CHARLES EDWARD STUART
Prince Charles—Contradictions in his character—Extremes of bad and
good—Evolution of character—The Prince’s personal advantages—Common
mistake as to the colour of his eyes—His portraits from youth to
age—Descriptions of Charles by the Duc de Liria; the President de
Brosses; Gray; Charles’s courage—The siege of Gaeta—Story of Lord
Elcho—The real facts—The Prince’s horse shot at Culloden—Foolish fables
of David Hume confuted—Charles’s literary tastes—His clemency—His
honourable conduct—Contrast with Cumberland—His graciousness—His
faults—Charge of avarice—Love of wine—Religious levity—James on Charles’s
faults—An unpleasant discovery—Influence of Murray of Broughton—Rapid
decline of character after 1746—Temper, wine, and women—Deep distrust of
James’s Court—Rupture with James—Divisions among Jacobites—King’s men and
Prince’s men—Marischal, Kelly, Lismore, Clancarty—Anecdote of Clancarty
and Braddock—Clancarty and d’Argenson—Balhaldie—Lally Tollendal—The Duke
of York—His secret flight from Paris—‘Insigne Fourberie’—Anxiety of
Charles—The fatal cardinal’s hat—Madame de Pompadour—Charles rejects her
advances—His love affairs—Madame de Talmond—Voltaire’s verses on her—Her
scepticism in religion—Her husband—Correspondence with Montesquieu—The
Duchesse d’Aiguillon—Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle—Charles refuses to retire
to Fribourg—The gold plate—Scenes with Madame de Talmond—Bulkeley’s
interference—Arrest of Charles—The compasses—Charles goes to Avignon—His
desperate condition—His policy—Based on a scheme of d’Argenson—He leaves
Avignon—He is lost to sight and hearing.
‘CHARLES EDWARD STUART,’ says Lord Stanhope, ‘is one of those characters
that cannot be portrayed at a single sketch, but have so greatly altered
as to require a new delineation at different periods.’ {12a} Now he
‘glitters all over like the star which they tell you appeared at his
nativity,’ and which still shines beside him, _Micat inter omnes_, on a
medal struck in his boyhood. {12b} Anon he is sunk in besotted vice, a
cruel lover, a solitary tippler, a broken man. We study the period of
transition.
Descriptions of his character vary between the noble encomium written in
prison by Archibald Cameron, the last man who died for the Stuarts, and
the virulent censures of Lord Elcho and Dr. King. Veterans known to Sir
Walter Scott wept at the mention of the Prince’s name; yet, as early as
the tenth year after Prestonpans, his most devoted adherent, Henry
Goring, left him in an angry despair. Nevertheless, the character so
variously estimated, so tenderly loved, so loathed, so despised, was one
character; modified, swiftly or slowly, as its natural elements developed
or decayed under the various influences of struggle, of success, of long
endurance, of hope deferred, and of bitter disappointment. The gay,
kind, brave, loyal, and clement Prince Charlie became the fierce, shabby,
battered exile, homeless, and all but friendless. The change, of course,
was not instantaneous, but gradual; it was not the result of one, but of
many causes. Even out of his final degradation, Charles occasionally
speaks with his real voice: his inborn goodness of heart, remarked before
his earliest adventures, utters its protest against the self he has
become; just as, on the other hand, long ere he set his foot on Scottish
soil, his father had noted his fatal inclination to wine and revel.
The processes in this change of character, the events, the temptations,
the trials under which Charles became an altered man, have been very
slightly studied, and, indeed, have been very obscurely known. Even Mr.
Ewald, the author of the most elaborate biography of the Prince, {13}
neglected some important French printed sources, while manuscript
documents, here for the first time published, were not at his command.
The present essay is itself unavoidably incomplete, for of family papers
bearing on the subject many have perished under the teeth of time, and in
one case, of rats, while others are not accessible to the writer.
Nevertheless, it is hoped that this work elucidates much which has long
been veiled in the motives, conduct, and secret movements of Charles
during the years between 1749 and the death, in 1766, of his father, the
Old Chevalier. Charles then emerged from a retirement of seventeen
years; the European game of Hide and Seek was over, and it is not
proposed to study the Prince in the days of his manifest decline, and
among the disgraces of his miserable marriage. His ‘incognito’ is our
topic; the period of ‘deep and isolated enterprise’ which puzzled every
Foreign Office in Europe, and practically only ended, as far as hope was
concerned, with the break-up of the Jacobite party in 1754–1756, or
rather with Hawke’s defeat of Conflans in 1759.
Ours is a strange and melancholy tale of desperate loyalties, and of a
treason almost unparalleled for secrecy and persistence. We have to do
with the back-stairs of diplomacy, with spies and traitors, with cloak
and sword, with blabbing servants, and inquisitive ambassadors, with
disguise and discovery, with friends more staunch than steel, or weaker
than water, with petty jealousies, with the relentless persecution of a
brave man, and with the consequent ruin of a gallant life.
To understand the psychological problem, the degradation of a promising
personality, it is necessary to glance rapidly at what we know of Charles
before his Scottish expedition.
To begin at the beginning, in physical qualities the Prince was dowered
by a kind fairy. He was firmly though slimly built, of the best stature
for strength and health. ‘He had a body made for war,’ writes Lord
Elcho, who hated him. The gift of beauty (in his case peculiarly fatal,
as will be seen) had not been denied to him. His brow was high and
broad, his nose shapely, his eyes of a rich dark brown, his hair of a
chestnut hue, golden at the tips. Though his eyes are described as blue,
both in 1744 by Sir Horace Mann, and in later life (1770) by an English
lady in Rome, though Lord Stanhope and Mr. Stevenson agree in this error,
brown was really their colour. {15a} Charles inherited the dark eyes of
his father, ‘the Black Bird,’ and of Mary Stuart. This is manifest from
all the original portraits and miniatures, including that given by the
Prince to his secretary, Murray of Broughton, now in my collection. In
boyhood Charles’s face had a merry, mutinous, rather reckless expression,
as portraits prove. Hundreds of faces like his may be seen at the public
schools; indeed, Charles had many ‘doubles,’ who sometimes traded on the
resemblance, sometimes, wittingly or unwittingly, misled the spies that
constantly pursued him. {15b} His adherents fondly declared that his
natural air of distinction, his princely bearing, were too marked to be
concealed in any travesty. Yet no man has, in disguises of his person,
been more successful. We may grant ‘the grand air’ to Charles, but we
must admit that he could successfully dissemble it.
About 1743, when a number of miniatures of the Prince were done in Italy
for presentation to adherents, Charles’s boyish mirth, as seen in these
works of art, has become somewhat petulant, if not arrogant, but he is
still ‘a lad with the bloom of a lass.’ A shade of aspiring melancholy
marks a portrait done in France, just before the expedition to Scotland.
Le Toque’s fine portrait of the Prince in armour (1748) shows a manly and
martial but rather sinister countenance. A plaster bust, done from a
life mask, if not from Le Moine’s bust in marble (1750), was thought the
best likeness by Dr. King. This bust was openly sold in Red Lion Square,
and, when Charles visited Dr. King in September 1750, the Doctor’s
servant observed the resemblance. I have never seen a copy of this bust,
and the medal struck in 1750, an intaglio of the same date, and a very
rare profile in the collection of the Duke of Atholl, give a similar idea
of the Prince as he was at thirty. A distinguished artist, who outlined
Charles’s profile and applied it to another of Her present Majesty in
youth, tells me that they are almost exact counterparts.
Next we come to the angry eyes and swollen features of Ozias Humphreys’s
miniature, in the Duke of Atholl’s collection, and in his sketch
published in the ‘Lockhart Papers’ (1776), and, finally, to the fallen
weary old face designed by Gavin Hamilton. Charles’s younger brother,
Henry, Duke of York, was a prettier boy, but it is curious to mark the
prematurely priestly and ‘Italianate’ expression of the Duke in youth,
while Charles still seems a merry lad. Of Charles in boyhood many
anecdotes are told. At the age of two or three he is said to have been
taken to see the Pope in his garden, and to have refused the usual marks
of reverence. Walton, the English agent in Florence, reports an outbreak
of ferocious temper in 1733. {17a} Though based on gossip, the story
seems to forebode the later excesses of anger. Earlier, in 1727, the Duc
de Liria, a son of Marshal Berwick, draws a pretty picture of the child
when about seven years old:—
‘The King of England did not wish me to leave before May 4, and I was
only too happy to remain at his feet, not merely on account of the
love and respect I have borne him all my life, but also because I was
never weary of watching the Princes, his sons. The Prince of Wales
was now six and a half, and, besides his great beauty, was remarkable
for dexterity, grace, and almost supernatural cleverness. Not only
could he read fluently, but he knew the doctrines of the Christian
faith as well as the master who had taught him. He could ride; could
fire a gun; and, more surprising still, I have seen him take a
crossbow and kill birds on the roof, and split a rolling ball with a
shaft, ten times in succession. He speaks English, French, and
Italian perfectly, and altogether he is the most ideal Prince I have
ever met in the course of my life.
‘The Duke of York, His Majesty’s second son, is two years old, and a
prodigy of beauty and strength.’ {17b}
Gray, certainly no Jacobite, when at Rome with Horace Walpole speaks very
kindly of the two gay young Princes. He sneers at their melancholy
father, of whom Montesquieu writes, ‘_ce Prince a une bonne physiononie
et noble_. _Il paroit triste_, _pieux_.’ {18a} Young Charles was
neither pious nor melancholy.
Of Charles at the age of twenty, the President de Brosses (the author of
‘Les Dieux Fétiches’) speaks as an unconcerned observer. ‘I hear from
those who know them both thoroughly that the eldest has far higher worth,
and is much more beloved by his friends; that he has a kind heart and a
high courage; that he feels warmly for his family’s misfortunes, and that
if some day he does not retrieve them, it will not be for want of
intrepidity.’ {18b}
Charles’s gallantry when under fire as a mere boy, at the siege of Gaeta
(1734), was, indeed, greatly admired and generally extolled. {18c} His
courage has been much more foolishly denied by his enemies than too
eagerly applauded by friends who had seen him tried by every species of
danger.
[Picture: The Prince of Wales, 1735]
Aspersions have been thrown on Charles’s personal bravery; it may be
worth while to comment on them. The story of Lord Elcho’s reproaching
the Prince for not heading a charge of the second line at Culloden, has
unluckily been circulated by Sir Walter Scott. On February 9, 1826,
Scott met Sir James Stuart Denham, whose father was out in the
Forty-five, and whose uncle was the Lord Elcho of that date. Lord Elcho
wrote memoirs, still unpublished, but used by Mr. Ewald in his ‘Life of
the Prince.’ Elcho is a hostile witness: for twenty years he vainly
dunned Charles for a debt of 1,500_l._ According to Sir James Stuart
Denham, Elcho asked Charles to lead a final charge at Culloden, retrieve
the battle, or die sword in hand. The Prince rode off the field, Elcho
calling him ‘a damned, cowardly Italian—.’
No such passage occurs in Elcho’s diary. He says that, after the flight,
he found Charles, in the belief that he had been betrayed, anxious only
for his Irish officers, and determined to go to France, not to join the
clans at Ruthven. Elcho most justly censured and resolved ‘never to have
anything more to do with him,’ a broken vow! {19a} As a matter of fact,
Sir Robert Strange saw Charles vainly trying to rally the Highlanders,
and Sir Stuart Thriepland of Fingask gives the same evidence. {19b}
In his seclusion during 1750, Charles wrote a little memoir, still
unpublished, about his Highland wanderings. In this he says that he was
‘led off the field by those about him,’ when the clans broke at Culloden.
‘The Prince then changed his horse, his own having been wounded by a
musket-ball in the shoulder.’ {20a}
The second-hand chatter of Hume, in his letter to Sir John Pringle
(February 13, 1773), is unworthy of serious attention.
Helvetius told Hume that his house at Paris had sheltered the Prince in
the years following his expulsion from France, in 1748. He called
Charles ‘the most unworthy of mortals, insomuch that I have been assured,
when he went down to Nantz to embark on his expedition to Scotland, he
took fright and refused to go on board; and his attendants, thinking the
matter gone too far, and that they would be affronted for his cowardice,
carried him in the night time into the ship, _pieds et mains liés_.’
The sceptical Hume accepts this absurd statement without even asking, or
at least without giving, the name of Helvetius’s informant. The
adventurer who insisted on going forward when, at his first landing in
Scotland, even Sir Thomas Sheridan, with all the chiefs present, advised
retreat, cannot conceivably have been the poltroon of Hume’s myth. Even
Hume’s correspondent, Sir John Pringle, was manifestly staggered by the
anecdote, and tells Hume that another of his fables is denied by the very
witness to whom Hume appealed. {20b} Hume had cited Lord Holdernesse for
the story that Charles’s presence in London in 1753 (1750 seems to be
meant) was known at the time to George II. Lord Holdernesse declared
that there was nothing in the tale given by Hume on his authority! That
Charles did not join the rallied clans at Ruthven after Culloden was the
result of various misleading circumstances, not of cowardice. Even after
1746 he constantly carried his life in his hand, not only in expeditions
to England (and probably to Scotland and Ireland), but in peril from the
daggers of assassins, as will later be shown.
High-spirited and daring, Charles was also hardy. In Italy he practised
walking without stockings, to inure his feet to long marches: he was
devoted to boar-hunting, shooting, and golf. {21a} He had no touch of
Italian effeminacy, otherwise he could never have survived his Highland
distresses. In travelling he was swift, and incapable of fatigue. ‘He
has,’ said early observer, ‘_the habit of keeping a secret_.’ Many
secrets, indeed, he kept so well that history is still baffled by them,
as diplomatists were perplexed between 1749 and 1766. {21b}
We may discount Murray of Broughton’s eulogies Charles’s Greek, Latin,
and Hebrew, and his knowledge of history and philosophy, though backed by
the Jesuit Cordara. {21c} Charles’s education had been interrupted by
quarrels between his parents about Catholic or Protestant tutors. His
cousin and governor, Sir Thomas Sheridan (a descendant of James II.),
certainly did not teach him to spell; his style in French and English is
often obscure, and, when it is clear, we know not whether he was not
inspired by some more literary adviser. In matters of taste he was fond
of music and archæology, and greatly addicted to books. De Brosses,
however, considered him ‘less cultivated than Princes should be at his
age,’ and d’Argenson says that his knowledge was scanty and that he had
little conversation. A few of his books, the morocco tooled with the
Prince of Wales’s feathers, remain, but not enough to tell us much about
his literary tastes. On these, however, we shall give ample information.
In Paris, after Culloden, he bought Macchiavelli’s works, probably in
search of practical hints on state-craft. In spite of a proclamation by
Charles, which Montesquieu applauded, he certainly had no claim to a seat
in the French Academy, which Montesquieu playfully offered to secure for
him.
In brief, Charles was a spirited, eager boy, very capable of patience,
intensely secretive, and, as he showed in 1745–1746, endowed with a
really extraordinary clemency, and in one regard, where his enemies were
concerned, with a sense of honour most unusual in his generation. His
care for the wounded, after Prestonpans, is acknowledged by the timid and
Whiggish Home, in his ‘History of the Rebellion,’ and is very warmly and
gracefully expressed in a letter to his father, written at Holyrood.’
{23a} He could not be induced to punish miscreants who attempted his
life and snapped pistols in his face. He could hardly be compelled to
retort to the English offer of 30,000_l._ for his head by issuing a
similar proclamation about ‘the Elector.’ ‘I smiled and created it’ (the
proclamation of a reward of 30,000_l._ for his head) ‘with the disdain it
deserved, upon which they’ (the Highlanders) ‘flew into a violent rage,
and insisted upon my doing the same by him.’ This occurs in a letter
from Charles to James, September 10, 1745, dated from Perth. A copy is
found among Bishop Forbes’s papers. Here Charles deplores the cruelties
practised under Charles II. and James II., and the consequent
estrangement of the Duke of Argyll. {23b}
In brief, the contest between Charles and Cumberland was that of a
civilised and chivalrous commander against a foe as treacherous and cruel
as a Huron or an Iroquois. On this point there is no possibility of
doubt. The English Government offered a vast reward for Charles, dead or
alive. The soldiers were told significantly, by Cumberland, that he did
not want prisoners. On the continent assassins lurked for the Prince,
and ambassadors urged the use of personal violence. Meanwhile the Prince
absolutely forbade even a legitimate armed attack directed mainly against
his enemy, then red-handed from the murder of the wounded.
With this loyalty to his foes, with this clemency to enemies in his
power, Charles certainly combined a royal grace, and could do handsome
things handsomely. Thus, in 1745, some of the tenants of Oliphant of
Gask would not don the white cockade at his command. He therefore ‘laid
an arrest or inhibition on their corn-fields.’ Charles, finding the
grain hanging dead-ripe, as he marched through Perthshire, inquired the
cause, and when he had learned it, broke the ‘taboo’ by cutting some ears
with his sword, or by gathering them and giving them to his horse, saving
that the farmers might now, by his authority, follow his example and
break the inhibition. {24a}
Making every allowance for an enthusiasm of loyalty on the part of the
narrators in Bishop Forbes’s MS. ‘Lyon in Mourning’ (partly published by
Robert Chambers in ‘Jacobite Memoirs’ {24b}), it is certain that the
courage, endurance, and gay content of the Prince in his Highland
wanderings deserve the high praise given by Smollett. Thus, in many ways
we see the elements of a distinguished and attractive character in
Charles. His enemies, like the renegade Dr. King, of St. Mary’s Hall
(ob. 1763), in his posthumous ‘Anecdotes,’ accused the Prince of avarice.
He would borrow money from a lady, says King, while he had plenty of his
own; he neglected those who had ruined themselves for his sake. Henry
Goring accused the Prince of shabbiness to his face, but assuredly he who
insisted on laying down money on the rocks of a deserted fishers’ islet
to pay for some dry fish eaten there by himself and his companions—he who
gave liberally to gentle and simple out of the treasure buried near Loch
Arkaig, who refused a French pension for himself, and asked favours only
for his friends—afforded singular proofs of Dr. King’s charge of selfish
greed. The fault grew on him later. After breaking with the French
Court in 1748, Charles had little or nothing of his own to give away.
His Sobieski jewels he had pawned for the expenses of the war, having no
heart to wear them, he said, ‘on this side of the water.’ He was often
in actual need, though we may not accept d’Argenson’s story of how he was
once seen selling his pistols to a gun-maker. {25a} If ever he was a
miser, that vice fixed itself upon him in his utter moral ruin.
Were there, then, no signs in his early life of the faults which grew so
rapidly when hope was lost? There were such signs. As early as 1742,
James had observed in Charles a slight inclination to wine and gaiety,
and believed that his companions, especially Francis Strickland, {25b}
were setting him against his younger brother, the Duke of York, who had
neither the health nor the disposition to be a roysterer. {26a}
Again, on February 3, 1747, James recurs, in a long letter, to what
passed in 1742, ‘because that is the foundation, and I may say the key,
of all that has followed.’ Now in 1742 Murray of Broughton paid his
first visit to Rome, and was fascinated by Charles. This unhappy man,
afterwards the Judas of the cause, was unscrupulous in private life in
matters of which it is needless to speak more fully. He was, or gave
himself the air of being, a very stout Protestant. James employed him,
but probably liked him little. It is to be gathered, from James’s letter
of February 3, 1747, that he suspected Charles of listening to advice,
probably from Murray, about his changing his religion. ‘You cannot
forget how you were prevailed upon to speak to your brother’ (the devout
Duke of York) ‘on very nice and delicate subjects, and that without
saying the least thing to me, though we lived in the same house . . . You
were then much younger than you are now, and therefore could be more
easily led by specious arguments and pretences. . . . It will, to be
sure, have been represented to you that our religion is a great prejudice
to our interest, but that it may in some measure be remedied by a certain
free way of thinking and acting.’ {26b}
In 1749 James made a disagreeable discovery, which he communicated to
Lord Lismore. A _cassette_, or coffer, belonging to Charles, had,
apparently, been left in Paris, and, after many adventures on the road,
was brought to Rome by the French ambassador. James opened it, and found
that it contained letters ‘from myself and the Queen.’ But it also
offered proof that the Prince had carried on a secret correspondence with
England, long before he left Rome in 1744. Probably his adherents wished
James to resign in his favour. {27a}
As to religion, Dr. King admits that Charles was no bigot, and d’Argenson
contrasted his disengaged way of treating theology with the exaggerated
devoutness of the Duke of York. Even during the march into England, Lord
Elcho told an inquirer that the Prince’s religion ‘was still to seek.’
Assuredly he would never make shipwreck on the Stuart fidelity to
Catholicism. All this was deeply distressing to the pious James, and all
this dated from 1742, that is, from the time of Murray of Broughton’s
visit to Rome. Indifference to religious strictness was, even then,
accompanied by a love of wine, in some slight degree. Already, too, a
little rift in the friendship of the princely brothers was apparent;
there were secrets between them which Henry must have communicated to
James.
As for the fatal vice of drink, it is hinted at on April 15, 1747, by an
anonymous Paris correspondent of Lord Dunbar’s. Charles had about him
‘an Irish cordelier,’ one Kelly, whom he employed as a secretary. Kelly
is accused of talking contemptuously about James. ‘It were to be wished
that His Royal Highness would forbid that friar his apartment, because he
passes for a notorious drunkard . . . and His Royal Highness’s character,
in point of sobriety, has been a little blemished on this friar’s
account.’ {28a}
The cold, hunger, and fatigue of the Highland distresses had, no doubt,
often prompted recourse to the national dram of whiskey, and Charles
would put a bottle of brandy to his lips ‘without ceremony,’ says Bishop
Forbes. The Prince on one occasion is said to have drunk the champion
‘bowlsman’ of the Islands under the table. {28b}
What had been a jovial feast became a custom, a consolation, and a curse,
while there is reason, as has been seen, to suppose that Charles, quite
early in life, showed promise of intemperance. In happier circumstances
these early tastes might never have been developed into a positive
disease. James himself, in youth, had not been a pattern of strict
sobriety, but later middle age found him almost ascetic.
We have sketched a character endowed with many fine qualities, and
capable of winning devoted affection. We now examine the rapid decline
of a nature originally noble.
Returned from Scotland in 1746, Prince Charles brought with him a head
full of indigested romance, a heart rich in chimerical expectations. He
now prided himself on being a plain hardy mountaineer. He took a line of
his own; he concealed his measures from the spy-ridden Court of his
father in Rome; he quarrelled with his brother, the Duke of York, when
the Duke accepted a cardinal’s hat. He broke violently with the French
king, who would not aid him. He sulked at Avignon. He sought Spanish
help, which was refused. He again became the centre of fashion and of
disaffection in Paris. Ladies travelled from England merely to see him
in his box at the theatre. Princesses and duchesses ‘pulled caps for
him.’ Naturally cold (as his enemies averred) where women were
concerned, he was now beleaguered, besieged, taken by storm by the fair.
He kept up the habit of drinking which had been noted in him even before
his expedition to Scotland. He allowed his old boyish scepticism
(caused by a mixed Protestant and Catholic education) to take the form of
studied religious indifference. After defying and being expelled by
Louis XV., he adopted (what has never, perhaps, been observed) the wild
advice of d’Argenson (‘La Bête,’ and Louis’s ex-minister of foreign
affairs), he betook himself to a life of darkling adventures, to a hidden
and homeless exile. In many of his journeys he found Pickle in his path,
and Pickle finally made his labours vain. The real source of all this
imbroglio, in addition to an exasperated daring and a strangely secretive
temperament, was a deep, well-grounded mistrust of the people employed by
his father, the old ‘King over the water.’ Whatever James knew was known
in London by next mail. Charles was aware of this, and was not aware
that his own actions were almost as successfully spied upon and reported.
He therefore concealed his plans and movements from James, and even—till
Pickle came on the scene—from Europe and from England. The result of his
reticence was an irremediable rupture between ‘the King and the Prince of
Wales—over the water,’ an incurable split in the Jacobite camp.
The general outline here sketched must now be filled up in detail. The
_origo mali_ was the divisions among the Jacobites. Ever since 1715
these had existed and multiplied. Mar was thought to be a traitor.
Atterbury, in exile, suspected O’Brien (Lord Lismore). The Earl
Marischal and Kelly {30a} were set against James’s ministers, Lord
Sempil, Lord Lismore, and Balhaldie, the exiled chief of the Macgregors.
Lord Dunbar (Murray, brother of Lord Mansfield) was in James’s disgrace
at Avignon. Sempil, Balhaldie, Lismore were ‘the King’s party,’ opposed
to Marischal, Kelly, Sheridan, Lally Tollendal, ‘the Prince’s party.’
Each sect inveighed against the other in unmeasured terms of reproach.
This division widened when Charles was in France, just before the
expedition to Scotland.
One of James’s agents in Paris, Lord Sempil, writes to him on July 5,
1745, with warnings against the Prince’s counsellors, especially Sir
Thomas Sheridan (Charles’s governor, and left-handed cousin) and Kelly.
They, with Lally Tollendal and others, arranged the descent on Scotland
without the knowledge of James or Sempil, whom Charles and his party
bitterly distrusted, as they also distrusted Lord Lismore (O’Brien),
James’s other agent. While the Prince was in Scotland (1745–1746), even
before Prestonpans, the Jacobite affairs in France were perplexed by the
action of Lismore, Sempil, and Balhaldie, acting for James, while the old
Earl Marischal (who had been in the rising of 1715, and the Glenshiel
affair of 1719) acted for the Prince. With the Earl Marischal was, for
some time, Lord Clancarty, of whom Sempil speaks as ‘a very brave and
worthy man.’ {31a} On the other hand, Oliver Macallester, the spy,
describes Clancarty, with whom he lived, as a slovenly, drunken,
blaspheming rogue, one of whose eyes General Braddock had knocked out
with a bottle in a tavern brawl! Clancarty gave himself forth as a
representative of the English Jacobites, but d’Argenson, in his
‘Mémoires,’ says he could produce no names of men of rank in the party
except his own. D’Argenson was pestered by women, priests, and ragged
Irish adventurers. In September 1745, the Earl Marischal and Clancarty
visited d’Argenson, then foreign minister of Louis XV. in the King’s camp
in Flanders. They asked for aid, and the scene, as described by the spy
Macallester, on Clancarty’s information, was curious. D’Argenson taunted
the Lord Marischal with not being at Charles’s side in Scotland. To the
slovenly Clancarty he said, ‘Sir, your wig is ill-combed. Would you like
to see my perruquier? He manages wigs very well.’ Clancarty, who wore
‘an ordinary black tie-wig,’ jumped up, saying in English, ‘Damn the
fellow! He is making his diversion of us.’ {32a} The Lord Marischal was
already on bad personal terms with Charles. Clancarty was a ruffian,
d’Argenson was the adviser who suggested Charles’s hidden and fugitive
life after 1748. The singular behaviour of the Earl Marischal in
1751–1754 will afterwards be illustrated by the letters of Pickle, who
drew much of his information from the unsuspicious old ambassador of
Frederick the Great to the Court of Versailles. It is plain that the
Duke of Ormonde was right when he said that ‘too many people are meddling
in your Majesty’s affairs with the French Court at this juncture’
(November 15, 1745). The Duke of York, Charles’s brother, was on the
seaboard of France in autumn 1745. At Arras he met the gallant Chevalier
Wogan, who had rescued his mother from prison at Innspruck. {32b}
Clancarty, Lord Marischal, and Lally Tollendal were pressing for a French
expedition to start in aid of Charles. Sempil, Balhaldie, Lismore, were
intriguing and interfering. Voltaire wrote a proclamation for Charles to
issue. An expedition was arranged, troops and ships were gathered at
Boulogne. Swedes were to join from Gothenburg. On Christmas Eve, 1745,
nothing was ready, and the secret leaked out. A million was sent to
Scotland; the money arrived too late; we shall hear more of it. {33a}
The Duke of York, though he fought well at Antwerp, was kneeling in every
shrine, and was in church when the news of Culloden was brought to him.
This information he gave, in the present century, to one of the Stair
family. {33b} The rivalries and enmities went on increasing and
multiplying into cross-divisions after Charles made his escape to France
in August 1746. He was filled with distrust of his father’s advisers;
his own were disliked by James. The correspondence of Horace Mann, and
of Walton, an English agent in Florence, shows that England received all
intelligence sent to James from Paris, and knew all that passed in
James’s cabinet in Rome. {33c} The Abbé Grant was suspected of being the
spy.
Among so many worse than doubtful friends, Charles, after 1746, took his
own course; even his father knew little or nothing of his movements.
Between his departure from Avignon (February 1749) and the accession of
Pickle to the Hanoverian side (Autumn 1749 or 1750), Charles baffled
every Foreign Office in Europe. Indeed, Pickle was of little service
till 1751 or 1752. Curious light on Charles’s character, and on the
entangled quarrels of the Jacobites, is cast by d’Argenson’s ‘Mémoires.’
In Spring, 1747, the Duke of York disappeared from Paris, almost as
cleverly as Charles himself could have done. D’Argenson thus describes
his manœuvre. ‘He fled from Paris with circumstances of distinguished
treachery’ (_insigne fourberie_) towards his brother, the Prince. He
invited Charles to supper; his house was brilliantly lighted up; all his
servants were in readiness; but _he_ had made his escape by five o’clock
in the afternoon, aided by Cardinal Tencin. His Governor, the Chevalier
Graeme, was not in the secret. The Prince waited for him till midnight,
and was in a mortal anxiety. He believed that the English attempts to
kidnap or assassinate himself had been directed against his brother. At
last, after three days, he received a letter from the Duke of York,
‘explaining his fatal design’ to accept a cardinal’s hat. ‘Prince
Charles is determined never to return to Rome, _but rather to take refuge
in some hole in a rock_.’
Charles, in fact, saw that, if he was to succeed in England, he could not
have too little connection with Rome. D’Argenson describes his brother
Henry as ‘Italian, superstitious, a rogue, avaricious, fond of ease, and
jealous of the Prince.’ Cardinal Tencin, he says, and Lord and Lady
Lismore, have been bribed by England to wheedle Henry into the
cardinalate, ‘which England desires more than anything in the world.’
Charles expressed the same opinion in an epigram. Lady Lismore, for a
short time believed to be the mistress of Louis XV., was deeply
suspected. Whatever may be the truth of these charges, M. de Puysieux,
an enemy of Charles, succeeded at the Foreign Office to d’Argenson, who
had a queer sentimental liking for the Prince. Cardinal Tencin was
insulted, and was hostile; the Lismores were absolutely estranged, if not
treacherous; there was a quarrel between James and Henry in Rome, and
Charles, in Paris. {35a} Such was the state of affairs at the end of
1747, while Pickle was still a prisoner in the Tower of London, engaged,
he tells us, in acts of charity towards his fellow-captives!
Meanwhile Charles’s private conduct demands a moment’s attention. Madame
de Pompadour was all powerful at Court. {35b} This was, therefore, a
favourable moment for Charles, in a chivalrous affection for the injured
French Queen (his dead mother’s kinswoman), to insult the reigning
favourite. Madame de Pompadour sent him _billets_ on that thick smooth
vellum paper of hers, sealed with the arms of France. The Prince tossed
them into the fire and made no answer; it is Pickle who gives us this
information. Maria Theresa later stooped to call Madame de Pompadour her
cousin. Charles was prouder or less politic; afterwards he stooped like
Maria Theresa.
For his part, says d’Argenson, the Prince ‘now amused himself with love
affairs. Madame de Guémené almost ravished him by force; they have
quarrelled, after a ridiculous scene; he is living now with the Princesse
de Talmond. He is full of fury, and wishes in everything to imitate
Charles XII. of Sweden and stand a siege in his house like Charles XII.
at Bender.’ This was in anticipation of arrest, after the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle, in which his expulsion from France was one of the
conditions. This Princesse de Talmond, as we shall see, was the unworthy
Flora Macdonald of Charles in his later wanderings, his protectress, and,
unlike Flora, his mistress. She was not young; Madame d’Aiguillon calls
her _vieille femme_ in a curious play, ‘La Prison du Prince Charles
Edouard Stuart,’ written by d’Argenson in imitation of Shakespeare. {36a}
The Princesse, _née_ Marie Jablonowski, a cousin of the Queen of France
and of Charles, married Anne Charles Prince de Talmond, of the great
house of La Trimouille, in 1730. She must have been nearly forty in
1749, and some ten years older than her lover.
We shall later, when Charles is concealed by the Princesse de Talmond,
present the reader with her ‘portrait’ by the mordant pen of Madame du
Deffand. Here Voltaire’s rhymed portrait may be cited:
Les dieux, en la donnant naissance
Aux lieux par la Saxe envahis,
Lui donnèrent pour récompense
Le goût qu’on ne trouve qu’en France,
Et l’esprit de tous les pays.
The Princesse, who frequented the _Philosophes_, appears to have
encouraged Charles in free thinking and ostentatious indifference in
religion.
‘He is a handsome Prince, and I should love him as much as my wife
does,’ says poor M. de Talmond, in d’Argenson’s play, ‘but why is he
not saintly, and ruled by the Congrégation de Saint Ignace, like his
father? It is Madame de Talmond who preaches to him independence and
incredulity. She is bringing the curse of God upon me. How old will
she be before the conversion for which I pray daily to Saint François
Xavier?’
Such was Madame de Talmond, an old mistress of a young man, flighty,
philosophical, and sharp of tongue.
On July 18, 1748, Charles communicated to Louis XV. his protest against
the article of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle which drove him out of every
secular state in Europe. Louis broke a solemn treaty by assenting to
this article. Charles published his protest and sent it to Montesquieu.
He complained that Montesquieu had not given him the new edition of his
book on the Romans. ‘La confiance devroit être mieux établi entre les
auteurs: j’espère que ma façon de penser pour vous m’attirera la
continuation de votre bonne volonté pour moi.’ {37a} Montesquieu praised
Charles’s ‘simplicity, nobility, and eloquence’: ‘comme vous le dites
très bien, vous estes un auteur.’ ‘Were you not so great a Prince, the
Duchesse de Guillon’ (d’Aiguillon) ‘and I would secure you a place in the
Academy.’
The Duchesse d’Aiguillon, who later watched by Montesquieu’s death-bed,
was a friend of Charles. She and Madame de Talmond literally ‘pull caps’
for him in d’Argenson’s play. But she was in favour of his going to
Fribourg with a pension after the Peace: Madame de Talmond encouraged
resistance. Louis’s minister, M. de Cousteille, applied to Fribourg for
an asylum for Charles on June 24, 1748. On September 8, Burnaby wrote,
for England, a long remonstrance to the ‘Laudable States of Fribourg,’
calling Charles ‘this young Italian!’ The States, in five lines, rebuked
Burnaby’s impertinence, as ‘unconfined in its expressions and so
unsuitable to a Sovereign State that we did not judge it proper to answer
it.’ {38a}
[Picture: Prince Charles, about 1734. From a miniature at Strathtyrum]
To Fribourg Charles would not go. He braved the French Court in every
way. He even insisted on a goldsmith’s preferring his order for a great
service of plate to the King’s, and, having obtained the plate, he
feasted the Princesse de Talmond, his friend and cousin, the Duc de
Bouillon, and a crowd of other distinguished people. {38b} In his
demeanour Charles resolutely affronted the French Ministers. There were
terrible scenes with Madame de Talmond, especially when Charles was
forbidden the house by her husband. Charles was led away from her closed
door by Bulkeley, the brother-in-law of Marshal Berwick, and a friend of
Montesquieu’s. {39a} Thus the violence which afterwards interrupted and
ended Charles’s _liaison_ with Madame de Talmond had already declared
itself. One day, according to d’Argenson, the lady said, ‘You want to
give _me_ the second volume in your romance of compromising Madame de
Montbazon [his cousin] with your two pistol-shots.’ No more is known of
this adventure. But Charles was popular both in Court and town: his
resistance to expulsion was applauded. De Gèvres was sent by the King to
entreat Charles to leave France; ‘he received de Gèvres gallantly, his
hand on his sword-hilt.’ D’Argenson saw him at the opera on December 3,
1748, ‘fort gai et fort beau, admiré de tout le public.’
On December 10, 1748, Charles was arrested at the door of the opera
house, bound hand and foot, searched, and dragged to Vincennes. The
deplorable scene is too familiar for repetition. One point has escaped
notice. Charles (according to d’Argenson) had told de Gèvres that he
would die by his own hand, if arrested. Two pistols were found on him;
he had always carried them since his Scottish expedition. But a _pair of
compasses_ was also found. Now it was with a pair of compasses that his
friend, Lally Tollendal, long afterwards attempted to commit suicide in
prison. The pistols were carried in fear of assassination, but what does
a man want with a pair of compasses at the opera? {40a}
After some days of detention at Vincennes, Charles was released, was
conducted out of French territory, and made his way to Avignon, where he
resided during January and February 1749. He had gained the sympathy of
the mob, both in Paris and in London. Some of the French Court,
including the Dauphin, were eager in his cause. Songs and poems were
written against Louis XV, D’Argenson, as we know, being out of office,
composed a play on Charles’s martyrdom. So much contempt for Louis was
excited, that a nail was knocked into the coffin of French royalty. The
King, at the dictation of England, had arrested, bound, imprisoned, and
expelled his kinsman, his guest, and (by the Treaty of Fontainebleau) his
ally.
Applause and pity from the fickle and forgetful the Prince had won, but
his condition was now desperate. Refusing to accept a pension from
France, he was poor; his jewels he had pawned for the Scottish
expedition. He had disobeyed his father’s commands and mortally offended
Louis by refusing to leave France. His adherents in Paris (as their
letters to Rome prove) were in despair. His party, as has been shown,
was broken up into hostile camps. Lochiel was dead. Lord George Murray
had been insulted and estranged. The Earl Marischal had declined
Charles’s invitation to manage his affairs (1747). Elcho was a
persistent and infuriated dun. Clancarty was reviling Charles, James,
Louis, England, and the world at large. Madame de Pompadour, Cardinal
Tencin, and de Puysieux were all hostile. The English Jacobites, though
loyal, were timid. Europe was hermetically sealed against the Prince.
Refuge in Fribourg, where the English threatened the town, Charles had
refused. Not a single shelter was open to him, for England’s policy was
to drive him into the dominions of the Pope, where he would be distant
and despised. Of advisers he had only such attached friends as Henry
Goring, Bulkeley, Harrington, or such distrusted boon companions as
Kelly—against whom the English Jacobites set all wheels in motion.
Charles’s refuge at Avignon even was menaced by English threats directed
at the Pope. The Prince tried to amuse himself; he went to dances, he
introduced boxing matches, {41a} just as years before he had brought golf
into Italy. But his position was untenable, and he disappeared.
From the gossip of d’Argenson we have learned that Charles was no longer
the same man as the gallant leader of the race to Derby, or the gay and
resourceful young Ascanius who won the hearts of the Highlanders by his
cheerful courage and contented endurance. He was now embittered by
defeat; by suspicions of treachery which the Irish about him kindled and
fanned, by the broken promises of Louis XV., by the indifference of
Spain. He had become ‘a wild man,’ as his father’s secretary, Edgar,
calls him—‘Our dear wild man.’ He spelled the name ‘L’ome sauvage.’ He
was, in brief, a desperate, a soured, and a homeless outcast. His chief
French friends were ladies—Madame de Vassé, Madame de Talmond, and
others. Montesquieu, living in their society, and sending wine from his
estate to the Jacobite Lord Elibank; rejoicing, too, in an Irish Jacobite
housekeeper, ‘Mlle. Betti,’ was well disposed, like Voltaire, in an
indifferent well-bred way. Most of these people were, later, protecting
and patronising the Prince when concealed from the view of Europe, but
theirs was a vague and futile alliance. Charles and his case were
desperate.
In this mood, and in this situation at Avignon, he carried into practice
the counsel which d’Argenson had elaborated in a written memoir. ‘I gave
them’ (Charles and Henry) ‘the best possible advice,’ says La Bête. ‘My
“Mémoire” I entrusted to O’Brien at Antwerp. Therein I suggested that
the two princes should never return to Italy, _but that for some years
they should lead a hidden and wandering life between France and Spain_.
Charles might be given a pension and the vicariat of Navarre. This
should only be allowed to slip out by degrees, while England would grow
accustomed to the notion that they were _not_ in Rome, and would be
reduced to mere doubts as to their place of residence. Now they would be
in Spain, now in France, finally in some town of Navarre, where their
authority would, by slow degrees, be admitted. Peace once firmly
established, it would not be broken over this question. They would be in
a Huguenot country, and able to pass suddenly into Great Britain.’ {43}
This was d’Argenson’s advice before Henry fled Rome to be made a
cardinal, and before the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, closing Europe
against Charles, was concluded. The object of d’Argenson is plain; he
wished to keep Charles out of the Pope’s domains, as England wanted to
drive the Prince into the centre of ‘Popery.’ If he resided in Rome,
Protestant England would always suspect Charles; moreover, he would be
remote from the scene of action. To the Pope’s domains, therefore,
Charles would not go. But the scheme of skulking in France, Spain, and
Navarre had ceased to be possible. He, therefore, adopted ‘the fugitive
and hidden life’ recommended by d’Argenson; he secretly withdrew from
Avignon, and for many months his places of residence were unknown.
‘Charles,’ says Voltaire, ‘hid himself from the whole world.’ We propose
to reveal his hiding-places.