Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (12 page)

Chapter 7

Long before dawn on the cold winter morning of January 9, 1744, the household was astir. It was another of those mornings when Charles, eager to be out and shooting game, awakened in his riding coat and boots and was up and ready to be off before the huntsmen had finished preparing themselves.

The members of the hunting party began to assemble in the courtyard, the breath of men and horses condensing in the chill air. The day's destination was the Pontine Marshes near the town of Cisterna, and Charles, who had just celebrated his twenty-third birthday, and eighteen-year-old Henry were both to take part, along with Charles's tutor Murray and various others. They were to hunt wild boar, a dangerous sport, and as usual Charles was impatient to be after his quarry.

He was so impatient that he did not wait for Henry, but dashed off ahead with only the postilions and servants, Murray, and one or two others accompanying him. Henry and the remainder of the party would catch up with them at Albano, Charles said, and they rode on. Suddenly, a few miles along, there was another change of plan. Charles and two servants pulled ahead of the rest of the riders, and Murray, to distract attention from what was really going on, pretended to hurt himself in a fall, necessitating a delay. While the others lingered behind to attend to him, Charles and his servants widened their lead, but instead of going to Albano as announced, they turned northeast toward the Tuscan border. A brief stop along the way was all that Charles needed to transform his appearance. He changed his wig and put on the coat and ensign of a Neapolitan courier. Farther on, he and his companions mounted fresh horses and he acquired a passport identifying him as Don Biagio, an Italian officer in the service of Spain.

Charles dared not stop, though the winding, snowbound roads made the going treacherous and there was always the chance that he might be recognized and seized. Tuscany was a stronghold of British intelligence, and British spies abounded in Florence. Jacobite spies were often sent from Rome to attack them in an attempt to prevent the transmission of intelligence to England. In one such incident, not long before the events of early 1744, a British agent named Dixon was set upon by one of James's men, Chamberlayne, and left for dead. Dixon survived the attack, but was so wounded and scarred that he no longer had any value to the British.
¹
The clandestine battles went on, and in the intelligence underworld the capture of James's son as he attempted to flee northward would have been the supreme coup.

The British envoy at Florence, Horace Mann, sent out a description of Charles, accurate save for the erroneous detail that his eyes were blue instead of brown. 'The young man is above the middle height," Mann wrote, "and very thin. He wears a light bag-wig; his face is rather long, the complexion clear, but borders on paleness; the forehead very broad, the eyes fairly large, blue, but without sparkle, the mouth large with the lips slightly curled; and the chin more sharp than rounded."
²

It had been suspected for some time that Charles would try to make his way to France, though exactly when, and exactly how, the British could not predict. It was difficult for him to go anywhere without being observed, for the activities of James's household were public knowledge and neither of James's sons went anywhere without servants in attendance. The boar-hunting party that provided Charles's opportunity to escape had been announced for January 12, then had been rescheduled for the ninth at short notice, and even then a series of swift and sudden maneuvers had been required to detach Charles from his retinue once the hunt was under way. Complete secrecy was not possible; the only chance Charles had to outsmart the British and their Italian colleagues was to outrun them, and this he was determined to do.

With his fatigued servants in tow, he rode for five days and nights with only a minimum of rest and no halting for changes of clothes. The horses slithered across frost-covered tracks and stumbled through snowdrifts, their riders' faces and hands blistered by freezing winds and pelted by snow and sleet. Charles seemed indefatigable, but his companions were completely exhausted. "I gave them little or no rest," Charles wrote later to his father. "The two servants suffered by my impatience to arrive at the end of my journey. ... If I had been to go [
sic
] much further I should have been obliged to get them tied behind the chaise with my portmantle, for they were quite
rendu
."
³
The suffering paid off, for Charles was able to get to Massa, and from thence by boat to Genoa, where he finally allowed himself a brief respite from travel.

After a day and a half he went on to Savona, where an obstacle of some sort presented itself—possibly a quarantine. He was delayed in Savona for some six days, but then managed to get aboard a small fishing craft which took him, through waters patrolled by the British fleet, to Antibes.

It was essential to maintain the fiction that Charles was continuing his boar hunt at Cisterna all this time, and to this end Henry, who was always willing to play the loyal second to his brother, went on with the hunt and helped to keep up pretenses. He sent loads of boar meat to the pope, to Cardinal Aquaviva and to other friends. He professed himself willing, for Charles's sake, to do anything at all, and did not complain about the fact that he had been told nothing of the plan in advance. He acted as if his brother were with him, hiding his anxiety for Charles's welfare from everyone but his father, to whom he wrote of his impatience "to hear news of our Dear Traveller, which news I doubt not will be but good, for the hand of God seems to be remarkably upon him on this occasion." The others in the hunting party played their parts equally well, and when the entire entourage returned to Rome on January 17 they took with them a tall, fair young man who resembled Charles—a double who apparently succeeded in convincing the Romans that he was indeed Charles Stuart.

The last leg of Charles's journey was accomplished without incident, though while he was at Antibes rumors of his presence spread and he could have been endangered had he lingered. From Antibes he rode toward Lyons, still keeping up a fast pace, and finally arrived in Paris at the end of January.

By this time the secret of his flight was known, and James was receiving the congratulations of the French and Spanish ministers in Rome. It was James, of course, who had carefully planned and arranged the entire dramatic episode. Believing, as he wrote to his agent in Paris Lord Sempill, that it was ''to be now or never in relation to France," he had decided to send his son northward to join the expedition to England. Earlier he had sent Balhaldie along the route Charles was to take, to prepare the way, and had made arrangements with Cardinal Aquaviva to supply Charles with post-horses and with his false passport. James knew that he could rely on Charles to unleash his pent-up energies to their fullest once he was given a chance to act. He believed that if anyone could run the gauntlet of bad weather, miserable roads and British spies it would be Charles. He seems to have believed that the invasion attempt would be a success, for he ordered new liveries for the members of his household, liveries to be put on when word arrived that Charles had ridden into London in triumph and proclaimed his father king.

Charles arrived in Paris, went directly to the lodging of Lord Sempill, and waited. Sempill was optimistic, confident that once the invasion force landed Londoners would rise up and overthrow King George. Charles too was optimistic, writing to his father that he had "met with all that could be expected from the King of France." King Louis, he said, was expressing "great tenderness," and was evidently prepared to support the Stuarts to the hilt. It may be that Louis sent Charles messages through intermediaries, but he did not meet with him face to face, and this filled James with "no small astonishment and concern." After all the assurances he had received that Charles would be put ashore in England with the invasion fleet, after all the trouble he had gone to and the risk Charles had taken, the French king's "negligent and indifferent behavior" toward Charles was dismaying.

It was difficult for the Jacobites to know how to interpret the behavior of the French, for neither Charles nor James nor any of their agents had a broad enough perspective to arrive at judicious conclusions. James, who relied heavily on his then preferred informant Daniel O'Brien, believed that Cardinal Tencin was the principal friend of the Jacobites at the court of Louis XV. Yet Tencin was only one member of King Louis's council of state, and was in fact the last member to be informed of the king's decisions regarding the invasion plan. Tencin was also embroiled in a bitter rivalry with the foreign minister Amelot—who was Sempill's principal court contact—and it was Amelot, along with the navy minister Maurepas, who were the moving forces behind the whole expedition. The fact that the utmost secrecy about the invasion plan was preserved, even in the highest government circles, led at times to poor communication, confusion and misunderstandings between French officials and the Jacobites. Yet there can be no doubt that the king and his ministers had every intention of launching an invasion, and were at no point merely pretending to do so.
⁴

After two weeks in Paris Charles moved to the Channel port of Gravelines, where he could be at the heart of the rapidly forming invasion army. Soldiers were gathering there in large numbers, and at St.-Omer and Bergues as well, waiting for the final order to go to Dunkirk and board the transport ships. It would have been easy for Charles to leave his rooms and walk through the narrow streets of Gravelines, disguised as a soldier himself or as a serving man, all but lost—save for his height and handsome face—amid the crowds and noise. After all that he had been through the sight of so much activity, all of it evidently military, must have been reassuring. The harbor was full of packet boats and cargo ships laden with timber and coal and stores, soldiers thronged the streets and taverns and the marketplace, laborers loaded sacks of grain, casks of water, beer and wine and other provisions for an army of ten thousand men.

"Little intrigues are going on for Mr. Fisher's amusement," Charles wrote cheerfully if cryptically to his father, referring to himself as "Mr. Fisher." Because of a last-minute decision to change the landing site from Maldon in Essex to Blackwall in the Thames estuary, the launching date for the invasion had been set back, but clearly the delay was only temporary. Within days the final phase would begin, the men would mass at Dunkirk, the transports would be launched and the French fleet would sail up the Channel to engage the English.

The British were preparing for the worst. They knew, through informants and through the observations of their own seamen, that an invasion force was soon to be launched. They knew that Charles was in Paris, or not far away. They made diplomatic protests, reminding the French of guarantees they had given not to allow any of the exiled Stuarts to enter French territory, though realizing that these protests were only a matter of form. Toward the end of February the English fleet, commanded by Sir John Norris, was at Spithead and the government was concerned for the safety of the capital. All Roman Catholics in London were commanded to take an oath of allegiance to the sovereign; those who refused to do so were to be sent at least ten miles outside the city, their horses and arms taken from them. Unauthorized arms were seized, and suspected Jacobites put in custody. Everything that could be done, was done, but the inescapable fact remained that Britain could muster practically no defending troops, for her army was on the continent supporting Hanoverian interests.

The French knew this, and it made them eager to strike. Because of the delay in embarkation they had lost the advantage of surprise, yet they expected to be able to hold the English navy at bay long enough to effect a landing. Once they were safely inside the Thames estuary, the rest would go smoothly.

The French admiral, Roquefeuille, led his squadron up the Channel from Brest and did not at first sight any British warships. Norris, with twenty ships of the line, was in the Downs, but Roquefeuille assumed that the British had not yet left Portsmouth and sent a signal ahead to indicate that the army should embark from Dunkirk as soon as possible. Shortly after this the French fleet encountered the British near Dungeness, but it was late in the afternoon, and both the hour and the state of the tide were wrong for an engagement. Roquefeuille, sobered by the strength of Norris's fleet, and with a storm coming on, made for the French coast. The storm blew harder, sudden winds churning the water into giant peaks and troughs in which many of the French vessels foundered. It was an omen of worse to come. Early in March fierce winds drove on across the Channel, striking at the unwieldy transport vessels where they were massed in the harbor at Dunkirk. Many were swept onto the rocks, where their valuable cargoes of men, animals and provisions were smashed to bits. Charles and Marshal Saxe had already embarked when the storm arose, and were lucky to return to port with their lives.

Hardly had the surviving men and ships had time to regroup and consider what to do next when bad weather struck once again, sending more ships and men to the bottom. By this time the French could no longer delay declaring war on Britain. It was understood that the battles of this newly declared war would be fought in Flanders, and so no troops could be spared for an invasion headed by a Stuart claimant to the British throne. The logic of the situation was relentless; Charles, who had always been at best a useful ancillary to French ambitions, now found that he was expendable. It was not that the French were fickle, merely that circumstances now forced them to alter the deployment of their forces. King Louis made provision for Charles to receive a pension of five thousand livres a month, and then turned his attention elsewhere. Marshal Saxe left Dunkirk to lead the French army in Flanders.

It was characteristic of Charles that, having survived the dangers of drowning and shipwreck, having watched his opportunity to become the conqueror of England melt away overnight, and having lost King Louis's attention, he impulsively declared that he would sail to England by himself. He would go "in an open boat," risking all on the hope that ''his presence could be of service in England." The French prudently advised him to stay out of sight, suggesting that he take refuge with his cousin the Bishop of Soissons. But Charles was reluctant to leave the coast, and lingered on at Grave-lines, made irritable by the constant advice of George Keith, Earl of Marischal. Unlike the fiery Balhaldie, the earl was possessed of a cool head, and good sense rooted in decades of military experience. He had sheltered James in Scotland in 1715, had played a major role in the abortive invasion attempt four years later, and had served Frederick the Great as well as James. He had been prepared to play his part in the invasion, but was resigned to accepting its failure. He knew folly when he saw it, and he saw Charles courting disaster with his rash talk of setting off for England alone.