Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (15 page)

In view of his later difficulties with women, it is worth noting that there is little sign of an ‘objective’ problem here. The problem lay in the prince’s mind. All evidence, now and later, suggests that women were deeply attracted to him and that he reciprocated, at least superficially.
⁵⁰

A comparison with his brother Henry is instructive. Opinions were divided among contemporaries as to which prince was the more impressive. The consensus was that although Henry was superior in cunning and took to academic pursuits more easily, Charles Edward was actually the more intelligent of the two.
⁵¹
An observer in 1742 summed it up well: Charles Edward, he claimed, had a quicker mind than Henry but Henry, conscious of this, bridged the gap by hard
work
. Although both were well-bred and good-natured, Charles Edward had the edge in intuitive knowledge and understanding of the world, was considerate and reasonable in conversation and never spoke without thinking.
⁵²
Moreover, all but zealot observers contrasted favourably the prince’s lukewarmness about religion with Henry’s increasing religious mania, already very evident by 1742.
⁵³
It was also clear that Henry tried to emulate his brother and tried his hand at anything at which Charles was successful. This extended even to the game of
trucco in terra
, of which they both became devotees.
⁵⁴

Another contrast, written in November of the same year, comes from secretary Edgar:

He [the prince] fatigues at that diversion [hunting] so much that nobody here can keep up with him, even a servant or two that are clever fellows have more than enough to do it, and if he were where we wish him, I doubt if I could find many that would not tire with the constant fatigue and exercise he takes. His brother takes a great deal of exercise also. Sometimes he goes out a’shooting, but has not such a delight in it as the Prince and sometimes he takes the air on horseback. At night, after a day’s strong fatigue, the Prince sits down and diverts himself at music for an hour or two as if he had not been abroad, and plays his part upon the bass viol very well, for he loves and understands music to a great degree. His brother does not understand it as well but he sings, when he pleases, much better.
⁵⁵

Perhaps the reason Henry, a much lesser personality than the prince, attracted so many favourable opinions was simply that as a boy he was better-looking. The word used by so many travellers to Rome in the 1730s to describe James’s second son was ‘merry’. His features were more regular than Charles Edward’s and his demeanour more smiling. His portraits show him to have been a very pretty child with wide, sparkling hazel eyes. He was shorter and more delicately built than his brother, But like so many pretty children, he turned out plain as an adult. The sunny disposition vanished to be replaced by a kind of dour narcissism. Charles Edward always retained his fair, reddish colouring but Henry in middle age looked dark and swarthy.

Henry is a key figure in the understanding of Charles Edward’s psychological development, and to some extent represents ‘the road not taken’. This is a complex skein to unravel, but, simplifying, we may say that the Henry solution – the way in which a given genetic
inheritance
interacted with the unique experience of the Stuart family context – was that of submission and internalisation. The later emergence of the ‘Cardinal-King’ as a homosexual personality reflects the disaster of his childhood.

Charles Edward’s experience, and therefore his solution, was different. His precious first five years with his mother were enough to give him a predominantly heterosexual personality. But the ensuing years of trauma and her early death left him with a reservoir of unconscious guilt. This in turn produced the cluster of psychological near-relations of guilt which undoubtedly informed the prince’s later behaviour: depression, rage, paranoia.
⁵⁶
The lack of a satisfactory family life left Charles a dreadful legacy. Ever afterwards he evinced clear signs of an unstable ego, a self in danger of fragmentation, an uncertain identity, and a general sensitivity and vulnerability.
⁵⁷

Another aspect of such a personality is compulsive secretiveness. The refusal to expose oneself totally for the inspection of others bespeaks an excessive vulnerability, a refusal to run the risk of being hurt. Secretive Charles Edward certainly was, as we shall see later. At this stage in his career, the tendency manifested itself in a secret correspondence carried on with the English Jacobites – a correspondence that came to light only when James sorted through his son’s effects two years later.
⁵⁸

From 1742, the one clearly discernible strand in Charles Edward’s personality was the total lack of any mechanism for dealing with authority, and hence a fatally blurred distinction between his own will and reality. In February of that year cardinals Tencin and Acquaviva found James seriously despondent over Charles Edward’s inability to take direction and over the possible consequences of the prince’s overdeveloped willpower.
⁵⁹
But James could scarcely escape responsibility for the way his son had turned out. Repressive in the areas where he should have been indulgent, weak where he should have been strong, manifestly preferring Henry to Charles, James elicited in the prince a deep contempt, whose dimensions were to be seen only later when father and son were geographically separate.

Most significantly of all, James had never acted the true role of parent, so as to enable the prince to reach adulthood. He had never shown him that authority could have a caring, healing and therapeutic aspect. The consequence was not only that the prince had to look for a replacement father, but whenever he found suitable ‘father-figures’ (like Lord George Murray or the Earl Marischal), he was forced to quarrel with them all in turn (i.e. to ‘kill’ them symbolically)
in
order to reach maturity. Such was the prince on the eve of his great adventures.

(1743–4)

THE YEAR 1743
brought a dramatic upsurge in Jacobite fortunes. The death of Fleury in January at the age of 90 removed the principal barrier to outright French support for the House of Stuart. At first Jacobite hopes seemed dashed once again when Louis XV announced that henceforth he would be his own Prime Minister; the expectation in the Palazzo Muti had been that Tencin would succeed Fleury. But Louis’s own inclinations and the tide of events in the war, especially in Germany, soon led him to contemplate seriously a descent on England.

A decisive prod in this direction was Sempill’s memoir to the French court in spring 1743, in the name of the leading English Jacobites, asking for a French invasion to restore the Stuarts.
¹
This was a highly significant development. At last the French seemed to be hearing about conditions in England from the horse’s mouth. This was a very different matter from the formulaic and predictable assurances that England was ripe for revolution, delivered periodically to Versailles by James.

Much encouraged by this new Jacobite bearing, Louis XV sent his master of horse James Butler on a fact-finding mission to England – the pretext was buying horses for the royal stables. Butler spent August and September 1743 in England. He returned to Versailles in October with a glowing report on the strength of Jacobitism in the British Isles. That was good enough for the French king. He now had both motive and opportunity for an invasion.

Full-scale planning for the project was set in train in November. Louis XV demonstrated his seriousness by writing to Philip V of Spain in his own hand to put him in the picture.
²

What was James’s position in all this? It has to be remembered
that
at the beginning of 1743 all talk of Charles Edward’s departure still concerned possible service in the French army in Flanders or Germany. At this stage the Jacobites’ best hope was that the prince would take part in an invasion of Hanover.
³
But as 1743 wore on, and whispers began to be heard in Rome that the French were contemplating some bold stroke against England, James’s eagerness to send his elder son to France gave way to circumspection and indecisiveness. Always determined that Charles Edward should not be in France simply as a French dupe or to act as a ‘scarecrow’ against the English, James now raised a further query with Tencin (since 1742 a minister of state on Louis XV’s great council of state): if a serious French project was on foot, would not the prince’s presence in France alert the English and put them on their guard?
⁴

James faced two major problems. First how serious were the French and what role in their schemes did they envisage for the prince? Second, assuming he could be reassured on French sincerity, there was the mechanical or physical problem of how Charles Edward got from Rome to Paris. The stumbling block here was the great Mediterranean plague, which was cutting a swathe through the Latin countries in 1743. As a result of its ravages, a
cordon sanitaire
had been thrown around the papal states. A strict quarantine was in force. There were alarming rumours that the virus had reached as far as Reggio in Calabria. Even communication with the outside world by letter was difficult. Rome in 1743 was to a large extent cut off from the rest of civilisation.
⁵

A letter from James to Lord Sempill in September 1743 succinctly shows James’s state of mind:

I never solicited the prince’s coming into France in this juncture, for though I have long wished that he should be out of this country, and that he might have leave to make a campaign, yet I feared any motion of his at the present would give an alarm to the English government, who ought to be kept asleep and without suspicion till all be ready to attack them in good earnest. But if with all that the French should be really serious to have him in France, I think it would be wrong not to comply with their desire, whatever may be their view in it. Though should his removal from hence and his presence in France be never so necessary, I don’t see how I could send him thither at this time with tolerable prudence and precaution for his safety unless the French themselves can fall on some method for that effect, since the quarantine by land makes
all
passages impracticable for him by that way, and that the English fleet render it extreme hazardous by sea.
⁶

There was some easing of the situation by September, when it was found that the plague seemed to have been halted in its tracks in Calabria, but the basic problem remained.
⁷
James received conflicting advice on the proposed journey. Tencin recommended travel in small Maltese boats. Jacobites like O’Brien, on the other hand, argued that only in extreme emergency should the prince’s person be hazarded at sea; the most he risked on land was arrest.
⁸
James at this juncture inclined to sending his son on a roundabout route via Switzerland.
⁹
It is clear that James would only have released his son for the journey to Paris after a pressing invitation from the French court. One of the puzzles surrounding the years 1743–4 has always been that, after the failure of the 1744 invasion attempt, Louis XV tried to lay the blame for the débâcle on Charles Edward’s sudden appearance at Versailles in February 1744, at the most critical moment of the enterprise.
¹⁰

The French had to balance security considerations against the desirability of quickening the Jacobite fifth column in England. The English Jacobites had promised to meet any French invading force landing in Essex with their own raw levies, provided Charles Edward arrived with the king’s manifesto and the powers of regency. Only thus could the French descent be presented to the English people as an attempt at Stuart restoration rather than an invasion proper. On the other hand, since France intended to invade England without warning and without a declaration of war, the mere presence of the Stuart prince on French soil would alert the English to what was afoot.
¹¹
How to square this circle was one of the principal subjects of discussion in Versailles in the second half of 1743.

A further complication affecting the investigation into who invited Charles Edward to France is that the discussions in the council of state on this topic were held on a hypothetical or contingency basis only. Louis XV, for whom duplicity was almost a conditioned reflex, did not confide the true details of the 1743–4 invasion project to all his ministers of state.
¹²
Foreign Minister Amelot and Navy Minister Maurepas were closely involved in the day-to-day planning, but Finance Minister Orry, Minister of War comte d’Argenson and Minister without Portfolio duc de Noailles were informed of the project only at the last minute. Even the pro-Jacobite Tencin, the last of the six ministers of state, was held at arm’s length.

The exclusion of the royal favourite Noailles is particularly surprising, but Louis XV knew he would be opposed to a pro-Jacobite
venture
and did not wish to hear views differing from his own. The issue of whether to invite Charles Edward to France was largely discussed by the ministers in a vacuum, as if it related merely to military service on the Continent.

But by the time Butler returned from England with his mission successfully accomplished, the devious Louis XV had hit on a solution to the Charles Edward conundrum. The trick was to acquire the Jacobite manifestoes and declarations to the people of England without having Charles Edward in tow. By a sleight of hand Louis could contrive it so that the prince arrived in Paris only after the expedition’s commander-designate, the comte de Saxe, had captured London. Charles Edward would then cross the Channel to ratify the French conquest. In this way the forces of the Jacobite fifth column would be successfully energised. while full secrecy was maintained right up to French landfall.