A Desperate Fortune (43 page)

Hugh’s surname was intentionally chosen to place him with a family of MacPhersons from near Inverness whose names are recorded as being among those men captured at Preston and transported to the Americas and the West Indies for seven years’ slavery.

As for Hugh’s Highland dress, worn to the meeting with King James in Rome, although standard clan tartans weren’t used in those days, I made Hugh’s plaid, in pattern and colors, identical to the one worn by a previous MacPherson chief, in a portrait painted a few years earlier.

Finally, since Highlanders were known to go everywhere heavily armed—it was common for a visitor to the Highlands in those years to see a man “walking with a dirk and pistol at his side and a gun in his hand”—I allowed Hugh to do likewise, giving him the best gun he would have been able to find on the Continent in 1732.

I was surprised to find in my research that the first rifle was reportedly invented by Gaspard Zollner of Vienna as early as the fifteenth century. In 1498, at a Leipzig competition, most of the marksmen reportedly used rifles—guns with grooves cut into the inside of the barrels to improve accuracy—although those grooves appear to have remained straight until the use of spiral rifling began to take hold around 1620. By the mid-1600s, companies of chasseurs, or riflemen, had been incorporated into most of the armies of what is now Germany, and by the end of that century their use had begun to spread, but in 1742, they were still enough of a novelty outside mainland Europe that Benjamin Robins, writing in his book
The
New
Principles
of
Gunnery
, felt it necessary to write of rifles: “…these pieces, though well-known on the Continent, being but little used in England; it is necessary to give a short description of their make…”

Robins’s book makes fascinating reading, as he tries to figure out the scientific reasons why such rifling might make guns shoot with more accuracy. At the end of his book, Robins makes the prescient statement that:

“Whatever State shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages of rifled barrel pieces, and…shall introduce into their armies their general use with a dexterity in the management of them; they will by this means acquire a superiority, which will…perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects which histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors of firearms.”

The English army didn’t formally adopt the use of the rifle until 1794.

The rifle Hugh carries is a duplicate of an actual circa 1730 sporting rifle sold at auction at Christie’s in 2009.

It might have proven useful while he was guarding Thomson in Paris, as the danger I describe was real. Even though the French police were apparently in the pay of the Jacobites, a fact bemoaned by Waldegrave in his letters to his superiors, the bounty on Thomson was a large one, and attempts were being made to find and capture him.

I made use of this reality to set them on the road south.

The journey from Paris to Rome was a commonplace one in those days, part of the established path of the “Grand Tour” many British tourists traveled at the time. Most of them either brought their own coaches across the Channel or hired one when they reached the Continent, but a very few used the public transportation of the diligences, both of land and water, and the
coches
d’eau
.

Conveniently for me, the routes and schedules of the diligences and their stopping places are preserved within the “Almanach [
sic
] Royal” for 1732 (a new one was printed each year), which lists also the feast days and saints’ days, the hours the sun and moon rose and set each day, and myriad other small details that helped me re-create the trip as accurately as I could.

Diligences were built to carry ten people inside, and even in winter it would have been unlikely for my characters to be the only passengers, so I created traveling companions for them.

I also created a villain.

It’s one of my personal quirks that I can’t make a person a villain unless I’m convinced, from the records available, that’s what he was. However long dead these people might be, they were—and remain—people first, and as such they deserve to be written about with respect.

The friend “by the name of Erskine” mentioned by Stevens as planning an attempt to seize Thomson in Paris was in fact William Erskine, accused of planning such an attempt in early March, forcing the British ambassador Waldegrave to reassure the French authorities his government “did not encourage the practice of carrying people off by stealth.”

But it’s impossible to tell from the surviving documents whether Erskine was indeed working for the British or for the Jacobites or, as he claimed, on behalf of a kinsman owed money by Thomson. I can’t even be sure which William Erskine he was, as there were several men of that name mentioned in the correspondence of the time.

So instead of making him my villain, I created Stevens.

But the wolves were real.

I read about them in
Some
Observations
Made
While
Travelling
through
France, Italy, &c., In the Years 1720, 1721, and 1722, In Two Volumes
, by Edward Wright, Esq., printed at London in 1730—one of the travel accounts that I read in the course of my research. A bibliography of those accounts would stretch to several pages, but Wright’s was one of my favorites, along with
The
Household
Book
of
Lady
Grisell
Baillie
(edited by Robert Scott-Moncrieff, WS, and printed at Edinburgh by the University Press for the Scottish Historical Society in 1911), which chronicles a tour that lady made of Europe from 1731 to 1733, meticulously noting the exchange rates between the French
louis
d’or
and the British pound as she went, and giving helpful tips such as how to smuggle your Protestant prayer book past the customs men at Rome.

These books and many others allowed me to re-create a landscape that, in some cases, no longer exists.

At Valence, for example, I was able to lodge my characters at the same inn, which was fondly remembered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his
Confessions
and, although long lost, is well described in the
Annales
de
la
Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, published in 1905 at Geneva.

Beyond that point, I remained conscious of the need to keep my travelers away from the common path of the tourists, especially avoiding Avignon—a city under the protection of the pope—where there was a sizable Jacobite community and, consequently, a number of Waldegrave’s spies.

Beginning in Marseilles, however, I had a written account of what Thomson said and did to go by, provided by the British informer Thomas Cole.

The aliases I gave to Thomson and the others for their time in Paris and the first part of their journey south were fictional, but from Thomas Cole’s letters I know for a fact that Thomson came to Marseilles that spring traveling under the name “Mr. Symonds.” I also know he met the banker, Mr. Warren, who had been expecting him.

I altered facts in one regard, by having Thomson meet Mr. Cole at the same time, when in actual fact it appears the two men didn’t meet until later on that summer, when Thomson returned to Marseilles on his way back from Rome. Introduced by Warren, Cole became friendly with Thomson and promptly sold all the information he’d learned (and continued to learn) from their conversations to Waldegrave. Mr. Cole became such a success as a British spy that he went from simply reporting what he’d learned to actively trying to “trap” individuals, a policy that backfired upon him rather spectacularly in 1735, when a man he informed against to the police turned the tables and claimed Cole had been his accomplice. Cole was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to the galleys. I cannot say I did not find that justice.

I’m not sure how John Thomson traveled from Marseilles to Rome, but I do know King James sent him back again by sea, and since many of the travelers whose accounts I was reading used ships or feluccas for this final leg of their voyage, I sent Thomson that way as well, taking the opportunity to introduce my own fictional addition to the pirate hunters who at that time kept a watchful eye out for the Barbary corsairs.

In Rome, I put my travelers in the Albergo del Sole al Pantheon, which has been a hotel since the fifteenth century, with its windows that look on the fountain and Pantheon now, as they would have done then.

The modest Palazzo Balestra that once housed King James and his court lies a short walk away.

I have been to the palace. I’ve gone up the once-secret staircase, but the king’s rooms are now a private apartment, so I was shown through the rooms just above it. Fortunately, Professor Edward Corp of the University of Toulouse had been able to visit the king’s rooms previously and shared his impressions with me, as well as some beautiful photographs he had taken of the painted ceiling as it yet remains, with Mary’s birds still beating hopefully towards the false sky.

At the time of Thomson’s visit, those rooms and the ones around them would have echoed with the footsteps of the two young princes, Charles and Henry, and the trusted courtiers who included Captain William Hay—again no stranger to the readers of my book
The
Firebird
—and the Earl Marischal.

Writing to their mutual friend, Admiral Thomas Gordon, from Rome in February 1732, Captain Hay claims the Earl Marischal “may be justly stiled [
sic
] the hero of our cause.”

Having read the earl’s own letters to Admiral Gordon, together with those to his brother, his niece and her family in Britain, and those preserved within the Stuart Papers, I agree with William Hay.

The earl’s fondness for Prince Henry and the journal Henry kept for him were things I found endearing, and I’ve relied on his own account of where he’d been and what he had been doing at that time in Rome to guide Hugh’s movements also.

I don’t know if the earl met Thomson, but I do know Thomson met the king. Their conversation was repeated by John Thomson to his “friend” at Marseilles, Mr. Cole, who promptly relayed it to Waldegrave, as I’ve relayed it to you, in the same words. In fact, nearly all of King James’s words used in that scene are his own, taken mostly from letters he wrote to his family and friends.

Thomson was imprisoned. I haven’t been able to find where he was actually held in the Castel Sant’Angelo, only that he claimed to have been moved from a poor cell into a comfortable apartment there, so I gave him the same apartment used half a century later for another man embroiled in a scandal: the self-styled “Count of Cagliostro.”

The letter to his father from there on the fifteenth of May was a real one, and I’ve quoted it verbatim. He also used his time in prison to write a full confession of his part in the scandal, addressed to the British Parliament, and in typical fashion the two letters tell different stories.

Released from prison that summer, he made his way back through Marseilles to Paris and eventually home to London, where in April of 1733 he testified to the Committee in charge of the Charitable Corporation affair in return for a percentage of whatever money they were able to recover by his evidence. It must not have been much. According to the
London
Gazette
, a statute of bankruptcy was awarded against Thomson on September 2 of that year, and afterward he largely disappears from history.

Interestingly, though, he turns up in St. Petersburg a few years later, happily engaged in business with his brother there and continuing to annoy the British by setting up a manufacturing house for wallpaper in Russia, thus undercutting the British exports to that country. He appears to have still been there in the 1770s, and I continue to keep my eyes open for new references to him, though he remains as enigmatic to me now as he was when I first began to read his letters.

As for the money? At the time, it was estimated that the swindle involving the Charitable Corporation resulted in profits to the conspirators amounting to half a million pounds, yet only a tiny portion of that was ever recovered.

I have an idea—completely unproven—where some of the rest might have gone.

In the summer of 1732, shortly after Thomson’s release from his prison in Rome, Martin O’Connor—who had led me into this tale to begin with, and appears to have been involved in the stock scandal from its beginning—began to develop new mines in Provence with his partners—mines that were presumably intended as a source of income for King James—with O’Connor personally investing 20,000
livres
of capital.

And in 1733, Thomson’s fellow fugitive, George Robinson, joined a number of fellow Jacobites, at least two of whom had also been involved in the scandal, to form a company aimed at developing mines in the province of Burgundy.
Their
starting capital was 360,000 pounds.

I could go on to say that neither venture ended in the way the Jacobites had wished, but it lies within the power of each storyteller to decide where best to end the story—a truism that would have been well-known and understood by Madame d’Aulnoy.

Her own story is a fascinating one, too long to recount here, but well worth searching out and remembering. For my part, I’m happy to see the woman who was not only arguably the writer of the first modern fairy tale, but also one of the most popular and successful novelists of her age, slowly being discovered again and restored in some part to the place she deserves in the canon.

I found it rather poignant that, in her novel
Hypolitus, earl of Douglas
, with its fairy tale about the Russian prince, Madame d’Aulnoy has the prince exclaim, when he first learns three hundred years have passed since he last saw his homeland: “When I come there again, who will know me? Or how shall I know any Body; My Dominions are, doubtless, fallen into the Hands of some strange Family? I can’t suppose there will be any left for me; so that I am likely to be a Prince without a Principality; every Body will shun me as if I were a Spectre…”