Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (13 page)

But perhaps the prince’s finest moment in Roman society was the great ball given in Cardinal Rohan’s summer palace, the Palazzo Pamphili in the Piazza Navona, in February 1741. This was on a vast scale. The usual boundaries between the three drawing rooms and the three playing rooms were discarded. There was a sixty-piece orchestra; the Cardinal himself held court in a hall of mirrors.
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Roman high society was out in force for the (literally) glittering occasion. Their fine ladies dripped with precious stones. Yet the show was stolen by Charles Edward, attired in Highland dress and sporting a cluster of jewels that dimmed the lustre of the many fine pieces already there.
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These jewels were valued at 40,000 scudi and were alleged to have been part of a sumptuary courtship display aimed at winning the hand of the Princess of Massa. Jewels of this quality were unavailable in Italy, and there was a subtle symbolism involved
in
their display on this occasion, since it suggested that the Stuarts had access to wealth and craftsmanship beyond the reach of the Roman nobility.
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Just as the jewels surpassed in beauty anything made in Italy, so were the Stuarts meant to overtop the local grandees. There could be no doubting their success that evening.

(1739–42)

HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY IS
a seductive doctrine. From the standpoint of the twentieth century it is easy to make the mistake of seeing the Jacobite movement as inevitably doomed, and the Jacobite risings as mere ‘local difficulties’ along the line of march of a triumphant Hanoverian succession. Both the ‘Whig theory of history’, championed by Macaulay and his successors, and the Namierite orthodoxy that supplanted it in the twentieth century, consigned Jacobitism to the waste bin of history, the former explicitly, the latter by implication. It is only in very recent years that scholars have come to appreciate the gravity of the threat posed to the Whig/Hanover system by the exiled Stuarts.
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The revisionist view depends largely on shedding preconceptions and judgments by hindsight and returning to the original sources. If we view the period up to 1750 not through the distorting lens of nearly two hundred and fifty years of later history but as seen by contemporaries, a very different picture of the importance of Jacobitism emerges. From politicians at the apex of the élite, like Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Chesterfield and Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, we discern an anxiety about the Jacobite threat amounting at times almost to hysteria. This is reflected in the work of the literary jackals who paid deference to these lions, especially Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe.

The Hanoverian dynasty, and its unflinching ally in Parliament from 1715–61, the Whigs – the party of Walpole, the Pelhams and the elder Pitt – knew that it was vulnerable to the Jacobite challenge on a number of grounds. The German kings were widely unpopular, their culture alien, their interests continental. It was the received opinion of the time that English foreign policy was almost entirely a
function
of the interests of the German state of Hanover. Walpole’s system of patronage – ‘Old Corruption’ – bought off some critics, but not nearly enough. Its benefits were restricted to a small élite. Excluded was not just the gentry but the mass of the ‘middling sort’ of people. The social basis of the Whig/Hanoverian ascendancy was tenuous and precarious.

Moreover, on ideological grounds the supporters of the Hanoverian
status quo
could not discredit Jacobitism effectively.
²
The Whig prescription of political quietism recommended to its critics was refuted by the behaviour of the founding fathers of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688. The very powerful ‘Country’ critique of Whig corruption used by the Tories and other political dissidents inside England was endorsed and co-opted by the Jacobites. The Jacobites, too, had the attraction that they advanced beyond merely abstract denunciation of the Walpole political system and held out the hope that they might actually destroy it. The one trump card Walpole and the Hanoverian kings held was the Stuarts’ religion. Anti-Catholicism was a powerful bugbear which Walpole’s propagandists never ceased to exploit, even though one of the more ingenious black propagandists, Defoe, himself admitted that he knew of ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would shed the last drop of their blood against popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.
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The older historical view held that Walpole cynically played the Jacobite card for his own ends throughout the twenty years of his hegemony (1721–42), that he had no real fear of Jacobitism, that, moreover, the Whigs genuinely feared the ‘popery’ and ‘arbitrary tyranny’ of the Stuarts. The newer ‘revisionist’ view demonstrates that Walpole was not bluffing: he really did fear the Jacobites and all their works, and his fear had a much more solid basis than the religious scruples to which he and his acolytes paid lip-service.

Walpole’s state was poised between an older landed class declining in power and a new rising aristocracy of money. It was thus in that limbo later memorably dubbed the ‘half-state’, not yet strong enough to beat off all challengers. The peculiar fear held by all beneficiaries of this inchoate capitalist system was that the Stuarts, if restored to power, would dismantle it in all three of its aspects, agrarian, financial and commercial. Not only would a triumphant Catholic dynasty have to do something about former church lands. It would surely also cancel the national debt, thus ruining fundholders, and would make commercial concessions to France in India and America as the price of Bourbon help in the Jacobite restoration.
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The fears entertained by the Hanoverian élite had a firm basis
in
fact. It was no secret that Scotland had been extraordinarily discontented ever since the 1707 Act of Union, especially since the expected benefits of opening colonial trade to Scottish merchants had not yet materialised. Ireland was a simmering cauldron, controlled by a mixture of carrot and stick: draconian penal laws whose importance was in their bite rather than their bark, since the Catholic gentry was co-opted by the very lax implementation of those penal laws.
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Add to this the endemic riots and discontents of mainland England – disturbances which were often legitimised by reference to ‘King James’
⁶
– and it can well be appreciated that Walpole and his followers often felt themselves to be perched on the edge of a rumbling volcano. Those who supported the Hanoverian dynasty genuinely feared the Jacobite threat, and they were right to do so.

But the Jacobites in turn threw away most of their chances. The failure of the 1715 rising was followed by an even greater fiasco in the rising of 1719. The year 1722 saw the failure of the important Layer/Atterbury plot in England. And any chance of constructing a grand European alliance against England was ruined for James in 1725 when Clementina left him. The credibility of the Jacobite movement was in tatters.

Then 1726 brought further problems for the Jacobites. France was always the key to restoration of the Stuarts, yet for seventeen years (1726–43) French policy was dominated by Cardinal Fleury, whose foreign policy can be summed up as ‘peace at any price’. André Hercule de Fleury, bishop of Fréjus had been the infant Louis XV’s tutor since 1715. The astute restraint with which he opposed the duc de Bourbon during the latter’s tenure of supreme power in France (1723–6) assured his succession as first minister, as also his elevation to the purple. Fleury’s pacific policies were echoed across the Channel by Walpole’s cautious approach to foreign affairs. After 1727 there was no longer any hope for the Stuarts from Austria, or, after 1730, from Russia.

Yet, though moribund, Jacobitism did not die. In the years when Charles Edward was growing to manhood, it performed three extremely important functions. For the Tories in England it provided a countervailing ideology and source of inspiration. The proscription of the Tory party after 1715 and the barring of office-holding to its luminaries produced a sense of desperation that could be assuaged with hopes of a Stuart restoration. Walpole’s branding of the Tory party as crypto-Jacobite became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Increasingly the English Tories saw Jacobite rescue as the only way out of an apparently endless sentence in the political wilderness.
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Second, in the first half of the eighteenth century it was the Jacobite movement that provided the checks and balances against the Whig/Hanoverian system. Curiously, in this way Jacobitism may have helped to head off revolution in England. With no internal brake, French absolutism careered unchecked towards catastrophe at the end of the century. The Hanoverian state, at least until 1760, had to rein in the worst excesses of executive power for fear of the political alternative across the water.
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Third, Jacobitism as an international force provided the ‘ultimate deterrent’ by means of which continental powers could obstruct British expansionism. It was bad luck for the Jacobites that France was unwilling to confront England during the 1720s and 1730s because England was not yet clearly perceived as the major threat to French global interests.
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Yet by the late 1730s rumours of war abounded. At the same time, for quite other reasons, discontent began to build in the Highlands, always the Jacobites’ military nucleus. Charles Edward undoubtedly seemed to be the right man in the right place at the right time.

The Glenbucket mission to Rome in 1737–8 is sometimes credited with being the first cause in a chain of events that eventually precipitated the 1745 rising.
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John Gordon of Glenbucket brought James word that the Highlands were in a ferment, that now was the time for a combined operation: a Jacobite rising in Scotland and a French invasion of England. James responded by sending one of his aides, William Hay, to Scotland on an intelligence mission. Hay was introduced into Scottish Jacobite circles by John Murray of Broughton (who had met Charles Edward in Rome in 1737 and was later to be his secretary during the ’45). An association of Scottish Jacobites was formed, including Lord John Drummond senior, the duke of Perth, Lord Lovat, Lord Linton (later earl of Traquair), Donald Cameron of Lochiel and William MacGregor of Balhaldy. In the early 1740s the most important of these was Balhaldy, for on instructions from James he went to Paris to work in harness with the Stuart agent Lord Sempill.

James, who had always complained bitterly about Jacobite factionalism, helped to compound it by employing O’Brien and Sempill as parallel agents, now confiding his most secret dealings with the French to one, now to the other. But it is clear that Sempill and Balhaldy, largely by ‘expedient exaggerations’ forced the pace of Jacobite negotiations with Fleury along more forcefully than the sobersided and diplomatic O’Brien. Under their prompting, Fleury’s
first
instinct was to trigger a Jacobite rising in the Highlands, using Spanish troops.

Spain and England had been getting ever closer to warfare in the 1730s over British contraband commerce with the closed trading area of Spanish America, and Spanish use of its
guardacostas
to intercept British smugglers. In 1739 this tension broke out into open warfare, the ‘War of Jenkins’s Ear’. In the early stages of the conflict, in the Caribbean, the Spanish held their own. They lost Portobello to Admiral Vernon, but when Vernon attacked Cartagena they beat him off with heavy losses. It made sense, then, for the Jacobites to co-ordinate their plots with Spain.

The most obvious way to do this was to send Charles Edward to Madrid. But at this juncture James, who had been pressing hard the year before for such an invitation, became circumspect. The ghost of the failure of the 1719 rising, engineered by Spain, haunted James.
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It was quite clear that any Spanish enterprise would have to be directed against Scotland. But what James really wanted was a foreign invasion of
England
. This could come only from France. Moreover, James was not even certain that Spain was in earnest over a Scottish expedition: might they not simply be intending to use Charles Edward as a scarecrow? And the Pope was far from convinced that the Spanish would press hard enough for a Catholic restoration in England.
¹²

This papal angle soon became crucial in more ways than one. Clement XII had promised a large sum of money to back the proposed Hispano-Jacobite scheme, but before the financial details could be ratified he fell dangerously ill. It was thought best to wait and see whether the Pontiff would pull through and, if not, who would succeed him, before committing Charles Edward to Spain.
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The winter weather of 1739–40 was singularly harsh. Not only did it carry off the ailing Pope, but it meant there was no question of the prince’s leaving for Spain before the spring. When spring came, James took one of his rare firm decisions. His elder son’s going to Spain was no longer even discussed. There were three main reasons for the decision. The first was the negative reports James was receiving from his representatives Ormonde and Marischal in Madrid. The count of Montemar ordered the two Jacobite emissaries to leave Madrid for the coast of Galicia, where they (and later the prince) would join an expedition to Scotland. Neither Ormonde nor Marischal believed the Spanish were sincere and asked for further assurances. Montemar became angry and tried to browbeat the Jacobites – precisely
the
wrong tactics with proud and obstinate men like Ormonde and Marischal.

A series of acrimonious meetings took place, at the end of which Marischal reported to James that the court at Madrid was patently insincere.
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The last thing Elizabeth Farnese wanted was a military stroke that would bring a quick end to the war with England. Moreover, the openness with which Charles Edward’s advent was talked about in Spain meant that the military project must be bogus. The Spanish were so contemptuous of the Jacobites and so cavalier in their tacit admission that they were merely using the Stuarts that they could not even tell a consistent story. While the line being fed to Ormonde and Marischal concerned an expedition from Galician ports to Scotland, the rumours being put about by Spain in France were to do with a descent on Ireland from Cadiz, using the prince.
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