Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (31 page)

A key day during the month at Holyrood was 10 October, when the prince issued his proclamations, principally a manifesto of future policy in both England and Scotland. Since the most damaging charge against the House of Stuart in the eyes of the aristocracy (and some of the gentry) was that they would dismantle the financial system introduced by the 1688 Revolution, Charles Edward attempted to reassure his audience by stating that he would refer the entire question of the National Debt to a future Parliament.
⁸⁷

An even more pressing issue for the Scots was the Act of Union. Here the prince hedged, promising that his first Parliament would revise it, but saying nothing about outright repeal.
⁸⁸
This was a case of the prince’s wriggling on the hook. In this instance French and Scottish interests coincided, but diverged from those of the House of Stuart. Since the ‘natural’ economic conflict between England and France would persist whoever was on the English throne (whether Stuart or Hanoverian), France generally preferred a Stuart restoration to Scotland alone, keeping the northern kingdom as a permanent thorn in England’s flesh. And Scottish nationalism could be assimilated to Jacobitism only if it was clear that the Jacobites wanted repeal of the Act of Union and the creation of an independent kingdom of Scotia.

This did not suit the Stuarts. They always and undeviatingly wanted restoration to all three kingdoms. ‘
Rien de partage. Tout ou rien
’ became the formulaic battle-cry of the prince in all his later jousts with the French ministers. This conflict between Stuart aspirations and the ambitions of the Scottish Jacobites finally found its disastrous resolution at Derby. For the time being the prince had to dissemble, to appear to promise what he had no intention of delivering. There was a terrible reckoning later. Ambivalence is fatal at decisive moments of history. French ambivalence over the Stuarts in 1745–6 cost them their best-ever chance to unseat their global rivals. Charles Edward’s ambivalence on Scotland was to lead to the débâcle at Derby.

One can sympathise with his prevarications on this crucial issue. After all, all his education and upbringing had inculcated the idea
that
he was
de jure
heir apparent to the throne of England, as well as Scotland. The irony is that, if he had categorically refused to give any assurances about the repeal of the Act of Union in his proclamations, he would have been better served in the long run than by his actual hints and half-promises. For one thing, he would never have been able to carry the council with him on the decision to invade England. Lord George Murray was said to have found the prince’s manifesto anachronistic.
⁸⁹
It was hardly that; it was merely (and disastrously) studiedly ambiguous.

In his own mind Charles Edward was always clear that he would proceed to England once his numbers were respectable. From this viewpoint October 1745 was a month of mixed fortunes. The prince received various additions to his strength: from Lord Ogilvy, from Farquharson of Monaltrie, from viscount Dundee.
⁹⁰
There were fresh levies from the Lowlands.
⁹¹
Glenbucket and Pitsligo brought in welcome recruits from Aberdeen and Banffshire.
⁹²
The chief of Mackinnon brought in his clan.
⁹³
One hundred MacGregors from Balquhidder came in.
⁹⁴
Other notable recruits were Arthur Elphinstone (later Lord Balmerino) and the Master of Strathallan.
⁹⁵
Tullibardine, jealous at the eminence attained by his younger brother Lord George Murray, pushed himself to the limit to raise a further contingent of Athollmen in his own right.
⁹⁶
Finally, at the very end of October, Cluny MacPherson brought in his clan.
⁹⁷
The Frasers under Lord Lovat were rumoured to be on the point of joining. The Mackintoshes, initially held in reluctant obedience to the authorities by their pro-Hanoverian chief, had been raised for the Jacobites in his absence by his wife Lady Anne (‘colonel Anne’ of Jacobite legend).
⁹⁸

But against this there were some grave disappointments and setbacks. The earl of Nithsdale and viscount Kenmure joined the prince, only to desert the next day when they learned of the exiguous numbers in his army.
⁹⁹
Barisdale’s recruiting drive in the north ended in fiasco. This ferocious and treacherous ruffian, one of the few really bad eggs in the Jacobite basket, had a very crude idea of enlisting men. This consisted of plying them with whisky until they were too drunk to know what they were signing up for. When they sobered up next day and found themselves in the Jacobite army, most of the ‘recruits’ promptly decamped.
¹⁰⁰

More seriously, Lord Lovat had still not committed himself.
¹⁰¹
Most ominously of all, the myth of the invincibility of the prince’s Highlanders took a beating, albeit in minor engagements. A body of Macleans, on the march to Edinburgh to join the prince, was
attacked
, disarmed and dispersed by Lt-Col. Campbell and the Argyllshire militia (en route to join Lord Loudoun’s anti-Jacobite standard).
¹⁰²
The same Colonel Campbell struck again just as the prince crossed the border into England, this time checking MacGregor of Glengyle.
¹⁰³

The prince seemed to be barely holding his own. Then on 14 October came the event he had hoped and prayed for. Momentarily all his critics were silenced, all doubters dumbfounded. There arrived at Montrose, the marquis d’Eguilles, special envoy from Louis XV.
¹⁰⁴
At last, it seemed, the French were coming.

(October-December 1745)

TO EXPLAIN D’EGUILLES’S
sudden advent at Montrose, we must examine the impact in Europe of the prince’s thunderbolt arrival in Scotland and his lightning successes thereafter. So totally unexpected was his landing at Moidart that all but the best-informed European sources remained incredulous for many months.
¹

The Pope knew better. From the very beginning of the ’45, Benedict XIV followed the drama with avid interest.
²
Although his loyalties were divided – he feared that an unsuccessful Jacobite rising would lead to the full visitation of the Penal Laws on his flock in England – he decided to back the Stuarts discreetly with money.
³
Although reports of vast numbers of Roman crowns paid over in exchange for a pledge of the full restoration of Catholicism in England were pure fantasy,
⁴
Benedict did make money available to James over and above the cash raised in the Monte di Pietà.
⁵

This extra sum was given to Henry Stuart when he left Rome for France at the end of August 1745.
⁶
At news of the prince’s landing in Scotland, James prised the younger Stuart prince out of his hermit-like existence of prayer and asceticism and ordered him to go to Versailles to lobby on his brother’s behalf. Thus began Henry’s one and only venture into the world of secular politics. It was to be an ill-starred eighteen months, culminating in disaster.

When news of Prestonpans came in, and especially when Benedict was assured by Tencin that France intended to throw its weight behind the rising, the Pope sent a further sum of money to Henry.
⁷
Charles Edward’s run of success in late 1745 amazed and delighted the Pope.
⁸
He began to allow himself to hope that he would live to see Catholicism restored in England, that sometime island of saints now occupied by demons, as he put it.
⁹

French reaction was more circumspect. The initial reaction at Versailles had been stupefaction. Then, as the prince began to establish himself in Scotland and the Jacobite pressure groups got down to serious lobbying,
¹⁰
Louis XV and his ministers had to take firm decisions on what to do next. This, of course, was what Louis XV hated most. The divisions among his ministers gave him the excuse to temporise, always his natural reaction.

It was obvious that swift action was needed. An expedition should at once have been sent to Scotland to consolidate the prince’s bridgehead. But Louis dithered. Although Tencin and the marquis d’Argenson urged an immediate troop landing in Scotland, the influential Saxe/Noailles clique favoured initiatives on the Continent, using the rising as a diversion.
¹¹
The other problem about a Scottish expedition was that it meant using the Brest fleet. But Maurepas already had this earmarked for the projected reconquest of Louisbourg in north America.

Louis XV solved these conflicting demands by stalling and playing for time. He sent d’Eguilles on a fact-finding mission: his brief was to ascertain the numbers in the Jacobite army, sound the prince’s intentions, and in general to gauge the strength of pro-Stuart feeling in Britain.

The ultimate downfall of all French efforts on behalf of the Jacobites in 1745–6 sprang from that one decision. By the time d’Eguilles’s first dispatches reached Versailles, the prince was already embarking on his ill-fated venture into England. The only thing left for the French to do then was to mount a cross-Channel expedition. But an invasion of England was at once more hazardous and less consonant with French interests than a landing in Scotland. This is not to say that Louis was not serious in his desire to help the prince: he was, and his English invasion project of 1745–6 was no feint. But by his own incompetence as much as by the divisions between his ministers of state, he left himself with having to implement the far tougher option when a moment’s decisiveness could have secured him the easier one.
¹²

Yet whatever the ultimate consequences of the d’Eguilles mission, his immediate impact on arrival in Scotland was sensational. Here was the living proof of the efficacy of the prince’s ‘rolling strategy’. Everything he had said to the clan leaders appeared true. France was not just ‘bound to’ join in; now she could be seen to be already doing so.

This inference was strengthened by the number of small French ships that got through to Scottish ports in October. Louis XV began
his
support for Charles Edward with pump-priming: he ordered Maurepas to send all available privateers to Scotland with men and materiel. Between 9–19 October four vessels from France (including the one bringing d’Eguilles himself) landed at Montrose and Stone-haven with artillery and stores.
¹³
On the advice of James Grant, a siege engineer in French service who accompanied the big guns, the materiel was transported by the Athollmen and the MacPhersons to Edinburgh, then ferried across the Forth to Alloa.
¹⁴
Batteries were then erected on both sides of the river to secure the capital against any attempt by British cruisers to force passage. There were rumours that the Whigs would attempt an amphibious operation: a blockade running up the Forth combined with a sortie in force from the castle.
¹⁵

D’Eguilles himself settled in well with the Jacobites. He was no dour Saxe, no pessimistic Marischal. Like so many others, at least at first, he fell under the prince’s spell and allowed himself to be caught up in the general euphoria. Everything, then, combined to make the prince’s prognostications of an impending large-scale French landing look sober and well-calculated.

The most significant factor in d’Eguilles’s presence, adding even greater weight to the prince’s blandishments, was that he had been sent to Scotland
before
Prestonpans. When news of that battle was received in Versailles, the French at last bestirred themselves. By the Treaty of Fontainebleau in late October they formally committed themselves to an alliance with the Jacobites.
¹⁶
This treaty has sometimes been regarded as a dead letter, but it did prevent the authorities in London from using Dutch troops against the ‘rebels’, since the Dutch were constrained by the articles of a previous capitulation to the French.

All of this helped the prince. The more evidence there was of French seriousness, the harder it would be for Lord George Murray and his natural majority on the council to resist the call for an incursion into England.

The moment of decision came on 30 October. That evening in Holyrood the prince forced a definite commitment, but not before the most acrimonious council debate yet had taken place, Charles Edward argued eloquently and cleverly for an invasion of England.
¹⁷
In the first place, he declared, it was now clear that the Jacobite army throve on activity and faded away in times of inertia or ‘phoney war’. This was not just a question of desertions – though the desertion rate in Edinburgh in October had been alarmingly high – but of morale. A constant momentum had to be sustained if the shaky force of irregulars was to be kept in being. With the defeat of the regular
Hanoverian
army and with all major Scottish targets in Jacobite hands, except for the forts and castles – impregnable in the present state of Jacobite artillery – where else could the Highland army meaningfully go?

It was well known, the prince continued, that the clansmen tended to lose interest if the prospect of hard fighting or good living seemed remote. The natural tendency to slink away to the glens and mountains was reinforced by the weeks of boredom and guard duty in Edinburgh. And the danger of wholesale desertion was compounded by another. The capture of Edinburgh and the defeat of Cope had delivered the Jacobites temporarily from financial embarrassment, but by now all the public monies had been collected, yet the Jacobite coffers were almost empty.
¹⁸
Their position was made no easier by Preston’s previous removal of all silver coin to the castle.
¹⁹
It would soon be a choice between trying to collect the hated Malt Tax or leaving the army without pay. What would the desertion rate be like then?

Moreover, there was the not negligible point that clan reaction, even among supposedly Jacobite chieftains, had been a severe disappointment. A month after Prestonpans Lovat still equivocated, the Grants and Mackenzies were still divided, Macleod and Sir Alexander MacDonald still did Duncan Forbes’s bidding. It was clear that a second victory was needed. It was necessary to seek out Wade and defeat him, in order to remove any doubt about the permanent mastery of Scotland.