Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) (81 page)

On his return to Liège, Charles Edward was dismayed to hear from Waters that he and Clementina had already been observed in that town.
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He considered moving on to another Flanders town, possibly Tournai or even Ghent – anywhere where it was cheap.
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The nearby garrisons ruled out the two towns, as mature reflection soon revealed to the prince. France was out of the question for other reasons. For the moment Charles was at a loss.
⁶⁸

Then word came through that he had been seen in Calais and Compiègne.
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The original ‘sighting’ in Liège, it transpired, was simply a lucky guess. Much relieved, the prince took a residence near the novitiate house of the Jesuits in Liège, on the rue de Sure de Hase.
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It was settled that he would spend the winter there.
⁷¹

But political business soon called him away to Paris. The Seven Years’ War was now in full spate. Charles Edward was hearing a lot of encouraging stories about French intentions towards the Stuarts. An army, 50,000 strong, had already been assembled in the Picardy ports. Against his will, the prince felt constrained by the urgent pleas of his followers to go to Paris to take soundings.

In November 1756 he passed through Brussels
en route
to the French capital.
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He took Clementina with him but left their child behind in Liège.
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On the afternoon of 25 November he reached Le Bourget, and came into Paris later that night.
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In Paris he renewed acquaintance with his old ally the duc de Richelieu and discussed with him and Lally a possible descent on England.
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The consensus seemed to be that for the moment the conduct of the war in Germany held France’s exclusive attention. The time for a project to restore the Stuarts was not yet. In his best ‘I told you so’ mood, the prince returned to Liège.
⁷⁶

Until mid-1758 the prince thereafter scarcely stirred from Liège and its environs. He made one trip to take the waters at Spa in June 1757,
⁷⁷
but otherwise increasingly sought solace in the bottle.

His tendency towards chronic alcoholism raises interesting questions about the relationship with Clementina. That the prince rowed with her, beat her and made her a scapegoat for his disappointments was now common knowledge, even though the wilder rumours of his behaviour towards her were false.
⁷⁸
One of the marks of the true alcoholic – and the prince was already dangerously close to qualification for that description – is a rejection of sexual intimacy as a balm for the assailing troubles. From his heavy consumption of wine and spirits alone, we should be able to infer that, whatever merit
Charles
had originally seen in Clementina as a mistress, he no longer perceived it. It is surely significant, too, that there were no more children of this ill-starred liaison.

For all that, he retained a touching faith in her fidelity to him (in all senses) and scoffed at rumours that she was trying to raise money to escape his clutches.
⁷⁹
No doubt this residual fondness for her was at the root of the false rumour that he had married her.
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But the prince’s position was crystal clear. Although he would never marry Clementina, it was a point of honour with him not to cast her off at the behest of the English Jacobites.
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The more the English party clamoured – and clamour they did, increasingly and vociferously, to the point of protesting that they would not co-operate in any French invasion until he had dismissed her – the more adamant the prince became.
⁸²

Ironically, the prince did have marriage on his mind at the time, though for quite other reasons. Although his official stance was that he would never marry until after a restoration, increasingly severe money problems tempted him to make a wealthy match as a way out of his financial morass.
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His straitened circumstances made him particularly bitter towards Cluny, who now found his way on to the prince’s short list of prime betrayers (along with O’Sullivan
et al
.) for his faulty stewardship of the Stuart plate.
⁸⁴
When mention of Cluny coincided with a further malfunction of the dreaded Julien Le Roy watch, as it did in May 1757, the prince’s rage knew no limits.
⁸⁵

While his supporters at Versailles lobbied the court for an invasion, and the ministers put them off with extravagant promises for the future, the prince’s public life at Liège continued uneventful. In September 1757 he moved to a more private and secure country house just outside the town.
⁸⁶
The drinking continued, as did the steady trickle of delegations from Jacobites in France urging more energetic pressurising of the French court.

But by now Charles Edward had more immediate problems. The years 1756–8 produced a determined attempt from James in Rome to get his son to ‘see reason’. In a desperate efflorescence of eleventh-hour epistolary effort, James triggered a sustained debate by letter between Rome and Liège. To make sense of it, we must first place it in the context of the Seven Years’ War and then examine the sombre psychological undercurrents.

The late 1750s saw a three-cornered relationship between James, Charles Edward and the French. Until 1759 French aims were simply to use the Stuarts as a scarecrow against England. James, on the other hand, was determined to force Louis XV bit by bit into giving
more
and more overt support for his cause. Charles Edward’s position was one of detachment. He did not trust France and was willing to be involved only in a certain, guaranteed descent on England,
not
Scotland or Ireland.

The complicating factor was the prince’s relationship with his father. Charles Edward refused to marry, as his father urged, or to give up Clementina Walkinshaw, as the English Jacobites demanded. This meant that France could not count on the support of the English Jacobites, even if they enlisted the prince on their side. It also meant that the kind of French guarantees the prince wanted would never be forthcoming. A firm and binding contract, in the form of a treaty of alliance like the Fontainebleau treaty of October 1745, could be made only between monarchs. Until James abdicated, Louis XV could not sign such a treaty for, if James was, in Bagehot’s terms, the ‘dignified’ element in the Stuart dynasty, Charles Edward was the ‘efficient’ part. A treaty with James alone would not be worth the paper it was written on. But royal protocol prohibited a treaty with Charles Edward alone. James would have to abdicate and name his elder son as successor. But James in turn would do this only if Charles gave up Clementina Walkinshaw, promised to marry a suitable bride, and came to Rome to make formal obeisance and compose their differences.

The prince refused to do any of these things. The full extent of shadow-boxing, tail-chasing and vicious circling involved in French relations with the Stuarts in the late 1750s can thus be appreciated.

A prolonged examination of the correspondence between James and Charles Edward in 1756–8 would be a wearisome endeavour, but some account of their verbal duelling must be given. The thesis of unconscious resentment and hatred between the two cannot really be sustained without copious illustration.
⁸⁷

James opened his campaign in a curious way for one who claimed to want to conciliate his son. First he rebuked him for accepting a loan from Stanislas.
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Next, he wrote to Louis XV to complain about his son.
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This was an extremely curious thing to do for one who claimed to want to present a united Stuart front to France.

Charles replied to his father’s overtures in his laconic quasi-heroic style: ‘His situation is more than singular and had he not always Providence to favour him more than many, … he would long ago be drowned.’
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James never liked it when anyone other than himself played the stoic or martyr. Crisply he cut through this and urged the prince to
work
closely with France and to come to Rome to discuss with him a unified policy towards Louis XV.
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Feeling himself put on the spot, the prince consulted his Mephistopheles Kelly – now newly restored to favour. Kelly recommended neutralising James by spreading a story at Versailles that he had already abdicated in favour of Charles.
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Kelly followed this up by another piece of arch-Machiavellianism. After making it clear that James’s only importance to him lay in how soon he would die, Kelly recommended a campaign of attrition and procrastination. A euphuistic letter, full of filial submission, should be sent to Rome to shut James up.
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Further stalling could be effected by the dispatch of an envoy to the Palazzo Muti to discuss common policy towards France.
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Finally, when James had been played out far enough on the line, the prince should go to Rome as the dutiful son. By that time James would be so desperate for a
rapprochement
that he would give Charles anything he asked.
⁹⁵

The prince took the advice and sent the letter.
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It was partly to talk over further ways of manipulating James that Charles went to Paris in the winter of 1756.

Predictably, James was delighted with what he read as a change of heart by the prodigal son.
⁹⁷
Then Kelly callously played the prince’s next card. The following communication to Rome embodied his poisonous advice. Before he made the journey to Italy, he wrote, there were certain ‘outrages’ to be cleared up. For instance, there was the ‘overbearing and despotic’ cardinal, his brother. And why, incidentally, had James told Charles Edward not to return to Rome after the imbroglio in Venice in 1749?
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Forewarned by his Jesuit contacts in Paris of what was afoot, James did not fall into Charles’s (and Kelly’s) trap. Ignoring the burden of his son’s complaint, he turned his flank by blandly remarking that he understood that delicate diplomatic negotiations with France required his son’s continuing presence in Paris.
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Since substantive negotiations with the French were the last thing the prince had in mind, and by the time he got his father’s letter he was back in Liège, the advantage had once again swung James’s way.

James now moved over on to the attack. His first target was Charles Edward’s cherished principle that he would not marry until a restoration. Was this not simply advertising Stuart pessimism and announcing to the world a lack of faith in God’s providence?
¹⁰⁰
French interest would be quickened in a Stuart prince with heirs; as proof of this, he revealed that Versailles had often in the past urged
him
to remarry.

Charles Edward’s reply was lame. Suddenly, it seemed, the state of affairs in England and the pace of his negotiations with France were all-important.
¹⁰¹
That was the reason he could not go to Rome at present.

Ingenuously believing that serious negotiations between the prince and the ministers of state really were on foot, James agreed that by all means his son’s trip to Rome should be postponed.
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Then he revealed the oceanic depths of his lack of understanding of Charles Edward. Ever the stoical pessimist, James exhorted the prince to get an assurance of a high-born wife and a good pension out of France, even if the invasion project foundered.
¹⁰³

James had unwittingly touched a raw nerve. Stung by his father’s constant emphasis on France, the prince revealed his continuing bitterness about his arrest in 1748. Too close an association with Versailles, he taunted his father, was inconsistent with true patriotism.
¹⁰⁴

James was deeply wounded by the aspersions on his patriotism. Peevishly he wrote back:

What I comprehend least of all is how you can bring in patriotism to support your opinion, while I think I can bring it in with a great deal of reason to support mine, and though I do not pretend to be a hero, I think myself as good a patriot as you and will not yield to you in that particular.
¹⁰⁵

The vast reserves of hostility are suddenly on open view in that letter, right down to the ironical taunt about heroes. The prince riposted with one of his favourite coldly contemptuous ploys. He wrote to Edgar the royal secretary, not to his father, requesting a renewal of the powers of Regent.
¹⁰⁶
James granted the Commission of Regency
¹⁰⁷
but continued on the attack, determined to bring his son to bay. Charles’s way of life meant no permanent residence and no wife. If he, James, had embraced such principles, he would by now have been wandering the face of Europe for forty years. Was it not obvious that, however unpopular the Hanoverians were, no one would want to restore a dynasty whose leading scion had no heir? That would mean resurrecting the nightmare of a disputed succession on Charles’s death.

James moved on to the arguments that had given him particular offence. When James had argued that all he had ever received from France he got because he had a son, Charles retorted that he did not want children who would be slaves to France and in a prison in Rome into the bargain. Rome was not a prison, James snapped back
angrily
, as witness his journeys to Spain in 1719 and to Lorraine in 1727. Moreover, ‘if you call it slavery to be beholden to another prince, there are now few in Europe who might not be termed slaves in that sense, for you do not, to be sure, pretend to be self-sufficient and to want and depend on nobody, which are attributes of God alone’.
¹⁰⁸

The temperature of the exchange was rising. Smarting under this rebuke, the prince loosed his most deadly shaft at his father. His pointed reply, rejecting all idea of marriage, struck at James at his two most vulnerable points: his failures with his wife and with his son. In the first place, the prince purred maliciously, marriages were known to go wrong. In the second, history demonstrated that the Jacobites always waited to see how the son would turn out. That was why the Jacobite movement was moribund between 1719 and 1745.
¹⁰⁹