Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  The other reason was more immediate. In the wake of her near-exile from the court at the time of the prince’s expulsion, Talmont had to tread carefully, especially since her protector at Versailles, Maurepas, was himself disgraced early in 1749.116 When she originally applied for congé to visit Luneville, she was given three months’ leave of absence. It was well over a year when she finally reappeared publicly in court life. Louis XV, suspecting the true nature of her ‘urgent business’ in Lunéville, was very angry at her ‘impertinent’ behaviour and complained vociferously to his father-in-law Stanislas. Her kinswoman the queen also took a dim view of her activities.117

  There were the circumstances when a letter from the prince arrived, claiming that he was inconsolable without her. Talmont sought an audience with Louis XV to obtain another congé. The king raged at her for her insolence: if she went to Lunéville again, it was on her own head; she could return to Paris only on pain of total disgrace. The princess used all her wiles to make her absence palatable. Louis would not accept that her reasons were valid. Finally he relented to the point of allowing her a congé from January to May 1751.118

  The princess wrote to Charles Edward to announce her return to Lunéville. But just as she was about to leave Paris, she was again stricken with her mystery illness. In Lunéville the prince fretted at the delay, then made final plans to journey to Berlin to meet Frederick of Prussia.

  At the very last moment Talmont seems to have had a premonition that she would lose the prince altogether if she did not at once make the trip to Lorraine. Cutting short her convalescence, against medical advice, she set out early on 24 January 1751. A gruelling two-day journey brought her, by now dreadfully ill, to her chateau outside Lunéville on the evening of 25 January.119

  Marie-Louise had hoped that her heroism in making such a journey in winter in her condition would finally get the prince to see the light and appreciate the extent of her sacrifice for him. She looked forward to a reconciliation. But the prince was now committed to his Berlin trip. Since he did not trust his mistress, he certainly did not intend to divulge his plans. One look at the decrepit, ailing princess in any case disabused him of any notion that they could travel together.

  Next morning, to Marie-Louise’s utter astonishment, the prince left her, complaining that the chateau was too uncomfortable to house two separate retinues. She did not see him again for two months. She received a couple of notes purporting to come from him in Lunéville, but obviously sent by Mittie junior during his absence. One was a complaint about her behaviour, coupled with a wish that she would make a New Year’s resolution to reform it.120 The other harked back to his old grievance about having doors shut in his face.121

  At the end of March 1751 the princess wrote to him, using the channel of Mittie junior. The letter was in the form of an ultimatum. Since she had returned to Lunéville at great personal and political risk only at his urgent request, would he now at once have the goodness to come and see her? Otherwise she would return to Paris to placate Louis XV.122 The prince, by now returned from another abortive mission, replied that he wished she had stayed in Paris in the first place. He relented sufficiently to spend one night with her, but then left suddenly the next day.123

  After an interval he returned, this time exuding charm. When Talmont, who had been bitten twice, reacted coldly, he complained of her lack of commitment and flew into a rage with her. She confided to Goring that he could no longer hurt her as much as in the old days, when all her emotions were in thrall. She bore the irate squall with equanimity.124

  The off-and-on relationship limped along until the expiry of the princess’s congé. Marie-Louise then announced her departure for Paris. This angered the prince. He had no particular liking or even use for her any more, but he would decide when the relationship was over. This was the old business of someone else ‘giving him laws’. Marie-Louise then promised to write to Louis XV to ask for an extension, provided Charles pledged himself to live with her and see her constantly. The prince promised. Talmont prepared for a resumption of their old passionate relationship.125

  But on the very night the idyll was scheduled to recommence, Marie-Louise had another of her dreadful attacks of migraine and vomiting. The prince arrived to find his mistress a puking invalid. His reaction was cold fury. He knew how to deal with this imperious Queen of Morocco who seemed to make a career out of thwarting his will. He had brought her to heel before by promiscuous flings with other women. With supreme callousness, the prince spent the night with one of the princess’s maids.126

  At noon next day Charles announced that he was leaving for good. The princess fell on her knees and begged him at least to save her a public humiliation by waiting until she had cleared the ante-room of servants. At least he would then leave unobserved. But the prince was savouring his total victory over the woman who had so long opposed her will to his. Coldly he informed her that he was going to take another mistress. He would leave when and how he pleased.127 As a parting master-stroke of cruelty, he demanded that she return his portrait, knowing that it was in her bureau in Paris. He ordered her to hand it over to Waters, his banker. She protested at the thought of having Waters as a witness to her indignity, but Charles was adamant.128 Then he swept from the chateau.

  That was the end of the affair. Marie-Louise spent another two months in Lunéville, vainly hoping he would return to her. She wrote a number of letters to him, which she described as being capable of melting the heart of a stone. His only reply was to say that he never wished to see her again.129

  Such was the dismal termination of a liaison that had from the very first carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The most obvious problem was that both the lovers were strong-willed and thought themselves perfect beings, let down or vitiated by the flaws of others. In the prince’s case, this masked a deep unconscious self-loathing that caused him to fail in crucial moments unless objective circumstances were overwhelmingly favourable. Not enough is known about the Princesse de Talmont, but Madame du Deffand alleged that her vanity went beyond all normal vanity into a realm where she genuinely believed herself perfect and expected everyone else to feel the same way about her.130

  The prince had turned to Talmont in the first place as a reaction to the affair with Louise de Montbazon, in hopes that such a sophisticated woman would not cling to him or make demands. At first the relationship seemed to fulfil these hopes. But there was one factor he had not counted on. The Princesse de Talmont was now in her late forties, and it was likely that Charles Edward would be her last lover. She wanted to exit from her career of dalliance with a solid, durable relationship, so that she could feel her emotional life had not been totally vain and ephemeral.

  Once the prince sensed that she wished to make of the relationship something more binding and committed, he reacted with coldness. Profound relationships with women were beyond him, as he demonstrated throughout his life. He needed women sexually, but anything deeper, more testing, stretched his resources farther than they would go. Badinage and repartee in a salon with witty blue-stockings was one thing; sexual promiscuity with maids and courtesans was another. But the ultimate horror for the prince was any demand that he integrate the two strands.

  In retrospect, the three troubled years with the Princesse de Talmont seemed to have produced nothing but a hell of physical and verbal abuse. The only good fruit of these years was the dismissal of Kelly (he left the prince’s service in November 1749).131 It took Marie-Louise to persuade the prince that if he really wanted Marischal as his secretary of state – and Marischal was adamant that he would have no dealings with the prince while Kelly was at his side – then Kelly had to go. But the diabolical Kelly was not finished with the prince yet. It was a woman who dislodged him. Years later he would take his revenge by being instrumental in dislodging another woman from the prince’s side.

  The Princesse de Talmont stayed on in Lunéville until the beginning of September 1751, still vainly hoping that the prin
ce would relent and return to her. How far the prince was from entertaining any residual thoughts of her can be seen from the fate of the letter she sent him on her return to Paris. On the back of the paper where Marie-Louise speaks of his memory’s reign equally in her mind and heart, the prince proceeded to jot down some financial calculations!132

  Talmont’s bitterness when the prince made no reply eventually found expression in a tempestuous altercation with Elisabeth Ferrand. Mlle Ferrand had been ill with a fever and did not respond to the letters the princess sent enquiring about Charles’s health and whereabouts. The princess dashed off a string of accusations, many of them personal, which Ferrand described as ‘blush-making’. Remonstrating violently against being accused of ‘basesse’, Ferrand put the termagant princess firmly in her place.133 Then she wrote to the prince, complaining ringingly of his former mistress. Talmont backtracked and apologised to Ferrand for a hasty letter caused by excessive stress.134 Henceforth she adopted a softer approach in her relations with the ‘sisters’ (which was how Ferrand and Vassé invariably referred to each other).135

  The new tack availed her little. When the prince paid his next flying visit to Paris (in December 1751), he spent time with the ‘sisters’ but did not communicate his presence to his ex-mistress.136 Like James, like Louise de Montbazon, the Princesse de Talmont had gone the way of all flesh. There was further correspondence with the prince, but for the remaining twenty years of her life she never set eyes on him again.

  28

  The Elibank Plot

  (1749–53)

  DURING THE YEARS of his turbulent relationship with the Princesse de Talmont, Charles Edward’s attention was by no means devoted only to his private life. He still hankered after a repeat of the ’45 by other means. The years 1750–3 were full of plots and rumours of plots as the prince cast about for some ingenious means of overthrowing the Hanoverian dynasty. This time he would have to make the attempt without any help from France. And – another of the prince’s idées fixes – it would have to be focused on England.

  One of the problems about planning a coup d’état in England – and without foreign aid or an invading army a Stuart restoration could only come about in this way – was the lack of contact with either James or the Jacobites in France. This fact alone led to the abandonment of a number of promising schemes. In 1749 Sir Hector Maclean worked out an imaginative project for a new Jacobite rising with the duc de Richelieu and Paris de Monmartel, éminence grise of French finances. The plan was that 5,000 French troops would land on the east coast of Scotland while 4,000 Swedes disembarked on the west coast. A general rendezvous would be held at Inverness, where the Jacobite clans would join the two sets of liberators. But when Sir Hector Maclean went to Rome to get James’s approval, the Stuart monarch vetoed the project, lest it clash with some other venture by the prince.1

  The prince was indeed planning a scheme of his own, but its tenor was very different. By now he was convinced that the key to a restoration lay neither on the Celtic fringes nor with marginal religious groups like the Catholics. There was in England a solid rump of alienated people: not just Jacobites, but disaffected Whigs and extreme ‘Country’ ideologues at present attached to the rival court of Prince Frederick at Leicester House, but chafing at its mild reformist challenge to George II’s supremacy.2 Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, doyen of the old English Jacobite party, had died in 1749. The new Jacobite leaders seemed to be men of a different stamp, especially the duke of Beaufort and Lord Westmoreland. Charles Edward accordingly reverted to an idea long peddled by the marquise de Mézières: that all attempts at Jacobite restoration should be based on English Protestants alone.3

  Moreover, by 1749–50 there were many straws in the wind that indicated a revival of Jacobite fortunes in England after the disaster of the ’45. In 1749, at the dedication of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, Dr William King, a prominent Jacobite of the university, delivered a famous coded oration, punctuated at intervals with the watchword redeat (‘may he return!’).4 Everyone in the audience knew that the ‘Bonnie Prince’ was being referred to.

  Burgeoning Jacobite sentiment was not a prerogative solely of ‘the home of lost causes’. At the other end of the social spectrum, the oppressed workers of England used pro-Stuart rhetoric as their legitimating ideology. In 1750 the striking keelworkers of Newcastle proclaimed ‘James III’ as part of their political programme.5 Confirming all these pro-Stuart trends, a French agent in London added further factors favouring the Jacobites. There was the burden of land tax levied to meet the costs of the English role in the War of Austrian Succession, plus the huge personal unpopularity of the duke of Cumberland.6

  Early in 1750 the prince took a firm decision to go to England that year. He worked on a manifesto dealing with the National Debt and sent secret messages to Lady Primrose (Anne Drelincourt, widow of the 3rd Viscount Primrose), doyenne of the English Jacobites, to enquire about his likely reception ‘as the Prince is determined to come over at any rate’.7 Having satisfied himself on that score, he assembled a minor arsenal at Anvers: 20,000 guns, bayonets and ammunition plus 4,000 swords and pistols were to be loaded on one ship, and another 6,000 guns and ammunition (but without bayonets) on a second vessel.8 Charles entrusted the work to his agents Goring and Dormer. They were instructed to be ready to sail to England with the arms as soon as he sent word.

  Next the prince sent to Rome for a renewal of his Commission of Regency. After much grumbling, James granted it.9 Finally, Charles laid a number of false trails to mask his risky journey to London. He spread the rumour that he was ill and at the point of death.10 And he sent a package of letters to Elisabeth Ferrand, written as if on the dates 15 September, 6 October and 24 October, with instructions that she was to post them on those dates.11 Any spies intercepting and reading his letters would then conclude that he was still on the Continent. All was now set for his daring journey.

  Why did the prince go to London in September 1750? Andrew Lang’s judgment is this:

  There are no traces of a serious organised plan and the Prince probably crossed the water, partly to see how matters really stood, partly from restlessness and the weariness of a tedious solitude in hiding, broken only by daily quarrels and reconciliations with the Princess de Talmond and other ladies.12

  But a close examination of the Stuart Papers shows that there was a much more compelling reason. What the prince feared was that George II would die before he himself was ready to act. In the ensuing maelstrom, unless he, Charles Edward Stuart, was on hand to make his bid, the initiative would pass to others. Charles’s especial fear, shared incidentally by the Pelhams, was that in the event of the death of ‘the Elector’, Cumberland would seize power, either by a military coup or, more likely, through summoning Parliament and having his brother Frederick declared non compos mentis.13 Cumberland would then be declared Regent until Frederick’s children came of age.

  The prince’s visit to London was designed to prepare a pre-emptive strike. If George II died, the prince wanted to be able either to beat Cumberland to the punch or to manipulate Frederick into declaring a Stuart restoration. We may remark in passing that it was not the least of Charles Edward’s misfortunes during the decade of the 1750s that the ailing George II clung to life until 1760, so that the expected power vacuum never took place. With hindsight, one can see all the prince’s hopes in this decade blighted by two sovereigns who hung on until the age of seventy-eight: George II ‘the Elector’, and his own father James.

  When all his preparations were complete, the prince left Lunéville on 2 September 1750, headed for Antwerp. He arrived at Antwerp on 6 September.14 From there he went to Ghent to confer with the intermediaries from the English Jacobites, to check that it was safe for him to cross. Charles was provided with a list of names and contact locations. Among these were Theobald’s Court in Theobald’s Row; the Grecian coffee house near the Temple; and Simmons coffee house in Chancery Lane.15

  Then the prince proceeded to O
stend.16 There he met the man who was to accompany him to England, John Holker.17 Holker was the very finest and most able type of Jacobite. Aged thirty-one, he had served in the Manchester regiment, was taken prisoner, but escaped to France, where he was already making a name for himself as a textile manufacturer in Rouen. He later became one of the key figures in the French industrial revolution.18 Yet Holker never lost either his ardent Jacobite sentiments or his personal regard for the prince. It was a tribute to his sterling qualities that he was willing to accompany Charles on such a perilous mission.

  On the morning of the 13th, Holker and the heavily disguised prince put to sea.19 After landing at Dover, they arrived in London on 16 September.20 Although the prince’s plan to come to London was known to the English Jacobites in a general way, his coming caught them unawares. Fearing betrayal, he told no one of his detailed plans. The consequence was that his arrival caused a certain amount of consternation. When he was ushered in to Lady Primrose’s house in Essex Street off the Strand under an assumed name, the mistress of the house was playing cards with some non-Jacobite nobility. Recognising him at once, she nearly dropped her cards in amazement.21

  Recovering quickly, she set about devising a programme for him. Fifty of his partisans were invited to a secret meeting at a house in Pall Mall. Among those present were the duke of Beaufort, Lord Westmoreland and Dr William King;22 also there was Robert Gordoun, henceforth an assiduous correspondent.23 The prince addressed his followers and explained his aims. He needed just 4,000 men to achieve the restoration without foreign help. The English Jacobites became alarmed. They rehearsed to him all the old arguments used in 1745–6 to justify their non-participation in the rising. The gentry were unused to bearing arms, they could not raise a private army unobserved, they were short of cash, they could be arrested under general warrants at any time. It soon became clear to the prince that he had a wasted journey.24 By inference from later events, it seems that the English Jacobites must have urged on him the desirability of some sort of foreign assistance and of a diversionary rising or raid elsewhere in the United Kingdom.