Read Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) Online
Authors: Frank McLynn
The doge’s reply took a long time to come. A week later, on 24 May, the prince reported himself still hopeful.
19
But on 26 May the predictable answer came. The Most Serene Republic would not risk the wrath of England again, as it had in 1737.
20
When the nuncio brought the reply, Charles Edward commented laconically, ‘Then I’ll leave.’ The nuncio tried in vain to find out where he was going next. He offered him the hospitality of the papal states. The prince made no reply but departed that very evening.
21
In private the prince was full of brooding bitterness. The Venetians, he noted, were ‘rascals’. Who would have imagined that the
Venice
which behaved so decently to him in 1737 would behave so shamefully now?
22
‘Now my friend [i.e. himself] must skulk to the perfect dishonour and glory of his worthy relations,’ he jotted down gnomically, ‘until he finds a reception fitting at home or abroad.’
23
Benedict XIV wrote to warn the cardinal legates of Bologna and Ferrara that the prince might be descending on them at any moment. He was determined not to be caught napping again. Weekly expenses at Avignon incurred on the prince’s behalf had amounted to upwards of 6,000 écus. The Pope was adamant that there should be no repeat of such financial madness; if the prince came into the papal states, it was to be made clear to him that the legates would not pay his expenses. Benedict felt strongly on this point. With another sort of personality it might be different, but not with a prince whom caprice and bad behaviour kept away from his father.
24
The Pope need not have worried. The prince already regarded the Vatican and all its works with a peculiar horror. He had already laid contingency plans in the event of a Venetian refusal. In the short term he would go to Lunéville, to the Ruritanian domain ruled by ex-king Stanislas of Poland.
25
The prince had a long-standing invitation to seek refuge there. The invitation had a dramatic provenance. Stanislas was actually listening to a lecture by Voltaire (one of Charles Edward’s strong admirers) on the misfortunes of the Stuarts when a courier entered with news of the prince’s arrest in the Opera cul-de-sac. Stanislas immediately offered Charles Edward asylum in Lunéville.
26
To Lunéville, then, the prince went. He lodged at first in the house of M. Mittie, the surgeon-general, before finding more spacious quarters where he could rendezvous with the Princesse de Talmont. Mittie’s son became for a time one of the prince’s most trusted agents. Yet it is clear that the prince always regarded Lunéville as no more than a convenient stopover.
What he wanted now was to make a permanent abode in Imperial territory. To this end he wrote to Choiseul (then marquis de Stain-ville) asking for help. On 13 July 1749 a double envelope, incorrectly addressed to the comte de Stainville, was left at the door of Choiseul’s Paris residence. The significant thing about the letter, which requested permission to shelter on Austrian territory, was that it was written on 26 May in Venice, immediately after the nuncio’s negative reply from the doge.
27
When Choiseul did not reply, the prince wrote again, in January 1750, reiterating his request.
28
This aspect of the prince’s intentions soon became generally known.
29
That the prince was not prepared to settle down in Lunéville was
evident
from the advice he sought from senior Jacobites on a permanent base. Marischal recommended Friburg.
30
Bulkeley opted for Switzerland or Bologna.
31
Charles himself had an inclination towards Sweden and actually set about obtaining a six-month passport there for himself and his effects.
32
‘What can a bird do that has not found a right nest?’ he wrote to Bulkeley. ‘It will always wander and never pitch on a branch.’
33
Yet inexorably, as the Powers closed ranks against him so as not to offend the formidable English, he found himself perforce hemmed in at Lunéville. Fortunately, very few people had the least idea where he was. While he fretted and fumed about the future, the prince tried to find distraction. On 22 September he observed the Aurora Borealis at Lunéville and wrote a precise description of it.
34
Earlier he had jotted down a set of maxims: (1) If there is a Being, there is also a destiny. (2) One should never judge others by oneself. (3) Never tell a secret to a weak man because it might frighten him and cause him to use it against you.
35
In early November 1749 the prince was back in Paris at the convent of St Joseph, thumbing his nose at the Paris police. He was in the French capital at least ten days. Among others he visited Lally, seeking support for his idea of a
coup d’état
in London.
36
Once again the French picked up his trail just too late. The ministers were indignant at his behaviour. In their eyes, Charles Edward lacked self-respect, both because he had promised not to return to France and because he seemed fatally drawn to the city that had ignominiously kicked him out.
37
By this time Louis XV himself seemed disposed to connive at his clandestine visits. But Puysieux and Madame Pompadour felt angry at the implicit insult to France. They thirsted to apprehend Charles and to send him packing to Civitavecchia.
38
Yet Charles Edward was always at least one step ahead of those who sought him. His abilities at playing a Scarlet Pimpernel role were pronounced. The prince would have made a perfect secret agent. As with many spies, the notion of betrayal was a central one in his psychic imagery. And the taste for disguise, first broached in 1744, then honed to a higher point of expertise with ‘Betty Burke’ and perfected during the affair with Louise de Montbazon, now came into its own as a fully-fledged aspect of the prince’s personality. The predilection for secretiveness, originally a means to an end, became finally an end in itself.
Techniques of disinformation, the art of disguise, the ability to cover his tracks, all these came as second nature to Charles Edward.
This
helps to explain, but does not diminish, the achievement involved in his ‘invisibility’ during the obscure years from 1749 to 1758. The plain fact was that for most of this time the combined espionage efforts of Europe could not get a proper fix on a man who was arguably the greatest celebrity of the time.
Some idea of the utter confusion sown by the prince can be obtained from the contemporary diplomatic records, which at any given moment were capable of locating the prince anywhere on a line from the Atlantic to the Urals! The most popular guess immediately after the departure from Avignon was Bologna.
39
The duc de Luynes reported him ‘certainly’ there.
40
A variant on this was that Charles Edward had agreed to live in northern Italy provided James dismissed O’Brien as his secretary of state.
41
Some years later d’Argenson provided a further gloss on this with a story of the prince’s living peacefully in a small town 300 leagues (sic) north of Rome.
42
Later the prince was reported in Berlin, much to Frederick the Great’s surprise and amusement; this particular rumour reached a head about the time Charles Edward was actually in Venice.
43
A surreptitious return to England was another favourite theory.
44
The analysts who wanted to play safe predicted an imminent return to Avignon.
45
It was left to the more intelligent diplomats to try to make something of the Talmont connection. Since her brother was Palatine of Ravva, this principality was added to the swelling list of possible locations.
46
More likely was Poland, where both the Princesse de Talmont and Charles Edward himself had roots and strong connections. The prince cunningly started a hare in this direction by writing a document in which he claimed to have married the daughter of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt and then asked permission of the king of Poland to settle on his territories.
47
Predictably, reports began to flood in to the respective foreign offices that the prince had been seen in Poland.
48
But since it was easy to ascertain that the Princess of Hesse had not in fact married the prince, his letter referring to ‘my wife’ and addressed to the king of Poland was taken to be a blind, masking a Polish marriage. The most likely candidate was Princess Teofila Konstancia, daughter of Michael Radziwill.
49
The Princess Radziwill rumour seemed plausible and it persisted for years, even though James Stuart himself accurately dismissed it as nonsense on the ground that Teofila was only ten years old in 1749.
50
Despite James’s disclaimers, the canard proved remarkably hard to dislodge; its tenacity was proved by its still being current in 1752.
51
Only a handful of observers guessed at Lorraine and Lunéville, and
most
of these included it merely in a shopping-basket of conjectures.
52
Puysieux alone, inveterate and brooding Stuart prince watcher, was always convinced his enemy was holed up in Lunéville.
53
Hatred, like the prospect of hanging, it seems, concentrates the mind.
Students of the hilarious could do worse than sample the infinite variety of the imaginary adventures of the ‘prince in fairyland’.
54
Even sober commentators were seduced into Arabian Nights fantasy. Barbier produced a tale of an extended tour of northern Europe on foot.
55
D’Argenson, while incorporating some true material in his sketch of the prince’s movements in 1749, concocted an itinerary that would have taxed a modern ‘shuttle’ diplomat: between Avignon and Venice (less than three months) the prince was supposed to have visited Sweden, Berlin and Dresden as well as Paris and Lorraine.
56
The farrago of nonsense written about the prince’s movements in 1749 and after testifies to the superlative skill with which he threw off his would-be pursuers. James and Henry themselves were no wiser than the benighted foreign diplomats. Charles used a cell structure of agents, wherein only the immediate link in the chain (usually Goring, a veteran of the Austrian service, at this stage) knew where he was at any given moment. In the intelligence battle the prince and his enemies used many of the same disinformation techniques against each other. Charles encouraged his supporters to spread rumours that he was dead or gravely ill, especially when he was about to embark on some perilous venture (like the 1750 trip to England).
57
His enemies retaliated, trying to winkle him out of hiding by claiming that he was dead at moments when they wanted him to show himself.
58
One inevitable result of all this chaos and illusion was that many ‘false princes’ arose, trying to trade on his name and reputation. Sometimes this was just a case of Charles Edward lookalikes or people mistaken for him being taken into custody or reported by spies.
59
There were false sightings in Spain and Bordeaux in 1751 and in Corsica in 1753.
60
But often the false Charleses were conscious charlatans. In October 1751 an escaped prisoner turned up in Seville, masquerading as the prince.
61
A bogus ‘Charles Edward’ swindled his way right down through northern Italy in 1753, leaving IOUs in the prince’s name.
62
Poor British intelligence was part of the answer to the prince’s success in these years. One highly-paid agent, supposedly hot on the scent of the prince, produced an ‘exclusive’ report that gave his height as 5 feet 5 inches (6 inches too short).
63
British spies also wasted a
lot
of time on meticulous surveillance of people who turned out not to be Charles Edward.
64
But another part of the answer was the prince’s genius for disguise. His favourite garb was that of a priest;
65
given his contempt for priestcraft, this is significant in itself. One of the few British agents who actually got close to him in the ‘obscure period’ – Pickle the Spy – dealt with this aspect of the prince at some length in a report to the duke of Newcastle in 1755:
The Young Pretender has an admirable genius for skulking, and is provided with so many disguises that it is not so much to be wondered at that he has hitherto escaped unobserved. Sometimes he wears a long false nose which they call
Nez à la Saxe
because Marshal Saxe used to give such to his spies whom he employed. At other times he blackens his eyebrows and beard and wears a black wig, by which alteration his most intimate acquaintances would scarce know him, and in these dresses he has mixed often in the company of English gentlemen travelling through Flanders without being suspected.
66
Hand in hand with the penchant for disguise went a taste for the use of aliases: Mr Benn, Mr Douglas, Dumont, Cartouche, The Wild Man, Mr Thompson, these are only some of the pseudonyms used by the prince in the first five years of his incognito in ‘imaginary space’ (to use one of his own expressions).
67
There was more to this than simple prudence. Taken together, the disguises and aliases point to something central in the prince’s personality. If a man turns to disguise as a way of life, it suggests a savage dissatisfaction with himself. And the use of aliases and pseudonyms even in contexts where the person receiving the letter knew perfectly well who the writer was suggests once again a fragile sense of identity.
This is hardly surprising. The long years of being a prince without a throne, royalty without a kingdom, a man supposedly deriving his right from God but enjoying the devil’s own luck, were now compounded by a further dimension of alienation. It was inexpedient for the prince to have a settled location or a traceable identity. To be a pretender who has to pretend not to be a pretender introduces a Chinese-box sense of chaos. For other men not blessed (or cursed) by a royal heritage, it was possible to choose an identity from a number of available roles defined by parents, teachers, mentors, religious leaders. In a very real sense Charles Edward, by contrast, had to make up his identity as he went along. What else could a defeated pretender who was not resigned to his fate do?