Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (74 page)

Accordingly, Charles changed his instructions to Goring. Goring was told to seek out Marischal at Versailles; his brief was to wrest from him an assurance that his embassy had nothing to do with any Jacobite plots, and that the English should therefore look to their own salvation.
⁵¹

But Marischal was determined to play dog in the manger. He had no enthusiasm for a
coup
in England. At the same time, he did not want such an enterprise to be undertaken by people not under his direction. He therefore decided to drag a red herring or two across the trail. Just before leaving Berlin, he wrote to Goring about the proposed northern alliance – which Charles Edward had now largely abandoned anyway, once he saw the way Frederick’s mind was working. Marischal’s point was that the prince’s proposed alliance offended against balance of power considerations: if troops from Sweden were used against England, Russia would retaliate by occupying Finland.
⁵²
Sweden knew that its best defence against Russia was Frederick of Prussia, so would take its cue from him. The deviousness of Frederick the Great thus comes through clearly. By encouraging Charles Edward to solicit Swedish help, while sending Marischal to Paris, Frederick aimed to control both ends of the Jacobite movement. He would keep his puppet dancing on the string until he had brought England to heel.

Charles Edward was already cynical about Frederick. As far as he was concerned, the only acceptable proof of the king’s sincerity was to allow him to marry his sister and ‘acknowledging me at Berlin for what I am’.
⁵³
But he was now locked into an intolerable impasse. The English Jacobites would co-operate only if they received the go-ahead from Marischal. Marischal would give this only if he won the nod from Frederick. Frederick would make no move without France. Yet Charles Edward himself refused to work with the French. One of the most profound problems about the intrigues that went on during 1751–3 was that there was no way to square this circle.
When
there was added to this the personal animosity entertained by Marischal for the prince, and the presence of a Hanoverian spy (Pickle) at the very heart of Jacobite deliberations, the recipe for disaster was complete.

The full extent of the deep endemic factors working against Charles Edward’s designs was not immediately apparent. What later became known as the ‘Elibank Plot’ commenced with a series of meetings in Paris. Actually, the so-called Elibank plot is a portmanteau term for the entire class of very different projects that were adumbrated and discarded during 1751–3. After a lot of fussy pedantry from Marischal about the correct venue for their meetings,
⁵⁴
the conspirators got down to business. Among those involved from the very beginning were Sir John Graeme, Goring, Lochgarry and Alexander Murray of Elibank.

Murray of Elibank was brother to the Lord Elibank who was a friend of Dr Johnson. He was typical of the adventurers attracted to the prince, and for whom he had a decided weakness. Early in 1751 he was charged with violence and intimidation in the Westminster by-election and was then imprisoned for refusing to beg pardon of the House of Commons on his knees.
⁵⁵
This was not his only claim to notoriety. Though high-born, he possessed little money until a marriage of convenience secured him £3,000 a year, ironically all interest payments on bonds paid by the National Debt. A renowned miser and usurer, Murray lent the impoverished prince several hundred pounds at a high rate of interest. This secured him an entrée into Charles Edward’s inner circles.
⁵⁶
To the prince what counted was liquidity, not its provenance or the interest charged on it. In other respects, too, Murray was a nonentity. He had never risen above the rank of lieutenant in military service. But significantly, the man he had supported in the disputed Westminster by-election was a Whig. The prince was now close to making a fetish out of disgruntled Whigs as
the
pure type of English supporter he wanted.
⁵⁷

The first part of the plot, the
coup
in London, now took shape. The original idea of this part of the plan was that George II and other members of the ‘Elector’s family’ be kidnapped and spirited away to France in a fast cutter waiting on the Thames. To this end, minute analyses of the sentry system at St James’s Palace were undertaken. Two or three hundred hand-picked men were to assemble in Westminster. To avoid arousing suspicion, they would all take lodgings in different houses. On the night fixed for the abduction they would assemble at pre-selected locations. Then the Palace would be seized, the Tower gates thrown open, the guards overpowered, and
the
luckless scions of the House of Hanover taken to France, there perhaps to suffer a long house arrest in the same way as Mary Queen of Scots.
⁵⁸

Marischal listened glumly to the details of the plot. In his view, there was not the slightest chance that the conspiracy could succeed. The entire project was chimerical, worthless.
⁵⁹
He later described the Elibank plot as being as impracticable as an attempt to seize the moon with one’s teeth.
⁶⁰
But, characteristically, Marischal did not veto the intrigue outright. He feared that if he did so, he would simply be cut out of the conspiracy. That would diminish his worth to Frederick the Great, and it was by the Prussian lodestone alone that Marischal now steered. So he expressed merely half-hearted opposition to the abduction. He did not full-bloodedly set his authority against the very principle of the scheme. This was read by the other conspirators as typical Marischal circumspection and defeatism. They went ahead, blithely telling their counterparts in England that Marischal had given the plot his imprimatur.

Gradually more and more pieces fitted into the complex mosaic. The circle of conspirators widened. Apart from Lady Primrose, the most important English Jacobite to be mixed up in the plot was Jeremy Dawkins, lately a Middle East explorer. In the City of London Jacobite movements were to be co-ordinated by Alderman George Heathcote.
⁶¹
Other aldermen mentioned as his acolytes were Benn, Blachford and Blakistoun.
⁶²
Further names frequently encountered as the plot matured were Messrs Trant, Fleetwood, Charles Hepburn of Keith and Sir John Douglas.
⁶³

Much against Charles Edward’s wish, French Jacobites were also drawn in. Dominique O’Heguerty, brother of the prince’s biographer, drew attention in 1751 to the high level of unrest and tension in England, which could be turned to French advantage in an attempt to undo some of the damage of the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
⁶⁴
Immediately the marquise de Mézières sent her trusted lieutenant Father Cruise to England. He confirmed O’Heguerty’s analysis.
⁶⁵
But he had further muddied the already turbid waters of the Elibank conspiracy.

The situation at the beginning of 1752, then, was this. There was a four-way traffic between Charles Edward and his clique, Marischal and the Prussians, the English Jacobites, and the French Jacobites of the diaspora. Lord Clare had been apprised in general terms that there was a project afoot.
⁶⁶
Thomas Carte and the Mézières coterie were reluctantly accepted as conduits to the English Jacobites, since Mézières enjoyed the confidence of Marischal.
⁶⁷

The development of the Elibank plot is notoriously hard to unravel in detail. Hardly surprisingly in the case of such a desperate endeavour, most of the incriminating evidence was later destroyed. But there seem to have been three main stages. First, the abduction of the Hanoverian royal family, so as to create a power vacuum that Charles Edward could exploit. The difficulties in the path of the implementation of such a daring escapade were legion. So a second stage was reached in which the English Jacobites inclined towards a once-and-for-all solution that would not expose them to such grave risks. Alexander Murray of Elibank proposed that the Hanoverian family be murdered, possibly by poison. But the prince vetoed this suggestion.
⁶⁸
He always felt repugnance towards schemes of assassination.

The third stage arrived when a compromise between abduction and homicidal action was proposed. The final version of the plot called for the seizure of the Tower and the Palace. The Hanoverian royals would be held as hostages. Once word of the
coup
reached the prince, who would be waiting on the Belgian coast, he would cross to consolidate the Jacobite position. Perhaps George II and his family would be forced to sign articles of abdication. Perhaps they would be shipped out to France as in the original plan. All these details are shadowy. But it
is
clear that the prince had lengthened the odds against himself by his morally commendable (if politically inexpedient) refusal to countenance assassination.

Since the final version of the Elibank plot was an extremely perilous undertaking, the clamour grew for a diversionary project that would take some of the heat off the London conspirators. Various possibilities were canvassed. There was the old idea of landing Swedish troops from Gothenburg, but as no one had yet approached Sweden, this seemed the purest fantasy. More promising was the idea of using Irish malcontents to stage a diversionary ‘invasion’ of England. The Irish Jacobites felt guilty about their quiescence during the ’45. Apparently some of their more vociferous spokesmen offered to land a force of between 11,000 and 14,000 either in north Wales or Scotland.
⁶⁹
This landing would be the signal for the London operation to commence.

But as 1752 wore on, it became abundantly clear that it was one thing to devise a complex and intellectually satisfying intrigue on paper; it was quite another to carry it out according to the plan. When it came to serious business, it transpired that there was no such Irish force as had been hinted at. Another part of the plot called for 8,000 swords to be delivered to Ogilvy’s regiment at Dunkirk.
These
would then be put ashore at the Firth of Forth.
⁷⁰
But such an enterprise required the co-operation of both France and Russia. Now not only would Frederick not give his assent to this until he had finally decided with France what their real policy towards England was to be; even more importantly, the prince still refused to work with France.

The refusal to work with the French was only one of several self-destructive acts by the prince during 1752 that eventually precipitated the Elibank plot into débâcle. Another was his abrupt dismissal of Mittie junior. Apparently the reason for this was that the prince’s anti-French sentiments had now hardened into phobia. Since the Elibank plot was supposed to be a purely English Protestant affair, Charles decided that none but Englishmen and women should be involved in it,
⁷¹
ignoring the fact that Mittie was already in the scheme up to his neck.

With characteristic self-laceration, the prince timed his hot-tempered sacking of Mittie for the very month when Lady Primrose was on the Continent to finalise the English end of the plot.
⁷²
Goring and the prince’s other advisers were aghast. Lady Primrose had always worked through Mittie, and now she was to be told that the man to whom she had confided all her secrets, and who knew enough to send the entire English Jacobite party to the gallows, had been dismissed from the prince’s service!
⁷³

Even more amazingly, in the very month of Lady Primrose’s visit to Paris (May 1752), the prince decided to resume relations with Clementina Walkinshaw, his mistress from the days of early 1746. Since the English Jacobites suspected her of being a Hanoverian spy, they were dismayed when the prince refused to listen to their entreaties to send her away.
⁷⁴
Security for the entire operation now seemed jeopardised.

The English Jacobites became confirmed in their suspicions when obvious intelligence leaks made it clear that there was a spy in their midst. The ‘mole’ was not Clementina but Pelham’s agent ‘Pickle’.
⁷⁵
Yet the coincidence that Pickle’s information started to become really effective immediately after Clementina joined the prince was just too great for the English Jacobites to form any other conclusion: in their view, Charles Edward was harbouring a spy and blindly refusing to do anything about this obvious fact.

It was Pickle himself who occasioned the fourth, and in some ways worst, of the prince’s self-destructive actions in 1752. As early as May, the faithful John Holker had identified Young Glengarry as ‘Pickle’ and informed the prince accordingly.
⁷⁶
Charles Edward
simply
refused to believe the evidence. As far as he was concerned, Glengarry had passed the only test that mattered: he had been to Rome but breathed not a word to James about the Elibank plot. There was no need to halt the planning. The scheme would proceed. The time to strike was at the end of October or beginning of November, when George II returned from Windsor to St James’s Palace. A firm date of 10 November 1752 was agreed for the operation.
⁷⁷

The frenzied pace of activity can be appreciated from the many meetings in Ghent between the prince and English agents, and with MacNamara, Mittie’s replacement, in Brussels.
⁷⁸
Goring, increasingly Marischal’s creature, was aware of all this, mentally shaking his head over the lack of clarity in the arrangements.
⁷⁹

Someone else who had passed the prince’s ‘ordeal by James’ was the marquise de Mézières.
⁸⁰
Following Lady Primrose’s excursion to the Continent, la Mézières went to England to co-ordinate the final stages of the plot.
⁸¹
English suspicions were immediately aroused when she entered the country without an official passport.
⁸²
The Pelhams already knew from Pickle that something momentous was afoot. The arrival of this inveterate but, at seventy, still deadly dangerous female intriguer put them on their mettle.