Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  All his old talents as a dancer were in evidence that night. It was eight o’clock next morning before the prince retired. The other revellers kept going until 4 p.m. To commemorate this unique manifestation of the pleasure principle, the citizens set up an equestrian statue of Charles Edward (on 24 February) in the place St Didier, opposite the house occupied by the exiled James in 1716.55

  This fresh drain on his resources – so obviously a calculated insult to His Holiness – brought Benedict as close to vindictive rage as any event in his life.56 The great ‘Charles Edward festival’ brought the Apostolic Chamber close to bankruptcy. They had already been forced to ask for a supplementary budget of several thousand écus to pay for the junketings.57 On top of this came the horrifying news that Charles Edward’s baggage and effects had now all arrived in Avignon. It seemed certain he was set for a long stay.58 Nor was the Pope’s temper improved by a series of long letters from Dunbar, purporting to justify the prince’s every action from leaving Rome in 1744 to his present sybaritism in Avignon.59 The Pope’s anger and frustration found an outlet in expressions of contempt for Dunbar’s intellectual capacity and his ‘pathetic’ epistles.60

  The Vatican now had to implement two strategies. The first was somehow to winkle the prince and his entourage out of the Apostolic Palace. The second was to persuade him to move on permanently. Getting him out of the palace in the interests of economy was vitiated by the prince’s insistence that the vice-legate pay the rent for any alternative accommodation.61 But the prince was finally persuaded to move to an imposing house on the outskirts of Avignon.62

  The strategy adopted for getting him to move permanently involved stressing the security problems of an open society like Avignon. Secretary of State Valenti advised the vice-legate to keep a constant drip-drip of disconcerting news going, stressing the many dangers of assassination and abduction in the papal enclave. He was to advance the argument that these dangers augmented geometrically as the number of balls increased arithmetically, simply because the revellers went masked.63

  The upshot was curious. When the prince finally quit Avignon, not long after moving into his new house, all parties took the credit on themselves. The Vatican congratulated itself on its ‘security’ disinformation campaign.64 The French felt that their unrelenting pressure had finally paid off. The British thought that the trick had been achieved by their threat to bombard Civitavecchia.65

  None of this was the case. The truth was that the prince had all along wanted to cock a snook at France while humiliating the Pope at the same time. In this way the twin wounds of Henry’s defection and the French expulsion could be assuaged. When the round of pleasure in Avignon became boring, the prince intended to move on to Phase Two of his defiance of Louis XV.

  All of this was hidden at the time. Shortly after the erection of the statue there came a dramatic and mysterious sequence of events. The Pope was fretting about the approach of Lent, determined that the prince be prevented from flouting religious scruple by continuing his festivities into the season of penance.66 Suddenly it was announced that Charles was ill and would not be seen in society for a while.67 The vice-legate stayed with the prince until midnight on the first day of his ‘cold’. On returning next morning, he was not admitted. The pretence was kept up that the prince was indisposed and, later, that he was out taking the air.68

  March came, and still there was no sign of the prince. At last Dunbar admitted to the vice-legate that the prince would not be seen again, for he had left on 25 February, taking with him just a single gentleman and no servants. The story about his illness had been a fiction. No one knew where he was going or what his intentions were.69

  The vice-legate set his spies to work. The prince was traced as far as Orange. He had taken a post-chaise there and asked the driver to wait to take him back to Avignon. Then he had vanished.70

  At first the Pope and the vice-legate waited nervously for their scourge to return. But he did not. Gradually their confidence built up. God had heard their prayers and delivered them. But where was the prince? This was a question that was to baffle the whole of Europe for the next nine years.

  27

  ‘Imaginary Space’

  (1749–51)

  WHEN THE PRINCE vanished from public view at Orange, he was very clear in his own mind what his next step would be. He had already told Kelly that the reason he was to stay in Paris was that he, the prince, would be seeing him shortly.1 Now Charles made good his boast. Travelling via Lyons – where he was momentarily spotted by a papal agent2 – the prince arrived in Paris in heavy disguise, less than three months after he had given his solemn word not to set foot on French territory.

  The plan had been concerted closely with the Princesse de Talmont, who remained in Paris to put the final touches to the masterpiece of deception.3 When the prince arrived in the French capital, he was hidden away in the utmost secrecy in the convent of St Joseph in the rue Saint-Dominique. The convent had long boasted a ‘profane’ quarter where ladies of quality could take refuge from the outside world at moderate prices. No proof of religious commitment was required. It was accepted that the great ladies came there simply to look for a quiet retreat.4 The convent was a favourite haunt of the Princesse de Talmont and her friends Elisabeth Ferrand and the comtesse de Vasse (Antoinette-Louise-Gabrielle des Gentils du Bessay).

  For the next two months – and intermittently for the next three years, whenever he visited Paris – Charles Edward lived the life of a fugitive, sometimes cramped in alcoves and niches no bigger than priest holes.5 There were false walls behind the rooms occupied by Mlle Ferrand and the comtesse de Vasse. The routine was that the prince spent the mornings in the infra-mural hideout in the former’s chamber, then transferred to the room of the latter for the afternoon. In the evening, when all visitors were locked out of the convent, the prince would descend from the comtesse de Vasse’s by a hidden staircase to the Princesse de Talmont’s bedroom below.6 There the lovers would spend the night.

  At first all went well. From his eyrie during the daytime the prince played eavesdropper, listening to snippets of gossip about the court and personalities of Versailles relayed to the ladies Ferrand and Vasse by their aristocratic visitors. On one occasion he was highly amused to overhear a long conversation about himself, which included ‘informed’ speculation on his whereabouts.7

  But as time went on, the prince began to grow bored and to chafe at his cramped lifestyle. He began to row with the Princesse de Talmont. These were no ordinary rows. The prince by now was accustomed to fall into volcanic rages if people opposed their will to his, crossed him, or even disagreed with him. The small change of verbal sniping between intimate couples was conflated by the prince into part of the general mosaic of rejection the world had foisted upon him. His subsequent rage frequently took a physical form and he would beat his mistress.

  The battered Princesse de Talmont’s legendary wit and repartee availed her little against a man who was not ashamed to use violence if thwarted, or simply worsted in a verbal encounter. More to the point, the two ladies Ferrand and Vasse, who were bound together by gentle bonds (probably unconscious lesbianism)8 were deeply shocked by the outbursts of physical violence and the ferocious altercations between the lovers which they could not fail to overhear.

  Tactfully the two ladies put it to the prince that it might be time to move on.9 After two months of huddled daytime privation, Charles Edward felt he had made his point. He had bearded Louis XV in his own lair and thrown all the assassins and secret agents of Europe off his trail. Besides, he had decided where he would make his permanent home. On 20 April the prince wrote to Earl Marischal, asking him to meet him in Venice.10 Charles Edward was still absurdly hoping to recruit this man (who, unknown to him, hated him vehemently) as his secretary of state. In hopes of assembling a skeleton court, Charles also asked Harrington (then at Dijon with Graeme) to join him in Venice.11 If possible, Graeme should accompany him.

  There was no reply
from Marischal. The prince wrote again to the same effect on 5 May. Back came the lame old excuse about ‘broken health’.12

  The prince set out in early May 1749, intending to avoid all French garrison towns. He was not a moment too soon. By now the French had got wind of his presence in their capital – probably because the prince told John Waters his banker that he would be ‘calling’ for his mail. The French instituted an intensive search. This time, if they found Charles, they were going to take him all the way to Civitavecchia and deposit him there.13

  The prince’s itinerary took him through Luneville and Lorraine. Then he headed south into Switzerland, passing through Lucerne, the Mt St Goddard pass and the vale of Bellinzona to Lugano. Then he crossed lake Como and rested at Bergamo before pressing on to Venice.14

  On 17 May Charles Edward wrote in sanguine spirits from the Most Serene Republic to his father. He was very hopeful of being allowed to stay in Venice, ‘a place that next to France is the best for my interest’.15 He decided to use the papal nuncio as his go-between to the doge’s council. The nuncio was deeply sympathetic to the prince, but warned him that the most consideration he was likely to receive was tacit consent to remain a few days incognito.16 But at least this time the prince did send on a formal compliment to the Pope – the first time he had done so since leaving Rome in January 1744. Benedict wrote back by special courier to tell Charles that he was free to reside anywhere in papal Italy, but would not be welcome if he returned to Avignon. Bologna was proposed as a suitable haven. But Charles Edward told the nuncio that in an open town like Bologna he would go in fear of his life – a very neat twist on the Pope’s own arguments about Avignon.17

  It gradually became clear why the prince had chosen to make his base in Venice. The city of masked revellers and shadowy secret agents was the perfect milieu for a man to whom disguise and cloak and dagger had become second nature. The prince dismissed Benedict’s countervailing argument: that a city based on the incognito, where so many went masked, provided the perfect locale for assassins and was thus the worst possible bet for the prince.18

  The doge’s reply took a long time to come. A week later, on 24 May, the prince reported himself still hopeful.19 But on 26 May the predictable answer came. The Most Serene Republic would not risk the wrath of England again, as it had in 1737.20 When the nuncio brought the reply, Charles Edward commented laconically, ‘Then I’ll leave.’ The nuncio tried in vain to find out where he was going next. He offered him the hospitality of the papal states. The prince made no reply but departed that very evening.21

  In private the prince was full of brooding bitterness. The Venetians, he noted, were ‘rascals’. Who would have imagined that the Venice which behaved so decently to him in 1737 would behave so shamefully now?22 ‘Now my friend [i.e. himself] must skulk to the perfect dishonour and glory of his worthy relations,’ he jotted down gnomically, ‘until he finds a reception fitting at home or abroad.’23

  Benedict XIV wrote to warn the cardinal legates of Bologna and Ferrara that the prince might be descending on them at any moment. He was determined not to be caught napping again. Weekly expenses at Avignon incurred on the prince’s behalf had amounted to upwards of 6,000 écus. The Pope was adamant that there should be no repeat of such financial madness; if the prince came into the papal states, it was to be made clear to him that the legates would not pay his expenses. Benedict felt strongly on this point. With another sort of personality it might be different, but not with a prince whom caprice and bad behaviour kept away from his father.24

  The Pope need not have worried. The prince already regarded the Vatican and all its works with a peculiar horror. He had already laid contingency plans in the event of a Venetian refusal. In the short term he would go to Lunéville, to the Ruritanian domain ruled by ex-king Stanislas of Poland.25 The prince had a long-standing invitation to seek refuge there. The invitation had a dramatic provenance. Stanislas was actually listening to a lecture by Voltaire (one of Charles Edward’s strong admirers) on the misfortunes of the Stuarts when a courier entered with news of the prince’s arrest in the Opera cul-de-sac. Stanislas immediately offered Charles Edward asylum in Lunéville.26

  To Lunéville, then, the prince went. He lodged at first in the house of M. Mittie, the surgeon-general, before finding more spacious quarters where he could rendezvous with the Princesse de Talmont. Mittie’s son became for a time one of the prince’s most trusted agents. Yet it is clear that the prince always regarded Lunéville as no more than a convenient stopover.

  What he wanted now was to make a permanent abode in Imperial territory. To this end he wrote to Choiseul (then marquis de Stain-ville) asking for help. On 13 July 1749 a double envelope, incorrectly addressed to the comte de Stainville, was left at the door of Choiseul’s Paris residence. The significant thing about the letter, which requested permission to shelter on Austrian territory, was that it was written on 26 May in Venice, immediately after the nuncio’s negative reply from the doge.27 When Choiseul did not reply, the prince wrote again, in January 1750, reiterating his request.28 This aspect of the prince’s intentions soon became generally known.29

  That the prince was not prepared to settle down in Lunéville was evident from the advice he sought from senior Jacobites on a permanent base. Marischal recommended Friburg.30 Bulkeley opted for Switzerland or Bologna.31 Charles himself had an inclination towards Sweden and actually set about obtaining a six-month passport there for himself and his effects.32 ‘What can a bird do that has not found a right nest?’ he wrote to Bulkeley. ‘It will always wander and never pitch on a branch.’33

  Yet inexorably, as the Powers closed ranks against him so as not to offend the formidable English, he found himself perforce hemmed in at Lunéville. Fortunately, very few people had the least idea where he was. While he fretted and fumed about the future, the prince tried to find distraction. On 22 September he observed the Aurora Borealis at Lunéville and wrote a precise description of it.34 Earlier he had jotted down a set of maxims: (1) If there is a Being, there is also a destiny. (2) One should never judge others by oneself. (3) Never tell a secret to a weak man because it might frighten him and cause him to use it against you.35

  In early November 1749 the prince was back in Paris at the convent of St Joseph, thumbing his nose at the Paris police. He was in the French capital at least ten days. Among others he visited Lally, seeking support for his idea of a coup d’état in London.36 Once again the French picked up his trail just too late. The ministers were indignant at his behaviour. In their eyes, Charles Edward lacked self-respect, both because he had promised not to return to France and because he seemed fatally drawn to the city that had ignominiously kicked him out.37 By this time Louis XV himself seemed disposed to connive at his clandestine visits. But Puysieux and Madame Pompadour felt angry at the implicit insult to France. They thirsted to apprehend Charles and to send him packing to Civitavecchia.38

  Yet Charles Edward was always at least one step ahead of those who sought him. His abilities at playing a Scarlet Pimpernel role were pronounced. The prince would have made a perfect secret agent. As with many spies, the notion of betrayal was a central one in his psychic imagery. And the taste for disguise, first broached in 1744, then honed to a higher point of expertise with ‘Betty Burke’ and perfected during the affair with Louise de Montbazon, now came into its own as a fully-fledged aspect of the prince’s personality. The predilection for secretiveness, originally a means to an end, became finally an end in itself.

  Techniques of disinformation, the art of disguise, the ability to cover his tracks, all these came as second nature to Charles Edward. This helps to explain, but does not diminish, the achievement involved in his ‘invisibility’ during the obscure years from 1749 to 1758. The plain fact was that for most of this time the combined espionage efforts of Europe could not get a proper fix on a man who was arguably the greatest celebrity of the time.

  Some idea of the utter confusion sown by the prince can be obtained fro
m the contemporary diplomatic records, which at any given moment were capable of locating the prince anywhere on a line from the Atlantic to the Urals! The most popular guess immediately after the departure from Avignon was Bologna.39 The duc de Luynes reported him ‘certainly’ there.40 A variant on this was that Charles Edward had agreed to live in northern Italy provided James dismissed O’Brien as his secretary of state.41 Some years later d’Argenson provided a further gloss on this with a story of the prince’s living peacefully in a small town 300 leagues (sic) north of Rome.42 Later the prince was reported in Berlin, much to Frederick the Great’s surprise and amusement; this particular rumour reached a head about the time Charles Edward was actually in Venice.43 A surreptitious return to England was another favourite theory.44 The analysts who wanted to play safe predicted an imminent return to Avignon.45

  It was left to the more intelligent diplomats to try to make something of the Talmont connection. Since her brother was Palatine of Ravva, this principality was added to the swelling list of possible locations.46 More likely was Poland, where both the Princesse de Talmont and Charles Edward himself had roots and strong connections. The prince cunningly started a hare in this direction by writing a document in which he claimed to have married the daughter of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt and then asked permission of the king of Poland to settle on his territories.47 Predictably, reports began to flood in to the respective foreign offices that the prince had been seen in Poland.48