Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (101 page)

The prince was not hidebound in this way. He understood that the great exploits of human history were all ‘impossible’ until someone actually did them. He had the intuitive military flair of a Montrose (but without his tactical ability); he possessed the panache of a great cavalry commander like Murat. It was no accident that the prince was a great hunter. He thought of making war in terms of the chase: rapidity of movement, lightning thrusts, economy, sudden death.
³

That such qualities can coexist with tactical myopia and ineptitude in the world of day-to-day politics has, I hope, been made sufficiently clear. We should not, however, be seduced into overstating the case. Charles Edward Stuart did not conquer Scotland simply on the basis of an ineffable magnetism that led important leaders of Scottish clan and feudal society into lemming-like suicide against their own interests. There was a pre-existing dynamic of social conflict at work in Scotland that Charles Edward was able to energise. Unless we admit this, we shall be nudged dangerously close to the more extreme version of the ‘great man’ theory of history. If the Scottish clan system was, as some historians claim, a peacefully evolving organism with decades of life left in it, which was convulsed by the thunderbolt arrival of the prince as if from outer space, then Charles Edward must indeed be one of the great figures of world history.
⁴

Such a view, even if arrived at by implication, is a gross exaggeration. But we must never forget Charles Edward’s real achievement in the ’45 and how close he came to success. Paradoxically the danger of forgetting this is especially acute for the prince’s biographer. In the forest of detail, including much that is detrimental to the prince’s reputation, through which he must hack, there is a risk that by being too close to him the biographer will omit the aerial view. But for historians and general readers alike, Charles Edward’s claim to fame must always stand or fall on his achievements in 1745–6. The biographer is at fault if he does not give this fact due weight.

The transition from historical figure to creature of legend can be charted only if the decline in the real Charles Edward is first traced. At his peak, the prince was handsome, intelligent, deeply compassionate, with great charm and affability, and possessed of a powerful personal magnetism. He enjoyed superb natural health and had tuned himself to concert pitch as a warrior. He was a crack shot and a fine horseman. His energy and charisma in the first four months
of
the ’45 laid deep foundations for the later legend of the Bonnie Prince. He seemed to lack none of the qualities of the ‘parfait, gentil knight’.

At the nadir of his career the prince was depressive, paranoid, alcoholic, reclusive, prickly and aggressive. His health had deteriorated to an alarming point. He was chronically asthmatic and dropsical. Less than thirty years separates the crest from the trough. Such a steep decline suggests a profoundly unbalanced personality, lacking any middle range of psychic activity.

The old view of the prince as a man unable to deal with failure because of mental feebleness will not stand up to scrutiny. A close study of Charles Edward reveals him as highly intelligent, even if the intelligence was often of the divergent or ‘lateral’ type. His poor spelling and punctuation is a red herring, assiduously peddled by those who cannot see that ‘intelligent’ and ‘academic’ are very far from matching complements. More pertinently, the prince, unlike his father who wrote letters of impeccable orthography and sentiments, never wrote a boring sentence, apart perhaps from the ubiquitous ‘My health is perfect’, whose significance through reiteration was precisely an unconscious intimation that his
mental
health was far from perfect. The prince habitually uses a medley of unusual (even eccentric) arguments, wit, irony and imagery that give even his most self-pitying letters a peculiar richness, contrasting strikingly with the dryness of James’s writing.

Appropriately for one who was himself destined to become a creature of legend, Charles Edward Stuart possessed the attributes of a primitive sun god. Waxing strong, he climbed steadily to the meridian of Derby, then waned, the pace of his decline accelerating.

Every individual thrives on success and languishes in failure, but most are capable of finding a viable equilibrium between the two. No one ever needed to succeed more desperately than Charles Edward Stuart. The ability to achieve the golden mean was beyond him. It had to be spectacular success or abject failure.
Aut Caesar aut nihil
was his motto, self-confessedly.

But whereas the path to success was always likely to be hard-won, the descent into failure was likely to be even steeper, and peculiarly so in the special milieu into which the prince had been born.

The odds against the prince at birth were immeasurably increased by the damage done to him in his early years. His experiences with two well-meaning but singularly disastrous parents left him traumatised and crippled, with particular vulnerabilities of depression, rage, guilt and paranoia.

His relationship with his father left him despising all forms of authority. His relations with possible father-substitutes reinforced that feeling. It was a great tragedy for the prince that the 2nd duke of Berwick (Liria) died young. He was the only one of James’s generation who possessed the ability to bring out the best in the prince.

The contempt for authority led by extension to a profound hatred for France, the one nation-state capable of realising his ambitions. As always with the prince, his attitude contained both rational and irrational elements. Even when France was being sincere in its desire to restore the Stuarts, the sincerity was always attenuated by French desire to attempt the task in their own circumspect, calculating way. From his own vantage point the prince was fully justified in feeling badly let down by Louis XV and his ministers, especially in the periods 1744–5 and 1746–8.

On the other hand, the prince exaggerated both the degree and nature of the French ‘betrayal’. Because his father collaborated with the French, and they with him, over Henry’s cardinalate, Clementina Walkinshaw’s flight and (most seriously) the prince’s expulsion in 1748, Charles Edward built up an image in his own mind of an oppressive two-headed demon of authority, one head being Louis XV, the other his father.

Yet, arguably, his mother’s legacy was even more disastrous. It has often been noted that successful men need to reach adulthood with the driving force of a competent, active mother behind them. Clementina’s early and tragic death removed an all-important prop and may in some sense have caused the prince always unconsciously to ‘fail’. The unconscious guilt Charles felt over her demise probably produced an internal saboteur ready to exaggerate the negative influences of his life.

Were Charles alive today, his stoical response to his mother’s death would not be taken as a sign (as it was) that he had weathered the storm. Rather, we might see it as a repression of all his fears and deeper anguish. We cannot know what he felt: the documents are silent. But that, in an age when calm in the face of disaster was normal conduct, should not surprise us. In human terms it seems likely that the death of Clementina affected Charles more profoundly than any around him suspected.

One effect of this sudden deprivation can be seen in his difficulties with forging long-term relationships with any woman. Clementina Walkinshaw, Marie Louise de Bouillon, the Princesse de Talmont, and his wife, Louise of Stolberg, all served for a while, only to be
discarded
in anger once they had outlived their function. We cannot plunge too deeply into the prince’s hidden character, but some conclusions are too plain to ignore. His mother’s death arrested his development, robbing him of the possibility in his later years of developing a sustaining bond with any woman.

The fragile identity produced by this inadequate parenting, reinforced by the peculiar problems of being a ‘Pretender’, led the prince to be forever at the mercy of a fragmenting self, where there was no equilibrium, where the centre did not hold. This explains the prince’s violent mood swings, his oscillation between rage and charm, his pattern of arrant defiance followed by meek submission.

Rage is the most obvious symptom of the fragmenting self, just as depression is the obvious reflex action to guilt. Depression makes one particularly vulnerable to political defeats and issues of self-esteem. The prince experienced more reverses than were good for a man in his psychological condition. The result was paranoia and cold reserve, a morbid fear of intimacy. Possibly the only person the prince ever trusted was his valet John Stewart. Intimate relations with people of his own rank would have meant risking a deeply wounding familiarity.

Depression can be arrested by qualities of wisdom and empathy but only if the depression is not too deeply rooted. The failure of the prince to use his intellect to overcome his irrationality is no argument for his lack of cerebral powers; it suggests, rather, that self-destructive tendencies were too deeply embedded in his mind for intellect to override them. Yet even in severely depressed individuals, the storm of irrationality can be ridden out by the exercise of creativity or humour. The prince, alas, did not possess creative talents of the first order. He had considerable qualities of aesthetic appreciation, but the demon that drove him was political ambition not creative self-realisation.

As for humour, this was certainly the most important defence mechanism in Charles Edward’s armoury. No one reading his correspondence or collecting the anecdotes that surround him could fail to notice the humorous tinge to many of his
obiter dicta
. Significantly, we find no record of this aspect of his personality after his marriage in 1772, almost as though the self-destructive cancer had by then destroyed all the positive impulses.

The most interesting cases of paranoia are always those where the dividing line between illusion and reality is very thin. The prince often lamented his singular ill-fortune in hyperbolic terms, but it is important to be clear that there
was
an objective basis for his laments.
The
decision at Derby, his brother’s becoming a cardinal (especially given the underhand way it was done), the arrest at the Opera and the expulsion from France, these were all events that would have shaken a much stronger man than the prince.

After 1748 Charles had two further crosses to bear. Despite James’s saintly protestations, he did not abdicate and hand over his regal status to his son. The prince was thus left as leader of the Jacobite movement – for by becoming a cardinal with James’s collusion Henry had virtually announced that in his and his father’s opinion Jacobitism was a fantasy – yet without the powers and prerogatives James had commanded when active leader. In such circumstances, the never very wide gap between ‘Pretender’ and inhabitant of a world of illusion narrowed still further.

After 1766 there was a further dimension to the prince’s limbo. This was something that would have brought a much tougher character close to madness, unless the Stuart claim was abandoned altogether. From being Prince of Wales and then king
in partibus
, Charles Edward became, as a result of the Pope’s refusal to accept his title, that ultimate absurdity, a Pretender
in partibus
. Nobody who fails to understand the alienating effect of such a status on one whose identity was already shaky can have any hope of understanding Charles Edward Stuart.

The prince was a significant historical personality for less than a year – the duration of the 1745 Jacobite rising. Yet he has become one of history’s legendary figures. How is this to be explained? Is it another example of the ‘Captain Scott syndrome’ – that peculiar British fascination for gallant losers? And does not the interest attaching to Charles Edward refute the old saw that history is about winners?

I would like to suggest that the answer is more complex. For a variety of reasons, which I have tried to unravel above, Charles Edward was uniquely placed to fit into a mythical niche. Along with King Arthur and Robin Hood (also in their pristine state real historical figures), ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ was able to transcend the limitations of ‘mere history’ to enter a mystical pantheon. It is not the fact of losing so much as the manner of it that guarantees membership of this exclusive club, as the example of the historical Arthur shows.

There is also the question of the unique interplay between historical and legendary subjects. How far, for example, does the transcendent reputation of George Washington derive from his (rather feeble) historical performance and how far from his position as American
monument?
Charles Edward after his death became the focus for a number of convergent themes: Scottish nationalism, romantic nostalgia for a vanished Eden, even what George Borrow called ‘a rage for gentility’. Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, even George IV, were key figures in creating the legend of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. Even those who affect to disdain this kind of Jacobitism need to explain why Charles Edward Stuart was chosen as the recipient of these posthumous favours. Why not his father, why not Earl Marischal, both of whom were keen to parade an alternative, compromising Jacobitism?

Paradoxically, it seems that it was the very dogged stubbornness that proved so self-destructive in life that won the prince a final victory in death. Who now remembers the victor of Culloden except as ‘butcher Cumberland?’ Yet the vanquished Charles Edward lives on as the subject of a hundred romances and fantasies. The heroic morality of strenuousness that destroyed the prince’s life and turned him into an alcoholic wreck was the same quality that has enabled him to survive in the imagination of humanity. Anyone who has followed the prince through sixty-seven unhappy years in the vale of tears will surely not begrudge him that final victory.

1 James Francis Edward, the prince’s father