Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (85 page)

Any further attempts at communication were in any case prevented by the onset of serious illness, from which James never fully recovered. In October 1762 an apoplectic fit and loss of speech led to extreme unction being administered.
⁶¹
Walpole overstated the case when he conjectured that on receipt of the news Charles Edward would probably get drunk to drown his sorrows.
⁶²
Quite apart from Charles’s indifference to his father’s fate – for in his view James had effectively died once he protected Clementina Walkinshaw – the prince would never consent to go to Rome while the hated Cardinal York lived there.
⁶³

The wisdom or folly of the prince’s attitude at the time was never tested, since James, amazingly, came through this illness too. Not until 1764 did he enter the terminal phase of his life. Then he took to his bed with a resolution that he would conduct no more business
and
read no more letters, but instead prepare himself for eternity.
⁶⁴
In this twilight state, more dead than alive, he remained until his death in January 1766.

All James’s appeals to his son were so much wasted ink. At first all other Jacobites fared no better. Murray of Elibank’s taunt that he was fulfilling the prophecies of Marischal and Lady Primrose failed to stir him.
⁶⁵
Nor did the suggestion (1761) that he approached the dismissed Pitt to act as his General Monk.
⁶⁶
Frustrated at his inability to raise even a line of answer from the prince, Murray tried a new tack. He invented a rumour that the man living at Bouillon was not Charles Edward Stuart but an impostor.
⁶⁷
Lord Caryll, a follower of the prince since Gravelines in 1744, was puzzled why Charles should be so concerned over an illegitimate child. Still, he offered the help of the dwindling English Jacobite party to get Charlotte back.
⁶⁸
Even the duc de Bouillon wrote to say that Clementina Walkinshaw was not worth all the fuss.
⁶⁹
Yet no answer came from the prince.

Finally, in January 1762, Charles relented a little. Walsh’s brother the comte de Serrant was in touch about the possibility of the prince’s settling in Spain. Charles broke his silence to inform the Abbé Gordon that it was still his intention not to enter into any political business whatsoever until his child was returned.
⁷⁰
A year later the prince repeated the same sentiments to Serrant himself.
⁷¹

At least he was now writing. A further chink in his iron defences came in 1762 when he allowed the first visit to Bouillon by an English Jacobite. The person chosen for this privilege was Lady Webb, who had already demonstrated a subtle line in charm and flattery.
⁷²
Lady Webb, wife of Sir Thomas Webb and daughter and heiress of William Gibson, had a special niche in Jacobite tradition, since she was related to one of the great Jacobite martyrs, the earl of Derwentwater of the ’15. Early in July 1762 she spent a week at the Chateau de Carlsbourg. The visit appeared to go well; Lady Webb spoke of the most precious seven days of her life. But on her return to Paris she did the unforgivable. She wrote to the prince, criticising his drinking.

I observed several times while at dinner the blood rise and surround your neck and in an instant fly up to your head … there is but one remedy … cooling your stomach immediately by large draughts of water to which you have so great an aversion.
⁷³

That was the end of Lady Webb, at least on a face-to-face basis. The prince instructed Gordon to make use of her but on no account to allow her to visit Bouillon again.
⁷⁴
It seemed clear to him that all
the
English Jacobites ever wanted to do was lecture him on his drinking without ever addressing themselves to the miseries that had brought on the drinking in the first place. His worst opinions of Lady Webb were confirmed. In May 1763 she delivered another homily. Referring to the prince’s lack of exercise and fresh air, and his refusal to eat enough food to absorb his heavy consumption of wine, she predicted (accurately) the onset of dropsy.
⁷⁵

Lady Webb’s gentle admonitions were nugatory alongside some of the broadsides directed at him by the Paris Jacobites. Money was again a problem. In January 1763 the banker Waters sent a splenetic letter to the prince:

People to preserve their credit must pay their debts, it is the way to obtain more. The maxim holds equally with princes. The King of France borrows and pays and so do all other sovereigns, they know it is their interest. It cannot certainly be yours to ruin me.
⁷⁶

It took an iron constitution of a singular kind to stand up to the punishment Charles Edward inflicted on himself in the years at Bouillon.
⁷⁷
A less robust man might well have succumbed to an alcohol-related disease. But as the prince entered his forties, intimations of mortality were all around him in the Jacobite movement. The royal secretary Edgar died in 1762. So did the baleful Kelly. Walsh died in 1763. Lally, disgraced in India, was marked down for execution (it took place in 1766). To reinforce the theme of
memento mori
, in November 1765 Lady Webb reported the death of the prince’s old adversary Cumberland, who, she was certain, had gone straight to Hell.
⁷⁸
Curiously the prince himself never shared the general Jacobite loathing for ‘the Butcher’. He always found it hard to believe that a prince of the blood could really have been guilty of the cruelties after Culloden.
⁷⁹
And he invariably vetoed all assassination attempts against him planned by the Jacobites. Moreover, he was personally magnanimous. The duchesse d’Aiguillon told Horace Walpole that when some of his friends abused Cumberland in her presence, Charles Edward replied that his brother Henry had hurt him more by turning cardinal than Cumberland ever could. The prince then recorded this eccentric verdict: ‘
C’est un prince très généreux, comme vous avez éprouvé, et vous ne devez pas parler contre lui, car il m’a vaincu
.’
⁸⁰
(‘You ought not to speak against him, for he beat me.’)

Finally, the death of Cluny MacPherson in January 1764 reopened all the old wounds about the prince’s lost effects.
⁸¹
Although Cluny declared on his death-bed that he knew nothing of the diamond rings and the seal whose disappearance the prince so lamented,
⁸²
Charles
decided
to pursue his own enquiries. The trail led back to Cluny’s elderly female relative in Badenoch. A correspondence peppered with mutual contempt went on between Gordon in Paris and Miss MacPherson in Scotland.
⁸³
Eventually the acidulous MacPherson female promised to hand over what she possessed of the Stuart plate on production of an unquestionable holograph order from Charles Edward Stuart.
⁸⁴

It seemed there was no limit to the ‘impertinence’ the world was prepared to mete out to a ‘man undone’. The prince’s feelings of being fair game for all manner of quasi-aristocratic parvenus were emphasised by an unpleasant incident in Bouillon in 1764. This time the affront was offered by Major de la Motte, commanding the garrison at Bouillon Castle. Two army deserters got drunk, stole a pair of sheets, and were condemned to death. All the prince’s old humanitarian instincts were aroused (and he might well have felt solidarity for the plight of some fellow drunkards). He sent his valet-de-chambre to de la Motte to plead for clemency, suggesting that the sentence be commuted to galley slavery and asking the favour on the strength of his royal birth.
⁸⁵
Charles suggested that to save de la Motte’s face, he should appear with his escort at the esplanade just before the execution and ask the boon of mercy.
⁸⁶

De la Motte was a man of the Hawley stamp. Not only did he turn the prince down, but he warned him brusquely of the consequences of interfering.
⁸⁷
Not only did he
not
delay the executions so as to give the prince time to write an appeal to Paris; he rushed the hangings through and capped his defiance by making derogatory remarks about ‘the Pretender’.
⁸⁸

The prince aroused his agents in Paris to seek satisfaction from Choiseul.
⁸⁹
But Choiseul by now had no time for the prince. Charles’s arguments were perfectly sound: he pointed out that he would not have interfered if the charge had been murder; it was the trivial nature of the offence that excited his compassion.
⁹⁰
Yet he had lost all credibility in Choiseul’s eyes. The upshot was that Choiseul conveyed informally to the prince’s agents that he was prepared to discipline de la Motte only if he received a formal complaint from Charles Edward himself.

At this point the prince drew back. Such a supplication would breach his own rule that he would have no dealings with France until Charlotte was returned. Even worse, there was the possibility that Choiseul might turn him down as de la Motte had done.
⁹¹
Charles was not prepared to run the risk of being wounded in this way. His
informal
suit in Paris to get de la Motte to purge his contempt collapsed.

Bouillon was now soured for the prince. The man who had insulted him and got away with it passed his chateau each day. But how to get out of the impasse? He could not go to Paris, and had turned down Madrid. Rome was out for obvious reasons. It was at this juncture that a miraculous breakthrough occurred. On the eve of his father’s death, he was reconciled with his brother Henry. Even more surprisingly, the agent of the reconciliation was Lady Webb.

(1765–6)

LADY WEBB WAS
remarkably thick-skinned. The prince’s obvious distaste for her strictures did not halt the flow of her admonitions and exhortations. With consummate cheek, she even dared to justify herself by reference to the prince’s alcoholism, remarking that her resolution not to trouble him again was ‘like those drunkards who make them in the morning and break them before night’.
¹

Her constant nagging, spiced with praise for the wondrous person that lay beneath the mask the prince chose to display to the world, even seemed to be paying dividends. At least the prince reverted to a semblance of normal life and went hunting every day.
²
Finally, Lady Webb’s sheer relentlessness in the war of attrition produced its most spectacular result. She acted as the bridge between the ailing prince and Cardinal York at Frascati.

This achievement is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that at this precise time the prince’s latent paranoia about his brother was being played on by Murray of Elibank. Referring to Henry contemptuously as ‘Red Cap’, Murray reported: ‘he looks upon you as nobody and even says he believes you can’t live long from your immoderate drinking.’
³

This was the context in which Lady Webb informed the prince in December 1764 that his brother was eager for a reconciliation but did not venture to write, as he feared Charles would snub him and not answer his letters.
⁴
The prince replied through Thibault that although the row over Charlotte prevented his replying, he was in principle interested in such a reconciliation, especially given the state of their father’s health.
⁵
Declaring that this reply ‘gave me more pleasure than words can express’,
⁶
Lady Webb conveyed the news to the Cardinal Duke. Henry was in conciliatory mood. He conceded
that
the Clementina Walkinshaw affair had been badly handled by his father, but now that James was virtually comatose, his attitudes were no longer a barrier. James neither knew about the planned reconciliation nor was in any mental or physical state to express an opinion on it.

Henry went on to say that as a gesture of good will he was prepared to make over the papal pension of 10,000 Roman crowns (which James would have left to his cardinal son) to Charles.
⁷
In euphoric mood Henry wrote a very warm letter to his brother. But he had jumped the gun.
⁸
The prince was still not ready to abandon his stubborn stance as incommunicado. Lady Webb rebuked him for inconsistency. She pointed out that he already corresponded on business with Gordon. Surely an exception should be made for the Cardinal Duke?
⁹

The prince professed his attachment to his brother, but still did not write to him.
¹⁰
Commendably, Henry then made another direct approach (September 1765).
¹¹
He followed with a small masterpiece of diplomacy. Having heard that Charles in pique had abjured his own abjuration when the prize of the English crown seemed finally beyond his grasp, he praised him for returning to the faith of his ancestors. He added that he quite understood the prince’s distaste about returning to Rome; he suggested instead some small town in the papal states.
¹²

At last, on 3 October 1765, the prince broke his silence and wrote to his brother.
¹³
Lady Webb was triumphant: ‘no words can express the joy with which I received the honour of Your Royal Highness’s of the 3rd.’
¹⁴

Yet the truth was that it was circumstance rather than sentiment that produced the letter to the Cardinal Duke. At the eleventh hour the prince suddenly saw the political abyss that yawned at his feet. At the very last moment he realised that there was a real possibility that he might not be recognised as
de jure
king of England when his father died. Only Henry could help him now. But to appreciate the dimensions of the problem Charles Edward faced on the
de jure
succession, we must return for a moment to the reign of Benedict XIV, the Vatican’s philosopher-king.

Benedict XIV had steered a difficult course in his relations with the Stuarts. Although in the excitement of the ’45 he had momentarily allowed himself to hope and believe in a Stuart restoration, the basic tenor of Benedict’s policies was to conciliate the British.
¹⁵
At the same time, he had a very high personal regard for both James and Henry, as evinced in the 1747 elevation to the cardinalate.