Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography (42 page)

According to Berry,
The Young Pretender's Mistress
(Edinburgh and London, 1977), p. 21, Clementina spent her youth and early womanhood with her mother and sisters in or near Edinburgh, though in 1731, when her father died, she was "out of the kingdom," possibly being educated abroad.

Clementina's mother, Katharine Walkinshaw, was, according to her great-granddaughter who wrote of her in 1822, "a woman of superior abilities" with "a firm undaunted, I may say manly, character" whose boast it was that "she had never leaned back in a chair." She ruled her ten daughters with firmness, refusing to let any of them sit in her presence without her permission and regulating their lives energetically. Family tradition had it that when important relations came to call, Katharine permitted only the most attractive of her daughters to present themselves, locking the others in the garret until the visitors left. She lived to be at least ninety, and was still capable of dancing vigorously to country tunes into her tenth decade. (Berry, pp. 7—8.)

Although Lord Elcho claimed in his memoirs that Clementina became Charles's mistress at Bannockburn House in January of 1746, there is no substantiation for this, and Elcho's animus against Charles makes his assertion suspect.

8. Johnstone, p. 87.

CHAPTER 17

1. "A True Account of Mr. John Daniel's Progress with Prince Charles,"
Origins of the Forty-Five
, ed. Walter Biggar Blaikie, Publications of the Scottish History Society, Second Series, Vol. H (Edinburgh, 1916), 167-224. John Daniel wrote how he took pity on his poor horse, "of a delicate and tender breed," and, knowing that the horse could drink beer, tried him on whiskey. He poured the spirits into the crown of his hat, and dissolved some snow in it to dilute it. The horse drank it down, "his mouth," Daniel noted, "being so cold that he did not know what he drank."

2. Tomasson and Buist, p. 146. The following account of the battle of Culloden relies in part on Tomasson and Buist's narrative, pp. 145—204.

3. Quoted in Blaikie, ed..
Origins of the Forty-Five
, pp. Ixix—Ixx.

4. Daniel's narrative, in Blaikie, ed..
Origins of the Forty-Five
, pp. 213-14.

5. Tomasson and Buist, p. 145.

6. That this position was ill chosen had important consequences. The lie of the land was such that Charles could not see the results of Cumberland's cannonade. One of the men with him, John Macdonald, was convinced that the Hanoverian guns were doing little damage to the Jacobite line, and presumably Charles was led to the same conclusion. Consequently Charles did not realize how urgent it was to give the command to advance, and when he finally gave it, the losses were already grave and the situation irremediable. Tomasson and Buist, p. 170.

7. Ibid., 170.

8. Ibid., 175.

CHAPTER 18

1. The following account of Charles's wanderings in Scotland between April and September, 1746, comes in part from Robert Forbes,
The Lyon in Mourning
, ed. Henry Paton, Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vols. XX-XXIII (Edinburgh, 1895), W. B. Blaikie, Itinerary of Prince Charles Ed'xard Stuart, Publications of the Scottish History Society, Second Series, Vol. XXlll (Edinburgh, 1897), Eric Linklater, The Prince in the Heather (London, 1965), and "Account of the Young Pretender's Escape,"
The Lockhart Papers
(London, 1817), II, 539-62.

2. Plora returned home to Scotland, where she settled down and had ten children. In 1774 she and her husband emigrated to America— surviving, on the journey, an attack by a French privateer that left Flora slightly wounded. Having settled in North Carolina, she and her husband were dismayed by the American revolutionaries and he fought for the British against the colonists. In 1779 they returned to Scotland.

3. John Prebble, Culloden (London, 1967), p. 194.

4. Linklater, p. 102.

5. George Hilton Jones,
The Main Stream of Jacobitism
(Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 240-41. While it is true that the scale of the destruction was maximized by Jacobite writers and annalists, such as Bishop Forbes, even the most dispassionate late-twentieth-century scholars agree that massive damage was done accompanied by widespread suffering.

CHAPTER 19

1. Henry complained to O'Brien in a letter written from Boulogne in March 1746 that his health was bound to suffer if he stayed there any longer, housebound, bored, and increasingly convinced that his martyrdom was of no use to Charles's cause. "Our enemies know better than we ourselves that we can't do anything for England," he wrote, begging O'Brien to do all he could to get him released from "this vile hole" and at least moved inland, if not to Paris. "Who could bear to stay in a place like Boulogne, three months, with such worrisome news and events and on top of all else with such people as ours? I can't do it anymore." Stuart Papers, pp. 166-67.

2. Laurence L. Bongie,
The Love of a Prince: Bonnie Prince Charlie in France, J 744-1748
(Vancouver, 1986), p. 144.

3.
Stuart Papers
, pp. 169ff.

4. Bongie, p. 143.

5.
Stuart Papers
, p. 187. The editors of the
Stuart Papers
omitted the offensive word.

6.
The Lockhart Papers
contain a Jacobite pamphlet describing in glowing terms Charles's arrival, reception and celebrity in France. Many of Charles's biographers have relied on it as an authentic account of events, but in fact it is mostly wishful thinking. According to the pamphleteer, Henry met Charles immediately when he disembarked; Louis XV greeted him as a princely hero at Versailles, not Fontainebleau, and made him a lengthy speech of honor; the queen greeted him like a son and made him so welcome that he went back to the palace several times a week to regale her and her ladies with his adventures. There is even a hint that one of the princesses was infatuated with him. The pamphlet goes on to describe his formal reception at Versailles, arriving there accompanied by a train of coaches complete with pages, footmen and gentlemen of the bedchamber. For this, the pamphleteer noted, Charles wore a velvet coat embroidered with silver and a waistcoat of gold brocade, and his every ornament, from the cockade in his hat and the buckles on his shoes to the buttons on his waistcoat, was covered with diamonds. "He glittered all over like the star which they tell you appeared at his nativity." Lockhart Papers, H, 565-86.

7. Bongie, pp. 150, 152.

8. Ibid., 151-52.

9. A contretemps between the government and the king had led all the ministers to resign en masse early in 1746, following which two of them had attempted in vain to form a new government. After a few days they gave up, defeated; wits referred to this brief hiatus as "the Long Administration." Had George II died in the early months of 1747, there would certainly have been a struggle for power between his ministers and the faction loyal to the Prince of Wales, who would have become King Frederick I. As it was, George survived, and in the elections of 1747 the Whigs tried to blacken their opponents by accusing them of Jacobitism. One Tory politician lamented that "the phantom of Jacobitism is made to appear in terrible shapes." Rogers, p. 5.

10. Bongie, p. 166.

CHAPTER 20

1.
Journal et memoires du Marquis d'Argenson
, V, 303—4.

2. The love affair between Charles and Louise has been brought to light in Laurence L. Bongie,
The Love of a Prince: Bonnie Prince Charlie in France 1744-1748
. Bougie's research in the Stuart Archives unearthed a one-sided amorous correspondence which, he believes, points to a love affair between the Young Pretender and Louise de la Tour d'Auvergne, Duchesse de Montbazon and Princesse de Rohan. Bongie speculates that Charles's letters to Louise were destroyed, only hers to him remain. However, one is always skeptical of any one-sided correspondence, and as Bongie himself writes, "it is puzzling that not one word of this tragic romance seems to have seeped down through the gossipy annals of a century that generally loved to record such juicy incidents in intimate detail." (Bongie, p. 13.) It was also a century, be it noted, that loved to fabricate amorous correspondences. Still, his conjecture is plausible, if far from indisputable, and Charles's behavior with Louise fits the pattern of his later treatment of other women.

3. Apart from Clementina Walkinshaw, Charles had never shown much interest in women. Bongie suggests that he may have taken a vow of chastity, and that he abandoned it, possibly as a gesture of defiance toward his father, in 1747. On one occasion, Charles told James's agent O'Brien that, far from complaining about Henry's sexual purity, he approved of it, adding, "And I'll even confess to you that in some things, I think myself as virtuous as he." (Bongie, p. 150.) Balhaldie wrote to James in February 1748 that Charles's Irish companions "had at last succeeded in corrupting" him, and that he had lost his innocence the previous summer. This fall from grace was all the more tragic, according to Balhaldie, "because of the resolution he [Charles] had taken of being singular in that virtue." By the time Balhaldie wrote his letter, Bongie says, Charles's affair with Louise was well advanced.

4. Bongie, pp. 5-6.

5. Ibid., 11.

6. Ibid., 219-21.

7.
Journal et memoires du Marquis d'Argenson
, V, 288.

8. According to Horace Walpole, not all the onlookers stood by passively. "It is said," he wrote to Horace Mann on December 15, "that a Mr. Dun, who married Alderman Parson's eldest daughter, is in the Bastille for having struck the officer when the young man [Charles] was arrested."
Walpole Letters
, II, 137. Walpole added, "What a mercy that we had not him here! With a temper so impetuous and obstinate, as to provoke a French government when in their power, what would he have done with an English government in his power?"
Walpole Letters
, II, 136-37.

9. Bongie, p. 268. Details of Charles's capture and imprisonment, together with an account of his own somewhat embroidered narrative of the experience, are in Bongie, pp. 252—62.

CHAPTER 21

1. Horace Walpole described the masquerade at Ranelagh, and the other peace celebrations, in his
Letters
, II, 150—52.

2.
Walpole Letters,
II, 153 note.

3. Viscount Mahon, ed..
The Decline of the Last Stuarts: Extracts from the Despatches of British Envoys to the Secretary of State
(London, 1893), p. 9.

4. Ibid., 9.

5. Lang, p. 363.

6.
Extracts from Despatches
, p. 77. King himself had made a list of 275 Midlands gentlemen who were sympathetic Jacobites. Petrie, II, 142—43.

7. Charles himself claimed late in his life that he had stayed two weeks in London in 1750, with "the government never having the least notice of it."
Extracts from Despatches
, p. 77. But a note in his handwriting among the
Stuart Papers
at Windsor indicates that only eight days separated his arrival in London from his return to Paris. Lang, p. 345 note.

8. Petrie, II, p. 152. This "Irish chairman" scheme was said to have been concocted by Charles and others while Charles was in England, but Petrie argues convincingly that he was only in England once after 1745; other purported trips to England were the result of confused chronology or faulty memories on the part of memoirists. Petrie, II, 157.

9. Bongie, p. 273.

10. Correspondence relating to Clementina's acceptance by a Netherlands convent spanned several years, so presumably Charles got word to her sometime in 1750, if not before. See Berry, pp. 34-45. This, like so much else about Charles and Clementina, is murky with uncertainty.

11. Berry, pp. 43-44.

CHAPTER 22

1. Berry, p. 65.

2. Ibid., 50.

3. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle, eds.,
Boswell on the Grand Tour
(New York, 1955), p. 249; James Lees-Milne, The Last Stuarts (London, 1983), p. 85.

4. Bruce Lenman attributes many of Charles's personality aberrations in later life—including in particular his alcoholism—to the all-pervasive effect of his incompatibility with his father. That Charles and James were radically different, and that Charles's petulance toward James gradually hardened into punishing indifference, are undeniable; certainly Charles attempted to sidestep his father from 1746 on, in order to be free to lead his own quixotic life. It would be a mistake, however, to attempt to attribute too much to one overriding deep-seated psychological influence. James's influence on his son was one strong influence among many, and bv the time he reached his thirties, Charles was very much his own man—albeit a sadly flawed one.

5. In 1754, John Edgar, nephew of James's servant James Edgar, wrote that Clementina had had two children by Charles, and other contemporary references allude to a second child, a son. If Clementina had a son, he presumably died in infancy, although there is a very slim possibility that he survived into adulthood. Here Jacobite wishful thinking is most likely heavily overlaid on sober fact; still, it is impossible to rule out a second surviving child altogether. Berry, pp. 52-53.

6. Berry, p. 51.

7.
Extracts from Despatches
, pp. 13-15.

8. Ibid.. 16-17.

9. Berry, pp. 58-59.

10. Ibid., 55-56, 80. Lord Elcho's account of Charles's mistreatment of Clementina contains the story that he was so jealous of her that he surrounded her bed with chairs placed on tables, and little bells on the chairs, so that if anyone came near her during the night the bells would ring an alarm. Though this memorable anecdote is often recounted by Charles's biographers, it is suspect, as the same story is told of Charles and Louise of Stolberg years later. Of course, it is possible that Charles rigged the same alarm system for Louise that he had once used with Clementina, and given his increasingly irrational behavior the story is not too far-fetched to have been true in both cases.

11. Berry, p. 65.

12. Ibid., 72.

13. Ibid, 70-71.

14. For the 1759 invasion and what led up to it see Claude Nordmann, "Choiseul and the Last Jacobite Attempt of 1759," in Eveline Cruick-shanks, ed.,
Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759
(Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 201-17.