Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (73 page)

Next the prince sent to Rome for a renewal of his Commission of Regency. After much grumbling, James granted it.
⁹
Finally, Charles laid a number of false trails to mask his risky journey to London. He spread the rumour that he was ill and at the point of death.
¹⁰
And he sent a package of letters to Elisabeth Ferrand, written as if on the
dates
15 September, 6 October and 24 October, with instructions that she was to post them on those dates.
¹¹
Any spies intercepting and reading his letters would then conclude that he was still on the Continent. All was now set for his daring journey.

Why did the prince go to London in September 1750? Andrew Lang’s judgment is this:

There are no traces of a serious organised plan and the Prince probably crossed the water, partly to see how matters really stood, partly from restlessness and the weariness of a tedious solitude in hiding, broken only by daily quarrels and reconciliations with the Princess de Talmond and other ladies.
¹²

But a close examination of the Stuart Papers shows that there was a much more compelling reason. What the prince feared was that George II would die before he himself was ready to act. In the ensuing maelstrom, unless he, Charles Edward Stuart, was on hand to make his bid, the initiative would pass to others. Charles’s especial fear, shared incidentally by the Pelhams, was that in the event of the death of ‘the Elector’, Cumberland would seize power, either by a military coup or, more likely, through summoning Parliament and having his brother Frederick declared
non compos mentis
.
¹³
Cumberland would then be declared Regent until Frederick’s children came of age.

The prince’s visit to London was designed to prepare a pre-emptive strike. If George II died, the prince wanted to be able either to beat Cumberland to the punch or to manipulate Frederick into declaring a Stuart restoration. We may remark in passing that it was not the least of Charles Edward’s misfortunes during the decade of the 1750s that the ailing George II clung to life until 1760, so that the expected power vacuum never took place. With hindsight, one can see all the prince’s hopes in this decade blighted by two sovereigns who hung on until the age of seventy-eight: George II ‘the Elector’, and his own father James.

When all his preparations were complete, the prince left Lunéville on 2 September 1750, headed for Antwerp. He arrived at Antwerp on 6 September.
¹⁴
From there he went to Ghent to confer with the intermediaries from the English Jacobites, to check that it was safe for him to cross. Charles was provided with a list of names and contact locations. Among these were Theobald’s Court in Theobald’s Row; the Grecian coffee house near the Temple; and Simmons coffee house in Chancery Lane.
¹⁵

Then the prince proceeded to Ostend.
¹⁶
There he met the man
who
was to accompany him to England, John Holker.
¹⁷
Holker was the very finest and most able type of Jacobite. Aged thirty-one, he had served in the Manchester regiment, was taken prisoner, but escaped to France, where he was already making a name for himself as a textile manufacturer in Rouen. He later became one of the key figures in the French industrial revolution.
¹⁸
Yet Holker never lost either his ardent Jacobite sentiments or his personal regard for the prince. It was a tribute to his sterling qualities that he was willing to accompany Charles on such a perilous mission.

On the morning of the 13th, Holker and the heavily disguised prince put to sea.
¹⁹
After landing at Dover, they arrived in London on 16 September.
²⁰
Although the prince’s plan to come to London was known to the English Jacobites in a general way, his coming caught them unawares. Fearing betrayal, he told no one of his detailed plans. The consequence was that his arrival caused a certain amount of consternation. When he was ushered in to Lady Primrose’s house in Essex Street off the Strand under an assumed name, the mistress of the house was playing cards with some non-Jacobite nobility. Recognising him at once, she nearly dropped her cards in amazement.
²¹

Recovering quickly, she set about devising a programme for him. Fifty of his partisans were invited to a secret meeting at a house in Pall Mall. Among those present were the duke of Beaufort, Lord Westmoreland and Dr William King;
²²
also there was Robert Gordoun, henceforth an assiduous correspondent.
²³
The prince addressed his followers and explained his aims. He needed just 4,000 men to achieve the restoration without foreign help. The English Jacobites became alarmed. They rehearsed to him all the old arguments used in 1745–6 to justify their non-participation in the rising. The gentry were unused to bearing arms, they could not raise a private army unobserved, they were short of cash, they could be arrested under general warrants at any time. It soon became clear to the prince that he had a wasted journey.
²⁴
By inference from later events, it seems that the English Jacobites must have urged on him the desirability of some sort of foreign assistance and of a diversionary rising or raid elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

Disappointed in his main hopes, the prince made a tour of London strongholds with Colonel Brett, a veteran Jacobite agent who had acted as envoy between Fleury and the English Jacobites in 1739.
²⁵
The Tower of London, the obvious target in any
coup
, particularly interested the prince. Like Cumberland with Carlisle Castle, Charles
had
no great opinion of its defensive potential. He remarked to Brett that one of the gates could be easily broken down with a petard.
²⁶

Frustrated in his primary intentions, the prince still had one essential task to perform in London. It had long been in his mind that the key to Jacobite restoration lay in England. If the work was to be done by English Jacobites alone, and this largely meant
Protestant
Jacobites, they had to be given a very great incentive. This incentive the prince now intended to provide in the form of a public abjuration of Catholicism and the embrace of Anglicanism.
²⁷

At a ceremony in an Anglican church in the Strand, the prince went through a formal apostasy from the faith of his forefathers.
²⁸
With his contempt for organised religion, Charles Edward failed to understand what a sensation this change of allegiance would eventually cause. As an intelligent man, he found the tenets of Christianity either humbug or self-evidently absurd. He did not realise that religion was still life and death to many people.

It was clear, though, that the prince’s hopes for a
coup de main
in London needed much more careful planning. It was time to depart to safety. Before he left, Charles spent an evening with William King, later to be an acidulous enemy. King found the prince naturally intelligent but lacking in formal education. At this stage in his career King was not in the business of rewriting history, so he freely admitted the prince’s charm, remarking particularly on his handsome face and good eyes.
²⁹
Only later did King rationalise his own disappointments in a character-sketch that was self-evidently absurd in its vindictiveness.
³⁰
No such reading of a personality as King provided would have been available, even to a Freud, on the basis of a few hours’ drinking tea in the good doctor’s lodgings. Yet it
was
clear that the prince’s decision to decamp was a prudent one. Dr King’s servant remarked on the extreme likeness between the visitor and the busts of the ‘Young Pretender’ on sale in Red Lion Street.
³¹

On 22 September the prince left London. He and Holker went by post to Dover, where they arrived in the small hours of the 23rd.
³²
In the morning they crossed to Boulogne. Another stretch of hard-driving travel got them to Paris on the evening of 24 September.
³³

The prince remained in Paris until the 28th, then made for Lunéville post-haste, arriving on 30 September.
³⁴
The entire excursion from Lorraine had taken just twenty-eight days. Apart from Dr King’s perceptive servant, there had been no danger. The prince had been under the Whigs’ noses without their having had the slightest suspicion.
³⁵

Yet the London trip, however superficially unsuccessful, had
sparked
in the prince ideas for a grand design within which a London
coup
could be carried out. His first task was to find foreign allies. He had vowed never again to collaborate with France. He had perforce to look elsewhere. One obvious possibility was Germany. The prince spent much of late 1750 scurrying from Lunéville to secret meetings with Goring in Worms and Mainz.
³⁶

As we have seen, the first notion Charles Edward toyed with was marriage to the duke of Daremberg’s daughter in return for an army of invasion 12,000 strong, destined for England.
³⁷
A secret meeting of representatives from both sides took place in Basle, but the proposal was not successful – hardly surprising, given the prince’s premises.

Nothing daunted, Charles simply moved his sights higher. His next target was the daughter of Frederick of Prussia. Through the good offices of Earl Marischal, now Frederick’s confidant, a meeting was arranged in Berlin in February 1751 between Charles Edward and the Prussian king.
³⁸
Frederick would not entertain the prince’s suit for his daughter’s hand, but promised to think carefully about supporting another Jacobite rising. He advised Charles to live in the remotest part of Europe he could find – Silesia was mentioned. Meanwhile he should collect 6,000 Swedes, either as mercenaries or ‘on loan’. When all the preparations in London were complete, the expedition should depart from Gothenburg for a landfall in north-east England.
³⁹

Charles Edward did not care for Frederick’s suggestion that France be kept informed of all his plans. But he went away from the meeting animated with thoughts of a grand northern alliance, embracing Russia, Sweden and Prussia.
⁴⁰
Finally, after much lucubration, he sent Goring back to Berlin to liaise with Marischal. The two of them were to lobby Frederick strongly for military assistance, stressing both the prince’s personal esteem for the Prussian monarch and his determination to help the king’s infant navy on to its feet if restored to the English throne.
⁴¹

But at this point a number of dramatic events took place in quick succession. Early 1751 brought a crop of deaths. First there was the demise of the king of Sweden, which seemed to increase the likelihood of a general European war.
⁴²
Then George II’s son Frederick died.
⁴³
If George II had succumbed at this time, the perennial Jacobite cliché about a ‘favourable conjuncture’ would at last have become fact.
⁴⁴
Further Jacobite excitement was aroused by the false rumour that the duke of Cumberland had died. Alas for the Jacobites, further investigation revealed that it was a horse of that name, not the ‘Butcher’ himself, that had expired!
⁴⁵

Any hopes of exploiting the new situation were unexpectedly dashed with the announcement that Frederick the Great was to send Earl Marischal as his minister to Paris.
⁴⁶
Superficially, this seemed to favour the Jacobites. The development seemed particularly ominous to the jittery English, since Lord Tyrconnel, who had been ‘out’ in the ’45, had just been appointed French minister to Prussia.
⁴⁷
From the English point of view, France and Prussia were now represented in each other’s courts by rebels. The dismissal of the notorious anti-Jacobite Puysieux from the post of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and his replacement by the more pliable St Contest who, it was felt, would complement Marischal neatly, seemed to provide the clinching argument for a pro-Jacobite plot being hatched by France and Prussia.
⁴⁸
English politicians in their private correspondence ruefully congratulated Frederick on a Machiavellian masterstroke.
⁴⁹

But Charles Edward, with the insight characteristic of cynicism, did not see things at all this way. Frederick had been Machiavellian, yes, but in a quite different sense. ‘Lord Marischal’s coming here [Paris] is a great politique [sic]: on one side to bully the Court of England, on the other to hinder our friends from doing the thing by themselves, bamboozling them with hopes.’
⁵⁰

The prince had always urged the English Jacobites to carry out an initiative on their own account. They had always insisted they needed a foreign ally. Now they seemed to have one. Yet Charles Edward knew from Prussian policy in the past and his personal acquaintance with Frederick that Prussia would draw back from outright Stuart restoration; they would, however, be quite happy to stir the pot betimes. If the English Jacobites handed Frederick a controlling interest in their affairs, they would be putting their heads in a noose. All the signs pointed to an anti-British alliance with France; yet he himself had sworn a mighty oath never to have anything to do with France.

Besides, there was the personality of Earl Marischal. Puzzlingly, however great his detachment from the Stuart cause and his general indolence on the Jacobite behalf, Marischal never lost credibility as he should have done. He, much more than either James or Charles Edward, was the high priest of the English Jacobite sect. They would not move a muscle without his approval. Yet the reality was that Marischal was already the type of ‘Jacobite’ – like Lord Clare in France or the old Marshal Duke of Berwick in James’s heyday – who cared far more for his own career than for the restoration of the Stuarts.

Anyone who doubts this should look at Marischal’s record. After the ’45, every time James or Charles Edward asked him to undertake a commission on their behalf, he would decline on the grounds of ‘old age’ or ‘broken health’. Yet in the service of Frederick of Prussia he exhibited the most remarkable vigour and enthusiasm. Charles Edward knew his man. He saw clearly enough that Marischal’s appointment to Paris was in reality a disaster for his own plans. But because of Marischal’s unassailable prestige with the English Jacobites, the prince had no choice but to work with him and through him.