Read Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Online
Authors: Frank McLynn
Still Charles did not reply. This was his punishment for the unsupportable accusations meted out to him by her parents. Louise saw just one way out of the impasse. She would have to arrange a meeting with the prince. But the awesome Princesse de Guémène stood like the angel with the fiery sword barring the return to paradise. She managed to block and thwart all Louise’s schemes for arranging a rendezvous.
The failure of Louise to meet the rendezvous agreed on by secret correspondence simply fuelled the prince’s self-justifications. It proved her essential weakness and timidity. Was she not mistress in her own house? Why did she not slay the dragoness, stand up to the fearsome Princesse de Guémène and tell her straight that she intended to command her own destiny, scandal or no scandal?
Despite many setbacks, Louise persevered. Her pertinacity was rewarded when she finally met her lover again, for the first time in four months. On 18 May 1748, on the Pont Tournant at midnight, she and the prince again consummated their love in a closed carriage.
91
The encounter left Louise as emotionally frenzied as ever. But the prince was lukewarm. He was the sort of person who, if he could not experience a sensation at the exact time he wanted, quickly convinced himself the desire did not exist. The high tide of his passion had passed, he told her. He loved her still, though not as much as before. And he had someone else.
We cannot be certain if, following the encounter on the Pont Tournant, there was not more cramped dalliance in closed carriages. It is even possible that Louise finally risked scandal and went openly to the prince’s house. Whatever the case, from the prince’s viewpoint the affair was now clearly on the wane. The events of 23 January had worked their evil too well. There could be no going back. At some stage early that summer the liaison petered out.
The prince even lost interest in his child. A son was born, christened and duly accepted as a Rohan. At the age of five months, the child died.
92
By that time the prince was disporting himself in the fleshpots of Avignon and had forgotten all about him. As for the luckless Louise, she was the originator and recipient of nothing more than dutiful correspondence with the prince (and later king) for the
rest
of her thirty-three years of life. Crushed by the traumatic experience of love
à la folie
, followed by callous abandonment by the man of her life, she relapsed stoically into the life of an unambitious aristocratic matron.
93
If we wish to believe that she ever saw the prince again, we have to take the unconfirmed word of British sources, who reported a meeting with the prince in 1753 at the monastery of St Anchin near Lille.
94
But it was not yet quite the end of the story. The prince did not bow out of Louise’s life before he had taken his revenge on the Rohans by provoking a social scandal. It will be remembered that the duc de Bouillon and Princesse de Guémène had requested that the prince continue his social calls, so that no malicious tongues would be set wagging. This was precisely what the prince was determined
not
to do. He had hit on the perfect method of chastising the contumacious Rohan clan. Pointedly, he stayed away from their social gatherings.
Two of the prince’s most ardent female supporters were Madame de Mézière’s daughters, the Princesse de Ligne and the Princesse de Montauban.
95
They made repeated efforts in the early months of 1748 to get the prince to call at the Guémène residence, but in vain. The prince was not content with simple snubbing. He toyed with the Guémènes, promising to attend suppers, then crying off at the last minute through ‘illness’ (at least he had learned something from Earl Marischal!).
96
Eventually, even the devoted Princesse de Ligne gave up.
97
The affront to the Rohans’ honour was taken up by the two most formidable matriarchs of the day. First the Princesse de Guémène essayed her mettle. But the prince hated and detested her.
98
Her overtures were brutally rebuffed. The sequel to this was a public slanging-match between the two, so fiery and intemperate that the marquis d’Argenson misinterpreted it as a lover’s quarrel.
99
Next the marquise de Mézières tried her hand. She had a much better track record of deference to the prince, but she fared no better. The old intriguer’s hackles rose. Angrily she accused the prince of betraying his old friends: ‘this in good French is called throwing your friends out of the window for amusement.’
100
She ended her irate letter by heavily underscoring her letter, ‘Eleanor, Marquise de Mézières’, as if to reassert the injured honour of the Rohans.
The prince was unconcerned. He was still
the
social catch in Paris. It was still a seller’s market for the prince’s attentions. The arrogant Rohans could stew in their own juice. That there were plenty of buyers for his presence soon became clear when he moved on to a new mistress and a new social set.
(March–August 1748)
THE POLITICAL SITUATION
in early 1748 could hardly have been less promising for the prince. It was now certain that a general peace would soon bring the War of Austrian Succession to an end. Charles Edward was still locked in stubborn conflict with France. All hope of a descent on England was laid aside. The prince’s best efforts with the comte d’Argenson were devoted to finding lucrative positions for his followers; Lord Ogilvy finally obtained a French regiment.
1
But the War Minister’s personal animus towards Lally – after Kelly the Jacobite personally closest to the prince – meant that, though Charles’s personal choice, he was unable to take over Lochiel’s regiment when the gallant Cameron chief died of meningitis later that year.
2
All the senior Jacobite officers of the ’45, except Lord George Murray, were now settled in France with places or pensions.
3
Charles Edward himself still officially refused to accept the French pension, but the French had hit on a scheme to force his hand. They refused to pay anything for the relief of the starving Jacobite ‘other ranks’ on the grounds that the monthly sum paid to the prince was ‘global’ and included an element for the subsistence of his needy followers. Henceforth the prince would be paid 11,000 livres a month (8,000 livres for himself and 3,000 for his followers).
4
Charles Edward was thus forced into a choice between seeing Highlanders die and accepting the French pension. He found an ingenious compromise. The ministers would pay the pension money to the banker Monmartel, who in turn would pay it to Lally.
5
It would then be distributed as needed, but the prince could still maintain the fiction that he had accepted nothing from Louis XV. When James wrote to say how glad he was that his son had finally accepted the French pension, Charles Edward angrily denied that this was the case.
6
The prince continued as uncompromising in all other political areas. He rejected brusquely a proposal to make him the next king of Poland:
A throne in itself, I assure you, is not the object of my ambition. I see that a private man may be happier than any sovereign, but I think I owe myself to my country. No other throne in the universe but that of Great Britain would engage my desires.
7
It is not surprising, given his inflexible attitude to Louis XV and his ministers, that he should have been drawn into a social circle that was far from uncritical of the Ancien Régime. Anne-Charlotte de Crussol-Florensac, duchesse d’Aiguillon, was the hostess of the most brilliant salon in Paris. Every Saturday she gave a magnificent supper, to which were invited notable foreigners, ministers in office, former ministers, and men of letters. She adopted a deliberate policy of mixing ranks. Among her circle could be found the future Foreign Minister duc de Choiseul, president Hénault, Abbé (later Cardinal) Bernis, Maupertuis the polar explorer, and the
philosophes
Voltaire and Montesquieu.
8
The duchesse d’Aiguillon lived an eccentric life even by the standards of Ancien Régime France. Now aged forty-eight, she connived at the open affair between her husband and the Princesse de Conti. In effect, the trio lived as a
ménage à trois
. Someone with such contempt for the proprieties was likely to be attractive to Charles Edward. It was not just in her intelligence and ability to speak four languages that she seemed a perfect complement to the prince. Montesquieu said of her that she was the woman in France who lived most fully and intensely in any given period of time, and that she was fonder of her enemies than her friends. Some observers, who had contrasted the prince’s reluctance to criticise Cumberland with his harshness towards Henry, thought they had heard that story somewhere before. And Montesquieu’s damning portrait of the duchess uncannily pre-echoed Louise of Stolberg’s later strictures on Charles Edward: ‘She has intellect, but it is of the poorest kind. She has the pride of a pedant and all the faults of a lackey.’
9
Moreover, some of the duchesse d’Aiguillon’s acidulous comments on the court of Louis XV would have struck a sympathetic chord in Charles Edward: ‘This place [Versailles],’ she once declared, ‘is the vain land of the wind. There blow there waterspouts of ambition, jealousy and pride. Illusions abound there.’
10
Sure enough, the duchesse d’Aiguillon and Charles Edward greatly took to each other at the temperamental level, though there seems
never
to have been any sexual element in their relationship. The prince became a constant visitor at her Saturday evening soirées.
11
She corresponded with him about her growing family of grandchildren.
12
He confided to her his hatred of Tencin.
13
She replied by identifying his friends and enemies at the French court (the duc de Gesvres, later in the year to play a crucial role in the prince’s life, was placed as one of the former).
14
Even after the prince went into exile and began his years as a wanderer, the relationship continued by letter.
15
There is a very touching exchange between the two at the time of the duc d’Aiguillon’s death in 1750.
16
The duchess was not the only one drawn into the web of the prince’s admirers. Montesquieu, who had earlier written to Hume for information on the Highland system of heritable jurisdictions, was also very attracted to Charles Edward. The feeling was reciprocated. General Francis Bulkeley told Montesquieu in August 1748, when the
philosophe
was at Bordeaux, that the prince liked him immensely, missed him and spoke often of him.
17
The relationship began with an exchange of literary productions, the prince’s protest against the Aix-la-Chapelle peace preliminaries for
Décadence des Romains
.
18
Montesquieu proved an adroit courtier. Who better to send a book on Roman heroes to, he wrote, than one who had made them come to life by emulating their exploits?
19
Continuing to lay it on with a trowel, Montesquieu spoke of the prince’s written declaration as having simplicity, nobility and eloquence. He said that if Charles were not a great prince, he and Mme d’Aiguillon would like to propose him for election to the Académie Française.
20
Amiably the prince replied, speaking of the ‘trust between authors’.
21
Montesquieu confessed himself flattered by the attention Charles Edward paid him.
22
The process of mutual admiration continued after the prince’s expulsion from France. Montesquieu frequently expressed his indignation at French treatment of the prince.
23
The level of mutual regard comes out in an exchange in 1749. Charles Edward requested that each edition of Montesquieu’s work be sent to him as it came out, even if he was at the Antipodes. ‘Though I am in obscurity,’ he went on, ‘my mind is not, thanks to your works.’
24
Montesquieu replied in kind: ‘We are all like the brave Scots in that we cannot hear of you without loving you. Whether you show yourself, or remain hidden, you will always have the admiration of the universe.’
25
But the most important development in the prince’s life resulting from his entry into the d’Aiguillon social circle was his acquisition of a new mistress. Marie-Anne-Louise Jablonowska, Princesse de
Talmont
, was a cousin of the queen of France and had been in her time a fabulous beauty. When the prince fell in with her, she was in her mid-forties.
26
Like her friend the duchesse d’Aiguillon, she was a highly unconventional woman. In her time she had had many lovers, most notably ex-king Stanislas of Poland (exiled to Lorraine after the War of Polish Succession in the 1730s).
27
In 1730 Marie Jablonowska was married to the Prince de Talmont, a scion and second son of the La Trémoille family.
28
This was another dynastic marriage of convenience. While the Prince de Talmont, ten years his wife’s junior, was a repressed homosexual who sublimated his leanings in devotional austerities,
29
the princess continued to live an emancipated life and took a string of lovers. She was intelligent, witty, cynical and worldly-wise, one who masked a failed or frustrated creativity under a veil of caprice and eccentricity.
30
She had an instant entrée to the court both through her kinship with the queen and her friendship with Maurepas, who shared her taste in caustic wit and cynical lampoonery.
31
By the time of Charles Edward’s return from Scotland, even her shaky marriage of convenience with the Prince de Talmont was on the rocks. Their public quarrels gave scandal even to the permissive court at Versailles. King Stanislas, who had gone on to take the Princesse de Talmont’s sister Countess Ossolinska as his mistress, was asked to mediate and arrange an amiable separation.
32
He in turn chose two arbitrators, one to champion the husband, the other the wife. President of the Parlement Maupeou was chosen to represent the prince; Maurepas represented the princess.
33