Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico)

by McLynn, Frank

  For all that, Charles Edward did secure some small triumphs in the Elibank years. Despite having a spy at the very nerve centre of Jacobite operations, the Hanoverians were as much at sea as ever as to the prince’s movements and his location at any given time. Some of the intelligence reports from this period reach new heights of absurdity. In 1751 there was a ludicrous hue and cry following reports that the prince was at Borscheit in Germany.106 Early in 1752 ‘the Young Pretender’ was reported as being probably in Bordeaux but ‘certainly’ somewhere in southern France.107 Later he was placed in Switzerland, intending (again!) to marry Princess Radziwill.108 Some idea of the utter hopelessness felt by Hanoverian agents with the job of tracking Charles Edward can be seen from an intelligence report early in 1753, allegedly following the prince’s itinerary successively through Prussia, Poland, Paris, Scotland, Denmark, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Liège and Lunéville.109 Simply by the law of averages, one of these ‘sightings’ was likely to correspond with fact!

  The prince’s other minor triumph was to direct a conspiracy without allowing any word of it to leak out to his father. After obtaining the renewal of the Commission of Regency in 1750, Charles Edward simply cut James out. His father’s homily on the necessity of marrying, written on his son’s thirtieth birthday, was ignored.110 All James ever received was the occasional short note, without date or address, containing the inevitable ‘my health is perfect’.

  The failure of the Elibank plot also elicited two wildly divergent views of the prince from two of its principal participants. This is Dr King’s version:

  I never heard him express any noble or benevolent sentiments … or discover any sorrow or compassion for the misfortunes of so many worthy men who had suffered in his cause. But the most odious part of his character is his love of money, a vice which I do not remember to have been imputed by any historian to any of his ancestors, and it is the certain index of a base and little mind.111

  Here, by contrast, is what Dr Cameron had to say just before his execution:

  I had the honour to be almost constantly about his person until November 1748 … I became more and more captivated with his amiable and princely virtues which are, indeed, in every instance so eminently great as I want words to describe. I can further affirm (and my present situation and that of my dear prince too can leave no room to suspect me of flattery) that as I have been his companion in the lowest degree of adversity ever Prince was reduced to, so I have beheld him too as it were on the highest pinnacle of glory amidst the continual applauses and I had almost said adoration of the most brilliant court in Europe, yet he was always the same, ever affable and courteous, giving constant proofs of his great humanity and of his love for his friends and country.112

  In such a conflict of evidence, it is clearly preferable to accept the word of a man ‘constantly about’ the prince to one who had seen him briefly over a period of six days and later rewrote his testimony. This is to say nothing of one’s natural preference for the word of the man whose mind the prospect of hanging, in Dr Johnson’s words, concentrates wonderfully, rather than that of the embittered zealot who rationalises three years of wasted effort by outright apostasy.

  But at another level the two wildly discordant judgments are interesting as denoting the two sides of the prince: purposive strength, willpower, perseverance, tolerance and humour on the one side; self-destructive guilt, rage and paranoia on the other. If Cameron concentrated solely on the light, King pointed up the darkness.

  King’s words were written after 1754, in the bitter aftermath of Elibank. King’s evidence, selected and biased as it is, is of a piece with the psychological portrait we have offered. The constant action of the ’45, the years of exile, the Elibank plot, all kept the prince’s shaky mental equilibrium going. When the action ceased in 1754, and all realistic political hopes were laid aside, the hitherto contained suffering broke out anew. When Dr Cameron made his dying speech, the prince could still be perceived as the hero of the ’45, his faults yet dimmed in the brightness of that golden memory. A year later little but a vague shadow of what he had once been remained.

  29

  Trust in Princes

  (1752–4)

  AFTER THE FINAL break with the Princesse de Talmont, the prince’s private life enters an obscure period. That he was still interested in women is clear, for in the years 1751–2 we find ample traces of secret amours. While his agent ‘Grandval’ (i.e. Dumont) was in Lille, the prince was smitten with coup de foudre for a beautiful unknown. He confesses that his head was completely turned at sight of her, that he was beside himself and that he was dying of love for her.1 Unfortunately, no evidence exists as to the outcome of this liaison.

  Suddenly, in 1752, the prince took a decision that amazed his contemporaries but has surprisingly not attracted as much comment as it deserves from later generations. He sent for Clementina Walkinshaw, his discarded mistress of January 1746. On any analysis this was an extraordinary thing to do, and it excited the stupefaction of Jacobites at the time. How can we explain it? What were the prince’s motives?2

  It is clear that by early 1752 the prince no longer felt safe in Lunéville. His enemies were closing in on him. If there is one thing that is bound to feed fantasies of persecution, it is circumstantial evidence of such persecution. By the beginning of 1752 the prince had plenty of it.

  On 20 May 1751, while returning on horseback to Lunéville through the neighbouring villages, the prince was set on by three brigands. A man leading a horse by the fountain in the village of Enville gave the signal. It was just after 6 p.m. The three men then chased Charles Edward all the way to the village of Metz. Only the narrowness of the road prevented their coming at him three abreast. At Metz the attack was called off. The prince secured a guard from the post-horse ‘syndique’ for the rest of the journey to Lunéville.3

  The experience shook him profoundly. At first he raged at the incompetence of Stanislas for allowing such brigandage within his domains. Then he thought again about the peculiar circumstances of the attack. An altogether more sinister interpretation occurred to him. His fears seemed confirmed by a letter from Sir James Harrington three months later that spoke of an Alloa customs collector’s having accepted a contract to assassinate him.4 Further worry was caused by reports of an English spy called Leslie, said to have gone to Lorraine to worm his way into the prince’s confidence ‘in a country which it is strongly suspected H.R.H. has crossed and bordered on more than once’.5 It seemed to the prince both that his enemies were out to kill him and that they knew roughly where to find him.

  This reflection had another sombre implication. Charles Edward could no longer be sure that the seemingly casual encounters he had with beautiful women were not part of some Hanoverian web. His correspondence began to reflect this anxiety that his amatory conquests might be real spies rather than simple bedroom adventuresses.6

  The prince therefore decided to change both his residence and way of life. He began by spending long periods away from Lunéville while he pondered the question of a more secure, permanent abode. He spent a good part of August and September 1751 at the waters of Spa.7 He was in Paris in October 1751 and again in December.8 In April 1752 he was seen at Middelburg on the Walcheren peninsula in Holland.9 In May that same year he sent orders to Stafford and Sheridan to close down his household in Avignon. They were to stay in lodgings there until further notice; his effects were to be stored in the papal palace.10 He himself moved to Ghent. His contact address there was the house of the lawyer Walwin (place de l’Emprereur, rue des Vasapelle, West Strata). All his precious books and collector’s items were sent to his new home in Ghent.11

  Immediately on arrival in Ghent, he sent to discover the whereabouts of Clementina Walkinshaw. At Bannockburn in January 1746 Clementina had promised him that if his great political ambitions came to nothing and he ever needed her, she would be his to command.12 Six years later, out of clear-cut motives of expediency, the prince took her up on her pledge.
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br />   Who was this woman who was to be his mistress for the next eight years? She was the tenth daughter of John Walkinshaw of Barrowfield (born 1671), a man who had been out in the ’15, been taken prisoner, and then escaped to join James at Bar-le-Duc.13 When Clementina Sobieska was detained at Innsbruck, John Walkinshaw was sent to remonstrate with the emperor. Later he was in Wogan’s party that conducted James’s bride to Rome.14 An elaborate legend was later woven around Clementina Walkinshaw’s allegedly being named after Charles Edward’s mother.15

  Nevertheless, there can be no doubt of the Walkinshaw family’s real, if not sentimental, attachment to the House of Stuart. John Walkinshaw himself died in 1731. But one of his kinsmen was arrested in Scotland after the ’45 on suspicion of having been one of the ‘Young Pretender’s’ secret agents.16 His real crime was having stuck to the ill-fated Lord Balmerino through his final days. Balmerino’s last request was to have this Walkinshaw at his side in the hours before his execution.17 And after the great and good Balmerino was beheaded, Walkinshaw took in Lady Balmerino and cared for her.18

  Clementina, then, came from unimpeachable Jacobite stock. The other thing to note about her was that she was a Catholic. After the failure of the ’45 and the departure of the prince from Scotland, she was left cocooned in the genteel poverty of Bannockburn. She determined to use her religion to break out of her prison. She applied to take the veil in convents in the Low Countries. Having convinced the respective prioresses of the suitability of her family background – for noble birth was all-important in the superior orders of nuns – she wore down the resistance of her family, who misunderstood her motives and scathingly called her a ‘priest-ridden weak girl’.19

  Clementina arrived on the Continent some time in 1751.20 There was a choice of convents in the Austrian Netherlands, including those at Ardennes, Mons and Maubeuge, but Clementina based herself at Dunkirk and seemed in no hurry to enter any of them. Then in June 1752, by great good fortune, came the summons to join the prince in Ghent.21

  It soon came to the ears of Charles Edward that the person who knew most about Clementina was John William O’Sullivan, major-general in the ’45 and Lord George Murray’s bête noire. Charles wrote to O’Sullivan for her address, indicating what he had in mind.22 He suggested that Clementina be approached discreetly when she was on her own. That the prince felt some disgust about his cold proposition to a discarded mistress emerges in his (naturally unheeded) instructions to O’Sullivan to burn his letter.23

  O’Sullivan received the prince’s letter at Cambrai. After expressing his delighted surprise to be once again in touch with Charles, he advised the prince very strongly against renewing the liaison. To have Clementina with him ‘would be too dangerous as well for Your Highness’s safety as glory in the present juncture’.24

  The prince reiterated his demands. O’Sullivan replied blandly on 3 June that he did not know where Clementina was exactly, but he was sure she would come out of her convent if the prince wished it, even though she had taken preliminary vows.25 O’Sullivan’s reluctance to be involved in this business was evident, but on the face of it his correspondence with the prince suggested no more than tepidity. The real significance of his reply to the prince (3 June) was that three days earlier (31 May), he wrote to Clementina; he was thus fully aware of her address. The tone was familiar but again that of a man acting under duress. Since, it appeared, she had neither entered the Convent of Poor Clares at Gravelines nor that at Arras, there could be no avoiding obedience to the prince’s wishes.26

  Clementina prepared to travel to Ghent by the roundabout route (via Paris) insisted on by Charles Edward. But no sooner had news of the prince’s resolve become common knowledge in his inner circle than he found himself with a revolt on his hands. The official reason always given in Jacobite correspondence was that Clementina’s sister Catherine was in the service of Augusta, Princess Dowager of Wales, mother of the future George III, at Leicester House.27 The fear was that Clementina had been planted with the prince as a spy – a suspicion which the downfall of the Elibank plot shortly afterwards seemed to confirm.

  Whatever the reasons for the peculiar distaste in which Clementina was regarded in Jacobite circles, its consequences soon made themselves felt. From Ghent Charles Edward rode to Lens to give Goring specific instructions about the route to follow when he brought Clementina from Paris. To the prince’s utter amazement, he found Goring rejoicing that (as he imagined) Clementina could not be found and that the prince’s ‘sending for a bad woman had not succeeded’.28 The prince lost his temper and bade Goring ‘go to all the devils in hell’. Goring responded by resigning on the spot. At first Charles taunted him with taking his money for years for easy assignments. Finding his honour impugned, Goring offered to meet Clementina at Lille and stay with her for two days until another escort arrived, but on the strict understanding that she should be made aware that Goring was no longer in the prince’s service.

  The two men parted, When he had cooled down, the prince reflected on Goring’s good service to him in the past. He wrote and offered to let bygones be bygones, but not without justifying his loss of temper: ‘It is not surprising that I should not care to have one in my family that pretends to give me laws in everything I do.’29 Thinking better of the assignment, the prince told Goring not to go to Lille but to stay at Courtrai and await further orders.

  This was not good enough for Goring. In a furious outburst he reiterated that he could not remain in the prince’s service if ‘that woman’ was at his side. To have Clementina with him in Ghent was inconsistent with the prince’s honour:

  the man who keeps a mistress is indeed not so much liable to censure, but surely he that procures her for him, or bears the name of it, is no better than a pimp, which title no other title can cover, and a blue ribbon would not so much serve to cover as to expose his infamy.30

  This outburst is puzzling from an eighteenth-century soldier who had, moreover, witnessed without blinking Charles Edward’s ‘orgies’ in Paris in 1746–8. Once again, we are alerted to the fact that there is something very strange and obscure about the whole Clementina affair. What it was we shall shortly see.

  Clementina was eventually conducted from Paris to Ghent and took up her duties as mistress. The cold letter the prince addressed to her in Paris showed that she could expect little in return.31 So it proved. The rest of 1752 saw an almost continual financial crisis, with bankers complaining about overdrafts, and the prince forever hurrying in to Antwerp to placate them.32 There was a running wrangle with Thompsons of Antwerp about a sum of £200 drawn on the bank, which Charles Edward claimed never to have received.33 So serious was the prince’s financial plight that even donations as small as £10 were welcomed.34 Charles’s lamentations about shortages of money became more insistent.35 In the end, some temporary relief was provided from an unexpected quarter at the close of the year. Pointing out that no one at the Palazzo Muti had heard from him for eighteen months, James Edgar reminded him that there was a sum of 4,000 crowns waiting for him in Rome which could be remitted.36

  If Clementina had nothing but hardship and a seriously depressed prince to deal with – especially when the Elibank plot aborted – Charles Edward for his part had obviously not sufficiently realised the price he would have to pay for having Miss Walkinshaw with him.

  The first consequence was the least serious. The relationship with Mme Vassé became cold and then petered out once her ‘sister’ Elisabeth Ferrand died in October 1752.37 Once Ferrand was dead and there was no one to moderate the contempt she felt for Clementina, Vassé moved quickly to terminate the relationship. Using the pretext of neurotic anxiety over what would happen to the prince’s effects if she followed her ‘sister’ into sudden oblivion, Vassé cunningly prevailed on the prince to have his trunks and impedimenta removed. The prince’s invitation to her to visit him at Ghent was turned down flat.38 Charles took the hint and had his boxes transferred to the care of Waters the banker.39 Vassé’s blan
d assurances in April 1753 – that her worrying away about his possessions was merely a sign of her deep attachment to him – fooled nobody.40

  To the prince the loss of such a friendship was of little importance. More serious were the continuing remonstrations from the English Jacobites about the security implications of his keeping Clementina as mistress. The prince rightly dismissed the rumour that she was a Hanoverian spy. It was not so easy to dispose of the argument that her ‘high visibility’ made the prince a much easier target for British agents and would-be assassins. Throughout 1753 the prince had to bear the brunt of both these sources of stress. As we have seen, part of the reason for the failure of the Elibank plot was the English Jacobites’ fear of committing themselves to the prince while he shared his bed with a suspected Hanoverian spy.

  The prince adamantly refused to listen to the entreaties from his friends on the other side of the water. There was no question of his dismissing Clementina, he informed them.41 In January 1753 he told Murray of Elibank that he would grant him audience on the strict understanding that he did not mention Miss Walkinshaw’s name.42

  When the English persisted, the prince became even more angry and obstinate. William King and the earl of Westmoreland sent over an envoy to urge Charles to put Clementina in a convent where, if he truly loved her, he could carry on a clandestine liaison.43 Marischal encouraged the envoy to make this demand bluntly to the prince. Charles Edward replied contemptuously that it was not for the English Jacobites to presume to advise him on this matter. He declared he would not put away a dog to please ‘those people’.44

  The prince’s determination to hang on to Clementina was not based on sentiment. He cared little for her. But any overture that he could construe as ‘giving him laws’ was bound to be rejected angrily. This rejection of any form of authority other than his own will was one of the many consequences of his disastrous relationship with his father.