Read Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Online
Authors: Frank McLynn
Such an unambiguous and clear-cut order to the prince to leave French territory might have seemed the end of the affair for Charles. How could he deny his father, the source of his own legitimacy? But the prince had prepared for this eventuality. He had it bruited about that James had written to him secretly, warning him that he might have to indite a formal letter in such terms for reasons of diplomatic protocol, but advising him to ignore all such instructions issued under duress.
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The French ministers were determined to provide the prince with no loophole. The duc de Gesvres was sent on his third mission to Charles Edward, bearing a copy of James’s letter. He also took Louis XV’s ultimatum: the prince had three days to leave Paris and nine to quit France.
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True to his resolution to speak to nobody but Louis XV, the prince refused to see Gesvres. The governor of Paris was reduced to taking an affidavit from the prince’s followers (Kelly, Graeme and Oxburgh) that they had received both the letter from James and the orders from Louis XV.
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The trio then reported to the prince. Kelly began to read out James’s long letter. When he came to the words ‘I order you as your father and king’ the prince walked away and would not listen to any more.
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The next move in the battle of wits was for the French to publish James’s letter in the newspapers and gazettes so that the people of Paris might know the true situation.
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This seemed a trump card, but the prince was equal to this development too. James had copied the letter to his son in French for Louis XV’s consumption and it was this version that was published. This gave the prince his opportunity. He declared that the letter was a forgery. The proof of this was twofold. In the first place, no king of England would ever write to the Prince of Wales in French, but in English. Second, the alleged letter had been delivered by Gesvres and had not arrived through the proper channels.
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Naturally, the prince concluded, if the letter really was genuine, he would obey it; but he was certain it was a piece of imposture.
The prince followed this up with a piece of effrontery. He sent a
message
to Louis XV, asking for time to write to Rome to verify that the letter
did
proceed from his father. Charles claimed to be convinced that the letter was forged – either that or his father had been imposed on.
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The clinching proof of this, the prince argued to Louis, was that his father had not withdrawn the commission of Regency. This was a nuance that a forger would not have been aware of. If it was really James who had written the letter, the very first thing he would have done was to revoke the powers of Regent.
Charles’s stalling tactics served only to make the king still more angry. His rage moved up another notch when the prince once again raised the stakes. Two could play at the game of publishing confidential documents, Charles decided. He let it be known that he had private letters from Louis XV, couched in unambiguous terms and guaranteeing him life-time asylum in France.
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It was now clear to the French ministers that all normal measures had been exhausted. They either had to acquiesce in the prince’s remaining in France, in full defiance of the king’s orders, or they had to use force against him. After Louis XV’s ultimatum delivered by Gesvres, anything other than the use of force would involve too great a loss of face by the French crown. The question then became, how exactly to proceed.
Divided counsels in the king’s council (
conseil d’en haut
) were nothing new, but this time the differences over how to proceed were particularly pointed. The comte d’Argenson was against all violence, fearing the damage it could do the king’s reputation.
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The duc de Noailles agreed that the prince should be arrested, but felt that this should be a ‘kid-gloves’ affair.
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Cardinal Tencin’s position was the most ambivalent. As James’s confidant, he had no particular liking for Charles Edward, who hated him. He was aware that he was being blamed in the council for the disastrous consequences of five years of pro-Jacobite policies, and wanted to distance himself from the prince so as to safeguard his own position as minister of state. At the same time, he realised that his position with James would be jeopardised if Charles Edward was treated humiliatingly. As Tencin saw it, the prince had pushed Louis XV into a corner.
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The only way out was some eleventh-hour initiative from Charles’s friends Richelieu and Belle-Isle. The trouble was that neither of these sat on the council of state.
But there can be no doubt that the two hardliners on the council were Puysieux and Maurepas. Puysieux had loathed the prince with incandescent intensity ever since the intellectual drubbing he had taken from him in August.
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Noting the depth of his rancour,
Maurepas
cunningly tried to evade responsibility for the prince’s arrest by suggesting that Puysieux was the man with the right credentials for the job. This was too obvious a ploy even for a man of Puysieux’s limited abilities to miss. He was adamant. Paris was Maurepas’s responsibility as director of the city’s police; it was therefore Maurepas who had to carry out the arrest.
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The devious and subtle Maurepas devoted much thought to the delicate task laid upon him. Foreign ambassadors were consulted. They opined that Louis XV was within his rights to arrest and expel Charles Edward, provided he was treated with respect.
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But Maurepas’s real problem was how to avoid the risk that the prince might make good his threat to kill himself. The course he favoured was to arrest Charles in his own house rather than in the open. A large body of old and reliable musketeers should surround the house and effect entry at 7 a.m. All other occupants of the house would be allowed to leave, but no one would be permitted to enter, by formal interdict which prescribed the Bastille as the penalty for non-co-operation. When the prince was left alone in the house with the musketeers, he would then be escorted to the prison at the Chateau de Vincennes.
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The other ministers considered that this was too risky. The prince would still have time to kill himself before the musketeers got inside the house. There was also the awesome possibility that the prince might persuade a band of fanatical Jacobites to fight to the death. Charles had also boasted (falsely) that his house was a veritable arsenal, chock-full of guns and gunpowder, and that anyone trying to storm it would be blown sky-high.
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The prospect of a bloody siege and final storming of the house by musketeers, possibly involving heavy loss of life, conjured a vision of chaos too frightening to contemplate. Besides, it is abundantly clear from the evidence that the ministers feared that the Paris mob might make such an attack on the prince’s house the occasion for a general street uprising.
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Bloody revolution indirectly caused by the prince was the last thing Louis XV wanted.
The consensus formed for a street arrest. When Tencin saw the way the wind was blowing, he became more hard-line even than Puysieux and Maurepas, doubtless to impress the king with his commitment. It was apparently Tencin who first suggested that the prince be bound after the arrest.
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It was now just a question of time before the inevitable happened. This was the point, in these early days of December 1748, when the prince should have conceded defeat. He could have won the admiration
of
Europe for his defiant stand coupled with outstanding gifts as a diplomatic brinksman. The title of hero-statesman would have been his. But the prince redoubled his efforts even as he was losing sight of his aim. He told Bulkeley on 7 December that he would leave Paris only to depart for the other world.
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Bulkeley, like all other Jacobites, detached himself from the prince once the contents of James’s letter were known. Jacobite careers and positions depended on unquestioning obedience to the (rare) direct and explicit orders from James.
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What was going through the prince’s mind in these last crucial days of freedom in Paris? Clearly the strain was intense. As early as September the papal nuncio reported that Charles was depressed, had lost weight and had an unhealthy colour.
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Yet he bore himself outwardly as if he had not a care in the world. From August to December he continued to show himself in public and to frequent the opera.
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On 30 November he attended the Comédie Française. Everyone in the audience stood up, as was the custom for princes of the blood.
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So much for Puysieux and his ‘monsieur’!
The contrast between the prince as seen in public and as seen by Nuncio Durini hints at the struggle going on within him. By now Charles had developed an obsession about French perfidy. His rational programme, as he later explained it to Bulkeley, was to force things to the bitter end, so that Louis XV would have to throw off the mask and sign an expulsion order in his own hand.
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Then Louis would be exposed to the world as the perfidious charlatan he was.
Yet it is clear that the prince’s struggle with France, fought against impossible odds, was also an externalised projection of an inner psychic drama. He had been beaten (betrayed, in his terms) at Derby, betrayed by his father and brother over the cardinalate. If he could just achieve this victory over France, the positive elements in his personality would once more gain the upper hand. The tragic irony was that the prince had chosen a scenario which could not but play to his negative, self-destructive impulses. We may say that France deserved better of Charles Edward. It is also plausible to argue the reverse. Yet there was in Charles Edward a perverse, almost suicidal, refusal to deal properly with the French court. Why could he not take the time and trouble to charm the French ministers – he was well capable of it? Instead, his self-destructiveness led him to express his disdain and contempt for them openly. He was outraged that such men controlled his destiny. He was not prepared to play by the rules of diplomatic protocol. He would not grovel before people for whom he had no respect. The unrealistic, self-destructive side of him
seemed
to conjure up a malignant demon or imp of the perverse that forever whispered in his ear: why should I truckle to these people?
On 10 December the prince’s nemesis came at last. The French plan was governed by two considerations. The prince had constantly warned that he would carry out what Charles XII of Sweden had merely threatened: in other words, there would be a bloody siege followed by suicide. That ruled out house arrest. In the case of open arrest, the question was where to carry out the operation. It was the prince’s insouciant frequenting of the opera that provided the clue.
The task of effecting the arrest was given to the duc de Biron, colonel of the French grenadier guards. With his most senior major M. Vaudreuil, Biron planned the coup with meticulous detail.
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At Vaudreuil’s house an operational committee was set up, consisting of the guards’ battalion commanders and their sergeants. The ambush was to be laid in and around the Palais Royal. Altogether 1,200 men were deployed, in alleyways, courtyards, houses, and even kitchens in the vicinity. It was known that carriages conveying the nobility to the Opera set down in the cul-de-sac hard by the Opera building. This was where the élite grenadier sergeants, hand-picked for their intrepidity, would be waiting.
The duc de Biron himself planned to wait nearby in a carriage, in disguise. All the way from the Palais Royal to the Chateau de Vincennes troops of musketeers were standing by, ready to spring to horse. Just in case Charles Edward managed to elude his captors and take refuge in a nearby house with his retainers, with the intention of standing off a siege, locksmiths, ladders and a supply of axes were at hand. There were even three surgeons waiting to tend the wounded. The most famous doctor in Paris, M. Vernage, was told to hold himself in readiness at his house between 6 and 7 p.m. and to come without question if he was summoned.
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Most controversially of all, Biron ordered up ten lengths of red silk cord, with which he intended to bind the prince hand and foot.
On the morning of the 10th, rumours of what was afoot reached the prince. The marquise de Mézières gave him an explicit warning that the ministers intended to arrest him.
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For his own reasons, or possibly because he still thought Louis would not dare to arrest him, Charles disregarded the warnings. Even as he drove to the Opera, the warnings continued. As he passed the Tuileries and came out on to rue St Honoré, someone called out: ‘Go home, prince, they’re going to arrest you!’
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It was between 5 and 6 p.m., already dark, when the prince arrived in the Opera cul-de-sac. With him were Harrington, Goring and
Sheridan
.
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As soon as he entered this miniature box-canyon, all gates and thoroughfares of the Palais Royal were closed. No one could get in or out.
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The prince must have suspected something was afoot when he saw the press of people in the cul-de-sac. But, dauntless as ever, he stepped out of the carriage. A throng of sergeants flocked around him, dressed in hodden grey, like servants anxious to catch a glimpse of a great man. Then a uniformed sergeant approached as if to clear a way through the crowd. This was the signal for his disguised comrades to act.
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One of the sergeants, who had assumed the
nom de guerre
of Sergeant Fortune took the breath out of the prince with a blow in his back from the knee.
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Two other sergeants seized his arms and two more his legs. It all happened so fast that the prince at first thought he was about to be murdered. Shrieking loudly, he was frog-marched away to the bottom of the cul-de-sac, through a door, and into a house belonging to a M. Marsulan, chief surgeon to the duc d’Orléans.
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