Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (26 page)

Though many of the townspeople were loyal to the Hanoverians, bonfires were lit to welcome Charles, church bells were rung, and at least some houses were illuminated.

Even the loyalists were impressed by Charles's appearance. "He is a fine person," one eyewitness wrote, "six foot high, a very good complexion, and presence majestic." Another found him "tall, straight, slender and handsome" in his green Scotch bonnet laced with gold, white wig. Highland plaid and broadsword. A crowd followed him as he walked across the marketplace into Full Street and on to Exeter House, the handsome, red-brick Elizabethan mansion where he was to spend the next two days.

Here good news reached him. Help from the continent had arrived. Some eight hundred Irish and Scottish troops fighting in the French army had landed at Montrose, led by Lord John Drummond, and added to these were two thousand more Scots who had come out to fight for the Jacobites since Charles left Edinburgh. Thus Drummond had an army two-thirds the size of the one at Derby, and there was every indication that still more Scotsmen would join in the coming weeks. Drummond brought with him orders from King Louis to make war against George II—referred to in the orders as the "Elector of Hanover"—and to assist Charles "in the taking possession of Scotland, England, and Ireland, if necessary, at the expense of all the men and money he is master of." Drummond claimed the title of "Commander-in-Chief of his most Christian Majesty's forces in Scotland," and he and his troops were the vanguard of a larger army yet to come from France. There was news of this larger army as well. Charles's envoy to Paris, Kelly, sent word that the rest of the invasion force would embark from France in fifteen days or at most three weeks. Meanwhile, Kelly urged, the Jacobites should "stand their ground, since a retreat must be fatal."

The following morning, December 5, the Derby streets were aswarm with soldiers, buying everything from powder flasks to buttons and handkerchiefs. According to Lord George Murray's aide-de-camp Johnstone, they expected to engage Cumberland the next day, and were eager for the fight, their "heroic ardor" high. "They were to be seen," he wrote, "during the whole day, in crowds before the shops of the cutlers, quarreling about who should be the first to sharpen and give a proper edge to his sword."
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The ordinary soldiers knew nothing as yet of the events in Scotland, but when Charles told the members of his council what he had learned, their view of the army's situation and prospects changed. Charles persisted in his desire to go on to London; the chiefs. Lord George Murray and the other officers were convinced that it would be preferable to retreat.

They made a forceful case. With a sizable second army in Scotland, and French reinforcements on the way, there was no need to risk the forty-five-hundred-odd men in Derby by pitting them against Cumberland's superior numbers and, after that, against the defenders of the capital massed at Finchley. Immediate victory would be gratifying but short-sighted, and in the long run wasteful and unnecessary. Besides, they argued, the taking of London had always been predicated on the cooperation of large numbers of English Jacobites, and so far these English Jacobites had proven to be a phantom.

Lord George, Ogilvy and Elcho were the staunchest proponents of this view, Elcho telling Charles bluntly that if he advanced toward London he would be in Newgate gaol within a fortnight.

To Charles, retreat was simply inconceivable, and at first he ignored the subject entirely and began considering the next day's order of march. But Lord George, whose discontent with the entire enterprise still smoldered and whose tendency to clash personally with Charles was never far below the surface, spoke up to demand a resolution of the question of whether to go on or turn back.

Charles was outraged. They were almost at the gates of London. Their objective was within their grasp. The men were excited and battle-ready, while Cumberland's army was exhausted and the rabble at Finchley was hardly an army at all. There was absolutely no reason to turn back, and every reason to go forward, he argued. They were feared, they were the better fighters, the French were on their way to help them, surely the English Jacobites would declare themselves once London was secured for King James.

At that moment Charles saw, far more accurately than his cautious officers, that the momentum of victory lay with his men. It was vital, he could not ultimately succeed without it. And he would squander it irretrievably if he retreated.

He argued on, an ebullient twenty-four-year-old convinced of the tightness of his view confronted with the equal conviction of many older and more seasoned men, most of them old enough to be his father. Murray's harsh arguing was distressingly paternal. And they were almost all against him. They even forced him to admit that, despite what he had been telling them all along, he had no actual commitments from any of the English Jacobite leaders.

The meeting ended in discord, the only agreement being to meet again in the early evening.

It was a shock, this negativity, coming as it did at the climax of three months of ever increasing, ever more astounding success. To Charles it made no logical sense whatever. He felt thwarted. To have the fruits of all this effort thrown aside as the result of an hour's heated discussion seemed monstrously wrong, totally unfair. He had to salvage the campaign if he could. He spent the afternoon in a vain search for pledges of support from the local Derbyshire gentry. But not surprisingly, they disappointed him. It was not that they were unsympathetic, merely that they lacked the daring to act then and there, with loyalist troops only a few miles away and many loyalist neighbors to confront.

The evening meeting went no better than the morning meeting had. Lord George, without waiting for any further discussion, began to give his advice on the best route of retreat. Charles tried to argue that Cumberland's men would inflict more casualties on them if they retreated than if they advanced, as he would "pursue them hotly, and be constantly at their heels." But there was no turning the clan chiefs, who had made up their minds. Even those few who had wavered earlier now announced themselves in favor of retreat.

"You ruin, abandon, and betray me if you do not march on," Charles shouted angrily, alternately bullying, shaming and pleading with the adamant men. They had named their preference. They were silent.

Filled with rage, Charles managed to maintain an icy dignity as he ordered the retreat.

"In future," he announced, "I shall summon no more councils, since I am accountable to nobody for my actions but to God and my father and therefore I shall no longer either ask or accept advice." Feeling alone and betrayed, unconsoled by the allegiance of some outside the council, such as Sheridan, who agreed with him, Charles managed to summon a façade of congeniality. Immediately after the council meeting a reception had been scheduled at Exeter House for the citizens of Derby. They rushed in by the hundreds to meet Charles, falling over one another in their haste, and upsetting the furniture. Charles withstood the assault, but the Stuart standard, placed in a prominent position nearby, was smashed.

The men, not being privy to the surprising decision their leaders had taken, marched out from Derby before dawn the next morning still believing that they were en route to London, and that they were headed for an engagement with Cumberland's army. Not until the sun rose did they realize, at first with disbelief, that they were being led away from the duke and the capital. Their cheerfulness turned, Johnstone wrote, to "expressions of rage and lamentation. If we had been beaten," he added, "the grief could not have been greater."

Chapter 16

Ten days after Charles and his enraged men left Derby for the north, a large flotilla of French ships put to sea from Dunkirk, their movements part of a vast design to concentrate men and ships at Calais and Boulogne for the invasion of England.

"Here we are at last on the eve of a great achievement," the naval minister Maurepas wrote in a letter to the Archbishop of Bourges. Elaborate naval preparations, under the direction of Antoine Walsh, were nearly complete. If all went as planned, twelve thousand French soldiers would be on English soil by the end of December.

King Louis was as enthusiastic and impatient for the invasion to begin as anyone else at his court. He supervised the coordination of the enterprise, pleased that the man he called the "Great Tyrant," George II, was to be dealt a killing blow at last, and arranged for a large sum of money to be carried across the Channel with the soldiers and delivered to Charles in person. And the king's squabbling ministers, who had been at odds with one another for many months over the issue of whether or not to support the Jacobites, had finally reached agreement on this venture.
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The soldiers were to embark from Calais and Boulogne, under the command of Louis François Armand du Plessis, Due de Richelieu, the great-grandnephew of the famed Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis's close friend. The aims of the invading force were set forth in a manifesto written by Voltaire, stating in English and French that, at the request of certain English supporters of the true English king, James Stuart, an army of restoration was being provided. This army intended no harm to the English, only their good—and the enthronement of their rightful ruler. Three thousand copies of the manifesto were printed and put aboard the transport ships, along with provisions, maps, arms, artillery and baggage. To preserve secrecy about the ultimate destination of the flotilla, the ships were not to be brought to their embarkation points until the last possible moment, so many stayed at Dunkirk and Ambleteuse and other coastal ports, being fitted out by local laborers pressed into service by the military.

The titular leader of the expedition was to be Henry Stuart, who had been in France for three months waiting to take his place at the head of the army of restoration. Somewhat shy, earnest, conscientious and, at twenty, still very young and sheltered, Henry had rented a house at Bagneux, where he settled in to wait for the expedition to get under way. He was introduced at court by his cousin the Duke of Fitzjames, but his first meeting with Louis XV at the end of October was awkward and humiliating.

Louis forgot about having agreed to grant Henry an audience, and when the appointed day came, Henry was kept waiting for hours. Finally the error was recognized by one of the king's servants, who ushered Henry into the royal presence. Even then all was not well, for instead of greeting Henry in brotherly fashion as a prince of royal Stuart blood, Louis demanded from him the deference he expected from lesser mortals—which wounded and confused the young man. (In fact, Henry's official incognito prevented any other welcome.) Tactless remarks were made on both sides, and the interview ended badly. The queen, however, Marie Leczcinska, who was a Pole and related to Henry and his brother through their mother. was warmer toward Henry than her husband had been. And by the time the ships and men were massing at the Channel ports in December, the king too had thawed. "Cousin," he said to Henry when the latter took his leave to go to Boulogne, "I hope you will dine quietly in London in January."
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While the French ships gathered in Boulogne and Calais, the English experienced a new wave of panic. Admiral Vernon was informed of the movement of the flotilla from Dunkirk—in fact he had known for several days that it would embark soon. But he was not at all certain that he could intercept it should it make for the English coast. He believed, based on combined intelligence reports, that the French had twenty-three thousand fighting men in the vicinity of the Channel ports. He expected six to seven thousand of these to constitute the invasion force, sailing in fifty hundred-ton ships. But would they land on the south coast, or in Suffolk, or elsewhere? Rumor had it that they had already landed at Pevensey Bay. If a southerly wind arose, Vernon informed his superiors, his ships would be driven northward, necessarily leaving the coasts of Kent and Sussex unprotected. Moreover, while his ships put to sea in pursuit of an enemy whose location and destination were unknown, the Kentish smugglers would inform the French that the coasts were clear.

Preparedness for an invasion was stepped up. Fire beacons were set up along the coast from Cromer to Harwich. The Thames bridges were fortified, and all aids to navigation on the river removed. Alarm signals warning of invasion were agreed on: seven cannons, one to be fired every half minute from the Tower, with an answering shot every half minute from St. James's Park. Marines in the Canterbury garrison received orders to march to Sheerness, other troops were sent to Maidstone, Rochester and Chatham, to remain on alert for further orders from the Admiralty.

In London, once again there was a run on gold at the Bank of England. The frantic populace, already overwrought from weeks of sleeplessness and fear, sought a scapegoat. When some French prisoners were being marched from the coast to London where they were to be confined at the Tower, word spread through the crowd that gathered to watch them that one young man among them was none other than Henry Stuart. "The mob," Walpole wrote, "persuaded of his being the youngest Pretender, could scarcely be restrained from tearing him to pieces all the way on the road, and at his arrival."
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Once again, for a few torturous days, a sort of madness gripped the public. Everyone came under suspicion. If a man withdrew his funds from the bank, he was suspected of wanting to send the money northward to support the retreating Stuart army. If he left his funds intact, people said it was because he had made a private agreement with the invaders. There was talk of raising still more regiments; the weavers offered a thousand men to fight for King George, and even the lawyers and judges "formed themselves into a little army," under the command of the lord chief justice, and presented themselves to guard the royal family at St. James's while the king went off to lead his troops.

Every Frenchman was suspect, and the sight of a Scotsman in the street was enough to start a riot. Frightened people reported hearing the sound of Highland drums, or French artillery, or the tramping of French boots along the country roads. So severe was the disarray in London that the heretofore cautious English Jacobites, the Earl of Barrymore and Sir John Hynde Cotton, sent word to Charles that they would join him there with what forces they could raise, if he changed his tactics and turned once again toward the capital.
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