even then he hated lying), the Earl told his brother that he found the
Jacobite Court at Rome no place for an honest man. He does not give
details, but he seems to hint at some enterprise which, in his opinion,
was not honourable. James, moreover, was sunk in devotion, weeping and
praying at the tomb of Clementina. From this uncongenial society the
Earl departed, and took up his abode at the Papal city of Avignon,
where Ormonde now resided. He liked the charming old place, and thought
it especially rich in original characters. By 1736, however, he had
returned to Spain, where, as he said, he was always sure to find ‘his
old friend, the Sun.’ News of the Earl comes through some very harmless
correspondence, intercepted at Leyden, in 1736, by an unidentified
spy.[13] Don Ezekiel del Toboso (Hamilton) was now out of favour with
James, which, judging by his very foolish letters, is no marvel. He
resided at Leyden, corresponding with Ormonde and George Kelly. George,
after fourteen years of the Tower, since Atterbury’s Plot, had escaped in
a manner at once ingenious, romantic, and strictly honourable. Carte, the
historian, was another correspondent; but gossip was the staple of their
budgets—gossip and abuse of James’s favourites, Dunbar and Inverness. In
Spain the Earl officially represented James, but his chief employments
were shooting and reading. His Spanish pension was unpaid (he had a
small allowance from the Duke of Hamilton), and he was minded ‘to live
contentedly upon a small matter,’ he says, rather than to ‘pay court in
anti-chambers to under Ministers whom I despise.’ ‘I wo na gie an inch
o’ my will for an ell o’ my wealth,’ he remarks, in the Scots proverbial
phrase. A Protestant canton in Switzerland would suit him best, where a
little money will furnish all that he requires. ‘I am naturally sober
enough, as to my eating, more as to my drinking, I do not game, and
am a Knight Errant _sin amor_, so that I need not great sums for my
maintenance.’ A Knight _sin amor_ the Earl seems usually to have been.
He must have been over forty at this time, and he had not yet acquired
his celebrated fair Turkish captive. The Earl, however, had not given up
all hope of active Jacobite service. ‘I propose to try if I can still do
anything, or have even the hopes of doing something.’ He had a ‘project,’
and, as far as the hints in his letters can now be deciphered, it was
to remove James, or, at all events, Prince Charles, from Rome (a place
distrusted by Protestant England), and to settle one or both of them—in
Corsica!
The Earl was interested, as a patriotic Scot, in the hanging of Porteous
by the Edinburgh mob. ‘It’s certain that Porteous was a most brutal
fellow; his last works at the head of his Guard was not the first time he
had ordered his men to fire on the people. I will not call them Mobb, who
made so orderly an Execution.’
To this extent may Radical principles carry a good Jacobite! The Earl
should have written the work contemplated by Swift, ‘A Modest Defence of
the Proceedings of the Rabble, in All Ages.’
A quarrel with the Spanish Treasurer, who was short of treasure, ended
in somebody assuring the official that the Earl was a man of honour,
‘who would go afoot eating bread and water from this to Tartary _con
un doblon_.’ To Tartary, or near it, the Earl was to go, though he had
been invited by Ormonde to Avignon. Till the end of the year 1737, Kelly
and others hoped to settle Prince Charles in Corsica, with the Earl for
his Minister. Marischal was expected by Ormonde at Avignon, in the last
week of December, and thither he went for a month or two, leaving for
St. Petersburg in March, to visit his brother. Keith had been severely
wounded at the assault on Oczakow, and the Earl found him insisting
that he would not have his leg amputated. The Earl took his part, and
brought Keith to Paris, where the surgeons saved his leg, but where he
had to suffer another serious operation. Thence the devoted brothers
went to Barège, where Keith recovered health. He returned to Russia,
leaving in the Earl’s care Mademoiselle Emetté, a pretty Turkish captive
child, rescued by him at the sack of Oczakow, and Ibrahim, another True
Believer. These slaves, says a friend who gave information to d’Alembert,
were treated by the Earl as his children. He educated them, he invested
money in their names (probably when he was in the service of Frederick
the Great), and he cherished a menagerie of young heathens, whom his
brother had rescued in sieges and storms of towns. One, Stepan, was a
Tartar: another is declared to have been a Thibetan, and related to the
Grand Lama. The Earl was no proselytiser, and did not convert his Pagans
and Turks. It is said that he was not insensible to the charms of pretty
Emetté.
‘Can I never inspire you with what I feel?’ he asked.
‘_Non!_’ replied the girl, and there it ended.
The Earl made a will in her favour, in 1741, and she later—much
later—married M. de Fromont. The love story is not very plausible, before
1741, as Emetté was still a girl when she accompanied the Earl to Paris,
during his Embassy, in 1751.
The movements of the Earl are obscure at this period, but in 1742-43
he was certainly engaged for the Jacobite interest in France, residing
now at Paris, now at Boulogne. The unhappy ‘Association’ of Scottish
Jacobites had been founded in 1741. Its promoters were the inveterate
traitor, Lovat, and William Macgregor, of Balhaldie, who, since 1715, had
lived chiefly in France, and was a trusted agent of James. Balhaldie’s
character has been much assailed by Murray of Broughton, who was himself
connected with the Association. As far as can be discovered Balhaldie was
sanguine, and even of a visionary enthusiasm, when enterprises concocted
by himself were in question. The adventures of other leaders, especially
adventures not supported by France, he distrusted and thwarted. The
loyal Lochiel and the timid Traquair were also of the Association, which
Balhaldie amused in 1742 with hopes of a French descent under the Earl
Marischal. Balhaldie had promised to the French Court ‘mountains and
marvels’ in the way of Scottish assistance, and the Earl ‘treated his
assertion with the contempt and ridicule it deserved,’ says Murray of
Broughton. The Earl’s own letters show impatience with Balhaldie and Lord
Sempil, James’s other agent in Paris. Thus, on February 12, 1743, the
Earl writes from Boulogne to Lord John Drummond, whose chief business
was to get Highland clothes wherein the Duke of York might dance at the
Carnival. The Earl protests, in answer to a remark of Sempil’s, that he
‘has more than bare curiosity in a subject where the interest of my King
and native country is so nearly concerned (not to speak of my own), where
I see a noble spirit, and where I am sensible a great deal of honour
is done me, and I add, that I still hope these gentlemen will do me the
honour and justice to believe that I shall never fail either in my duty
to my King and country, my gratitude to them for their good opinion,
or in my best endeavours to serve.’ All this was in reply to Sempil’s
insinuation that the Scottish Jacobites thought the Earl lukewarm. Murray
confirms the Earl by telling how Balhaldie tried to stir strife between
the Earl and the Scots, who revered him, though Balhaldie styled him ‘an
honourable fool.’[14]
Lord John Drummond suggested to James’s secretary, Edgar, that the Earl
should supersede Balhaldie, ‘who had been obliged to fly the country in
danger of being taken up for a Fifty pound note.’ Lord John’s advice
was excellent. The Earl, and he alone, was the right man to deal with
the party in Scotland, who could trust his sense, zeal, and honour. But
James, far away in Rome, could never settle these distant and embroiled
affairs. He went on trusting Balhaldie, who was also accepted by the
party in England. Had James cashiered Balhaldie and instated the Earl,
matters would have been managed with discretion and confidence. The
Earl was determined not to beguile France into an endeavour based on
the phantom hosts of Balhaldie’s imagination. Had he been minister, it
is highly probable that nothing would have been done at all, and that
Prince Charles would never have left Italy. For Balhaldie continued to
represent James in France, and Balhaldie it was, with Sempil, who induced
Louis XV. to adopt the Jacobite cause, and brought the Prince to France
in 1744. While his father lived, Charles never returned to Rome.
On December 23, 1743, James sent to the Duke of Ormonde, an elderly
amorist at Avignon,[15] his commissions as General of an expedition to
England and as Regent till the Prince should join. The Earl received
a similar commission as General of a diversion, ‘with some small
assistance,’ to be made in Scotland. The Earl was at Dunkirk, eager
to sail for Scotland, by March 7, 1744, and Charles was somewhere,
_incognito_, in the neighbourhood. But the Earl, as he wrote to
d’Argenson, had neither definite orders nor money enough; in short, as
usual, everything was rendered futile by French shilly-shallying and
by the accustomed tempest. D’Alembert and others assert that Charles
asked the Earl to set forth with him alone in a sailing-boat, to which
the Earl replied that, if he went, it would be to dissuade the Scottish
from joining a Prince so brave but so ill-supported. It is certain that
d’Argenson told Marshal Saxe that the Prince ought to retire to a villa
of the Bishop of Soissons, with the Earl for his _chaperon_. The Earl
was still anxious for an expedition in force, but d’Argenson distrusted
his information on all points. Charles declined to go and skulk at the
Bishop’s, and wrote that ‘if he knew his presence unaided would be useful
in England he would cross in an open boat.’[16]
On this authentic evidence the Earl was anxious to make an effort, and
Charles’s remark about going alone in an open boat was conditional—_s’il
savait que sa présence seule fut utile en Angleterre_. But no energy,
no hopes, no courage, could conquer the irresolution of France. By
April Prince Charles was living, _très caché_, in Paris. Thus his long
habit of hiding arose in the _incognito_ forced on him by the Ministers
of Louis XV. The Prince, as he writes to his father (April 3, 1744),
was ‘goin about with a single servant bying fish and other things, and
squabling for a peney more or less.’ He was anxious to make the campaign
in Flanders with the French army, ‘and it will certainly be so if Lord
Marschal dose not hinder it.... He tels them that serving in the Army
in flanders, it would disgust entirely the English,’ in which opinion
the Earl may have been wrong. Charles accuses the Earl of stopping the
Dunkirk expedition (and here d’Alembert confirms), ‘by saying things that
discouraged them to the last degree: I was plagued with his letters,
which were rather Books, and had the patience to answer them, article by
article, striving to make him act reasonably, but all to no purpose.’[17]
It was not easy to ‘act reasonably,’ where all was a chaos of futile
counsels and half-hearted French schemes. They would and they would not,
in the affair of the expedition of March 1744. We find the Earl now
urging despatch, now discouraging the French, and, on September 5, 1744,
he writes to James, from Avignon, ‘there was not only no design to employ
me, but there was none to any assistance in Scotland.’[18] The Earl
believed that the Prince’s incognito was really imposed on him by the
devices of Balhaldie and Sempil, ‘to keep him from seeing such as from
honour and duty would tell him truth.’
Through such tortuous misunderstandings and suspicions on every side,
matters dragged on till Charles forced the game by embarking for Scotland
secretly in June 1745. The Earl Marischal was the man whom he sent to
report this step to Louis XV. ‘I hope,’ Charles writes to d’Argenson,
‘you will receive the Earl as a person of the first quality, in whom I
have full confidence.’ The Earl undertook the commission.[19] On August
20, 1745, he sent in a _Mémoire_ to the French Court. Lord Clancarty had
arrived, authorised (says the Earl) to speak for the English Jacobite
leaders, the Duke of Beaufort, the Earl of Lichfield, Lord Orrery, Lord
Barrymore, Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, and Sir John Hinde Cotton. They
offered to raise the standard as soon as French troops landed in England.
When they made the offer, the English Jacobites (who asked for 10,000
infantry, arms for 30,000, guns, and pay) did not know that Charles
had landed in Scotland. D’Argenson naturally asked for the seals and
signatures of the English leaders, as warrants of their sincerity. He
could not send a _corps d’armée_ across the Channel on the word of one
individual, and such an individual as the profane, drunken, slovenly,
one-eyed Clancarty. The Earl, on October 23, 1745, tried to overcome the
scruples of d’Argenson, but in vain.[20] Clancarty, it is pretty clear,
came over as a result of the persuasions of Carte, the historian, in whom
the leading English Jacobites had no confidence. ‘The wise men among them
would neither trust Lord Clancarty’s nor Mr. Carte’s discretion in any
scheme of business,’ says Sempil to James (September 13, 1745).
Sempil was ever at odds with the Earl, who, says Sempil, ‘insists on
great matters.’ French policy was to keep sending small supplies of
money and men to support agitation in Scotland. The Earl did not want
mere agitation and a feeble futile rising; he wanted strong measures,
which might have a chance of success. ‘He can trust nobody,’ says Sempil,
‘and is persuaded that the French Court will sacrifice our country, if
his firmness does not prevent it.’ The Earl was right; what he foresaw
occurred. Sempil, however, was not far wrong, when he observed that the
Prince was already engaged, and a little help was better than none. ‘I
am sorry to see my old friend so very unfit for great affairs,’ writes
Sempil. The Earl had ever been adverse to a wild attempt by the Prince,
as a mere cause of misery and useless bloodshed. He probably thought that
no French support and a speedy collapse of the rising were better than
trivial aid, which kept up the hearts of the Highlanders, and urged them
to extremes.
By October 19 the Duke of York was flattered with hopes of sailing at
the head of a large French force. The force hung about Dunkirk for six
months, doing nothing, and then came Culloden. The Duke was prejudiced
against Sempil and his friend Balhaldie, and already there was a split in
the party, Sempil on one side, the Earl Marischal on the other. George
Kelly returned from Scotland, as an envoy to France, but Sempil would
not trust him even with the names of the leading English Jacobites. The
secrecy insisted on by Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, Lord Barrymore, the
Duke of Beaufort, and the others was kept up by Sempil even against
Prince Charles himself. This naturally irritated the Earl, and, what with
Jacobite divisions in France, and French irresolution, Marischal had
to play a tedious and ungrateful part. James expected him to join the
Prince, but he, for his part, gave James very little hope of the success
of the adventure.[21] James himself, with surprising mental detachment,
admitted that the best plan for the English Jacobites was ‘to lie still,’
and make no attempt without the assistance from France which never came.
The Earl disappears from the diplomatic scene, on which he had done no
good, in the end of 1745. He obviously attempted to settle quietly in
Russia with his brother. But the Empress ‘would not so much as allow
Lord Marischal to stay in her country,’ wrote James to Charles, in April
1747. Ejected from the North, he sought ‘his old friend, the sun,’ in
the South, at Treviso, and at Venice. The Prince, in August 1747, wrote
from Paris imploring the Earl to join him, for the need of a trustworthy
adviser was bitterly felt. The Earl replied with respect, but with
Republican brevity, pleading his ‘broken health,’ and adding, ‘I did not
retire from all affairs without a certainty how useless I was, and always
must be.’
At Venice the Earl entertained a moody young exile, who tells a story
illustrating at once his host’s knowledge of life, the strictness of
his morality, and his freedom from a tendency to censure the young and
enterprising.[22]
From Venice the much-wandering Earl retired to his most sure and
hospitable retreat. He joined his brother, who had now entered the
service of Frederick the Great. He reached Berlin in January 1748.
Frederick, asking first whether his estates had been confiscated, made
him a pension of 2,000 crowns. Frederick loved, esteemed, sheltered, and
employed the veteran, ‘unfit for affairs’ as he thought himself. No doubt
Frederick’s first aim was to attach to himself so valuable an officer
as Keith, by showing kindness to his brother. But the Earl presently
became personally dear to him, as a friend without subservience, and a
philosopher without vanity or pretence. In his new retreat the Earl was
not likely to listen to the prayers of Prince Charles, who, being now a
homeless exile, implored the old Jacobite to meet him at Venice. Henry
Goring carried the letters, in April 1749, and probably took counsel
with the veteran. Nothing came of it, except the expulsion from the
Prince’s household at Avignon of poor George Kelly, a staunch and astute
friend, who was obnoxious to the English Jacobites. Since 1717 Kelly
had served the Cause, first under Atterbury, then—after fourteen years’
imprisonment—in France, Scotland, and as the Prince’s secretary. He had
been Lord Marischal’s ally in 1745, but Rousseau says that the Earl’s
failing was to be easily prejudiced against a man, and never to return
from his prejudice. Kelly’s letter to Charles might have disarmed him.
‘Nobody ever had less reason or worse authority than Lord Marischal for
such an accusation; for your Royal Highness knows well I always acted
the contrary part, and never failed representing the advantage and even
necessity of having him at the head of your affairs.... His Lordship may
think of me what he pleases, but my opinion of him is still the same.’
There seems to be no doubt that the Earl had written to Floyd (whom he
commends to Hume as an honest witness) to say that ‘from a good hand’ he
learned that Kelly ‘opposed his coming near the Prince,’ and had spoken
of him as ‘a Republican, a man incapable of cultivating princes.’ The
Earl _was_ ‘incapable of cultivating princes,’ and Rousseau esteemed
him for the same. But it was under Kelly’s influence that Charles, in
1747, tried to secure the society and services of the Earl. He had been
prejudiced (as Rousseau says he was capable of being), probably by Carte
the historian. Years afterwards, when the Earl had disowned Charles,
Kelly returned to the Prince’s household. He never had a stauncher
adherent than this Irish clergyman of exactly the same age as his father.
History, like the Earl Marischal, has been unduly prejudiced against
honest George Kelly.[23]
II
THE EARL IN PRUSSIAN SERVICE
About the Earl’s first years in the company of the great Frederick little
is known or likely to be known. _Deus nobis hæc otia fecit_, he may have
murmured to himself while he refused the Prince’s insistent prayers for
his service, and put his Royal Highness off in a truly Royal way, with
his miniature in a snuff-box of mother-of-pearl. The old humourist may
have reflected that men had given lands and gear for the cause, and now,
like the representative of Lochgarry, have nothing material to show for
their loyalty, save an inexpensive snuff-box of agate and gold. No, the
Earl would not travel from Venice in 1749 to meet the Prince.
His name occurs in brief notes of Voltaire, then residing with Frederick,
and quarrelling with his Royal host. Voltaire kept borrowing books from
the Scottish exile, books chiefly on historical subjects. If we may
believe Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, then at Berlin, the celebrated
Livonian mistress of Keith caused quarrels between him and his brother,
and even obliged them to live separately.[24] The Earl gave much good
advice to Henry Goring, the Prince’s envoy at that time, and if he was
indeed on bad terms with his brother (these bad terms cannot have lasted
long), he may have been all the better pleased to go as Frederick’s
ambassador to Versailles in August 1751. Thither he took his pretty
Turkish captive, and all his household of Pagans, Mussulmans, Buddhists,
and so forth. I have elsewhere described the Earl’s relations with Prince
Charles, then lurking in or near Paris; his furtive meetings with Goring
at lace shops and in gardens, his familiarity with Young Glengarry, who
easily outwitted the Earl, and his unprejudiced tolerance of a perfectly
Fenian plot—the Elibank Plot—for kidnapping George II., Prince Fecky,
and the rest of the Royal Family. The Earl merely looked on. He gave no
advice. His ancient memories could not enlighten him as to how the Guards
were now posted. ‘What opinion, Mr. Pickle,’ he said to Glengarry, ‘can I
entertain of people that proposed I should abandon my Embassy and embark
headlong with them?’ The Earl had found a haven at last in Frederick’s
favour. He was willing to help the cause diplomatically, to send Jemmy
Dawkins to Berlin, to sound Frederick, and suggest that, in a quarrel
with England, the Jacobites might be useful. He was ready enough to dine
with the exiles on St. Andrew’s Day, but not to go further. When Charles
broke with the faithful Goring in the spring of 1754, the Earl broke with
_him_, rebuked him severely, and never forgave him. He had never loved
Charles; he now regarded him as impossible, even treacherous, and ceased
to be a Jacobite.
The nature of his charges against the Prince will appear later.
Meanwhile, as the Prince had behaved ill to Goring, who fell under his
new mania of suspicion, as he declined to cashier his mistress, Miss
Walkinshaw, in deference to English and Scottish requests, as he was a
battered, broken wanderer, _sans feu ni lieu_, the Earl abandoned him
to his fate, and even, it seems, officially ‘warned the party against
being concerned with him.’ After forty years of faithful though perfectly
fruitless service, the Earl apparently made up his mind to be reconciled,
if possible, to the English Government. Though his appointment as
ambassador had been a direct insult to Frederick’s uncle, George II.,
the great diplomatic revolution which brought Prussia and England into
alliance was favourable to the Earl’s prospects of pardon.
He probably accepted the Embassy not without hopes of being able to
do something for the Cause. James certainly took this view of the
appointment. But the end had come. The retreat of Charles in Flanders
had been detected at last by the English. The English dread of Miss
Walkinshaw, and the quarrel over that poor lady, made themselves heard of
in the end of 1753. By January 17, 1754, we find Frederick writing to the
Earl that he ‘will secretly be delighted to see him again.’ Frederick
bade Marshal Keith send an itinerary of the route which the Earl ‘will do
well to follow’ on his return to Prussia. On the same day Keith wrote to
his brother the following letter, which shows that their affection, if
really it had been impaired, was now revived:—[25]
‘17 January, 1754.
‘I’m glad my dearest brother says nothing of his health in the
letter ... 27th Dec., for Count Podewils had alarmed me a good
deal by telling me that you had been obliged more than once to
send Mr. Knyphausen in your place to Versailles, on occasion of
incommoditys; and tho’ I hope you would not disguise to me the
state of your health ... yet a conversation I had some days ago
with the King gives me still reason to suspect that it is not
so good as I ought to wish it. He told me that for some time
past you had solicitated him to allow you to retire ... and at
your earnest desire he had granted your request, but at the
same time had acquainted you how absolutely necessary it was
for his interest that you should continue in the same post till
the end of harvest, by which time he must think of some other
to replace you; he asked me at the same time if your intention
was to return here; to which I answer’d ... it was, tho’ I said
this without any authority from you ... he told me that in that
case he thought you should keep the time of your journey and
route as private as possible, and that after taking leave of
the Court of France you should give it out that your health
required your going for some time to the S. of France, that
it was easy on the way to take a cross road to Strasbourg and
Francfort, and after passing the Hessian dominions to turn into
Saxony, by which you would evite all the Hanoverian Territories
and arrive safely here. Everything he said was more like a
friend than a sovereign, and showed a real tenderness for your
preservation....’