Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (59 page)

Lochiel took the opportunity to deliver a stinging but dignified rebuke to the prince. The Avignon trip was singularly ill-advised, not just because the French might take the opportunity to conclude a quick peace while the prince was off their territory, but because he seemed to be putting his own pride and pique with France before the interests of Scotland. It behoved him to make some excuse, to say that he had gone to Avignon to throw off British spies who were dogging his footsteps. Finally, Lochiel pleaded, both morality and the prince’s own reputation required that he forthwith abandon his suit at Versailles for a descent on England. He owed it to the Scots to settle for what France was actually prepared to grant: a small expedition to Scotland.
⁷⁷

It is interesting that in the struggle between the good and bad father-figures, it was Lochiel who consistently urged the art of the possible (an expedition to Scotland), and Kelly who encouraged the prince in his ‘all or nothing’ posture (an expedition to England alone).
⁷⁸

Lochiel’s misgivings about the Avignon venture were shared by Benedict XIV, who condemned the prince as a firebrand. The prince had thrown himself into a well, and his father’s friends, like those in the fable, would have to let down a rope.
⁷⁹

It was not just the prince’s friends and supporters who were stupefied by his action. His departure was the talk of Paris.
⁸⁰
That it was foolhardy all agreed. All that remained was to assign it a meaning. Did it portend another unilateral Scottish venture?
⁸¹
Or was it the prelude to his return to Rome? The almost simultaneous departure of Dunbar from Rome to Avignon seemed to lend credence to the latter conjecture.
⁸²
The French ministers were so baffled that they decided to adumbrate contingency plans in the council in case the prince was already launched on another unilateral British venture.
⁸³

We have dealt at some length with the degree of stupefaction elicited by the first stage of the prince’s journey in order to underscore
the
awed incredulity that resulted when Charles Edward continued on to Spain. If the Avignon venture seemed to be the action of a blockhead, the Spanish mission genuinely appeared to seasoned observers like the work of a madman. It was a particular mortification to the prince’s supposed friend the Spanish ambassador. In all their time together Charles had not breathed one word about a mission to Spain. For once the dour and pessimistic O’Brien was not wrong when he reported to James that the prince had now lost all credibility as politician or statesman. He had left France without Louis XV’s permission, then added insult to injury by going to a foreign court for things Versailles had refused him. Moreover, his attitude to Spain was no less insulting. He proposed to enter Spanish territory without official permission, cutting across all James’s careful diplomacy on behalf of Henry. It was now clear to the most purblind Spanish grandee that there was a total lack of rapport between the prince and his father and brother.
⁸⁴

The prince was undaunted. As long as he had Kelly to play the sycophant, he heeded no other voices. With an aplomb completely unwarranted by all political realities, he set out for Spain, travelling by way of Montpellier, Perpignan and Barcelona.
⁸⁵

On 2 March he arrived in Madrid, accompanied by Colonel Nagle (one of Ormonde’s old followers), Dr Cameron and William Vaughan, a Welsh Jacobite who had been out in the ’45.
⁸⁶
He had hoped to meet up with Sir Charles Wogan, long in Spanish military service, but Wogan was now governor of La Mancha and absent from the court. But Sir Thomas Geraldin was there, and the prince at once sent him with a message for Carvajal, the Spanish chief minister.

The prince’s arrival was a deep embarrassment for Carvajal. He had not presented the letter for King Ferdinand that Charles had sent on from Barcelona. Carvajal still thought that he could persuade the prince to depart surreptitiously, before anyone knew he was in the kingdom. In the greatest secrecy he sent a coach to fetch the prince for a parley. This cloak-and-dagger approach excited Charles’s scorn: ‘I find all here like pheasants, that it is enough to hide their heads to cover the rest of their body, as they think.’
⁸⁷

The interview with Carvajal was difficult. The minister repeatedly urged the prince to go back. Doggedly Charles insisted that his letter to the king be delivered. Reluctantly Carvajal agreed. Next morning Carvajal appeared at the door of the prince’s inn with word that Ferdinand and his queen would like to see him.

At the royal audience the prince received the treatment he already
knew
so well from Louis XV. The Spanish king and queen wished him well, spoke of their personal friendship for the Stuarts, even guaranteed the continuance of a Spanish pension, but stressed that this was not the time to be thinking of large-scale expeditions. In the circumstances, they trusted the prince would not take it amiss if they asked him to return to France as soon as possible.
⁸⁸

These polite courtesies masked the political realities at court. The veils of illusion were lifted to some extent when the prince was refused permission to see the queen dowager Elizabeth Farnese. The prince was bitter about these facile protestations of friendship that had no content. He commented acidly: ‘One finds in old histories that the great proofs of showing such things are to help people in distress; but this, I find, is not now à la mode, according to the French fashion.’
⁸⁹

It was made clear to the prince that all his future dealings in Spain would have to be with Carvajal, a man he despised on sight: ‘a weak man just put in motion like clockwork.’
⁹⁰
That the prince was in a wounded, depressed state is clear from an incident when he was leaving the palace. The well-known singer Farinelli took him by the hand and said that they had met before in Italy. Outraged at this familiarity, the prince glared at the singer for his effrontery.
⁹¹

The private session with Carvajal that followed was even more painful. The prince put a number of firm questions to the minister. What help would Spain provide if France mounted an expedition? Would Spain agree to store 30,000 muskets and 10,000 sabres for him until the need arose? Would Carvajal grant commissions for raising three regiments in Spain? Most important of all, would he send three large merchant ships laden with corn to Scotland to succour the starving Highlanders, now suffering untold privations after Cumberland’s reign of terror?
⁹²
Carvajal promised to consider these points carefully. But on the loftier pretensions he could offer no comfort. Carvajal wound up the interview by dismissing all the prince’s grand designs as chimerical. He then asked him again to leave Spain. The prince insisted on another interview next day. Carvajal agreed, provided Charles left Spain the day after that.

But Carvajal proved just as unyielding at the next interview and again sharply requested him to leave Spain. The prince stalled, claiming that he was awaiting the arrival of his retinue. At this point Carvajal put his foot down. He would allow a period of grace for the ‘retinue’ to come up, but the prince must leave Madrid and wait in Guadalajara.
⁹³

Before he left Madrid, the prince visited the aged Lady Mary
Herbert
, an elderly female eccentric who earlier in life had refused to marry the duc de Bouillon and instead went off to Spain on a madcap scheme to exploit the mines of the Asturias. The prince found her living in a garret, very ill and in rags. He gave her all the money he had with him and his own greatcoat, for she was so reduced in penury that she no longer possessed outdoor clothes.
⁹⁴

Charles Edward arrived in Guadalajara with Geraldin on 8 March and immediately nagged Carvajal for an answer to his four propositions.
⁹⁵
On 11 March the minister’s answer arrived. He made no reply to the prince’s query about ancillary aid in the event of a French expedition. He dismissed out of hand the possibility of new regiments but agreed to provide the arms and provisions for Scotland.
⁹⁶

The prince replied by asking for Ferdinand’s personal answer to the expedition query.
⁹⁷
Not surprisingly, Carvajal ignored this. The writing on the wall was clear even for the prince. As a parting snub to Carvajal, he deliberately ignored protocol and wrote directly to Elizabeth Farnese to say how mortified he was that the dowager queen had not received him.
⁹⁸
Then he sent Geraldin and Archie Cameron back to Madrid to make sure Carvajal did send the provisions to Scotland.
⁹⁹
Finally, he shook the dust of Spain off his feet as fast as possible.

What had Charles Edward achieved in Spain? At a personal level, his charm had worked with the king and queen; even Carvajal admitted he had made a good impression at this level.
¹⁰⁰
As for the reportedly large sums given to the prince by Ferdinand, the stark reality was that Carvajal gave the prince just 1,000 pistoles to cover his expenses – an obvious snub.
¹⁰¹
Ever alert to the nuances of humiliation, Charles Edward adroitly turned the tables on Carvajal by pretending to regard this as a loan. On his return to Paris, he sent Carvajal a banker’s draft for the amount.
¹⁰²

But the prince’s efforts at the instrumental level had been worse than useless. The promised supplies were never sent to Scotland.
¹⁰³
At best he succeeded for a while in muddying the waters of international diplomacy. An earlier rumour that Spain was involved in another Jacobite project seemed verified.
¹⁰⁴
When it became clear that the Spanish court was deeply embarrassed by his visit, a French plot to stir up trouble between Spain and England was suspected.
¹⁰⁵
The chances of success for the prince’s Spanish mission were always so slim and its likely consequences so disastrous that one is tempted to seek the true explanation for the prince’s trip at the psychological level.

The way Charles excluded members of his family from his plans until it was too late for them to do anything about it is striking. The complete break between the prince and his father and brother, which was to occur later in the year, is already present in embryonic form. The Spanish trip seemed to express all the disenchantment with the patient diplomacy favoured by his father and brother that Charles had always felt. At last he no longer felt like dissembling and suppressing his criticisms. In the prince’s mind, assiduous lobbying of foreign courts, working through channels of established protocol, never produced results. It had produced the desert of 1719–45, only ended when he himself took matters into his own hands. He had tried diplomacy with Louis and his ministers of state. He had given it three months, and could see it stretching out to three years, then a decade, without issue. Voluntarism was the answer.

Such a stance immediately separated him from his father and brother, but by now Charles Edward thoroughly despised them. He told the English Jacobites before he left for Spain that he wanted to be his own master, with his own ministers in France, and wished for a complete divorce from James and all his works.
¹⁰⁶
If this meant alienation, then so be it. Naturally, the prince was unable to see that this programme, which contained a scintilla of rationality, in fact released his own unconscious self-destructive impulses.

From Guadalajara the prince sped back to Paris. For a time he stayed incognito at the archbishop of Cambrai’s house, the Maison Blanche at the end of the Faubourg St Marcel on the Fontainebleau road.
¹⁰⁷
Unaware of the disastrous collapse of his reputation and credibility, he once again began lobbying the king and his ministers for an expedition to England.
¹⁰⁸
He had also, as he thought, another ace up his sleeve. He was now prepared to marry for dynastic reasons, but his choice was the most surprising conceivable.

To understand the prince’s thinking about a dynastic marriage, we must return for a moment to late 1746. On the prince’s safe return from Scotland, James thought that the time was ripe for one or both of his sons to marry.
¹⁰⁹
Possible brides were canvassed. O’Brien suggested a Mlle de Mazarini as a suitable consort for the prince, but James wanted someone of higher rank.
¹¹⁰
His favourite candidate was the Princess Fortunata, third daughter of the duke of Modena, or possibly even Matilde, the duke’s second daughter.
¹¹¹
But the prince was adamant that he would marry none other than Louis XV’s daughter. It was her or no one. James pointed out the absurdity of such an ambition: it was plausible, even likely, once the Stuarts were restored, but a pipe-dream until then.
¹¹²

There the matter rested until the prince’s return from Spain. Suddenly Charles announced a bright idea that he claimed had been germinating ever since his days in the heather. If France and Spain would not help him, it was time to look further afield. What better choice as his bride than the Czarina Elizabeth? His marriage portion would be an expedition of 20,000 Russian troops against England.
¹¹³

Once again the prince revealed his lamentable ignorance of international politics. Russia was drawing ever closer to England. The long-serving Field-Marshal Keith had recently been eased out of the Russian service. His brother Earl Marischal had been refused permission to visit him. This was the context of Russo-Jacobite relations in which the prince proposed to bid for the Czarina’s hand! Not surprisingly, James scouted the idea as another of his son’s fantasies.
¹¹⁴

The year 1747 also saw the vanishing of the prince’s last realistic hopes of aid from France. James feared an early peace and advised Charles to stay put until the French expelled him. They would then have to find him a suitable wife to salve their conscience.
¹¹⁵
But James underrated the extent to which opinion at Versailles was swinging against the prince. Even his applications to serve with the French army in the coming campaign in Flanders were brusquely refused.
¹¹⁶