Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (77 page)

Whatever the reasons for the peculiar distaste in which Clementina was regarded in Jacobite circles, its consequences soon made themselves felt. From Ghent Charles Edward rode to Lens to give Goring specific instructions about the route to follow when he brought Clementina from Paris. To the prince’s utter amazement, he found Goring rejoicing that (as he imagined) Clementina could not be found and that the prince’s ‘sending for a bad woman had not succeeded’.
²⁸
The prince lost his temper and bade Goring ‘go to all the devils in hell’. Goring responded by resigning on the spot. At first Charles taunted him with taking his money for years for easy assignments. Finding his honour impugned, Goring offered to meet Clementina at Lille and stay with her for two days until another escort arrived, but on the strict understanding that she should be made aware that Goring was no longer in the prince’s service.

The two men parted, When he had cooled down, the prince reflected on Goring’s good service to him in the past. He wrote and offered to let bygones be bygones, but not without justifying his loss of temper: ‘It is not surprising that I should not care to have one in
my
family that pretends to give me laws in everything I do.’
²⁹
Thinking better of the assignment, the prince told Goring not to go to Lille but to stay at Courtrai and await further orders.

This was not good enough for Goring. In a furious outburst he reiterated that he could not remain in the prince’s service if ‘that woman’ was at his side. To have Clementina with him in Ghent was inconsistent with the prince’s honour:

the man who keeps a mistress is indeed not so much liable to censure, but surely he that procures her for him, or bears the name of it, is no better than a pimp, which title no other title can cover, and a blue ribbon would not so much serve to cover as to expose his infamy.
³⁰

This outburst is puzzling from an eighteenth-century soldier who had, moreover, witnessed without blinking Charles Edward’s ‘orgies’ in Paris in 1746–8. Once again, we are alerted to the fact that there is something very strange and obscure about the whole Clementina affair. What it was we shall shortly see.

Clementina was eventually conducted from Paris to Ghent and took up her duties as mistress. The cold letter the prince addressed to her in Paris showed that she could expect little in return.
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So it proved. The rest of 1752 saw an almost continual financial crisis, with bankers complaining about overdrafts, and the prince forever hurrying in to Antwerp to placate them.
³²
There was a running wrangle with Thompsons of Antwerp about a sum of £200 drawn on the bank, which Charles Edward claimed never to have received.
³³
So serious was the prince’s financial plight that even donations as small as £10 were welcomed.
³⁴
Charles’s lamentations about shortages of money became more insistent.
³⁵
In the end, some temporary relief was provided from an unexpected quarter at the close of the year. Pointing out that no one at the Palazzo Muti had heard from him for eighteen months, James Edgar reminded him that there was a sum of 4,000 crowns waiting for him in Rome which could be remitted.
³⁶

If Clementina had nothing but hardship and a seriously depressed prince to deal with – especially when the Elibank plot aborted – Charles Edward for his part had obviously not sufficiently realised the price he would have to pay for having Miss Walkinshaw with him.

The first consequence was the least serious. The relationship with Mme Vassé became cold and then petered out once her ‘sister’ Elisabeth Ferrand died in October 1752.
³⁷
Once Ferrand was dead
and
there was no one to moderate the contempt she felt for Clementina, Vassé moved quickly to terminate the relationship. Using the pretext of neurotic anxiety over what would happen to the prince’s effects if she followed her ‘sister’ into sudden oblivion, Vassé cunningly prevailed on the prince to have his trunks and impedimenta removed. The prince’s invitation to her to visit him at Ghent was turned down flat.
³⁸
Charles took the hint and had his boxes transferred to the care of Waters the banker.
³⁹
Vassé’s bland assurances in April 1753 – that her worrying away about his possessions was merely a sign of her deep attachment to him – fooled nobody.
⁴⁰

To the prince the loss of such a friendship was of little importance. More serious were the continuing remonstrations from the English Jacobites about the security implications of his keeping Clementina as mistress. The prince rightly dismissed the rumour that she was a Hanoverian spy. It was not so easy to dispose of the argument that her ‘high visibility’ made the prince a much easier target for British agents and would-be assassins. Throughout 1753 the prince had to bear the brunt of both these sources of stress. As we have seen, part of the reason for the failure of the Elibank plot was the English Jacobites’ fear of committing themselves to the prince while he shared his bed with a suspected Hanoverian spy.

The prince adamantly refused to listen to the entreaties from his friends on the other side of the water. There was no question of his dismissing Clementina, he informed them.
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In January 1753 he told Murray of Elibank that he would grant him audience on the strict understanding that he did not mention Miss Walkinshaw’s name.
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When the English persisted, the prince became even more angry and obstinate. William King and the earl of Westmoreland sent over an envoy to urge Charles to put Clementina in a convent where, if he truly loved her, he could carry on a clandestine liaison.
⁴³
Marischal encouraged the envoy to make this demand bluntly to the prince. Charles Edward replied contemptuously that it was not for the English Jacobites to presume to advise him on this matter. He declared he would not put away a dog to please ‘those people’.
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The prince’s determination to hang on to Clementina was not based on sentiment. He cared little for her. But any overture that he could construe as ‘giving him laws’ was bound to be rejected angrily. This rejection of any form of authority other than his own will was one of the many consequences of his disastrous relationship with his father.

The other criticism of Clementina, that her presence made him vulnerable to abduction and assassination, affected the prince deeply.
He
found himself unable to settle in Ghent, especially when Marischal, from whom he sought advice on his residence, warned him that it was dangerously close to Dutch territory.
⁴⁵
Even his frequent trips to Brussels and Antwerp were now becoming fraught.
⁴⁶
By April 1753 he was thinking of settling in Frankfurt or Cologne.
⁴⁷
Pending a final resolution, he intended to be in Ghent as little as possible and to make frequent excursions to the waters of Spa and Aix.
⁴⁸

The prince’s movements in 1753 denote a morbid fear of being seized by a Hanoverian snatch squad and the perennial terror of being betrayed. In February he made a fleeting trip to Paris, where he attended a Mardi Gras ball in disguise.
⁴⁹
On 12 April he arranged to meet Dormer in Brussels. The next day he cancelled the arrangement and set out for Cologne, hoping to meet Marischal there.
⁵⁰
The prince enjoyed himself, rummaging through the Cologne bookshops for works by Polybius and tomes on the French army.
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But Marischal advised against his continued presence in Cologne on the ground that five or six men could seize him while he went for walks by the Rhine and then spirit him away to the Dutch territories.
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On receipt of this advice, the prince moved on to Coblenz, where he stayed at
Les Trois Couronnes
inn.
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By the beginning of June he was in Frankfurt, intending to make a long stay. Once again he summoned Marischal.
⁵⁴
Since Charles was staying at the
Emperor
inn, he suggested that Marischal put up at the
Rose
in the same street. But again Marischal warned that the presence of Clementina put Charles at risk in any part of the Rhineland.
⁵⁵

Frustrated, but still with a pathetic respect and trust in Marischal, the prince returned to the Netherlands. Passing through Luxembourg and then swinging in a wide arc to throw any pursuers off the scent, he made his way to Louvain and then doubled back to Liège.
⁵⁶
The burgomaster of Liège, to whom Dormer made the introduction, found him a suitable residence.

Charles and Clementina settled in at their new house near the Pont Magen.
⁵⁷
Almost the prince’s first action was to order a crate of wine.
⁵⁸
His state of mind at the time can be gauged from a series of jottings on 21 July that provide almost a textbook illustration of both the positive and negative sides of his personality. ‘I aspire only to war and glory’; ‘I am a man who believes in God but not in men’: these ‘uplifting’ statements are followed by a paean of praise to drink. ‘
Le jeu, la chose est à boire
.’
⁵⁹

This turning to wine was very significant. Stress had built up again not just with the failure of the Elibank plot but with Clementina’s pregnancy. First reported in June 1753, the pregnancy was a source
of
ribald and facetious comment in Jacobite circles. A remark from one of Edgar’s Paris correspondents is typical. ‘There is no news here at all but now and then some little talk of the Hibernian Princess who, they say, keeps her ground and begins to be sick in her stomach and pitches now and then of a morning.’
⁶⁰

But to Charles Clementina’s pregnancy was no laughing matter. He had not summoned her to Ghent to produce unwanted infants, especially given his parlous financial position. The hostility to the pregnancy was no surprise; in psychological terms, it threatened to displace the prince as ‘only child’. It is significant that although he and Clementina lived together for another seven years, there was no further issue. Predictably, too, at about the time of Clementina’s confinement, the accumulated stress in the prince emerged as illness.
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When the baby was born, he had ‘such violent fluxions in the cheek that he is scarcely able to hold the pen’.
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This is hardly consistent with Clementina’s later statement that the birth of the child gave the prince great joy.
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Charles Edward’s daughter Charlotte was born and baptised in the church of Sainte Marie des Fonts in Liège on 29 October 1753.
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Her birth precipitated an outburst on the prince’s part that no one has satisfactorily explained. Since the prince’s conversion to Protestantism, he had taken it into his head to dismiss all his Catholic servants, at Avignon and elsewhere. Now, less than a month after Charlotte’s birth, he suddenly added the following to these orders: ‘My mistress has behaved so unworthily that she had put me quite out of patience and as she is a papist too, I discard her also.’
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In his instruction to Goring to get rid of all Catholics in his employment, the prince adds: ‘She told me she had friends that would maintain her, so that, after such a declaration and other impertinences, makes me abandon her. I desire to know who her friends are, that she may be delivered into their hands.’
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Even more bizarre is the following note made by the prince at this time: ‘A mark to be put on the child if I part with it – I am pushed to the last point and so won’t be cajoled any more.’
⁶⁷

The usual explanations for these outbursts – financial worries, anti-Catholic bigotry, alcoholic rage – all fail to convince. They seem excessive even if we postulate the maximum in unconscious rage and resentment towards Clementina and the child. But they
are
explicable if we assume that at some stage during the pregnancy – possibly even during the delirium of childbirth – Clementina blurted out a hidden secret from her past. The prince’s outbursts would then be a shocked recognition that this was no
ingénue
he had invited to share his life.
The
English Jacobites had got it wrong. They suspected Clementina of betraying the cause. Charles Edward now suspected that the betrayal was of an entirely different kind and that it was his ‘honour’ that was at stake.

That there was something very mysterious about Clementina’s life before 1752 has already been hinted. What it is we must now try to establish. The starting point must be her remark to Andrew Lumisden in 1760. ‘I was bred to business about Whitehall and could be of use to him, were there not unluckily an obstacle in the way, which has done him no service and me great hurt.’
⁶⁸

This enigmatic sentence has been passed over as unimportant by all Clementina’s biographers. Only Sir Compton Mackenzie, with his novelist’s intuition, saw what a crucial statement it was:

It is always assumed that the obstacle was her sister Catherine … but as this obstacle was perfectly well known to everybody, why write about it so mysteriously? The longer we ponder that letter, the more clearly we perceive a hint of something we know nothing about, something which perhaps was whispered in Jacobite circles and which created that overwhelming prejudice against Clementina. Had she been some great man’s mistress already? Had she been used by him as a spy for his own ends? Had she even borne him a child?
⁶⁹

To produce a solution to this problem we must take account of a number of factors. First, there were persistent rumours of a second (or preceding) child borne by Clementina, so persistent indeed that the prince later swore an affidavit that he had had only one child with Clementina.
⁷⁰
This would explain why the prince wanted a mark put on his own child. If Clementina departed and took up with a former lover, it might not then be possible for the prince to tell his own offspring.