Read Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Online
Authors: Frank McLynn
The prince miscalculated because he had not got the measure of Louis XV’s personality. Concepts of honour and morality, other than as verbal camouflage, meant little to the French king. Fundamentally amoral, he was constrained by religion only because it threatened divine punishment in the after-life. The law of love itself Louis would have regarded with contempt. He was not the sort of person who would be bothered by philosophical self-contradiction or ideological inconsistency. Moreover, the prince’s tactics were precisely the wrong
ones
when it came to manipulating Louis XV. Indecisive, secretive, neurotic, Louis was likely to react with peculiar anger to anyone who backed him into a corner. The prince’s tactic of revealing the contradictions between the king’s actions and Bourbon ideology were always likely to miscarry in face of a personality like Louis XV. To the French king, prevarication, secrecy and duplicity were almost a way of life. His resentment against a man who tried to strip away the veils of obfuscation and mystification in which he wrapped himself can well be imagined. The conflict between Louis XV and Charles Edward was not that between two strong wills. It was rather a duel between a hunter and a singularly deadly animal whose lack of aggression right up to the moment of truth misleads the hunter as to the beast’s ultimate ferocity.
October came and with it the signing of the treaty. Louis had given the prince a lot of rope, but it was clear that he was not going to allow him to defy the might of the French state. France was in danger of becoming the laughing-stock of Europe. It was time for Louis to deploy more formidable forces over a wider front.
One obvious tactic was to bring pressure on the prince through the numerous Jacobite émigrés in the service of France, men who owed their pensions, careers and futures to the patronage and generosity of Versailles. But Louis overrated their influence with the prince. Charles Edward had long operated on the principle that whoever was not with him was against him. Since most of the émigrés were either James’s men – and had already been used unsuccessfully by him to attempt to moderate the prince’s behaviour – or were French careerists first and Jacobites second, there was little leverage they could exert. The fate of General Francis Bulkeley’s attempt at mediation showed how little could be expected from this tactic. Bulkeley penned a most adroit letter of compliance as from the prince to Louis XV. Charles refused to send it on. In a most striking clue to his state of mind, he rejected Bulkeley’s efforts with these words, echoing Pilate: ‘
Quod dixi, dixi, et quod scripsi, scripsi
.’ (‘What I have said, I have said, and what I have written, I have written.’)
16
A more promising line of approach seemed to be to muzzle those ministers most obviously opposed to Charles Edward, like Puysieux and Maurepas, and bring in those courtiers with a proven record of being able to get on with the prince. Immediately after signing the ratification of the treaty on 18 October, Louis sent the duc de Gesvres, governor of Paris and first gentleman of the Royal Chamber, to reason with the prince.
17
Gesvres was an old favourite of Charles Edward’s, even though he was described unkindly by one Jacobite
as
having no more brains than a sparrow.
18
The interview was cordial but abortive. ‘Do you like the king of England so much as to give him so much pleasure?’ Gesvres asked, insisting that Louis XV would arrest the prince if pushed to the limit.
19
The prince struck back vigorously. ‘What crime have I committed that I should be arrested?’ he asked. He warned that he would rather die than submit to the laws of Hanover.
20
De Gesvres stayed with him for more than an hour, explaining the situation.
21
He also read him a long letter from Louis XV, a mixture of threat and cajolery.
22
It was left that the prince would come to see Gesvres at 8.30 p.m. next day to give a definite answer. But Charles Edward’s reply was a severe disappointment to the French. He simply reiterated the sentiments he had expressed to Puysieux in August. Although the letter was courteously written, the pith of it was that the prince regretted that he was unable on this occasion to do Louis’s bidding.
23
At about the same time Louis XV wrote to James to ask him to put pressure on his son.
24
James wrote to Charles about his ‘singular’ behaviour and warned him that he was on a collision course.
25
He did not, however, explicitly ask him to desist from his actions: as he explained to Tencin, given the prince’s history of ignoring him, such a command would be counterproductive and might push his son into open revolt.
26
James’s lack of firm action over the prince’s intransigence in the autumn of 1748 has sometimes been considered odd, but his correspondence with Tencin reveals the reasons.
27
One of the factors that constrained him was a fear of deepening the rift between himself and his son. James was convinced that many ostensible Jacobites like Kelly were either Hanoverian double agents or had their own sinister reasons for wanting to widen the breach between Stuart father and son. Besides, James was shrewd enough to see that summoning Charles Edward back to Rome meant conceding that all Jacobite hopes were in vain. And since the prince would not go to Switzerland – Friburg had by this time withdrawn its invitation – James was practically powerless.
28
Matters had now reached a desperate pass. The eyes of all Europe were on Louis XV and the prince, waiting to see which would crack first. Frederick of Prussia, who had earlier claimed that France’s sloughing off of Charles Edward illustrated the cynicism of the times, changed his tune by the end of November. He said he could not understand how a sane man could so depart from reason as to want to stand ‘Knut-like’ against the tide.
29
By the beginning of December
he
was bored with the long-running saga and rebuked his minister in France Chambrier for wasting too much time on it in his dispatches.
30
Benedict XIV was another incredulous observer. He claimed that Louis XV had done everything possible to get the prince out of France without violence. The Pope’s main concern was to make sure Charles Edward did not return to Rome. He was convinced that the shock would kill James.
31
In England the crisis was watched with a mixture of exasperation and incredulity.
32
Some saw the prince’s obstinacy as a colossal blunder, ruining his reputation and destroying the Jacobite cause more completely than Culloden.
33
Others perceived it as a brilliant propaganda stroke. According to this version, the prince’s elaborate charade was devised for English consumption. He was showing the English nation that he was his own man, the exact opposite of a French puppet.
34
The same strategy had been adopted by Charles II: humiliated by France, then restored to England. Some even wilder rumours were gaining currency, to the effect that the dauphin and the French queen were using Charles Edward as a weapon in their struggle to smash the influence of Madame de Pompadour.
35
What was happening meanwhile at Versailles? From being an irritant and an embarrassment before the final signature of the Aix-la-Chapelle treaty, ‘
l’affaire Prince Edouard
’ was now a major crisis. The credibility of the king and his ministers was at stake. The only question for the council was how to resolve the crisis. Forlorn Jacobites like Lady Clifford, who feared for their own future if the House of Stuart became a dirty word in France, hopefully intimated that it was all a question of money.
36
If the right financial incentives were offered to the prince, he would be prepared to depart. Puysieux, rightly, was sceptical. He thought the issue was greater than mere lucre. In any case, he alleged, Louis XV was already so angry that it was doubtful he would agree to a pacific solution at this late hour.
37
This was not quite true. Louis still hoped to avoid a damaging showdown. Again he sent Gesvres to see the prince and make a final effort to get him to see reason.
38
In tandem with this, he wrote to James in strong terms, asking him to
order
his son from France.
39
Gesvres’s second interview with the prince was a tearful affair. Charles stressed that he was personally and emotionally very attached to both Gesvres and Louis XV, but that had nothing to do with it. Gesvres warned that the prince had no choice: he could either depart peacefully for Switzerland or he would be arrested and shipped out to Rome.
40
At this the prince became angry. If what Gesvres said was true, it indicated personal vindictiveness on Louis XV’s part.
Would
he really need to use so much force just to please George II?
41
After his conversation with Gesvres, the prince made the following note:
I have always thought Louis was constrained by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle and that he acted reluctantly. But after his sending Puysieux and Gesvres twice, I begin to think this is a personal thing, that Louis wishes to chase me from his kingdom for private reasons.
42
It is easy to dismiss this as paranoia, but it may be too easy. Anything that forced Louis XV to reveal his hand clearly, without subterfuge or prevarication, was liable to provoke an angry backlash. At last the prince began to realise something of the slumbering ogre he had aroused by forcing Louis into the daylight. But he was too far sunk in his own project to back out now. As his trump card, he warned Gesvres that Louis’s troops would never take him alive. If they attempted to arrest him, they would have a suicide on their hands.
43
Since the prince had made a point of receiving him with his hand on his sword-hilt, and the room in which they sat contained enough guns and swords for a long siege, Gesvres was convinced this was no bluff.
44
Gesvres finally asked the prince in exasperation whether he seriously expected France to renege on its treaty obligations and go to war again just for him. Stung by this, the prince replied haughtily that from then on he would discuss his position only with the French king himself.
45
The court next made an effort to bring pressure to bear on the Princesse de Talmont. Madame d’Aiguillon had dropped out of the prince’s circle once she saw him in head-on collision with Louis, but la Talmont was still at his side.
46
Some said she was encouraging him to fight to the bitter end; others claimed she was trying to turn Charles away from his desperate project. The truth was that she
had
originally encouraged the prince in his defiance. But once she saw how things were developing at Versailles and realised that she was on shifting sands herself, she changed tack and began to advocate bowing to the inevitable.
47
Maurepas, Talmont’s chief contact at court, let it be known that when the prince was finally expelled, there would be a reckoning for those who had encouraged him to defy the king.
But this was not a good time to ask the Princesse de Talmont to exert influence. The hotel Talmont had still not been sold, and as part of the ‘civilised’ separation arranged by Maurepas, the Talmont
couple
took it in turn to live in the house. Unaware that it was the husband’s turn to be in residence, the prince one afternoon went in search of his mistress. To his great consternation, he found the way barred by Talmont’s butler and informed there was no one at home. Talmont had decided to heed Maurepas’s warning by denying the troublesome Charles Edward his house.
48
Thinking that it was his mistress who was excluding him, the prince returned next morning with tools for forcing the doors of the
hôtel
. A major scandal was brewing when General Bulkeley hurried to the scene and persuaded the irate prince to desist.
49
The context was thus not propitious for the Princesse de Talmont to exert a restraining influence. First she had to make abject apologies for her husband’s ‘mistake’. Then she had to query the wisdom of the prince’s posture towards Louis XV. The moment she chose was a dinner given by the Irish brigade officer Colonel Beauchair. She begged and implored the prince to see reason. Charles Edward’s response was typical. In a singularly brusque manner he cut across her words and changed the subject.
50
The only hope for the French now, short of violence, was a direct order to the prince from his father. When James received Louis XV’s request, he agonised before complying. He told Tencin that it had cost him a lot to send the required order. The sole consideration that swayed him to act in concert with Louis XV was the thought of the fiasco that might ensue if the prince were returned to Rome under armed guard.
51
Nevertheless, the letter James eventually sent could not have disappointed Versailles. After revealing that he had followed his son’s struggle with the French with mounting anxiety, James concluded:
I see you on the edge of a precipice about to fall in, and I would be an unnatural father if I did not do my best to save you. I therefore here and now order you, both as your father and your king, to obey without delay Louis XV’s order to you to leave his dominions.
52
There are two things to note about this letter. In the first place, if James was sincere in his avowed intention of playing no further part in public affairs, he should not have written it. For one thing, it gave the French the opportunity to say that any action they took against the prince was being taken not on their own account but in the name of King James.
53
Second, the prince was certain to regard this letter as the ultimate betrayal. By plotting to have Henry made a cardinal, James had already pushed his relations with Charles Edward dangerously
near
the limit. By writing this letter, in effect an act of collusion with Louis XV, James confirmed his status as evil genius in the prince’s mind. It was bad enough that Louis XV should break his word and act as the creature of the ‘Elector of Hanover’. But it was scarcely to be borne that the prince’s own father should abet him in his nefarious actions.