Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (61 page)

Meanwhile Tencin, Puysieux and O’Brien were laughing up their sleeves.
³⁰
The prince’s next audience with Louis XV was significant. The king archly asked the prince if he had seen anything of Tencin recently. When the prince said no, Louis looked enquiringly at the duc de Bouillon. Bouillon said that the secret of Tencin could be unlocked by Puysieux better than anyone else.
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There was much mute shrugging of the shoulders, in retrospect a pointer to Tencin’s treachery. And by now Louis had received from James a formal written request for approval of his younger son’s cardinalate.
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The prince departed in mid-June for the Princesse de Conti’s country house, where he went sightseeing in St Germain and environs.
³³
He returned to find that his carelessness and ingratitude
were
causing him to move house once again. The prince forgot to write a thank-you note to Madame de Sessac. She retaliated by declaring that the Passy house had been loaned on a one-month basis only. Fortunately for him, the prince was now offered Cardinal Rohan’s country seat at St Ouen, at a riverside location six miles from Paris.
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It was there that the fuse, originally lit three months earlier, finally licked to the end of the gunpowder trail and exploded. In time-honoured fashion, the prince was almost the last person to know of Henry’s elevation to the purple. James planned it that way, for he knew what must surely follow. For all that, his announcement of the
fait accompli
to Charles Edward is some sort of masterpiece of bland double-speak:

I know not whether you will be surprised, my dearest Carluccio, when I tell you that your brother will be made a Cardinal the first days of next month. Naturally speaking, you should have been consulted about a resolution of that kind before it had been executed, but as the Duke and I were unilaterally determined on the matter, and that we foresaw you might probably not approve of it, we thought it would be showing you more regard, and that it would be even more agreeable to you, that the thing should be done before your answer could come here, and so have it in your power to say that it was done without your knowledge or approbation.
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The arch insinuation in the letter is as astonishing as its illogicality is gross.

It is difficult to convey the anguish in Charles Edward’s heart, and the general consternation in the Jacobite movement, produced by this thunderclap. The prince found himself struck literally speechless when he read the letter. He shut himself up for several hours before penning a brief reply, the gist of which was summed up in the second sentence: ‘Had I got a dagger through my heart, it would not have been more sensible to me than at the contents.’
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By common consent James and Henry had struck a mortal blow at the entire Stuart cause.
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For Henry to accept a cardinal’s hat with James’s connivance was tantamount to admitting that only a fool could any longer believe in a Stuart restoration. James and Henry had conceded that the quest was forlorn, the cause hopeless. Moreover, Henry’s embrace of ‘priestcraft’ seemed to turn the cliché’d dross of Hanoverian propaganda into pure gold. All the insinuations about ‘popish pretenders’ were true after all. Had not the younger
Stuart
just proved it? Moreover, Henry’s celibacy seemed to condemn the Stuart line to extinction unless Charles Edward married, which he refused to do. Unless Henry was later freed by papal dispensation to renounce Holy Orders, the Stuart dynasty was a heart-beat away from oblivion. What a temptation to prospective assassins that was!

All these points were made with some force by Jacobite supporters. Significantly, the most severe critics of Henry’s actions were members of the Catholic clergy themselves. Father Myles MacDonnell delivered a biting attack on a move he considered actuated purely by Henry’s pique and spite against his brother.
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An even more incisive critique was sent to James by the bishop of Soissons. It seemed to be ever the bishop’s fate to lock horns with rulers, whether
de jure
or
de facto
. He pointed out that Henry’s cardinalate was, in effect, a resignation of Stuart pretensions to the throne of England. If Charles Edward died, the English would never accept a cardinal, even an ex-cardinal, as king. Even if the prince lived, he would have the perpetual albatross of a cardinal brother around his neck. To be restored to the throne of England, the Stuarts needed to put as much distance between themselves and Rome as possible without actually abandoning the faith. James and Henry had done the precise opposite. In any case, being a cardinal was a worldly ambition, designed to secure benefices. Surely a duke of York could get these without becoming a cardinal? It followed that the action Stuart
père et fils
had taken was futile.
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James later admitted he was shattered by the depth and breadth of the opposition to making Henry a cardinal. His tactic was to put the blame on Charles Edward for ‘causing’ Henry’s flight to Rome.
⁴⁰
In later years he rationalised his disastrous action as a Machiavellian ploy to force Louis XV to show his hand and prove that he had no secret agreement with the prince, unknown to the Palazzo Muti.
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In the short run, he wrote a number of disingenuous letters to the prince, of which the burden was that Charles had only himself to blame for what had happened.
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The prince treated these apologies with the contempt which on this occasion they genuinely deserved. He informed his father that thenceforth he had no brother and never wanted to hear his name mentioned again.
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To the bishop of Soissons the prince lifted a corner of his thoughts to reveal the extent to which he despised Henry. He could have admired him grudgingly if he had turned Capuchin out of a desire for spiritual perfection.
⁴⁴
But to become a ‘redcap’ surely excited the contempt of all reasonable men.

The ripples caused by the explosion of the sensational news soon
carried
beyond the inner circles of the Jacobites. All Paris was stupefied by the tidings.
⁴⁵
The common opinion was that for the ‘Elector of Hanover’ to have scored such a
coup
, he must have bribed many of the principals, especially Tencin and the Pope.
⁴⁶
Interestingly, Benedict XIV revealed that he had in fact been offered £150,000 by the English to subvert the Stuart cause by making Henry a cardinal, even before James approached him on the subject.
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The scale of the bribe is significant. By their actions James and Henry had handed the Hanoverians a political advantage worth millions of pounds in present-day terms.

We shall often enough have occasion to remark on the prince’s tendency to paranoid delusion. But on this occasion his conviction that he had been uniquely victimised surely has some foundation. Louis XV cynically colluded with James to sink the Jacobite cause at the very moment he was supposedly seriously considering Jacobite military options on the council of state. This is of a piece with his personality. His natural instinct for duplicity would have been whetted by the prince’s refusal to toe his line. Like all genuine tyrants, what Louis XV most detested was someone with the strength of will to stand up to him.

Even Benedict XIV, normally a wise and sagacious pontiff, must be faulted on this occasion. His bland statement that Henry’s becoming a cardinal need not prevent a Stuart restoration if that was what God really wanted
⁴⁸
is exactly the sort of nonsense that has so often gained organised religion a bad name.

Yet the most interesting psychological study is that of the two principal actors in the tragic farce. It is hard to escape the conclusion that both Henry and James were motivated by bad faith. With James it was the desire to, as it were, pull up the drawbridge on Jacobitism, to ensure that his elder son could not succeed where he had failed. With Henry, not only was there general sibling rivalry at play, but there was also the issue of his sexual personality. It is not too much to say, when all the threads have been unravelled, that the
coup de grâce
to the Jacobite movement was delivered by Henry’s deviant sexuality, which made the thought of marriage purely horrific. This of course always remained something impossible to say in Jacobite circles.

Charles Edward sank into a profound depression as the impact of Henry’s defection sank in. To Edgar he spoke of making a bonfire of all his ciphers to assuage his drooping spirits.
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To his father he mentioned that he was hunting with Prince Constantin outside Passy ‘so as to dissipate as much as possible my melancholy thoughts’.
⁵⁰
In
February
the papal vice-legate in Avignon had reported the prince’s depression and his consequent heavy smoking and drinking.
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But that was nothing compared with the trough of despair into which Charles now sank. Hunting with the Rohans alternated with heavy drinking sessions.
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Occasionally he would pen a trivial line to his father, or write a note of congratulation to Louis XV for his victories in Flanders.
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The rest was black despondency.

Almost incredibly, it was a matter of days after the prince had received the ‘dagger through his heart’ that Lord George Murray arrived in Paris to seek a reconciliation with him. Murray had been in Rome with James and had received a magnificent reception.
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James knew his son’s opinion of Lord George and had tried to dissuade Atholl’s worthy scion from courting certain humiliation at the prince’s hands.
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But Murray insisted. He was not to know that Kelly and others had worked Charles Edward up to a rare pitch of hatred against his old lieutenant-general. When news came in that Murray of Broughton had turned king’s evidence in England to save his own skin, Kelly cleverly worked on the prince to persuade him that the frequent clashes between the two Murrays during the ’45 had all been a charade. In reality, behind the false front the two men had been in concert; their aim had always been to betray the prince.
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Charles had already reacted by threatening to have Lord George arrested if he came to Paris. He asked James to do the same in Rome.
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Yet even if the prince had not already been in a state of almost permanent cold fury whenever the name of Lord George Murray was mentioned to him, Murray’s timing was singularly infelicitous. He could not have chosen a worse moment to arrive in Paris. When the prince learned of his presence in the French capital, he sent Stafford round to his lodging to say that he did not wish to see him, either then or ever, and that Murray would be well advised to quit Paris with all speed.
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The arrival of Lord George Murray at such a juncture was particularly infuriating to the prince. At the precise moment he was digesting his father’s treachery, the most troublesome thorn in his side during the ’45 reappeared. Charles knew his father had been treacherous; he was still convinced that Lord George had betrayed him at Culloden. The association of ideas was too powerful. Here in a matter of days was the conjunction of two hated authority figures, his father by letter, and the failed father-figure of the ’45 in the flesh. Always, it seemed, there was this element in the prince’s disappointments. Derby was the work principally of Lochiel and Lord George. Henry’s
becoming
a cardinal was the work of Louis XV, his own father, and Benedict XIV, the ‘Holy Father’. And just as Louis XV had colluded in James’s treachery over the cardinalate, so would James later collude in French treachery when they expelled the prince in 1748. Already, for Charles Edward, Louis XV and James were birds of a perfidious feather. In his best scathing style the prince later compared and contrasted them: ‘They are both “honest men”. James is blinded by priests and Louis by whores.’
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Pitifully, the prince had not yet learned to discard the most treacherous of all the father-figures. Trying to rationalise the complete break between king’s men and prince’s men, in 1747 he tried to interest Earl Marischal in becoming his secretary of state.
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Marischal, who detested the prince, trundled out his usual excuse of ‘ill-health’.
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It would be another seven years before Charles took the full measure of this man’s hatred.

All through August and September 1747 the prince was in the company of the Rohan family. He expressed his contempt for authority by hunting in an area exclusively reserved for the king of France; not even the great nobility were allowed to venture there. Puysieux, delightedly reporting that Louis XV was very angry about the incident, lost no time in warning off the delinquent prince.
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The Rohans were still devoted to the prince and concerned for his future. Cardinal Rohan tried to arrange his marriage to a ten-year-old daughter of the Prince de Soubise, reportedly a millionairess.
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But the prince wanted none of it; he wanted to be free to act at a moment’s notice if the call came from Britain. With the collapse of French aid, all his hopes were centred on a power vacuum in England following George II’s death. It was expected that there would then be a struggle for power between Cumberland and Prince Frederick, George II’s detested eldest son. It was the prince’s intention, once the two combatants were exhausted in civil war, to play duke William of Normandy to the two Harolds of 1066. When one or other brother emerged victorious, the prince planned to cross the Channel to snatch the prize.
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As he confided to Papal Nuncio Durini, the prince had yet another reason for remaining unmarried. The lack of a Stuart heir might eventually force James to order Henry to renounce his celibate vows and beget legitimate descendants. The refusal to marry continued to be one of the principal ways for the prince to manipulate his father.
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