Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (2 page)

I must first of all thank Her Majesty the Queen for allowing me to work in her archives. Then I must explain two procedural decisions I have taken that may offend purists. While leaving eighteenth-century punctuation intact, I have taken the liberty of tidying up Charles Edward’s eccentric spelling. He was an atrocious speller, and I personally find that his letters when reproduced in all their pristine orthography distract one from the content of what he is saying. The other decision I have taken is to switch from New Style dates to Old Style during the period of the ’45 itself. In the mid-eighteenth century there was an eleven-day difference in the two styles, but since the great events of the ’45 are all known by Old Style dates (e.g. ‘Black Friday’ as 5 December 1745 OS, not 16 December NS; Culloden as 16 April 1746 not 27 April), I have retained the traditional dates. All dates before and after the ’45 are New Style. Since long sea-voyages provide natural intervals both as prelude and sequel to the ’45, no confusion arises.

Anyone attempting to write a biography of this scope is bound to end up owing a considerable debt to dozens of (usually nameless)
individuals
, librarians and archivists of many different tongues and cultures. But there are some individuals who have helped me ‘above and beyond the call of duty’ whom I must mention by name. Over the years I have had many interesting conversations about the Jacobites and their world with friends. In this category I would particularly like to mention Jack Lindsay, Eveline Cruickshanks and Jeremy Black. Then there are the people who helped me by smoothing the ways to archives. Here a special mention is due to Mgr Charles Burns of the Vatican Archives, Father Francis Edwards SJ, curator of the Farm Street archive, and Dom Geoffrey Scott of Douai Abbey. I have spent many fascinating hours discussing the workings of the unconscious with the distinguished Australian psychoanalyst Dr George Christie. Sir Oliver Millar generously gave me his expert advice in finding suitable illustrations. Miss Jane Langton and her successor as Registrar of the Royal Archives at Windsor, Mrs Sheila De Bellaigue, went to extraordinary lengths to help me in my quest. I must thank also those scholars with whom I corresponded and who helped me by shedding light in their particular area of expertise: Professor L. L. Bongie (the Prince’s ladies), Dr Rohan Butler (Choiseul), Dr J. Rogister (Louis XV).

My list of acknowledgments would not be complete without mention of my editor at Routledge, Andrew Wheatcroft, who was enthusiastic about the project from the very start and who, as both a writer and an editor himself, was uniquely placed to appreciate the problems involved in writing such a work. But lastly and mostly, I must thank my wife Pauline both for her ‘in house’ editing and for her tolerance in enduring a thousand and one days and nights of Charles Edward arcana.

Twickenham, January 1987

On Christmas Day 1688 a tired and broken man arrived with his family at the French port of Ambleteuse, on his way to Versailles to ask Louis XIV for sanctuary. The man was James II, king of England, expelled from his kingdom by William of Orange in what was to be known to history as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. With him was his queen, Mary of Modena, and a six-month-old son, James Francis Edward. Thus was born the Jacobite movement. Neither the infant James Francis nor his son Charles Edward was ever to regain the throne of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland for the Stuart family. But both their lives would be dominated and ultimately destroyed by the effects of that fateful year 1688.

James Francis Edward Stuart grew up in the chateau of St Germain, which Louis XIV made over to the exiled James II. His early years saw the successive disappointment of all Jacobite hopes of restoration, whether by war of diplomacy. All Louis XIV’s tireless efforts on the Stuarts’ behalf came to nothing.
¹
At the death of William of Orange (William III of England) in 1701, and again on the demise of James’s daughter Anne in 1714, Jacobite aspirations soared only to plummet.
²
The end of 1714 saw the House of Hanover shakily ensconced on the throne of England. After the failure of the 1715 Jacobite rising, the Hanoverian tenure was more secure, though still very far from unshakeable.
³

The one unquestionable stroke of good fortune young James Francis enjoyed in these years was to be recognised by Louis XIV as James III,
de jure
king of England, after his father’s death in 1701. But how strongly personal was Louis XIV’s attachment to the Stuarts soon became clear after 1713. The conclusion of the War of Spanish Successsion forced French interests to override the idiosyncraces
of
Le Roi Soleil
. The Jacobite court was politely moved on: James III became ‘Jamie the Rover’, doomed to a series of rebuffs and disappointments.
⁴

There are two things to note about the young life of James III at St Germain (until 1713). One was his physical bravery. At the murderous battle of Malplaquet (1711) James distinguished himself by pronounced, almost reckless courage. The other was his stoicism. He came under the influence of Archbishop Fénelon of Cambrai, who inculcated a detached resignation to life’s buffetings and a quiet acceptance of God’s Providence. This ‘quietism’ was later to be the source of much friction with his son.
⁵

But as a politician James was a disaster. He had no power to move men. He was utterly lacking in charisma. He seemed to be singularly ill-starred, almost as if he had the Midas touch in reverse. The Jacobite rising of 1715 was a chilling demonstration of this. Detained on the Continent by adverse weather, James arrived in Scotland early in 1716 to find that his cause was already lost. His attempts to rally the clansmen by the force of his own personality led to humiliation for him and accelerated ruin for his Scottish supporters.
⁶

James’s fortunes in Europe were no better. Expelled from St Germain by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, he moved his miniature court onwards, unable for years to find a satisfactory base. He was successively in Bar (Lorraine), Avignon and Urbino. Finally, after much acrimonious negotiation with the Pope, James took up permanent residence at the Palazzo Muti in Rome.

The Palazzo Muti was no architectural masterpiece. The exterior was unprepossessing, and put in the shade by the glories of the church of Santi Apostoli adjacent to it on the Piazza. The Palazzo Muti was built around a square courtyard with ochred walls overlooking a small fountain in the centre. A dark, steep staircase led up from the entrance hall to the
piano nobile
where some semblance of regal atmosphere was imposed on the unpromising raw material.

Even before coming to Rome from Urbino, James had combined his plans for another Jacobite rising with his hopes for a suitable wife. James had thought seriously of marriage ever since the failure of the 1715 rising and the decline into terminal illness of his mother Mary of Modena (she died of cancer in 1718). His first choice was Benedicta, daughter of the duke of Modena; she reminded him of his mother both in looks and titles. James claimed to love Benedicta passionately. The duke of Modena was made of sterner stuff. He weighed James’s restoration prospects in the balance and found them wanting.
⁷

James’s quest for a wife now became less sentimental and more hard-headed. Charles Wogan, one of the heroes of the ’15, whom James had employed as an agent in Russia, was a dashing cavalier, likely to impress the great ladies of Europe. James sent him on a mission to scour the courts of Germany for a likely bride.
⁸
Wogan saw no one who fitted the bill in Westphalia or Bavaria, but at Ohlau in Silesia he met and was deeply impressed with Maria Clementina Sobieska, youngest daughter of the Polish Prince James Sobieski. The Sobieskis were one of Poland’s great families. It was Clementina’s grandfather John Sobieski who had turned back the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
⁹

Convinced that he had found the right woman for his king, Wogan returned to Italy. He described the sixteen-year-old Clementina to James. She was small and delicate, brown-haired, black-eyed and full of the spirited courage of the Sobieskis.
¹⁰
James sent to Silesia to ask for her hand. The Jacobite suit was accepted without demur.

There is something curious about James’s headlong dash into matrimony at the age of thirty. It was almost as though, having rejected sentiment as the basis for marriage after his disappointment with Benedicta of Modena, he became indifferent about his future partner, provided she satisfied the necessary minimum requirements for a royal bride. No doubt the fabled wealth of the Sobieskis, who were major creditors of the Polish state, had something to do with it. But if James had exercised his usual caution, he might have probed more deeply into the background of his future queen. Had he done so, he would have discovered a far from auspicious heredity. James Sobieski was a depressive, probably from the burden of living in the shadow of a famous father. Clementina’s mother, a daughter of the Prince Palatine, was beautiful and elegant but feather-brained and unstable. Already this legacy had tilted Maria Clementina in the direction of excessive piety.

None of this seems to have been considered at the time. After so many rebuffs in so many different areas of his life, James was overjoyed to have achieved acceptance. He prepared to receive Clementina in Bologna.

The future queen and her party set out for Italy, ostensibly on a pilgrimage to Loreto. But word of the real purpose of her journey leaked out. Determined to stop the marriage, which would breed fresh pretenders to his English throne, George I brought pressure on the Austrian Emperor to have the Sobieski party arrested. Because of Clementina’s dilatoriness at Augsburg, the arresting troops caught up with her at Innsbruck in October 1718.
¹¹

All that winter Clementina was under house (or castle) arrest. Both James and the Sobieski family contemplated calling the marriage off. Eventually a saviour was found: none other than Wogan, the man who had first ‘discovered’ Clementina. With three companions (the ‘three musketeers’ of Jacobite legend: Messrs Misset, Gaydon and O’Toole), Wogan engineered a daring rescue. Travelling to Innsbruck, they snatched Clementina from the Schloss Ambrass (April 1719) after a six-month captivity. Braving dreadful weather in the Brenner pass, Wogan and friends brought her to safety in the papal states.
¹²

When they arrived at Bologna at the end of April, James was not there to greet his queen. He had gone to Spain, hoping to take part in the Spanish expedition on his behalf that became the storm-tossed fiasco and military defeat of the ’19.
¹³
Consequently, it was by proxy that Clementina was married on 9 May 1719 to ‘James III, king of England’, with James Murray standing in for James.

The full, solemn marriage ceremony took place on 2 September 1719 at Montefiascone, seventy miles north-west of Rome, after James’s return from Spain. It was only on the very morning of the ceremony that James first set eyes on Clementina. The
de jure
monarch was impressed by what he saw. His queen was less so: she had been buoyed up by the romantic illusion that all Jacobites were of the swashbuckling stamp of Wogan and his ‘musketeers’; the dour and uncharismatic James brought her down to earth with a bump. Many years later James ruefully conceded that the marriage had never really had a chance on that basis alone; the contrast between himself and Wogan was too cruel. At the time all that James could see was that Wogan had served him well. In gratitude James made the Irishman a knight baronet and praised him extravagantly.
¹⁴

The royal couple returned to Rome where a papal guard was mounted daily outside the Palazzo Muti. The dark and gloomy Palazzo would not have been any princess’s idea of a fairy-tale castle. To compensate the Pope gave the couple the Palazzo Savelli at Albano as a summer residence. This became a great favourite with James. The country estate at Albano where he spent his
villegiatura
(summer holiday) provided him with one of his few lifelines in moments of great stress. There were too many of these for the ‘Old Pretender’ in the future.

But there were no regrets at first. In the honeymoon period James counted himself fortunate in having such a queen. And the following summer his joy was unconfined when he learned that Clementina was pregnant. At last he would secure the Stuart line with an heir.
Neither
he nor the queen could have had any idea that he had begotten a son who was to be one of history’s legendary figures.

Who was this man Charles Edward Stuart who became known to legend as Bonnie Prince Charlie?

The exiled Stuarts were at the centre of a web of hopes and aspirations entertained by hundreds of refugee clients, the men who had served them in their ill-fated attempts to recover the throne of England. The prince would thus be heir apparent to an esoteric cult. He would be in one culture but not of it; he would be of another culture but not in it. He would grow up speaking, writing and thinking in three languages but in none of them well. His ambitions would be centred on three distant kingdoms that he had never seen. He would have to carry the role of prince without the power and deference a prince normally commands. The gap between appearance and reality would always yawn like a chasm.

Other exiles have doubtless shared the same fate. But the most famous victims of diaspora, the Jews and the Huguenots, had a religious and cultural cohesion that gave them solidarity in the face of the outside world. One of the problems about the Jacobites was that they had no such binding ideological cement. Often the reason for people’s Jacobitism was spurious or adventitious. Because of their aristocratic connections, the Jacobites slotted easily into élite positions in the military and administrative cliques of Ancien Régime Europe. As their careers flourished, they became increasingly reluctant to jeopardise them on quixotic pro-Stuart insurrections in Britain.