Princesse de Guémène.71 But although Charles Edward had met Louise before (their first meeting was in early 1745 during his first period in France), it was not until late summer 1747 that romance blossomed.72
Exactly when and where the affair commenced – whether at Navarre in early September or at St Ouen shortly afterwards – cannot be determined. But it is clear that once the liaison did begin, it was passionate and erotic. Louise was obviously a highly-sexed woman and Charles Edward had already acquired a strong taste for carnal pleasure. The first phase of the relationship was easy and had an idyllic quality. Louise’s husband was away at the wars in Flanders. The lovers frequently spent nights together, either at the Guémène residence on the place Royale or at St Ouen, which Louise could visit under a plausible prete
xt, since her great uncle the comte d’Evreux had a summer place there, next door to the prince’s house.73
It was in October that Louise conceived the prince’s first child.74 But immediately afterwards difficulties in their liaison began. The ending of the summer season removed the pretext for Louise’s visits to St Ouen. Thenceforth the prince had to go clandestinely to the Guémène house for his nights of frenzied love-making. To keep the affair a secret, the lovers took elaborate precautions. A coach, heavily draped and guarded, took the prince at night to the rue Minimes in Paris. When the coast was clear, the prince got out and made his way by side entrances to the Guémène residence in place Royale (the rue Minimes ran parallel to the place).
Since the coach was soon observed threading its way along the country lanes of St Ouen at the same time each night, the Paris police were alerted. At first lieutenant of police Berryer thought there was an English assassination plot against the prince. Then Daniel O’Brien, the prince’s valet and the only man he ever really trusted, was stopped for questioning by the police, following an early-morning incident involving the coach. It became clear that the prince was involved in a clandestine affair of the heart. The name of the lady in question was not mentioned. Satisfied, Berryer called off his dogs.75
The tempestuous affair now absorbed most of the prince’s energies. He was besotted with Louise: physical desire was compounded by the feeling that she too, like him, was a rebel and an outsider. The prince even proposed to give up his claim to the Sobieski inheritance on her behalf, much to James’s irritation.76 He showed a wholly unwonted indifference to affairs of state. That there was an element of ‘epater les Français’ in his relationship is clear from the few moments in late 1747 when he was called upon to play a political role. He was at the duchesse d’Aiguillon’s house with the philosophe Montesquieu when news of Hawke’s victory at Cape Finisterre came in. Charles Edward at once spoke with pride of the skill of Hawke and Anson. Montesquieu protested: were these not victories by his enemies? ‘That’s true,’ the prince replied archly, ‘but it’s still my country’s fleet.’77
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