Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (33 page)

From the start the affair was difficult, for though adultery was extremely commonplace in Louise's social circle, and was widely condoned as long as it was discreet, neither she nor her young husband were practiced adulterers, and her mother-in-law kept a strict eye on her. The Prince de Guéméné was in Holland with the army, and in his absence his mother ordered her servants to guard the virtue of her daughter-in-law. In order to see Louise, Charles had to resort to secret midnight coach rides between his house in the country and hers in Paris, with his servants armed and riding along with him as bodyguards. Her suspicions aroused, the vigilant mother-in-law eventually called in the Paris police, who waited, hidden in the shrubbery, outside Charles's residence in St.-Ouen and tracked the comings and goings of his coach.

At first the lovers cared nothing for danger—in fact Charles most likely enjoyed and welcomed it as adding even more excitement to the affair. But after a month or two, Louise became pregnant with Charles's child and morning sickness made her miserable. Meanwhile her husband had come home, and she needed to make him believe that the child was his—which meant spending her nights with him and not with Charles. This in turn led the jealous Charles to redouble his efforts to see her, even if it meant waiting outside the Guéméné residence until three o'clock in the morning or later. Things went from bad to worse, with Louise feeling ill, her mother-in-law tightening the guard around the house, and Charles threatening to lay siege to it and create a scandal unless he was allowed to spend the entire night with his mistress.
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Frustrated and enraged, he exploded, firing his pistols in front of the house after making exaggerated demands and threatening to leave Louise for another woman.

Not surprisingly, tongues began to wag and rumors to spread— although Louise's husband, whether from blindness, stupidity, cowardice or indifference, seems to have done nothing. Eventually, late in January, 1748, when Louise was three months pregnant, her father and her mother-in-law confronted her with their knowledge of the truth and forced her, after shedding floods of tears, to write to Charles and end the affair. He was to continue to see her, and his other relatives, in the conventional way so as to confute the rumors of infidelity, but it was all to be a pretense; as Bouillon told his daughter, in return for all their kindness toward him Charles had shown not only ingratitude but wickedness.

Apparently the affair did not wind down tranquilly. Louise, cut to the heart by the pain of losing; Charles and the humiliation of being forced to give him up, continued to write him anguished letters in which she threatened to kill herself and their unborn child unless he responded. Respond he finally did, but not until three months later, when he agreed to a brief midnight assignation in a rented carriage. And then he had the insensitivity, or cruelty, to tell her that he had acquired another mistress.
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The new mistress, Princesse Marie-Louise de Talmont, was as unlike Louise as possible. At forty-seven, she was still a serene, classic beauty, elegant and quintessentially womanly. She had had many lovers, quite a few of them distinguished, and she held their admiration by her celebrated wit and intelligence as well as by her beauty. Voltaire was captivated by her taste and her skill at repartee, others noted her sound judgment and absolute independence of action. Influential, highly placed at court, and, like Charles, a cousin of the queen, Mme. de Talmont had her detractors, one of whom, Mme. du Deffand, was eloquent in her dispraise. "She believes herself to be perfect," wrote du Deffand, ''she says so, and wants everyone else to believe it too." Vain, temperamental, capricious, she terrified her servants and everyone else forced to live with her. "She would like to be loved, but it is her vanity alone that demands it—her heart demands nothing."
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If Mme. de Talmont was cold, with a diamond-hard intelligence and a capacity for making shrewd judgments about the world, she must also have been very good company, able to entertain a man and flatter his vanity. Clearly Charles found the combination appealing, and she, in turn, desired him for his good looks and his considerable fame. They were both narcissistic; they were both ambitious, and both had daring—though hers was confined to the drawing room and the bedroom. After his ultimately disagreeable entanglement with Louise, and with her father and her vexatious mother-in-law (who had had the temerity to stage a verbal brawl with him in public), Charles must have found the older woman's frank, cosmopolitan sensuality refreshing. She did not make demands on him, or try to smother him, and though she was married, she did not seem to have any troublesome relatives to contend with.

Meanwhile, as Charles's amorous life unfolded, the War of the Austrian Succession was finally reaching its ragged end. After years of on-again, off-again fighting, some of it glorious, much of it brutal and wasteful of lives, all of it costly, the dozen or so warring states had had enough. A peace treaty had been negotiated, and its preliminaries were ratified at the end of April, 1748. The final version would not be signed for some months, but there was no doubt that it eventually would be. As expected, the English had imposed on the French as a condition of peace that King Louis recognize the Hanoverian succession and force the Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, to leave his realms.

But where was he to go? Rome was out of the question; to return to his father's house would be an unbearable humiliation. Yet many of the European states—even the small German-speaking principalities—were certain to refuse him entrance because to do so meant offending the reigning King of England. For Charles, the end of the war meant not only that he would have to find a new country to live in, but a new strategy to pursue. For however obliquely, the War of the Austrian Succession had been his war too; his invasion of England had been one dimension of the hostilities directed against Maria Theresa and her allies. And now that the war was over, he would have to find a new context for Stuart belligerence if he could.

The best way out of his dilemma, he was convinced, would be for him to get married. Choosing a Protestant bride would convince his future subjects in Britain that he was religiously tolerant, even if his brother was a cardinal of the Roman Church. Of course, locating the right woman would take time, the search had to begin immediately.

On May 1 Charles's agent, Sir John Graeme, left for Prussia with instructions to meet with King Frederick and propose that he give Charles his sister as a bride. If this proved unacceptable, Graeme was to ask on Charles's behalf for refuge in Prussia. Weeks went by, and finally Charles received word from Graeme that the mission had been a failure. King Frederick and the Elector of Hanover were becoming fast friends, and no marriage alliance was possible. Worse still, the Prussian king had great influence over the other German rulers, who also sought the favor of the Hanoverians.

Charles sent urgent word to Graeme to continue his search, secretly and in haste. There must be some Protestant prince who would oblige him, he insisted. He was ready to marry any woman sight unseen, provided she was a Protestant.

While Graeme went from court to court, finding rejection everywhere, Charles kept up appearances in Paris. He was seen at Mme. de Talmont's, he continued his visits to the opera and the Comedie-Française, where, as always, he was received with loud and prolonged applause. He also walked in the gardens of the Tuileries, where crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of him and cheer him as he passed. Everywhere he went he took his band of Highlanders, who were a spectacle in themselves, and he walked among them wearing a fur hat with a large white plume, looking larger than life and every inch a prince.

It was a display of bravado, for Charles knew that it would be only a matter of time before he was asked to leave the country. Possibly he felt that by entrenching himself sufficiently in the public eye he would have the public behind him when the authorities tried to enforce the peace treaty. The crowds he drew included more and more English tourists, who were permitted to visit France now that peace had been made. English women in particular made trips to Paris in order to attend the opera and applaud Charles, and while there they bought the souvenirs Parisian shopkeepers sold to commemorate his daring achievements in 1745. One such item was a map, with explanatory narrative, tracing Charles's route through Scotland and England. The printer sent the map to Charles for his corrections, which he obligingly gave, and the map sold well in the summer months as Parisians waited to hear that their king had asked Charles to leave.

In July and again in August, polite requests came from the French court—specifically, from the current Foreign Minister de Puisieux— that Charles vacate his lodgings and oblige the king by leaving the country. Each time he responded by claiming that he had a right to remain, that the king had promised him refuge, and that if the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was invoked against him, he had a treaty of his own, the Treaty of Fontainebleau signed in 1745, to rely on. It was no good pointing out to him that the newer treaty took precedence; he had a formal protest ready, and copies of this protest, like copies of his itinerary in England and Scotland, sold well throughout the summer. So outwardly confident was he that he could not be dislodged that in September he rented a new and grander house than the one he had been living in and paid a year's rent in advance.

In October, however, the situation changed. The final version of the peace treaty was signed, Charles's grace period had expired. The French ministers could no longer afford to let him embarrass them, and the king, though still somewhat sympathetic, was becoming annoyed. He went to the trouble of arranging to have Charles lodged at Fribourg, where, he assured him via his messengers, he would be comfortable and treated with honor. But Fribourg was not acceptable. He then sent the humane, soft-spoken Due de Gesvres to reason with Charles, hoping that this envoy would find him more compliant. But though the duke found Charles hospitable, he also found him adamant. Charles would not budge. And he managed to give his kindly visitor the impression that, if necessary, he would defend himself with the formidable array of muskets, sabers and other weaponry that he kept on view in his house.

By November 21, Charles's refusal to depart from Paris was the "grand topic of the day," according to Argenson's memoirs. People talked of nothing else, and cheered their hero louder than ever when he made his appearances. Rumor had it that he had threatened never to leave France alive; the king's guardsmen would have to kill him if they tried to eject him—or he would kill himself. Some blamed Mme. de Talmont for his recalcitrance, and she, prudent courtier that she was, decided to detach herself from the young man who was causing such trouble. The king warned her that she herself would be exiled if she admitted Charles to her house. She ordered her servants to refuse him entrance, but he insisted on making a nuisance of himself, just as he had done when Louise de Rohan-Guéméné ended her affair with him. He made himself conspicuous in the Talmont gardens, he shouted at his mistress's servants, and when all else failed he swore that he would break down the gates if they were shut to him again.
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One of Charles's more level-headed companions, Francis Bulkeley, persuaded him not to make good his threat but his provocations to the French court continued. King Louis, by now thoroughly justified in looking on Charles as a hysterical child, had some weeks earlier appealed to the child's father for help in handling him. James sent his son a letter commanding him to obey the terms of the treaty and the urgent pleas of the French ministers. Charles calmly pocketed his father's letter unread. However, Louis too had received a copy of James's letter, and took it as justification to play his final card. Late in the evening of December 3, the Due de Gesvres delivered an ultimatum: Charles now had three days to leave Paris and nine to leave France. Otherwise he would be forcibly expelled.

On the third day following, Charles was still at his residence, holed up with his arsenal of weapons, swearing, according to his tense servants, that he would blow himself up with gunpowder the instant any French guardsman approached him. Meanwhile the king had turned the problem over to the Due de Biron, colonel of the French Guards, ordering him to arrest Charles and leaving the logistics of the arrest to him.

On December 10, Biron invested Paris with twelve hundred royal troops, with detachments of his own French Guards placed strategically near Charles's house and vicinity. After dark that evening, Charles left his house as usual to attend the opera, accompanied by his three principal companions. Sir Henry Goring, Sir James Harrington and Michael Sheridan. In anticipation of their arrival at the opera, Biron had placed guardsmen in street clothes near the entrance, who mingled with the crowd that always collected there before a performance.

The men were watchful. They had been told that Charles would be armed, and might try to shoot himself if provoked. They were also on alert to break up the notoriously volatile crowd should any disturbance arise. The coach pulled up, the four men got out—one of them, conspicuous by his height and elegant dress, the celebrated Pretender to the British throne. As the crowd began to cheer, and Charles, preceding his companions, walked toward the opera doors, five of the plainclothed guardsmen surrounded him—so suddenly that he had no time to react. He was cut off from his friends, his arms pinioned, and carried swiftly out of sight of the dazed onlookers. One of the guardsmen produced a length of silk cord to bind him, while the others hastily searched and disarmed him, informing him that he was under arrest and that the bonds were for his own protection.
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The remaining guardsmen and soldiers moved in to intimidate the crowd while Charles was spirited away in a coach to the prison of Vincennes where he was given relatively spacious quarters.

With the angry Charles in custody, the guardsmen proceeded to seize his companions, officers and servants. Goring, Harrington and Sheridan were taken off to the Bastille, as were seven other gentlemen of Charles's household, eleven French servants and two Savoyards, also servants, and five Scots and two Irish bodyguards. Mme. de Talmont's footman was also caught in the net; he was delivering a miniature portrait of his mistress to Charles when the arrests were made.