Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (80 page)

But if the stress the prince was reacting to in Basle was the blighting of his hopes – symbolised by the permanent malfunction of Le Roy’s watch rather than the imminence of exposure by Hanoverian agents – the stress nevertheless produced very real symptoms. In September 1755 he was very ill with a mysterious malady, ‘vapours mixed with spleen’, which was almost certainly the result of heavy drinking, by now virtually the prince’s conditioned reflex to stress.
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Another permanent worry was money, especially in expensive Switzerland.
The
number of servants thrown on the scrap-heap multiplied. Daniel O’Brien and Dobson joined Goring and Dumont on the list of cast-offs.
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This is how the prince explained his situation:

It is better that they should beg their own bread or go into other service than to let Mr. Thompson be obliged to sell drugs to gain his livelihood, which he is absolutely resolved to do if all fails him rather than ever to do the least thing that could anyways be against his real interest and honour.
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Others did not see it that way and interpreted his actions either as miserliness or eccentricity. Mittie junior sought relief at the feet of Lady Primrose, then visiting Paris. His pitiful tales hammered another nail into the coffin of Charles Edward’s reputation with the English Jacobites.
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The most ludicrous incident involved James in Rome. Five of the servants Charles had dismissed in Avignon made their way south across the Alps to the Palazzo Muti, after the prince told them to seek alternative employment there. James had a morbid fear of further clients attaching themselves to his payroll. After giving the men forty crowns each, he sent them back to France where, he alleged, there were more opportunities for work.
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Subsequent tales of Stuart ruthlessness and ingratitude lost nothing in the telling.

The one event in the prince’s life of any public significance in 1755 was his meeting with Cluny MacPherson. Unfortunately this relationship too turned sour. When Cluny landed in France after nine years of dodging the redcoats in Badenoch, he experienced a profound shock at many levels. There was culture trauma after a decade in the cage on Ben Alder. There was the shock of finding that events had moved on rapidly, that in Scotland he had been in a kind of time-warp. Most jolting of all was the change for the worse in Charles Edward. Once in Paris, Cluny expected an early conference with the prince as a matter of urgency. But the reclusive prince refused to budge from Basle.
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Cluny protested that he would feel naked if he made a trip to Switzerland, especially as he knew nothing of its language or culture.
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But the prince insisted on Basle as the venue. He ordered Cluny and Henry Patullo (the messenger he had sent to Scotland the year before to fetch Cluny) to travel via Belfort to the
Le Sauvage
inn in Basle.
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Then it emerged that Cluny was penniless.
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This was a severe blow to the prince. He had called Cluny over precisely in hopes that the MacPherson chief would meanwhile have recovered the bulk of the Loch Arkaig treasure. Charles grumbled excessively about paying out fifteen louis d’ors for Patullo’s and Cluny’s travelling expenses:

In such straitened circumstances, anyone that has Mr. Douglas’s interest at heart must make shift as well as they can … their zeal or credit seems very little not to have found some way of getting so little as to furnish for their journey hither.
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Cluny and Patullo finally made the trip, travelling via Compiègne and Strasbourg.
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Their meeting with the prince in Basle was not a success. Charles was stupefied to hear that nothing remained of the Loch Arkaig treasure.
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Even worse, Cluny had taken charge of a waggon-load of the prince’s most treasured possessions after Culloden, including a family heirloom of jewels among the gold plate. He now claimed never to have seen it nor to know anything of it.
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This lost plate and jewellery was to become a major obsession with the prince, dwarfing the neurosis over the Le Roy watch.

The prince was already angry when Cluny and Patullo added insult to injury by presuming to lecture him on his shortcomings, and in particular to discuss the recent calumnies spread by Marischal’s protégé Jeremy Dawkins. The reason the financial supply from the English Jacobites had dried up, Cluny explained, was that Charles had lost all credibility. He would have to mend his ways.
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Charles Edward reacted with cold fury. Referring to a ‘very surprising message delivered in a still more surprising manner’, he repeated that he would not be bullied: ‘Reason may and I hope always shall prevail, but my own heart deceives me if threats or promises ever can.’ On his critics he remarked, ‘I despise their low malice and I confess it below my dignity to treat them in the terms they merit.’
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Dismayed that he could make no more impression on the prince than Goring, Marischal or any of the others, Cluny saved his fire until he was well clear of Basle. After producing a detailed accounting of the Loch Arkaig money to vindicate his handling of the finances,
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Cluny sat down with Patullo to make a final appeal to the prince to see reason. He should abandon his debauched life, agree to be guided by a cabinet of advisers, and vigorously rebut the slanders of Dawkins and Marischal. In particular, he should lay to rest the canard that, as a man ungrateful for the best services, but unforgiving and vindictive in face of the slightest offence, he combined all the vices of the Stuarts with none of their virtues.
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This was an ably constructed memoir, and it is just conceivable that the prince might have taken it to heart. Unfortunately Cluny and Patullo spoiled their own case by going over the top. Shocked by what they had seen of the prince’s physical condition and his
almost
permanent inebriation at Basle, they now presumed to give him advice on his drinking: ‘If you likewise would be prevailed on to use a little green tea mixed with cream, in place of beer, to abate thirst, you would soon be sensible of the happy difference.’
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Cluny had gone too far. To the prince, this was the rankest impertinence. Here was a man who could give no satisfactory account of his stewardship in Scotland, and who had lost the precious casket of family jewels among the plate, daring to lecture him like one of Wesley’s temperancers. Cluny’s homily merely succeeded in convincing the prince that he was being singled out for special discriminatory treatment. This feeling of being victimised that Cluny kindled in the prince had singularly unfortunate results. The character sketch adumbrated in the Cluny/Patullo memoir became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Forgetting all the services that Cluny had done him, the prince henceforth hounded the MacPherson chieftain mercilessly over the missing valuables until his death in 1764.

All overtures from normal mortals had proved unavailing. It remained to be seen whether his father could do any better. In 1755 hostilities broke out between Britain and France in north America. By common consent, a general European war could not be long delayed. This fact, plus the channel to the prince opened by Edgar in 1754, gave James motive and opportunity to begin a sustained correspondence with his son. It would be an exaggeration to say that relations between James and Charles improved after 1755, but at least they were now in touch with one another on a fairly regular basis.

The exchanges revealed a thinly-masked mutual hostility, common in such fraught relationships between father and son.
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The correspondence opened with James’s request (on 29 October 1754) for a letter setting out the details of his son’s financial difficulties. At first the prince did not rise to the bait. He answered through Edgar that he needed no help with his ‘lawsuit’.
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James waited until his son’s 34th birthday, on 31 December, before penning a homily in reply. He reproached Charles for taking it for granted that Providence had blessed the young Pretender more than the old. He himself had spent a lifetime hoping for a Stuart restoration, but it had never happened. It could well turn out the same for Charles, yet
he
was neglecting to provide an heir. He attacked the prince’s so-called friends who ‘have driven you into a labyrinth out of which it will be hard to extricate yourself.
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When the prince replied that he intended to do nothing contrary to his honour, James pounced again. ‘Do you rightly understand the extensive sense of honour and duty?’
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James sweetened the pill in May 1755 by proposing that the two of them work together to get an alliance with France, now on the brink of declaring war on England.
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The last of James’s many messages rebuking his son for fecklessness at such a critical political conjuncture came at a bad time for the prince. He was already smarting under Cluny’s criticisms. This time Charles struck back at his father with a stinging rebuke. Reverting to the question of heirs, he declared vehemently that he would never have any. James’s own career, he added tartly, should have shown him the folly of begetting heirs. Why, all the world waited to see how James’s son would turn out. The result was that from 1719 to 1745 the Jacobite movement was moribund.
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This nettled James. The hostility between the two was no longer kept under wraps. Returning to his son’s financial problems, he asked what had happened to his much-vaunted friends. Finally he could not resist open sarcasm: ‘What you gain by your present system I know not, but you fairly venture losing the advice and assistance of everybody that is not in that great secret.’
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James determined to tighten the screws on his son. Significantly, the episode of sending back the dismissed Avignon servants took place at the end of 1755. James followed this with an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Sir John Graeme to go as his personal representative to talk to Charles Edward.
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But by a stroke of fate James was suddenly handed the most effective of entering wedges.

Out of the blue Waters made a bad mistake. Piqued by the continuing slanders about the prince from the English Jacobites, and annoyed with Charles for not deigning to reply to them, Waters set the situation before James. Without naming Clementina Walkinshaw, he laid the blame squarely at her door:

There is a woman with the Prince who is the author of all this mischief, and unless she be got away from him without loss of time, it is only too apparent that H.R.H.’s reputation will be made very black over all Great Britain, so, with submission, there is a pressing necessity for the king to attempt a cure for this rising evil and to persuade the Prince to remove from the place he is in, for the government in England, I am persuaded, knows where he is.
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This was indiscreet and a bad error. Charles Edward had warned Waters that in no circumstances was he to divulge to James where he lived.
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Now Edgar pounced. By return he conveyed to Waters the king’s desire to know where his son was living, adding (just in case Waters had not got the point) that Waters himself must know,
since
he was so certain the English government knew where it was.
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He further asked if the name of the woman in question was Clementina Walkinshaw and if there was a child.

This elicited something like a howl of pain from Waters. He was impaled on a hook of his own making. ‘You pushed me too far, though I see you will say I brought it upon myself; theory told me there is no serving of two masters; experience convinces me.’ Still wriggling on the hook, he tried to pretend that he corresponded with the prince only through a
poste restante
; his exact whereabouts were known only to a few intimates. But Waters did concede that the woman was Clementina Walkinshaw and that there was a female child of the union.
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With fulsome apologies, Waters apprised Charles Edward of his gaffe. Feeling himself cornered, the prince let Waters know his terms for a full reconciliation with James. He was to dismiss O’Brien (Lord Lismore) and to distance himself from Henry (Charles could not bring himself to mention his brother’s name, but spoke of ‘his young priest’).
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There, for the moment, the correspondence halted, brought to a sudden stop by another of James’s severe illnesses.
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While all this was going on, and partly as a result of James’s getting too close for comfort, the prince decided it was time to move on once more.
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This was an abrupt
volte-face
, given his 1755 attitudes. Ill-health and lethargy kept him confined to Basle for the whole of that year. He flatly turned down all invitations to go to Paris, and lived as a recluse, penning the occasional reflection on contemporary events, such as the great Lisbon earthquake that famously aroused Voltaire from his dogmatic slumbers.
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‘Too ill to travel’ was the perennial refrain (too drunk, his enemies would have said).
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The renting of a new home suggested a quasi-permanent residence in Switzerland.
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Yet in June 1756 Charles and Clementina quit Basle. Liège had been the cheapest place they had lived in so far. Therefore it was to Liège that they returned.
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For the moment Charlotte remained in Basle.
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After leaving Clementina at their lodgings at Chausée St Gilles in Liège,
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the prince immediately set out on another of his secret journeys. This time his destination was Lorraine, where he was to confer with ex-king Stanislas. Charles ordered his agent Colonel Hussey to meet him in Luxembourg, but Hussey failed to keep the appointment.
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The prince pressed on to Lunéville. He soon showed that, when he had a mind to, he had lost none of his old capacity to charm.
Stanislas
was much taken with him and promised to promote his cause with his son-in-law Louis XV.
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