Read Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Online
Authors: Frank McLynn
The danger from the English fleet became even more acute when the prince put in at Antibes on the evening of the 23rd. An English pinnace had been sent to intercept the boat; it came into port close on the
felucca
’s heels. Both sides asked permission to land from the harbourmaster. As they lay at anchor, the English craft was so close it almost scraped the stern of the prince’s boat.
46
The arrival of the two boats together in a quarantine port created a minor sensation. The commandant and governor of Antibes, M. de Villeneuve, was informed and came in person to investigate. Now was revealed a major consequence of the misunderstanding between
France
and the Jacobites. Since Amelot and Louis XV had not expected Charles Edward to set out from Rome, no instructions had been sent to commanders of French ports. Villeneuve was completely in the dark.
47
According to his standing orders, he had to send back any boat arriving from Monaco or Italy or send it on to Marseilles or Toulon.
Things looked grim for the prince. Just when he was on the point of being expelled, he got a message to Villeneuve, stating that a great secret would be revealed to him if he would just find a pretext to be rid of the English pinnace. Villeneuve then pronounced his Solomonic judgment. Both boats must leave, he declared, but the English first, since he had further investigations to pursue with regard to the
felucca
.
48
As soon as the English craft had cleared from the harbour, Charles Edward revealed his identity to an astonished Villeneuve.
49
Thinking quickly, the governor transferred the prince to another ship. This was a sane precaution, since Matthews did not seem disposed to take no for an answer. Even while Villeneuve was improvising arrangements for his unexpected royal guest, an English
chaloupe
, satellite of the great warships, came in and asked for supplies. Since no English ships had been seen for days before this, Matthews’s game was clear to Villeneuve. He gave permission for revictualling on condition the
chaloupe
was gone that very night.
50
While supplies were being loaded, Villeneuve played out yet another charade. Indignantly dressing down the captain of the
felucca
in public, he demanded that it leave forthwith. The Finale boat left before the
chaloupe
could give chase. When the latter’s ‘vital supplies’ had been loaded on, it took up the trail and pursued the
felucca
all the way back to Monaco.
51
The prince, of course, had meanwhile been transferred surreptitiously to a larger ship. Villeneuve pondered his next move. The presence of the Stuart prince obviously meant that great schemes were afoot of which he knew nothing. He dashed off an express to his superior, marquis de Mirepoix, Intendant of Ports, asking for clear directions.
52
He gave interim orders for the prince to be fed and housed with every courtesy on board the ship to which he had been transferred. When dusk fell on the evening of the 24th, he went down to the harbour and fetched the prince to his permanent quarters, a detached house in a secluded part of the town.
53
There the prince waited until Villeneuve heard from Mirepoix. As the days passed and the governor chatted with Charles Edward, it came to Villeneuve that the affair was bigger even than he had
suspected
. Mirepoix might not have grasped the full implications of the prince’s presence on French soil. Villeneuve accordingly sent a courier directly to Amelot, asking for explicit guidance.
54
But Villeneuve had left it too late. The reply from Mirepoix came in. It stated that in the circumstances an eight-day quarantine should be enforced; after that the prince was free to leave.
55
There was no holding Charles Edward once he heard this. In vain did Villeneuve plead with him to stay in Antibes until the second courier, from Amelot, arrived. Faced with the prince’s determination, Villeneuve could do nothing. Ostensibly expressing concern over the fatigue the prince had suffered and would again, he offered him a chaise, hoping perhaps to slow him down. The prince wanted none of it. He and his party galloped out of Antibes at full speed at 8 a.m. on the morning of 29 January.
56
After an all-night journey, they arrived at Aix-en-Provence on the 30th. Even the prince was exhausted after the sixteen posts between Antibes and Aix, most of them on bad roads with inadequate horses.
57
Resting for a day, the party pressed on to Avignon, which was reached on 1 February. At Avignon Charles Edward discussed the implications of the French invasion project with the duke of Ormonde.
58
Ormonde was the Jacobite ‘elder statesman’. Now nearly eighty, he had retired to Avignon in the 1730s after long service for James at the court of Madrid.
Then it was another gruelling ride, to Lyons, reached at 4 p.m. on 3 February. Leaving before dawn next morning, they spent four more weary days in the saddle.
59
Even the prince’s great stamina was taxed. He arrived in Paris utterly exhausted (‘
rendu
’) on Saturday 8 February.
60
What were the consequences of this heroic thirty-day journey in mid-winter?
61
The first thing to note is that everyone except the conspirators was taken completely by surprise. After years of crying wolf about Charles Edward’s allegedly imminent departure for France, Mann was caught on the hop when it actually happened. The prince was in Lyons before that fanatical anti-Jacobite had word of his arrival in Antibes.
62
Even when it was known that the prince had escaped his agents’ surveillance, Mann could not decide what his purpose was. Mann identified four possibilities; amazingly, not one of them was the correct one. These were: a descent on Scotland with the Brest fleet; a marriage with the king of France’s daughter; a marriage with the Princess of Modena, then in Paris; service with France in the next campaign in Europe.
63
Mann then shot even wider of the target by postulating an invitation from the Emperor. We shall
soon
see the Young Pretender at the Imperial Court in Frankfurt, he assured Horace Walpole, prior to service in the Bavarian army.
64
This was supposed to be all part of a conspiracy by the powers (Austria, Prussia, Spain and France) to invade Hanover.
65
Never was Mann’s anti-Jacobite paranoia more startlingly evinced.
Mann was equally wide of the mark when it came to assessing the papal role in Charles Edward’s departure. He believed that the Pope had provided Charles Edward with 80,000 crowns plus a proclamation calling on all Catholics in the British Isles to rise and follow Charlie.
66
The truth was quite different. The Pope knew nothing of the plan to get the prince out of Rome and was as incredulous as anyone as news of his arrival in Genoa, Antibes, etc. came in.
67
As the witty Benedict XIV later remarked, if the British had offered a good price for his letters to Charles Edward on this affair, he would have sold and the British would have ended up, as their side of the bargain, with – precisely nothing.
68
The French representative in Rome was in no better case, sulkily reporting the escapade to Amelot as if it were a secret his superior had deliberately kept from him.
69
Yet if everyone in Rome was taken completely unawares, their surprised reaction was as nothing to the consternation felt in Paris when the prince arrived like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.
70
Louis XV, realising that his Machiavellian game was up, sent a warm compliment to Charles on his arrival, hoping to rationalise the consequences of his own duplicity.
71
In reality the prince’s arrival threw the French ministers into disarray. Security for the cross-Channel project was blown sky-high.
72
In order to assess the impact of Charles Edward’s advent on the French invasion plans, we need to appreciate the stage Saxe’s preparations had reached while the prince was on his thirty-day Odyssey.
Serious planning had been under way since the end of November 1743, but had already been bedevilled by grave disagreements between France and the English Jacobites. Although urged to ferry his army across in fishing boats, the comte de Saxe dared not take the risk and insisted on the protection of the Brest fleet.
73
The English Jacobites for their part decided to avoid the risk of arrest by asking for a postponement of the French landing until after Parliament had risen.
74
Both sides, then, were already showing signs of excessive timidity.
But worse was to come. The French strategy was to send the Brest fleet up the Channel to lure Sir John Norris’s defenders to Spithead away to the west, leaving Saxe with an unguarded Channel to cross. Then 10,000 French troops would disembark at Maldon in Essex, to
be
joined by the English Jacobites and their levies. At this point both sides added complicating refinements to their plans. It was clearly impossible for the French to achieve total surprise
and
use the Brest fleet to convoy the invaders. Maurepas hit on a compromise. Roquefeuil, commander of the Brest fleet, was to decoy Norris or engage him in combat. While the Downs were thus left undefended, Roquefeuil was to detach five ships under Barrailh. Barrailh was to sail to Dunkirk to provide Saxe with the escort he had requested.
75
Such a plan greatly increased the possibility that things might miscarry. The English Jacobites compounded the complications by switching the projected landfall from Maldon in Essex to Blackwall, two miles from London.
76
This meant the provision of two sets of pilots to negotiate the treacherous Thames estuary: one to guide the French as far as the Hope; the other to take them to Blackwall.
The invasion project, then, already depended for its success on meticulous liaison, timing and co-ordination. The English pilots had to be in Dunkirk ready to take the French over the minute Roquefeuil decoyed Norris away from the invasion area. But the French still had secrecy on their side. Even with all the delays, the English government in the first two weeks of 1744 still had no inkling that their kingdom was about to be invaded.
77
This was the situation when the exhausted prince rode into Paris on 8 February. By his untimely presence he immediately increased the risk that the English might divine the true scope of French intentions. It was still of course possible to argue, as Mann and others did, that the prince was destined for the French fleet, possibly for a descent on Ireland or Scotland.
78
But his presence on French soil clearly indicated that a formal declaration of war by France was not far off.
Moreover, there are circumstantial grounds for thinking that the discovery of the French invasion plan was triggered by the prince’s arrival in Paris. Saxe’s enterprise against England was revealed to the duke of Newcastle by his master-spy, French diplomat François de Bussy.
79
Bussy had known about the plan virtually since its inception. Why then did he not reveal it to his English paymasters earlier? The most likely answer is that, gambling for such high stakes when the future of kingdoms hung in the balance, he feared detection if he divulged the details of Saxe’s operation. Yet Charles Edward’s arrival could have placed him in an impossible situation. If Bussy continued to remain silent, and yet the project foundered, it would later be obvious to the English that their master-spy had suppressed vital intelligence. Bussy’s credibility was now at stake.
The chronology of his leaking the Saxe project is intriguing. His cipher to Newcastle, revealing the entire operation, was decoded on 14 February, i.e. six days after the prince’s arrival in the French capital. It could well be, then, that, albeit for different reasons, Charles Edward really did destroy the prospects for the restoration of his family in 1744 – as Louis XV and others later charged.
Naturally, none of this was apparent to the political actors at the time. All Saxe could see was further bungling by the Jacobites. After two requests for delays from Lord Barrymore and his associates across the Channel, here, to cap all, was the Stuart prince himself blundering on to the stage at the crucial moment, destroying the fragile fabric of secrecy Saxe had so painstakingly built up.
Not surprisingly, Paris erupted on all sides. As soon as he heard the news, comte d’Argenson, Minister of War, complained to Louis XV that this would ruin everything.
80
Recriminations flew thick and fast among the French ministers about who was responsible for inviting the prince. The blame was largely laid at Tencin’s door though, as he truthfully protested, he knew nothing of the invasion project.
81
The English, too, seem to have scented something in the wind. The very next day after Charles Edward’s arrival, British minister Thompson reported the possibility of a descent on the English coast, though not until 18 February did he know of the prince’s presence in France.
82
Something of the coolness of the French response to his arrival was borne in on the prince when the court informed him that he was to remain in the strictest incognito.
83
Lord Elcho went with the Earl Marischal to see the prince at Sempill’s house on the Estrapade (where Charles was lodging). They found him alone, drinking tea, depressed about his incognito.
84
Conversation turned to the French invasion. The prince ordered Elcho and Marischal to follow him to Dunkirk. Yet within days these orders proved otiose. The French issued instructions of their own. Marischal and Elcho were to accompany the main invasion force at Dunkirk. Charles Edward himself was to embark with Saxe on the
Dauphin Royal
, Barrailh’s flagship, but to remain incognito meanwhile at Gravelines.
85
Saxe showed just how much contact he wanted with the Stuart prince by stationing himself at Dunkirk, keeping Charles at arm’s length and away from the open preparations.
86