Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (36 page)

In their early years, Charles, Clementina, Charlotte and one or two servants lived fugitive lives, coming to rest in this or that Belgian town for a few months at a time, then moving on when Charles was recognized or when he feared he soon might be. Young Glengarry had made the Hanoverian ministers aware that Charles was seriously involved in political intrigues; though the 1752—1753 plan had been circumvented, other schemes were being put forward and at any given time there were conspirators and would-be conspirators in plenty.

Few in government circles wrote Charles off as a forlorn hope, despite his loss of official French support. ''No expense to be spared to find the Pretender's son," Newcastle wrote in his notes at a cabinet meeting in November of 1753. ''Sir John Gooderich to be sent after him. Lord Anson to have frigates on the Scotch and Irish coasts."
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Hanoverian agents in Rome, Paris and even Russia had dozens of spies and informers on their payrolls, and during the course of the 1750s the espionage network became more elaborate and more efficient. Hence the need for Charles and his small household to keep moving, employ disguises and aliases—one researcher has estimated that Charles used some twenty different aliases in the 1750s and early 1760s—and live as obscurely as possible.

Often Charles left Clementina and Charlotte while he pursued his most dangerous clandestine intrigues alone. The dispatches Horace Mann sent to London are full of the descriptions of Mann's spies who caught fleeting glimpses of the "Young Pretender." He was seen in Avignon, dressed as an abbé, walking abroad in the evening with three or four of his friends and attended at other times by members of his permanent, albeit much reduced, Avignon household. He was seen passing through Paris, walking in the streets on his way to the Scots College, ''so disguised as to make it extremely difficult to know him, having painted his face with red, and colored his eyebrows with the deepest black, and keeping a handkerchief to his face as to keep off the cold." He was glimpsed in the Netherlands, meeting with suspected and known Jacobites, waiting for a planned insurrection in England that never occurred.
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When the English agents lost track of Charles, they watched the roads to Rome, waiting for couriers or servants from James's court who might be expected to lead them to him. In September of 1755, five of Charles's Scots servants, three of whom had been with him in Scotland, were seen riding through Tuscany on their way south. Horace Mann took note of their passing, and when three months later the same five men, now wearing James's livery, were seen riding back toward France, Mann sent two of his English informers to join the Scotsmen and try to discover anything they could about Charles's whereabouts and activities. The Englishmen succeeded in passing themselves off as harmless travelers, and ''insinuated themselves so well" into the company of Scotsmen "as to pass the whole evening with them."

Where was Charles at present, the Englishmen asked. The Scotsmen answered only "that they were going to Avignon and should soon know," and with considerable merriment they drank the health of "the Boy that is lost and cannot be found."

"But he will soon be found!" one of them offered—before a companion reproved him and told him to hold his tongue.
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Tantalizing encounters such as this convinced Mann that major Jacobite plans were afoot, yet his spies could not manage to locate Charles or find out exactly what was being planned. Young Glengarry's usefulness had come to an end; on the death of his father the previous year he had gone back to Scotland to head his clan. Thus the spy network lost a key agent, and at times there was such a dearth of information about Charles that the English were tempted to believe that he was either dead or locked away out of reach, possibly in a madhouse.

Such speculations would doubtless have pleased Charles no end. Far from being confined in a madhouse, and very much alive, he was living with Clementina and Charlotte in Basel, posing as an English doctor—another account calls him "a private English gentleman"—named Thompson. The household consisted of the "Thompson" family, Charles's elderly servant John Stuart of Ardvorlich—who later became his major domo—and two "ordinary servants." They lived, according to the British minister at Bern, who may have got his information from Lord Elcho, "very decently, as persons of easy fortune, but without the least affectation of show or magnificence." Dr. Thompson was often away on business, and when his wife accompanied him their child was left in the care of the elderly servant.
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Eventually the family had to move when a Basel art dealer, having been struck by the resemblance between Dr. Thompson and a portrait of Charles which he had for sale, realized that the English gentleman was none other than the Stuart Pretender. The word got out and quickly spread. Charles and his entourage were soon on their way to Flanders.

In the late 1750s Charles found a more or less permanent pied-à-terre for himself and his family, if a somewhat incongruous one. The Due de Bouillon, Louise de Rohan-
Guéméné's father and grandfather of Charles and Louise's dead son, offered Charles and Clementina his château of Carlsbourg at Saussure. The offer was prompted by political considerations; France was once again at war with England and Louis XV was at pains to offer comfort to one of England's most famous enemies. One wonders whether Clementina knew of the affair between Charles and Louise. Charles may have told her, or she may have heard gossip. At any event, she was very unhappy at Carlsbourg, and ultimately left the château and Charles, taking their daughter with her.

For years Clementina had lived in the shadow of Jacobite accusations. Many of Charles's advisers and supporters believed that she had an unhealthy hold over him, and accused her of undermining his cause. She was a Catholic, she was a hindrance to any future royal marriage Charles might decide to make, she made him look disreputable. Worst of all, Clementina was widely suspected of being a Hanoverian agent, as she had begun to live with Charles at about the same time that the plans for rebellion in 1752—1753 came to nothing. One of her sisters had lived in the household of the Prince and Princess of Wales since 1736, first as a seamstress and later as housekeeper. After the prince died in 1751 she stayed on as housekeeper to his widow at Leicester House. Because of her long service with the royal family, "Walky," as she was known, was in a position of trust; it was reasoned that she might have recruited Clementina to serve as an agent on behalf of her mistress the princess.

At first Charles refused to listen to the accusations, but as the years passed the voices criticizing Clementina became more and more insistent. Visitors called on him, begging him to put aside the "harlot'* who was betraying him, pleading with him not to let his mistress ruin forever his chances to regain the throne his grandfather had lost. He was urged to put Clementina in a convent, forget about his illegitimate daughter and find a royal bride who could give him a true heir.

The terrible scenes that occurred between Charles and his mistress only provided more fodder to Clementina's critics. The ugly arguments in cafes, witnessed by shocked or amused patrons, the shouts and shrieks coming from the residences the couple shared, Charles's drunken rages which became the subject of common gossip—all these were terribly damaging to the man who only a few years earlier had been widely praised as a celebrity and hero. Either Clementina was driving Charles to drink, or, at the very least, she was not helping him control what had become a dangerous habit.

And she was provoking him to a level of violence unbefitting a Stuart prince. As Clementina herself told Lord Elcho, Charles mistreated and abused her physically throughout the whole time she lived with him. He frequently thrashed her with a stick as many as fifty times in a single day, she said—a claim that becomes easier to believe when it is compared with other reports that Charles was accustomed to chasing his servants with a drawn sword when they displeased him. "You pushed me to the greatest extremity and even despair," Clementina wrote to Charles seven months after she left him, "as I was always in perpetual dread of your violent passions."
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At midnight on July 23, Clementina bundled her six-year-old daughter into a hired carriage, got in herself, and ordered the driver to take them the hundred and sixty miles to Paris. After two long days of traveling they finally arrived, having only what little money the Earl Marischal had given Clementina for her immediate expenses. She had not dared to bring along a servant, and there was no one waiting in the city to help mother and daughter get settled. It had taken considerable daring, but Clementina had finally left Charles, choosing her time carefully to coincide with one of his many trips away from Carlsbourg and leaving behind a letter for him to find on his return.

"Your Royal Highness cannot be surprised at my having parti [left] when you consider one [
sic
] repeated bad treatment I have met with these eight years past," the letter read, "and the daily risk of losing my life. Not being able to bear any longer such hardships, my health being altered by them has obliged me at last to take this desperate step of removing from your Royal Highness with my child which nothing but the fear of my life would ever have made me undertake anything without your knowledge."
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Clementina hoped to hide herself in Paris, but Charles's elderly retainer John Stuart followed her there and confronted her once she arrived. Too feeble to force her, even if he had wanted to, the old man pleaded with her to return to the château. She would sooner "make away with herself than go back, Clementina told him. And as for Charlotte, she would be "cut to pieces sooner than give her up."
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Predictably, Charles was enraged when he returned to Carlsbourg and found that Clementina had left him. When he had calmed down sufficiently, he wrote to the Abbé John Gordon, principal of the Scots College in Paris, to solicit Gordon's aid in getting Clementina and his daughter back. He was absolutely determined to recover Charlotte, he told Gordon, even if he had "to burn down every convent in Paris to find her." Gordon did his best, contacting the prefects of police and providing them with descriptions of mother and daughter. Clementina had slipped away from the servant John Stuart after only a day, and he did not know where she had gone. Gordon had reason to believe that she was looking for a convent which would accept Charlotte as a boarding pupil, but could not discover which convent.

Meanwhile Charles alternated between anger and misery. Two days after he discovered that his mistress and daughter were gone he dictated a letter to Gordon again urging him to do all he could to find them, "both of them, especially the little girl." In his own hand he wrote, "I take this affair so much to heart that I was not able to write what is here above. Shall be in the greatest affliction until I greet back the child, which was my only comfort in my misfortunes."
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Months went by, and Clementina proved to be as good at eluding her pursuers as Charles had always been at eluding his. Charles kept writing to Gordon, suggesting where Clementina might be—with Waters the banker, at Rouen, with the Archbishop of Toulouse, who had once offered to find a convent for her to live in—but none of his suggestions led to her discovery. By October Gordon had begun to assume that Clementina had managed to leave France and that she was likely to be in Italy, perhaps in Venice or Nice. In fact she and Charlotte were in hiding at the Convent of St. Denis four miles north of Paris, under the protection of no less a personage than King Louis.

About this time Charles discovered, to his extreme chagrin, that his father had been a party to Clementina's plot to abandon him and that James had given her his permission to take his granddaughter to Paris where she could receive a genteel education. Both mother and daughter were as good as lost to him, Charles seems to have concluded. He no longer had any power over them. Those Jacobites who had been urging him for years to get rid of Clementina now crowed with delight to discover that she was gone for good. As for Charles, he had taken to his bed, attacked by fever and in pain from hemorrhoids.

He was suffering, not only because his familiar if tumultuous domestic life had come to an end and he had lost his beloved daughter but because, only a year or so earlier, the last and most ambitious French enterprise for the invasion of Britain had collapsed in disaster.

Another continental war had begun in 1756, and at first the British had fared badly. Hanover was virtually overrun, the British forces were being defeated and even the strong British navy was scattered so widely over the vast war theater—for this was virtually a global war—that it could not adequately protect the home coasts. Renewed schemes for a French invasion of either England or Scotland with Charles at the head of the invading force had begun to reach Louis XV's council as early as June of 1755, but in January and February of 1759 the foreign minister, Choiseul, carried forth an expensive and complex plan of his own.
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Instead of relying on the Jacobite exiles, or on Charles's unreliable supporters in England and Scotland, Choiseul hit on the idea of landing a combined Russo-Swedish army in Scotland. He asked the Swedish government to assemble twelve thousand men in Gothenburg and requested the Russian chancellor Vorontsov to prepare to send ten to twelve thousand of his men to Scotland on board the Swedish fleet. Preparations went forward throughout the winter of 1759 and Charles, ever skeptical of the good faith of the French and still full of resentment over his expulsion from France ten years earlier, was at length persuaded to approach Choiseul for an interview. A meeting was arranged for February 7, and though the foreign minister arrived on time, Charles did not. Choiseul waited, no doubt impatiently, remembering what he had heard of the Pretender's irresponsible life and unheroic conduct. Eventually Charles arrived, thoroughly drunk, carried in the arms of one of his forbearing followers.