Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  The duchess was not the only one drawn into the web of the prince’s admirers. Montesquieu, who had earlier written to Hume for information on the Highland system of heritable jurisdictions, was also very attracted to Charles Edward. The feeling was reciprocated. General Francis Bulkeley told Montesquieu in August 1748, when the philosophe was at Bordeaux, that the prince liked him immensely, missed him and spoke often of him.17

  The relationship began with an exchange of literary productions, the prince’s protest against the Aix-la-Chapelle peace preliminaries for Décadence des Romains.18 Montesquieu proved an adroit courtier. Who better to send a book on Roman heroes to, he wrote, than one who had made them come to life by emulating their exploits?19 Continuing to lay it on with a trowel, Montesquieu spoke of the prince’s written declaration as having simplicity, nobility and eloquence. He said that if Charles were not a great prince, he and Mme d’Aiguillon would like to propose him for election to the Académie Française.20 Amiably the prince replied, speaking of the ‘trust between authors’.21 Montesquieu confessed himself flattered by the attention Charles Edward paid him.22

  The process of mutual admiration continued after the prince’s expulsion from France. Montesquieu frequently expressed his indignation at French treatment of the prince.23 The level of mutual regard comes out in an exchange in 1749. Charles Edward requested that each edition of Montesquieu’s work be sent to him as it came out, even if he was at the Antipodes. ‘Though I am in obscurity,’ he went on, ‘my mind is not, thanks to your works.’24 Montesquieu replied in kind: ‘We are all like the brave Scots in that we cannot hear of you without loving you. Whether you show yourself, or remain hidden, you will always have the admiration of the universe.’25

  But the most important development in the prince’s life resulting from his entry into the d’Aiguillon social circle was his acquisition of a new mistress. Marie-Anne-Louise Jablonowska, Princesse de Talmont, was a cousin of the queen of France and had been in her time a fabulous beauty. When the prince fell in with her, she was in her mid-forties.26 Like her friend the duchesse d’Aiguillon, she was a highly unconventional woman. In her time she had had many lovers, most notably ex-king Stanislas of Poland (exiled to Lorraine after the War of Polish Succession in the 1730s).27 In 1730 Marie Jablonowska was married to the Prince de Talmont, a scion and second son of the La Trémoille family.28 This was another dynastic marriage of convenience. While the Prince de Talmont, ten years his wife’s junior, was a repressed homosexual who sublimated his leanings in devotional austerities,29 the princess continued to live an emancipated life and took a string of lovers. She was intelligent, witty, cynical and worldly-wise, one who masked a failed or frustrated creativity under a veil of caprice and eccentricity.30 She had an instant entrée to the court both through her kinship with the queen and her friendship with Maurepas, who shared her taste in caustic wit and cynical lampoonery.31

  By the time of Charles Edward’s return from Scotland, even her shaky marriage of convenience with the Prince de Talmont was on the rocks. Their public quarrels gave scandal even to the permissive court at Versailles. King Stanislas, who had gone on to take the Princesse de Talmont’s sister Countess Ossolinska as his mistress, was asked to mediate and arrange an amiable separation.32 He in turn chose two arbitrators, one to champion the husband, the other the wife. President of the Parlement Maupeou was chosen to represent the prince; Maurepas represented the princess.33

  The terms of the separation allowed the prince, whose income was much less than his wife’s, to sell their hôtel. Until that time, the two would share the same home for the sake of appearances. Thereafter, the couple would live apart.34 The protracted negotiations while the Prince de Talmont bartered for the best possible price for his house later produced some interesting and unforeseen results involving Charles Edward.

  Such, then, was the woman whom the prince now publicly avowed as his mistress. Part of the punishment Charles meted out to his former mistress Louise de Montbazon was to appear openly at the Opera at the end of April 1748 with his new mistress, knowing that Louise was also in attendance and would be watching.35

  The prince switched from the passionate intensity of love with the twenty-two-year-old Louise to the calculated lubricity of an affair with the mature and vastly experienced Princesse de Talmont. The arrangement suited him better at the sexual level. In place of feverish love-making of the honeymoon variety, he now enjoyed the practised arts of an aristocratic courtesan. This freed him from any real responsibility in the sexual relationship. The switch from a twenty-two-year-old mistress to one twice her age is abrupt enough to merit further consideration.

  All the evidence from the doomed romance with Louise de Montbazon suggests that the prince relished highly charged carnal relationships. What he did not relish was any sense of responsibility or commitment to a woman. It was to be the Princesse de Talmont’s misfortune, as she reached the end of her career as upper-class adventuress, that she tried to convert the affair with Charles Edward into something more permanent. The more one examines the prince’s personality, the more one sees it as one where sexual promiscuity, or at any rate tempestuous short-term affairs, were its most appropriate expression. The peculiarly unfortunate, truncated and flawed relationship with his mother must bear much of the responsibility. Where a son enjoying a sustained loving relationship with a loving mother gradually learns to integrate love and sex, one deprived too early, especially in tragic circumstances, may find his response to women fragmented. It is certain that Charles Edward never enjoyed a satisfactory, sustained, integrated relationship with any woman. The nearest he came was with Louise de Montbazon. But as soon as stresses impinged on the passion, the prince’s fragile personality began to unravel.

  From the very beginning the new relationship was a stormy one. The prince and Madame de Talmont were oil and water. She was a woman used to satisfying her whims, indulging her intellectual, aesthetic or carnal fantasies – a genuine capriciosa, in a word. The prince by 1748 had reached the point where he would allow no one to question his authority, where he (or she) who was not with him was against him, where no one could speak a word of even the mildest criticism about him – this was construed as ‘giving him laws’ – where his will was paramount. The underlying trend in the relationship with La Talmont was thus the collision of the irresistible force with the immovable object.

  These latent contradictions took time to work themselves to the surface. At the beginning of the affair, to testify to her devotion, Madame de Talmont wore a cameo of the prince in a bracelet, on the other side of which was a picture of Jesus Christ. A contemporary wag36 pointed out that the same motto suited both personages depicted on the bracelet: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’37

  At first it looked as though the marquis d’Argenson was right, that Madame de Talmont had a mesmeric hold on Charles Edward and encouraged him in all his worst excesses, distorting his vision and adding a moiety of madness and stupidity all her own.38 More and more it seemed likely that the prince intended to defy the French to do their worst once a general peace was signed. So worried were the exiled Jacobites in France, who after all depended on Louis XV for their new careers, that a general meeting was called to discuss the looming crisis. Present were Glenbucket, Ardshiel, Lord Lewis Gordon, Lord Nairne, Lochiel and Sir Hector Maclean – a fair sprinkling of the prince’s council during the ’45.39 It was decided that Lochiel was the only person at once capable of giving dispassionate advice to the prince and still with enough credit to be listened to.40 Unfortunately, Lochiel fell ill with meningitis and died soon afterwards. All other Jacobites felt they did not have the credibility to breach the magic circle of Kelly, Lally and Harrington. Mostly they were reduced to wringing their hands in despair.41

  The peace preliminaries at Aix-la-Chapelle continued. Eventually agreement was reached. The prince’s position became increasingly grave. How could he defy the might of France? Charles Edward seemed to be basing his hopes on two things: a pr
estigious foreign marriage and his status as the hero of the Paris mob.

  The prince had an immense popular following in Paris. Throughout 1748 he tried to build up this power base by showing himself in public as much as possible. The Opera, Comédie Française and other spectacles were particular targets.42 He seems to have thought that fear of popular disturbance might force the court to stay their hand against him. The strategy was not entirely chimerical: the ministers of state did take seriously the possible reactions of the mob. But the political consciousness that would sanction a head-on clash with the Ancien Régime was still forty years in the future.

  The deus ex machina of a foreign marriage seemed much more promising. As usual, the prince started his marriage prospect by aiming very high. He sent Sir John Graeme to Berlin to ask for the hand of Frederick the Great’s sister.43 Apart from the desire to cock a snook at France, the prince had a further aim. As he told Graeme, he wanted to show the world that he had done with ‘popery’. To seek a Protestant bride was his answer to the chicanery of the ‘Vicar of Christ’ who had connived at the treacherous design to make Henry a cardinal.44

  Once again we confront the utter cynicism of the prince in matters of religion. He despised the forms and trappings of organised churches and regarded all religious disputation as the theological writhings of medieval schoolmen. He was a modern figure in that he genuinely could not understand how rational men could be swayed by dogmas and belief in the supernatural. But it was a mistake to make his contempt so plain. Committed believers, especially those with political leverage, do not like to be told by wayward princes that their cherished beliefs are no better than the totems and taboos of benighted savages. But it was ever thus with the prince: he would embrace any dispensation, Protestant or Catholic, as long as it seemed likely to take him closer to his personal goals.

  Predictably, Graeme’s mission was a fiasco. Frederick sent word that he wanted Graeme out of his kingdom instantly: the emissary should think himself lucky he had not been placed under arrest.45

  Graeme now wanted to abandon the hunt for a Protestant princess in Germany, on the ground that all the other princelings would take their cue from Frederick of Prussia. But the prince held him to his task. He stressed that he was engaged in a race for time against the peace negotiations. As for family solidarity among the Protestant princes in support of the ‘Elector of Hanover’, Henry had already shown how much that was worth.46

  Graeme then proceeded to Darmstadt and entered into negotiations for the hand of Princess Caroline-Louise, daughter of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. The landgrave stalled, stressed his friendship for George II, and hinted that the proposal would have been welcome a year earlier.47 But Graeme was under strict orders from Charles Edward. The marriage proposal was a once-and-for-all affair; if it was rejected now, there would be no second chances.48 The landgrave left the decision to his daughter. Knowing her father’s real wishes, she rejected the suit.49 This part of the prince’s strategy of thwarting France was already an abject failure by August 1748.

  25

  ‘A Great Prince in Prison Lies’

  (August–December 1748)

  THE GREAT TRAUMATIC crisis with France in 1748, that was to leave a scar on the prince’s psyche greater even than Derby or his brother’s defection as a cardinal, was already in prospect by August of that year. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was to be ratified on 18 October, but it was already clear from the preliminaries that England would make peace with France only if all members of the Stuart family were expelled from French dominions. Naturally the Stuarts protested.1 This was to be expected, a mere ritualistic formality. What no one except intimates of the prince expected was that by the most blatant brinkmanship he would force France to reveal her own shame. There was already domestic discontent about the terms on which France was proposing to make peace: ‘bête comme la paix’, ‘stupid as the peace’, became a proverb. Charles Edward, by his stubborn resistance, would force the reality of French politics into naked exposure: not only was the peace against the national interest of France; it also made nonsense of her official ideology.

  What eventually became the scandal of the decade began innocuously enough. In the early stages of the struggle with Louis XV the prince was diplomacy itself. In July he entered his own protest against the provisions of the Aix-la-Chapelle treaty which had just been published.2 At the same time he wrote to the French king to explain his position, which was that the preliminaries placed him in a terrible position. He seemed to imply that his protest was every bit as formulaic as James’s but added, in a phrase that acquires an ominous significance in hindsight, that he would never forget Louis’s protection ‘whatever happens in the future’.3

  Immediately, the three-way process that clouded the events of late 1748 made its appearance. Puysieux sent a polite letter to O’Sullivan informally requesting the prince’s departure. The mere mention of this from O’Sullivan brought an angry rebuke from Charles Edward.4 Meanwhile, on seeing the prince’s personal protest, James wrote to him in August to ask him not to publish any more declarations ‘in the king’s name’.5 Charles regarded his father with contempt. He knew he could expect no positive support from him in the ordeal that lay ahead. All his letters to James in this period say the same: nothing.

  Yet it was not easy to ignore the French. They were as determined that the prince should leave their territory as he was to remain on it. At first they tried gentle prodding. In August an envoy was sent from Versailles directly to the prince to remind him that the preliminaries of the peace had been signed as long ago as April. Puysieux, who hated Charles Edward and resented the place he had in Louis XV’s affections, went twice in person to see his bête noire and to request him to observe the clear provisions of the Aix-la-Chapelle treaty.6 The prince replied haughtily that since he rejected the legitimacy of the entire treaty, it followed that he could not be bound by any articles that referred to him.7 Moreover, he pointed out, the Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed in October 1745 between James and Louis guaranteed him a secure asylum in France. Puysieux replied that the guarantee applied only in wartime. Nothing had ever been promised the prince in peacetime. And it was a commonplace of international politics, understood by everybody, that when a new treaty was signed it annulled the provisions of old ones.8

  Puysieux then made his personal position crystal clear. On his first visit to the prince, he referred to him as ‘Your Royal Highness’. By the second visit, this had become ‘Monsieur’.9 Puysieux’s bad opinion of the prince was confirmed when a source from within the Stuart household informed him anonymously that Charles Edward was determined to dig in his heels and defy the French to do their worst.10

  As he demonstrated later, Louis XV liked nothing better than running parallel policies. In echelon with the official channel used by Puysieux, the king tried his own brand of diplomacy. On 25 August he wrote the prince a long letter. As father of the French people, he argued, he could not allow the prince’s interests to override those of twenty million Frenchmen and, ultimately, of all Europe. But he was personally sympathetic to the prince’s position. Knowing his reluctance to return to Italy, he offered to use all his influence to find a safe refuge in Friburg or Switzerland.11 The number of crossings-out in the letter indicates Louis’s indecision and nervousness about how to proceed.

  It was not difficult for Louis to persuade Friburg and the Swiss cantons to agree to provide a secure home for the prince.12 Predictably, the English protested to the putative hosts, but their attitude smacked too much of dog in the manger.13 In any case, the English minister in Switzerland, John Burnaby, overreached himself by delivering a note to the magistrates of Friburg that was far too imperious in tone.14 English attempts at bullying were counterproductive. Friburg and the other Swiss cantons expressed themselves ready and pleased to play host to the Stuart prince.15

  But Charles Edward wanted none of it. As far as he was concerned, the clauses of the Aix-la-Chapelle treaty demanding his expulsio
n from France could not possibly be implemented by a ruler by divine right. Louis XV recognised James as king of England and Charles Edward as heir apparent. Were Louis to expel a fellow sovereign at the behest of the English, he would make a mockery of the entire notion of divine, indefeasible right. If Louis once admitted that the legitimate claimant to a throne could be expelled by another divine right monarch in the interests of expediency, he cut the ground from under his own legitimacy. The situation was different with George II. He was self-confessedly king as trustee. He reigned with the say-so of the English Parliament. Louis XV was constrained by no parliament. It followed that if he expelled a fellow-monarch by divine, indefeasible right, he would in effect be conceding that he himself could be expelled by force majeure, since that was ultimately the only sanction he recognised. Charles Edward argued that Louis was in a different position from the ‘Elector of Hanover’; he could not allow the untrammelled sway of expediency, lest he diminish the mystique of monarchy itself. Once again we see that the prince’s intellectual grip was stronger than his detractors would have us believe. The events of late 1748 have usually been presented as the obstinate refusal of a blockhead to face reality. In fact they represented a calculated gamble. Only at the very end of the struggle, when the balance of power swung decisively in Louis’s favour, did the prince’s self-destructive urges come into play.

  The prince miscalculated because he had not got the measure of Louis XV’s personality. Concepts of honour and morality, other than as verbal camouflage, meant little to the French king. Fundamentally amoral, he was constrained by religion only because it threatened divine punishment in the after-life. The law of love itself Louis would have regarded with contempt. He was not the sort of person who would be bothered by philosophical self-contradiction or ideological inconsistency. Moreover, the prince’s tactics were precisely the wrong ones when it came to manipulating Louis XV. Indecisive, secretive, neurotic, Louis was likely to react with peculiar anger to anyone who backed him into a corner. The prince’s tactic of revealing the contradictions between the king’s actions and Bourbon ideology were always likely to miscarry in face of a personality like Louis XV. To the French king, prevarication, secrecy and duplicity were almost a way of life. His resentment against a man who tried to strip away the veils of obfuscation and mystification in which he wrapped himself can well be imagined. The conflict between Louis XV and Charles Edward was not that between two strong wills. It was rather a duel between a hunter and a singularly deadly animal whose lack of aggression right up to the moment of truth misleads the hunter as to the beast’s ultimate ferocity.