Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (64 page)

The terms of the separation allowed the prince, whose income was much less than his wife’s, to sell their
hôtel
. Until that time, the two would share the same home for the sake of appearances. Thereafter, the couple would live apart.
³⁴
The protracted negotiations while the Prince de Talmont bartered for the best possible price for his house later produced some interesting and unforeseen results involving Charles Edward.

Such, then, was the woman whom the prince now publicly avowed as his mistress. Part of the punishment Charles meted out to his former mistress Louise de Montbazon was to appear openly at the Opera at the end of April 1748 with his new mistress, knowing that Louise was also in attendance and would be watching.
³⁵

The prince switched from the passionate intensity of love with the twenty-two-year-old Louise to the calculated lubricity of an affair with the mature and vastly experienced Princesse de Talmont. The arrangement suited him better at the sexual level. In place of feverish
love-making
of the honeymoon variety, he now enjoyed the practised arts of an aristocratic courtesan. This freed him from any real responsibility in the sexual relationship. The switch from a twenty-two-year-old mistress to one twice her age is abrupt enough to merit further consideration.

All the evidence from the doomed romance with Louise de Montbazon suggests that the prince relished highly charged carnal relationships. What he did not relish was any sense of responsibility or commitment to a woman. It was to be the Princesse de Talmont’s misfortune, as she reached the end of her career as upper-class adventuress, that she tried to convert the affair with Charles Edward into something more permanent. The more one examines the prince’s personality, the more one sees it as one where sexual promiscuity, or at any rate tempestuous short-term affairs, were its most appropriate expression. The peculiarly unfortunate, truncated and flawed relationship with his mother must bear much of the responsibility. Where a son enjoying a sustained loving relationship with a loving mother gradually learns to integrate love and sex, one deprived too early, especially in tragic circumstances, may find his response to women fragmented. It is certain that Charles Edward never enjoyed a satisfactory, sustained, integrated relationship with any woman. The nearest he came was with Louise de Montbazon. But as soon as stresses impinged on the passion, the prince’s fragile personality began to unravel.

From the very beginning the new relationship was a stormy one. The prince and Madame de Talmont were oil and water. She was a woman used to satisfying her whims, indulging her intellectual, aesthetic or carnal fantasies – a genuine
capriciosa
, in a word. The prince by 1748 had reached the point where he would allow no one to question his authority, where he (or she) who was not with him was against him, where no one could speak a word of even the mildest criticism about him – this was construed as ‘giving him laws’ – where his will was paramount. The underlying trend in the relationship with La Talmont was thus the collision of the irresistible force with the immovable object.

These latent contradictions took time to work themselves to the surface. At the beginning of the affair, to testify to her devotion, Madame de Talmont wore a cameo of the prince in a bracelet, on the other side of which was a picture of Jesus Christ. A contemporary wag
³⁶
pointed out that the same motto suited both personages depicted on the bracelet: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’
³⁷

At first it looked as though the marquis d’Argenson was right, that
Madame
de Talmont had a mesmeric hold on Charles Edward and encouraged him in all his worst excesses, distorting his vision and adding a moiety of madness and stupidity all her own.
³⁸
More and more it seemed likely that the prince intended to defy the French to do their worst once a general peace was signed. So worried were the exiled Jacobites in France, who after all depended on Louis XV for their new careers, that a general meeting was called to discuss the looming crisis. Present were Glenbucket, Ardshiel, Lord Lewis Gordon, Lord Nairne, Lochiel and Sir Hector Maclean – a fair sprinkling of the prince’s council during the ’45.
³⁹
It was decided that Lochiel was the only person at once capable of giving dispassionate advice to the prince and still with enough credit to be listened to.
⁴⁰
Unfortunately, Lochiel fell ill with meningitis and died soon afterwards. All other Jacobites felt they did not have the credibility to breach the magic circle of Kelly, Lally and Harrington. Mostly they were reduced to wringing their hands in despair.
⁴¹

The peace preliminaries at Aix-la-Chapelle continued. Eventually agreement was reached. The prince’s position became increasingly grave. How could he defy the might of France? Charles Edward seemed to be basing his hopes on two things: a prestigious foreign marriage and his status as the hero of the Paris mob.

The prince had an immense popular following in Paris. Throughout 1748 he tried to build up this power base by showing himself in public as much as possible. The Opera, Comédie Française and other spectacles were particular targets.
⁴²
He seems to have thought that fear of popular disturbance might force the court to stay their hand against him. The strategy was not entirely chimerical: the ministers of state
did
take seriously the possible reactions of the mob. But the political consciousness that would sanction a head-on clash with the Ancien Régime was still forty years in the future.

The
deus ex machina
of a foreign marriage seemed much more promising. As usual, the prince started his marriage prospect by aiming very high. He sent Sir John Graeme to Berlin to ask for the hand of Frederick the Great’s sister.
⁴³
Apart from the desire to cock a snook at France, the prince had a further aim. As he told Graeme, he wanted to show the world that he had done with ‘popery’. To seek a Protestant bride was his answer to the chicanery of the ‘Vicar of Christ’ who had connived at the treacherous design to make Henry a cardinal.
⁴⁴

Once again we confront the utter cynicism of the prince in matters of religion. He despised the forms and trappings of organised churches and regarded all religious disputation as the theological writhings of
medieval
schoolmen. He was a modern figure in that he genuinely could not understand how rational men could be swayed by dogmas and belief in the supernatural. But it was a mistake to make his contempt so plain. Committed believers, especially those with political leverage, do not like to be told by wayward princes that their cherished beliefs are no better than the totems and taboos of benighted savages. But it was ever thus with the prince: he would embrace any dispensation, Protestant or Catholic, as long as it seemed likely to take him closer to his personal goals.

Predictably, Graeme’s mission was a fiasco. Frederick sent word that he wanted Graeme out of his kingdom instantly: the emissary should think himself lucky he had not been placed under arrest.
⁴⁵

Graeme now wanted to abandon the hunt for a Protestant princess in Germany, on the ground that all the other princelings would take their cue from Frederick of Prussia. But the prince held him to his task. He stressed that he was engaged in a race for time against the peace negotiations. As for family solidarity among the Protestant princes in support of the ‘Elector of Hanover’, Henry had already shown how much that was worth.
⁴⁶

Graeme then proceeded to Darmstadt and entered into negotiations for the hand of Princess Caroline-Louise, daughter of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. The landgrave stalled, stressed his friendship for George II, and hinted that the proposal would have been welcome a year earlier.
⁴⁷
But Graeme was under strict orders from Charles Edward. The marriage proposal was a once-and-for-all affair; if it was rejected now, there would be no second chances.
⁴⁸
The landgrave left the decision to his daughter. Knowing her father’s real wishes, she rejected the suit.
⁴⁹
This part of the prince’s strategy of thwarting France was already an abject failure by August 1748.

(August–December 1748)

THE GREAT TRAUMATIC
crisis with France in 1748, that was to leave a scar on the prince’s psyche greater even than Derby or his brother’s defection as a cardinal, was already in prospect by August of that year. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was to be ratified on 18 October, but it was already clear from the preliminaries that England would make peace with France only if all members of the Stuart family were expelled from French dominions. Naturally the Stuarts protested.
¹
This was to be expected, a mere ritualistic formality. What no one except intimates of the prince expected was that by the most blatant brinkmanship he would force France to reveal her own shame. There was already domestic discontent about the terms on which France was proposing to make peace: ‘
bête comme la paix
’, ‘stupid as the peace’, became a proverb. Charles Edward, by his stubborn resistance, would force the reality of French politics into naked exposure: not only was the peace against the national interest of France; it also made nonsense of her official ideology.

What eventually became the scandal of the decade began innocuously enough. In the early stages of the struggle with Louis XV the prince was diplomacy itself. In July he entered his own protest against the provisions of the Aix-la-Chapelle treaty which had just been published.
²
At the same time he wrote to the French king to explain his position, which was that the preliminaries placed him in a terrible position. He seemed to imply that his protest was every bit as formulaic as James’s but added, in a phrase that acquires an ominous significance in hindsight, that he would never forget Louis’s protection ‘whatever happens in the future’.
³

Immediately, the three-way process that clouded the events of late 1748 made its appearance. Puysieux sent a polite letter to O’Sullivan
informally
requesting the prince’s departure. The mere mention of this from O’Sullivan brought an angry rebuke from Charles Edward.
⁴
Meanwhile, on seeing the prince’s personal protest, James wrote to him in August to ask him not to publish any more declarations ‘in the king’s name’.
⁵
Charles regarded his father with contempt. He knew he could expect no positive support from him in the ordeal that lay ahead. All his letters to James in this period say the same: nothing.

Yet it was not easy to ignore the French. They were as determined that the prince should leave their territory as he was to remain on it. At first they tried gentle prodding. In August an envoy was sent from Versailles directly to the prince to remind him that the preliminaries of the peace had been signed as long ago as April. Puysieux, who hated Charles Edward and resented the place he had in Louis XV’s affections, went twice in person to see his
bête noire
and to request him to observe the clear provisions of the Aix-la-Chapelle treaty.
⁶
The prince replied haughtily that since he rejected the legitimacy of the entire treaty, it followed that he could not be bound by any articles that referred to him.
⁷
Moreover, he pointed out, the Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed in October 1745 between James and Louis guaranteed him a secure asylum in France. Puysieux replied that the guarantee applied only in wartime. Nothing had ever been promised the prince in peacetime. And it was a commonplace of international politics, understood by everybody, that when a new treaty was signed it annulled the provisions of old ones.
⁸

Puysieux then made his personal position crystal clear. On his first visit to the prince, he referred to him as ‘Your Royal Highness’. By the second visit, this had become ‘Monsieur’.
⁹
Puysieux’s bad opinion of the prince was confirmed when a source from within the Stuart household informed him anonymously that Charles Edward was determined to dig in his heels and defy the French to do their worst.
¹⁰

As he demonstrated later, Louis XV liked nothing better than running parallel policies. In echelon with the official channel used by Puysieux, the king tried his own brand of diplomacy. On 25 August he wrote the prince a long letter. As father of the French people, he argued, he could not allow the prince’s interests to override those of twenty million Frenchmen and, ultimately, of all Europe. But he was personally sympathetic to the prince’s position. Knowing his reluctance to return to Italy, he offered to use all his influence to find a safe refuge in Friburg or Switzerland.
¹¹
The number of crossings-out in the letter indicates Louis’s indecision and nervousness about how to proceed.

It was not difficult for Louis to persuade Friburg and the Swiss cantons to agree to provide a secure home for the prince.
¹²
Predictably, the English protested to the putative hosts, but their attitude smacked too much of dog in the manger.
¹³
In any case, the English minister in Switzerland, John Burnaby, overreached himself by delivering a note to the magistrates of Friburg that was far too imperious in tone.
¹⁴
English attempts at bullying were counterproductive. Friburg and the other Swiss cantons expressed themselves ready and pleased to play host to the Stuart prince.
¹⁵

But Charles Edward wanted none of it. As far as he was concerned, the clauses of the Aix-la-Chapelle treaty demanding his expulsion from France could not possibly be implemented by a ruler by divine right. Louis XV recognised James as king of England and Charles Edward as heir apparent. Were Louis to expel a fellow sovereign at the behest of the English, he would make a mockery of the entire notion of divine, indefeasible right. If Louis once admitted that the legitimate claimant to a throne could be expelled by another divine right monarch in the interests of expediency, he cut the ground from under his own legitimacy. The situation was different with George II. He was self-confessedly king as trustee. He reigned with the say-so of the English Parliament. Louis XV was constrained by no parliament. It followed that if he expelled a fellow-monarch by divine, indefeasible right, he would in effect be conceding that he himself could be expelled by
force majeure
, since that was ultimately the only sanction he recognised. Charles Edward argued that Louis was in a different position from the ‘Elector of Hanover’; he could not allow the untrammelled sway of expediency, lest he diminish the mystique of monarchy itself. Once again we see that the prince’s intellectual grip was stronger than his detractors would have us believe. The events of late 1748 have usually been presented as the obstinate refusal of a blockhead to face reality. In fact they represented a calculated gamble. Only at the very end of the struggle, when the balance of power swung decisively in Louis’s favour, did the prince’s self-destructive urges come into play.