Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (72 page)

The other reason was more immediate. In the wake of her near-exile from the court at the time of the prince’s expulsion, Talmont had to tread carefully, especially since her protector at Versailles, Maurepas, was himself disgraced early in 1749.
¹¹⁶
When she originally applied for
congé
to visit Luneville, she was given three months’ leave of absence. It was well over a year when she finally reappeared publicly in court life. Louis XV, suspecting the true nature of her ‘urgent business’ in Lunéville, was very angry at her ‘impertinent’ behaviour and complained vociferously to his father-in-law Stanislas. Her kinswoman the queen also took a dim view of her activities.
¹¹⁷

There were the circumstances when a letter from the prince arrived, claiming that he was inconsolable without her. Talmont sought an audience with Louis XV to obtain another
congé
. The king raged at her for her insolence: if she went to Lunéville again, it was on her own head; she could return to Paris only on pain of total disgrace. The princess used all her wiles to make her absence palatable. Louis would not accept that her reasons were valid. Finally he relented to the point of allowing her a
congé
from January to May 1751.
¹¹⁸

The princess wrote to Charles Edward to announce her return to Lunéville. But just as she was about to leave Paris, she was again stricken with her mystery illness. In Lunéville the prince fretted at the delay, then made final plans to journey to Berlin to meet Frederick of Prussia.

At the very last moment Talmont seems to have had a premonition that she would lose the prince altogether if she did not at once make the trip to Lorraine. Cutting short her convalescence, against medical advice, she set out early on 24 January 1751. A gruelling two-day journey brought her, by now dreadfully ill, to her chateau outside Lunéville on the evening of 25 January.
¹¹⁹

Marie-Louise had hoped that her heroism in making such a journey in winter in her condition would finally get the prince to see the light and appreciate the extent of her sacrifice for him. She looked forward to a reconciliation. But the prince was now committed to his Berlin trip. Since he did not trust his mistress, he certainly did not intend
to
divulge his plans. One look at the decrepit, ailing princess in any case disabused him of any notion that they could travel together.

Next morning, to Marie-Louise’s utter astonishment, the prince left her, complaining that the chateau was too uncomfortable to house two separate retinues. She did not see him again for two months. She received a couple of notes purporting to come from him in Lunéville, but obviously sent by Mittie junior during his absence. One was a complaint about her behaviour, coupled with a wish that she would make a New Year’s resolution to reform it.
¹²⁰
The other harked back to his old grievance about having doors shut in his face.
¹²¹

At the end of March 1751 the princess wrote to him, using the channel of Mittie junior. The letter was in the form of an ultimatum. Since she had returned to Lunéville at great personal and political risk only at his urgent request, would he now at once have the goodness to come and see her? Otherwise she would return to Paris to placate Louis XV.
¹²²
The prince, by now returned from another abortive mission, replied that he wished she had stayed in Paris in the first place. He relented sufficiently to spend one night with her, but then left suddenly the next day.
¹²³

After an interval he returned, this time exuding charm. When Talmont, who had been bitten twice, reacted coldly, he complained of her lack of commitment and flew into a rage with her. She confided to Goring that he could no longer hurt her as much as in the old days, when all her emotions were in thrall. She bore the irate squall with equanimity.
¹²⁴

The off-and-on relationship limped along until the expiry of the princess’s
congé
. Marie-Louise then announced her departure for Paris. This angered the prince. He had no particular liking or even use for her any more, but
he
would decide when the relationship was over. This was the old business of someone else ‘giving him laws’. Marie-Louise then promised to write to Louis XV to ask for an extension, provided Charles pledged himself to live with her and see her constantly. The prince promised. Talmont prepared for a resumption of their old passionate relationship.
¹²⁵

But on the very night the idyll was scheduled to recommence, Marie-Louise had another of her dreadful attacks of migraine and vomiting. The prince arrived to find his mistress a puking invalid. His reaction was cold fury. He knew how to deal with this imperious Queen of Morocco who seemed to make a career out of thwarting his will. He had brought her to heel before by promiscuous flings with other women. With supreme callousness, the prince spent the night with one of the princess’s maids.
¹²⁶

At noon next day Charles announced that he was leaving for good. The princess fell on her knees and begged him at least to save her a public humiliation by waiting until she had cleared the ante-room of servants. At least he would then leave unobserved. But the prince was savouring his total victory over the woman who had so long opposed her will to his. Coldly he informed her that he was going to take another mistress. He would leave when and how he pleased.
¹²⁷
As a parting master-stroke of cruelty, he demanded that she return his portrait, knowing that it was in her bureau in Paris. He ordered her to hand it over to Waters, his banker. She protested at the thought of having Waters as a witness to her indignity, but Charles was adamant.
¹²⁸
Then he swept from the chateau.

That was the end of the affair. Marie-Louise spent another two months in Lunéville, vainly hoping he would return to her. She wrote a number of letters to him, which she described as being capable of melting the heart of a stone. His only reply was to say that he never wished to see her again.
¹²⁹

Such was the dismal termination of a liaison that had from the very first carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The most obvious problem was that both the lovers were strong-willed and thought themselves perfect beings, let down or vitiated by the flaws of others. In the prince’s case, this masked a deep unconscious self-loathing that caused him to fail in crucial moments unless objective circumstances were overwhelmingly favourable. Not enough is known about the Princesse de Talmont, but Madame du Deffand alleged that her vanity went beyond all normal vanity into a realm where she genuinely believed herself perfect and expected everyone else to feel the same way about her.
¹³⁰

The prince had turned to Talmont in the first place as a reaction to the affair with Louise de Montbazon, in hopes that such a sophisticated woman would not cling to him or make demands. At first the relationship seemed to fulfil these hopes. But there was one factor he had not counted on. The Princesse de Talmont was now in her late forties, and it was likely that Charles Edward would be her last lover. She wanted to exit from her career of dalliance with a solid, durable relationship, so that she could feel her emotional life had not been totally vain and ephemeral.

Once the prince sensed that she wished to make of the relationship something more binding and committed, he reacted with coldness. Profound relationships with women were beyond him, as he demonstrated throughout his life. He needed women sexually, but anything deeper, more testing, stretched his resources farther than they would
go
. Badinage and repartee in a salon with witty blue-stockings was one thing; sexual promiscuity with maids and courtesans was another. But the ultimate horror for the prince was any demand that he integrate the two strands.

In retrospect, the three troubled years with the Princesse de Talmont seemed to have produced nothing but a hell of physical and verbal abuse. The only good fruit of these years was the dismissal of Kelly (he left the prince’s service in November 1749).
¹³¹
It took Marie-Louise to persuade the prince that if he really wanted Marischal as his secretary of state – and Marischal was adamant that he would have no dealings with the prince while Kelly was at his side – then Kelly had to go. But the diabolical Kelly was not finished with the prince yet. It was a woman who dislodged him. Years later he would take his revenge by being instrumental in dislodging another woman from the prince’s side.

The Princesse de Talmont stayed on in Lunéville until the beginning of September 1751, still vainly hoping that the prince would relent and return to her. How far the prince was from entertaining any residual thoughts of her can be seen from the fate of the letter she sent him on her return to Paris. On the back of the paper where Marie-Louise speaks of his memory’s reign equally in her mind and heart, the prince proceeded to jot down some financial calculations!
¹³²

Talmont’s bitterness when the prince made no reply eventually found expression in a tempestuous altercation with Elisabeth Ferrand. Mlle Ferrand had been ill with a fever and did not respond to the letters the princess sent enquiring about Charles’s health and whereabouts. The princess dashed off a string of accusations, many of them personal, which Ferrand described as ‘blush-making’. Remonstrating violently against being accused of ‘
basesse
’, Ferrand put the termagant princess firmly in her place.
¹³³
Then she wrote to the prince, complaining ringingly of his former mistress. Talmont backtracked and apologised to Ferrand for a hasty letter caused by excessive stress.
¹³⁴
Henceforth she adopted a softer approach in her relations with the ‘sisters’ (which was how Ferrand and Vassé invariably referred to each other).
¹³⁵

The new tack availed her little. When the prince paid his next flying visit to Paris (in December 1751), he spent time with the ‘sisters’ but did not communicate his presence to his ex-mistress.
¹³⁶
Like James, like Louise de Montbazon, the Princesse de Talmont had gone the way of all flesh. There was further correspondence with the prince, but for the remaining twenty years of her life she never set eyes on him again.

(1749–53)

DURING THE YEARS
of his turbulent relationship with the Princesse de Talmont, Charles Edward’s attention was by no means devoted only to his private life. He still hankered after a repeat of the ’45 by other means. The years 1750–3 were full of plots and rumours of plots as the prince cast about for some ingenious means of overthrowing the Hanoverian dynasty. This time he would have to make the attempt without any help from France. And – another of the prince’s
idées fixes
– it would have to be focused on England.

One of the problems about planning a
coup d’état
in England – and without foreign aid or an invading army a Stuart restoration could only come about in this way – was the lack of contact with either James or the Jacobites in France. This fact alone led to the abandonment of a number of promising schemes. In 1749 Sir Hector Maclean worked out an imaginative project for a new Jacobite rising with the duc de Richelieu and Paris de Monmartel,
éminence grise
of French finances. The plan was that 5,000 French troops would land on the east coast of Scotland while 4,000 Swedes disembarked on the west coast. A general rendezvous would be held at Inverness, where the Jacobite clans would join the two sets of liberators. But when Sir Hector Maclean went to Rome to get James’s approval, the Stuart monarch vetoed the project, lest it clash with some other venture by the prince.
¹

The prince was indeed planning a scheme of his own, but its tenor was very different. By now he was convinced that the key to a restoration lay neither on the Celtic fringes nor with marginal religious groups like the Catholics. There was in England a solid rump of alienated people: not just Jacobites, but disaffected Whigs and extreme ‘Country’ ideologues at present attached to the rival
court
of Prince Frederick at Leicester House, but chafing at its mild reformist challenge to George II’s supremacy.
²
Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, doyen of the old English Jacobite party, had died in 1749. The new Jacobite leaders seemed to be men of a different stamp, especially the duke of Beaufort and Lord Westmoreland. Charles Edward accordingly reverted to an idea long peddled by the marquise de Mézières: that all attempts at Jacobite restoration should be based on English Protestants alone.
³

Moreover, by 1749–50 there were many straws in the wind that indicated a revival of Jacobite fortunes in England after the disaster of the ’45. In 1749, at the dedication of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, Dr William King, a prominent Jacobite of the university, delivered a famous coded oration, punctuated at intervals with the watchword
redeat
(‘may he return!’).
⁴
Everyone in the audience knew that the ‘Bonnie Prince’ was being referred to.

Burgeoning Jacobite sentiment was not a prerogative solely of ‘the home of lost causes’. At the other end of the social spectrum, the oppressed workers of England used pro-Stuart rhetoric as their legitimating ideology. In 1750 the striking keelworkers of Newcastle proclaimed ‘James III’ as part of their political programme.
⁵
Confirming all these pro-Stuart trends, a French agent in London added further factors favouring the Jacobites. There was the burden of land tax levied to meet the costs of the English role in the War of Austrian Succession, plus the huge personal unpopularity of the duke of Cumberland.
⁶

Early in 1750 the prince took a firm decision to go to England that year. He worked on a manifesto dealing with the National Debt and sent secret messages to Lady Primrose (Anne Drelincourt, widow of the 3rd Viscount Primrose), doyenne of the English Jacobites, to enquire about his likely reception ‘as the Prince is determined to come over at any rate’.
⁷
Having satisfied himself on that score, he assembled a minor arsenal at Anvers: 20,000 guns, bayonets and ammunition plus 4,000 swords and pistols were to be loaded on one ship, and another 6,000 guns and ammunition (but without bayonets) on a second vessel.
⁸
Charles entrusted the work to his agents Goring and Dormer. They were instructed to be ready to sail to England with the arms as soon as he sent word.