old Tom Hearne, whose MSS. are in the Bodleian, Anne practically
negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht. She found a French priest, whose
sister was in the household of Madame de Maintenon, she wrote
mysterious letters to him, he showed them to Louis XIV., and the
priest was presently lurking in Miss Oglethorpe's town house. Harley
visited his Egeria; she introduced the abbé; Gauthier (the abbé
himself?) and Messager were appointed by France to treat. Harley
insisted on the surrender of Dunkirk! Louis offered Anne Oglethorpe
2,000,000 livres if she would save Dunkirk for France. Her
Oglethorpean majesty refused the gold, but did Louis's turn, on
condition that he would restore King James! For all this magnanimity
we have only Tom Hearne's word. Swift, for example, was not likely to
reveal these romantic circumstances about the Lady and the Dragon.
Swift does not mention Anne in his letters, but being so deep in the
greatest intrigues of the day and in the smallest, she was a valuable
source of information to Thomas Carte, the nonjuring historian and her
lifelong correspondent, when he was gathering materials for his Life
of the first Duke of Ormond and his _History of England_. In 1713,
Nairne, James's secretary, desires Abram (Menzies) to inquire if Mrs.
_Oglethorpe_ had credit with Honyton (Harley), and how far?[35]
Schutz, the Hanoverian envoy, writes to Bothmar, November 21, 1713:
'Miss Oglethorpe, the Lord Treasurer's mistress, said that the
Pretender was to travel, and she said it on the very day the news came
from Holland that the Bishop of London had declared to the
plenipotentiaries who are there, that the Queen entreated their
masters not to receive the Pretender in their dominions.'[36] She knew
all the particulars of Harley's opposition to the Duke of Ormond's
schemes for improving the army, and what the Exchequer could and could
not supply to back them.[37] She knew all about Lady Masham's quarrel
with her cousin, Lord Oxford, in 1713, over the 100,000_l._ in ten per
cents which Lady Masham had expected to make out of the Quebec
expedition and Assiento contract, had not his lordship so 'disobliged
her.' Anne acted as intermediary, hunting up her friend the Duke of
Ormond, with whom her mother had great influence, and fetching him to
meet Lady Masham at Kensington--who told him how ill the Queen was,
and how uneasy at nothing being done for her brother, the Chevalier.
If Ormond would but secure Lady Masham 30,000_l._ of the 100,000_l._,
she would join with him, and he should have the modelling of the army
as he pleased. Ormond also failed to oblige Lady Masham, but
Bolingbroke, whom she hated, snatched his opportunity in the quarrel
and got her the money; in return for which service, Lady Masham had
Harley turned out of office and Bolingbroke set in his place. And
then Queen Anne died.
[Footnote 35: Carte MSS.]
[Footnote 36: Macpherson, _Hanoverian Papers_.]
[Footnote 37: Carte MSS. In the Bodleian.]
Miss Oglethorpe also knew that Sir Thomas Hanmer and Bishop Atterbury
were the two persons who sent the messenger (mentioned only as Sir
C.P. in the Carte Papers) to warn Ormond to escape to France in 1715.
Women seem to have managed the whole political machine in those days,
as the lengthy and mysterious letters of 'Mrs. White,' 'Jean Murray,'
and others in the Carte MSS. testify.
We are not much concerned with the brothers of the Oglethorpe girls,
but the oldest, Theophilus, turned Jacobite. That he had transferred
his allegiance and active service to King James is proved by his
letters from Paris to James, and to Gualterio in 1720 and 1721.[38]
According to the second report on the Stuart Papers at Windsor, he was
created a baron by James III in 1717. In 1718 he was certainly
outlawed, for his younger brother, James Edward (the famous General
Oglethorpe), succeeded to the Westbrook property in that year.
[Footnote 38: Gualterio MSS. Add. MSS. British Museum.]
In July 1714 Fanny Oglethorpe, now about nineteen, turns up as an
active politician. The Chevalier at Bar and his adherents in Paris,
Scotland, and London, were breathlessly waiting for the death of Queen
Anne, which was expected to restore him to the throne of his
ancestors. Fanny had been brought up a Protestant by her mother in
England, under whose auspices she had served her apprenticeship to
plotting. Then she came to France, but Fanny cannot have been
Thackeray's 'Queen Oglethorpe' at Bar-le-Duc. In the first place, she
was not there; in the second, a lady of Lorraine was reigning
monarch.[39]
[Footnote 39: Wolff, _Odd Bits of History_ (1844), pp. 1-58.]
With the fall of Oxford in 1714 ended Anne's chief opportunity of
serving her King. The historian therefore turns to her sister Eleanor,
who had been with her in the Fanny Shaftoe affair, but remained in
France. Penniless as she was, Eleanor's beauty won the heart of the
Marquis de Mézières, a great noble, a man over fifty, ugly, brave,
misshapen. Theirs, none the less, was a love match, as the French
Court admiringly proclaimed. 'The frog-faced' Marquis, the vainest of
men, was one of the most courageous. Their daughters became the
Princesses de Montauban and de Ligne, whose brilliant marriages caused
much envy. Of their sons we shall hear later. Young Fanny Oglethorpe,
a girl of twenty in 1715, resided with her sister Eleanor (Madame de
Mézières), and now Bolingbroke, flying from the Tower, and become the
Minister of James, grumbles at the presence of Fanny, and of Olive
Trant, among the conspirators for a Restoration. Olive, the Regent's
mistress, was 'the great wheel of the machine,' in which Fanny 'had
her corner,' at Saint Germains. 'Your female teazers,' James calls
them in a letter to Bolingbroke. Not a word is said of a love affair.
How the Fifteen ended we all know. Ill-managed by Mar, perhaps
betrayed by Bolingbroke, the rising collapsed. Returning to France,
James dismissed Bolingbroke and retired to Avignon, thence to Urbino,
and last to Rome. In 1719 he describes 'Mrs. Oglethorpe's letters' as
politically valueless, and full of self-justifications, and 'old
stories.' He answers them only through his secretary; but in 1722 he
consoled poor Anne by making her a Countess of Ireland. Anne's bolt
was shot, she had had her day, but the day of her fair sisters was
dawning. Mr. John Law, of Lauriston _soi-disant_, had made England too
hot to hold him. His great genius for financial combinations was at
this time employed by him in gleek, trick-track, quadrille, whist,
loo, ombre, and other pastimes of mingled luck and skill. In
consequence of a quarrel about a lady, Mr. Law fought and slew Beau
Wilson, that mysterious person, who, from being a poverty-stricken
younger son, hanging loose on town, became in a day, no man knows how,
the richest and most splendid of blades. The Beau's secret died with
him; but Law fled to France with 100,000 crowns in his valise. Here
the swagger, courage, and undeniable genius of Mr. Law gained the
favour of the Regent d'Orléans, the Bank and the Mississippi Scheme
were floated, the Rue Quincampoix was crowded, France swam in a dream
of gold, and the friends of Mr. Law, 'coming in on the ground-floor,'
or buying stock before issue at the lowest prices, sold out at the
top of the market.
Paris was full of Jacobites from Ireland and Scotland--Seaforth,
Tullibardine, Campbell of Glendaruel, George Kelly (one of the Seven
Men of Moidart), Nick Wogan, gayest and bravest of Irishmen, all
engaged in a pleasing plan for invading England with a handful of
Irish soldiers in Spanish service. The Earl Marischal and Keith his
brother (the Field-Marshal) came into Paris broken men, fleeing from
Glenshiel. _They_ took no Mississippi shares, but George Kelly, Fanny
Oglethorpe, and Olive Trant, all _liés_ with Law and Orléans,
'plunged,' and emerged with burdens of gold. Fanny for her share had
800,000 livres, and carried it as her dowry to the Marquis des
Marches, whom she married in 1719, and so ceased conspiring. The
Oglethorpe girls, for penniless exiles, had played their cards well.
Fanny and Eleanor had won noble husbands. Poor Anne went back to
Godalming, where--in the very darkest days of the Jacobite party, when
James was a heart-broken widower, and the star of Prince Charles's
natal day shone only on the siege of Gaeta--she plotted with Thomas
Carte, the historian.
The race of 1715 was passing, the race of 1745 was coming on, and
touching it is to read in the brown old letters the same loyal
names--Floyds, Wogans, Gorings, Trants, Dillons, Staffords,
Sheridans, the Scots of course, and the French descendants of the
Oglethorpe girls. Eleanor's infants, the de Mézières family, had been
growing up in beauty and honour, as was to be expected of the children
of the valiant Marquis and the charming Eleanor. Their eldest
daughter, Eléonore Eugénie, married Charles de Rohan, Prince de
Montauban, younger brother of the Duc de Montbazon, whose wife was the
daughter of the Duc de Bouillon and Princess Caroline Sobieska, and so
first cousin to the sons of James III. That branch of Oglethorpes thus
became connected with the royal family, which would go far towards
rousing their hereditary Jacobitism when the Forty-Five cast its
shadow before.
In May 1740, Madame de Mézières took it into her head to run over to
England, and applied to Newcastle for a pass, through Lady Mary
Herbert of Powis--a very _suspect_ channel! The Minister made such
particular inquiries as to the names of the servants she intended to
bring, that she changed her mind and did not go. One wonders what
person purposed travelling in her suite whose identity dared not stand
too close scrutiny. There was a brave and eager Prince of Wales over
the water, nearly twenty, who had some years ago fleshed his maiden
sword with honour, and who was in secret correspondence on his own
account with his father's English supporters. Could he have had some
such plan even then of putting fate to the touch? He is reported in
Coxe's _Walpole_ to have been in Spain, in disguise, years before.
In 1742 Eleanor had the sorrow of losing a daughter in a tragic way.
She had recently become a canoness of Povesay, a very noble
foundation, indeed, in Lorraine, where the Sisters wore little black
ribbons on their heads which they called 'husbands.' She was
twenty-five, very pretty, and most irreligiously devoted to shooting
and hunting. Though these chapters of noble canonesses are not by any
means strict after the use of ordinary convents, there were serious
expostulations made when the novice insisted upon constantly carrying
a gun and shooting. She fell one day when out with her gun as usual.
It went off and killed her on the spot.
Whatever Eleanor aimed at in 1740 by a journey to England, was baulked
by Newcastle's caution. In 1743 the indefatigable lady, 'and a
Scottish lord,' submitted a scheme to Louis XV., but it was thwarted
by de Noailles. Then Prince Charles rode secretly out of Rome, landed,
like Napoleon, at Fréjus, and at the expedition of Dunkirk met the
Earl Marischal and young Glengarry.
The Chevalier de Mézières, too, Eleanor's son, went to Dunkirk with
Saxe to embark for England. There was a great storm, and the ships
went aground. Several officers and soldiers jumped into the sea, and
some were drowned. The Chevalier de Mézières came riding along the
shore, to hear that a dear friend was drowning. The sea was going
back, but very heavy, and de Mézières rode straight into the raging
waters to seek his friend. The waves went over his head and carried
away his hat, but he persevered until he had seized a man. He dragged
him ashore, to find it was a common soldier. He hastened back, and
saved several soldiers and two or three officers. His friend, after
all, had never been in danger.
The Saxe expedition never sailed, so Eugène de Mézières went to beat
Hanoverians elsewhere, and was wounded at Fontenoy. Consequently he
could not follow the Prince to Scotland. His mother, Eleanor, plunged
into intrigue for the forward party (Prince Charlie's party),
distrusted by James at Rome. 'She is a mad woman,' said James. She and
Carte, the historian, were working up an English rising to join the
Prince's Scottish adventure, but were baffled by James's cautious,
helpless advisers. Then came the Forty-Five. Eleanor was not subdued
by Culloden: the undefeated old lady was a guest at the great dinner,
with the splendid new service of plate, which the Prince gave to the
Princesse de Talmond and his friends in 1748. He was braving all
Europe, in his hopeless way, and refusing to leave France, in
accordance with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. When he was imprisoned
at Vincennes, Eleanor was threatened. Catholic as she was, she frankly
declared that Prince Charles had better declare himself a Protestant,
and marry a German Protestant Princess. He therefore proposed to one,
a day or two before he disappeared from Avignon, in February 1749, and
he later went over to London, and embraced the Anglican faith.
It was too late; but Eleanor Oglethorpe was not beaten. In October
1752 'the great affair' was being incubated again. Alexander Murray,
of the Elibank family, exasperated by his imprisonment for a riot at
the Westminster election, had taken service with Prince Charles. He
had arranged that a body of young Jacobite officers in foreign
service, with four hundred Highlanders under young Glengarry, should
overpower the Guards, break into St. James's Palace, and seize King
George; while the Westminster mob, Murray's lambs, should create an
uproar. Next day Glengarry would post north, the Highlanders would
muster at the House of Touch, and Charles would appear among his
beloved subjects. The very medal to commemorate the event was struck,
with its motto, _Laetamini Cives_. The Prince was on the coast in
readiness--nay, if we are not mistaken, the Prince was in Westbrook
House at Godalming!
This we conjecture because, in that very budding time of the Elibank
Plot, Newcastle suddenly discovered that the unwearied Eleanor
Oglethorpe, Marquise de Mézières, was in England,--had arrived
secretly, without any passport. He tracked her down at Westbrook
House, that lay all desolate and deserted, the windows closed, the
right-of-way through the grounds illegally shut up. General Oglethorpe
after 1746 had abandoned his home, for he had been court-martialled on
a charge of not attacking Cluny and Lord George Murray, when the
Highlanders stood at bay, at Clifton, and defeated Cumberland's
advanced-guard. The general was acquitted, but, retiring to his wife's
house at Carham, he deserted Westbrook Place.
The empty house, retired in its woodlands, on the Portsmouth road,
convenient for the coast, was the very place for Prince Charles to
lurk in, while Murray and Glengarry cleared the way to the throne. And
so, in fact, we find Eleanor Oglethorpe secretly ensconced at
Westbrook Place while the plot ripened, and local tradition still
shows the vault in which 'the Pretender' could take refuge if the
house was searched. All this, again, coincides with the vague legend
of the tall, brown-haired ghost who haunts Westbrook Place,--last home
of a last hope.
The young Glengarry, as we know, carried all the tale of the plot to
the English Prime Minister, while he made a merit of his share in it
with James at Rome. Eleanor, too, was run to earth at Westbrook Place.
She held her own gallantly. As to having no passport, she reminded
Newcastle that she _had_ asked for a passport twelve years ago, in
1740. She was now visiting England merely to see her sister Anne, who
'could not outlast the winter,' but who did so, none the less. Nor
could Anne have been so very ill, for on arriving at Dover in October
Eleanor did not hasten to Anne's sick-bed. Far from that, she first
spent an agreeable week--with whom? With my Lady Westmoreland, at
Mereworth, in Kent. Now, Lord Westmoreland was the head of the English
Jacobites, and at Mereworth, according to authentic family tradition,
Prince Charles held his last Council on English ground. The whole plot
seems delightfully transparent, and it must be remembered that in
October Newcastle knew nothing of it; he only received Glengarry's
information early in November.
The letter of Madame de Mézières, with her account of her innocent
proceedings, is written in French exactly like that of the Dowager
Countess of Castlewood, in _Esmond_. She expressed her special
pleasure in the hope of making Newcastle's personal acquaintance. She
went to Bath; she made Lady Albemarle profoundly uncomfortable about
her lord's famous mistress in Paris, and no doubt she plunged, on her
return, into the plots with Prussia for a Restoration. In the Privy
Council, in November 1753, her arrest was decided on. Newcastle jots
down, on a paper of notes: 'To seize Madame de Mézières with her
papers. No expense to be spared to find the Pretender's son. Sir John
Gooderich to be sent after him. Lord Anson to have frigates on the
Scotch and Irish coasts.'
By 1759 Eleanor was, perhaps, weary of conspiring. Her daughter, the
Princesse de Ligne, was the fair patroness of that expedition which
Hawke crushed in Quibéron Bay, while Charles received the news at
Dunkirk.
All was ended. For seventy-two years the Oglethorpe women had used
their wit and beauty, through three generations, for a lost cause.
They were not more lucky, with the best intentions, than Eleanor's
grandson, the Prince de Lambesc. With hereditary courage he rescued an
old woman from a burning cottage, and flung her into a duck-pond to
extinguish her blazing clothes. The old woman was drowned!
Not long ago a lady of much wit, but of no occult pretensions, and
wholly ignorant of the Oglethorpes, looked over Westbrook Place, then
vacant, with the idea of renting it. On entering it she said, 'I have
a feeling that very interesting things have happened here'! Probably
they had.[40]
[Footnote 40: The facts are taken from Ailesbury's, de Luynes',
Dangeau's, and d'Argenson's _Memoirs_; from Boyer's _History_, and
other printed books, and from the Newcastle, Hearne, Carte, and
Gualterio MSS. in the Bodleian and the British Museum.]
XI
_THE CHEVALIER D'ÉON_
The mystery of the Chevalier d'Éon (1728-1810), the question of his
sex, on which so many thousand pounds were betted, is no mystery at
all. The Chevalier was a man, and a man of extraordinary courage,
audacity, resource, physical activity, industry, and wit. The real
mystery is the problem why, at a mature age (forty-two) did d'Éon take
upon him, and endure for forty years, the travesty of feminine array,
which could only serve him as a source of notoriety--in short, as an
advertisement? The answer probably is that, having early seized
opportunity by the forelock, and having been obliged, after an
extraordinary struggle, to leave his hold, he was obliged to clutch at
some mode of keeping himself perpetually in the public eye. Hence,
probably, his persistent assumption of feminine costume. If he could
be distinguished in no other way, he could shine as a mystery; there
was even lucre in the pose.[41]
[Footnote 41: The most recent work on d'Éon, _Le Chevalier d'Éon_, par
Octave Homberg and Fernand Jousselin (Plon-Nourrit, Paris, 1904), is
rather disappointing. The authors aver that at a recent sale they
picked up many MSS. of d'Éon 'which had lain for more than a century
in the back shop of an English bookseller.' No other reference as to
authenticity is given, and some letters to d'Éon of supreme importance
are casually cited, but are not printed. On the other hand, we have
many new letters for the later period of the life of the hero. The
best modern accounts are that by the Duc de Broglie, who used the
French State archives and his own family papers in _Le Secret du Roi_
(Paris, 1888), and _The Strange Career of the Chevalier d'Éon_ (1885),
by Captain J. Buchan Telfer, R.N. (Longmans, 1885), a book now out of
print. The author was industrious, but not invariably happy in his
translations of French originals. D'Éon himself drew up various
accounts of his adventures, some of which he published. They are oddly
careless in the essential matter of dates, but contain many astounding
genuine documents, which lend a sort of 'doubtsome trust' to others,
hardly more incredible, which cannot be verified, and are supposed by
the Duc de Broglie to be 'interpolations.' Captain Buchan Telfer is
less sceptical. The doubtfulness, to put it mildly, of some papers,
and the pretty obvious interpolations in others, deepen the
obscurity.]
Charles d'Éon was born on October 7, 1728, near Tonnerre. His family
was of _chétive noblesse_, but well protected, and provided for by
'patent places.' He was highly educated, took the degree of doctor of
law, and wrote with acceptance on finance and literature. His was a
studious youth, for he was as indifferent to female beauty as was
Frederick the Great, and his chief amusements were fencing, of which
art he was a perfect master, and society, in which his wit and gaiety
made the girlish-looking lad equally welcome to men and women. All
were fond of 'le petit d'Éon,' so audacious, so ambitious, and so
amusing.
The Prince de Conti was his chief early patron, and it was originally
in support of Conti's ambition to be King of Poland that Louis XV.
began his incredibly foolish 'secret'--a system of foreign policy
conducted by hidden agents behind the backs of his responsible
ministers at Versailles and in the Courts of Europe. The results
naturally tend to recall a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera of
diplomacy. We find magnificent ambassadors gravely trying to carry out
the royal orders, and thwarted by the King's secret agents. The King
seems to have been too lazy to face his ministers, and compel them to
take his own line, while he was energetic enough to work like Tiberius
or Philip II. of Spain at his secret Penelope's task of undoing by
night the warp and woof which his ministers wove by day. In these
mysterious labours of his the Comte de Broglie, later a firm friend of
d'Éon, was, with Tercier, one of his main assistants.
The King thus enjoyed all the pleasures and excitements of a
conspirator in his own kingdom, dealing in ciphered despatches, with
the usual cant names, carried in the false bottoms of snuff-boxes,
precisely as if he had been a Jacobite plotter. It was entertaining,
but it was not diplomacy, and, sooner or later, Louis was certain to
be 'blackmailed' by some underling in his service. That underling was
to be d'Éon.
In 1755 Louis wished to renew relations, long interrupted, with
Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, the lady whom Prince Charlie wanted to
marry, and from whose offered hand the brave James Keith fled as fast
as horses could carry him. Elizabeth, in 1755, was an ally of England,
but was known to be French in her personal sympathies, though she was
difficult of access. As a messenger, Louis chose a Scot, described by
Captain Buchan Telfer as a Mackenzie, a Jesuit, calling himself the
Chevalier Douglas, and a Jacobite exile. He is not to be found in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_. A Sir James and a Sir John
Douglas--if both were not the same man--were employed as political
agents between the English and Scottish Jacobites in 1746, and, in
1749, between the Prince and the Landgrave of Hesse. Whatever the true
name of the Douglas of Louis XV., I suspect that he was one or the
other of these dim Jacobites of the Douglas clan. In June 1755 this
Chevalier Douglas was sent by Louis to deal with Elizabeth. He was
certainly understood by Louis to be a real Douglas, a fugitive
Jacobite, and he was to use in ciphered despatches precisely the same
silly sort of veiled language about the fur trade as Prince Charles's
envoys had just been using about 'the timber trade' with Sweden.