Pickle the Spy; Or, the Incognito of Prince Charles. Lang Andrew

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СКАЧАТЬ into the coffin of French royalty. The King, at the dictation of England, had arrested, bound, imprisoned, and expelled his kinsman, his guest, and (by the Treaty of Fontainebleau) his ally.

      Applause and pity from the fickle and forgetful the Prince had won, but his condition was now desperate. Refusing to accept a pension from France, he was poor; his jewels he had pawned for the Scottish expedition. He had disobeyed his father’s commands and mortally offended Louis by refusing to leave France. His adherents in Paris (as their letters to Rome prove) were in despair. His party, as has been shown, was broken up into hostile camps. Lochiel was dead. Lord George Murray had been insulted and estranged. The Earl Marischal had declined Charles’s invitation to manage his affairs (1747). Elcho was a persistent and infuriated dun. Clancarty was reviling Charles, James, Louis, England, and the world at large. Madame de Pompadour, Cardinal Tencin, and de Puysieux were all hostile. The English Jacobites, though loyal, were timid. Europe was hermetically sealed against the Prince. Refuge in Fribourg, where the English threatened the town, Charles had refused. Not a single shelter was open to him, for England’s policy was to drive him into the dominions of the Pope, where he would be distant and despised. Of advisers he had only such attached friends as Henry Goring, Bulkeley, Harrington, or such distrusted boon companions as Kelly – against whom the English Jacobites set all wheels in motion. Charles’s refuge at Avignon even was menaced by English threats directed at the Pope. The Prince tried to amuse himself; he went to dances, he introduced boxing matches, 45 just as years before he had brought golf into Italy. But his position was untenable, and he disappeared.

      From the gossip of d’Argenson we have learned that Charles was no longer the same man as the gallant leader of the race to Derby, or the gay and resourceful young Ascanius who won the hearts of the Highlanders by his cheerful courage and contented endurance. He was now embittered by defeat; by suspicions of treachery which the Irish about him kindled and fanned, by the broken promises of Louis XV., by the indifference of Spain. He had become ‘a wild man,’ as his father’s secretary, Edgar, calls him – ‘Our dear wild man.’ He spelled the name ‘L’ome sauvage.’ He was, in brief, a desperate, a soured, and a homeless outcast. His chief French friends were ladies – Madame de Vassé, Madame de Talmond, and others. Montesquieu, living in their society, and sending wine from his estate to the Jacobite Lord Elibank; rejoicing, too, in an Irish Jacobite housekeeper, ‘Mlle. Betti,’ was well disposed, like Voltaire, in an indifferent well-bred way. Most of these people were, later, protecting and patronising the Prince when concealed from the view of Europe, but theirs was a vague and futile alliance. Charles and his case were desperate.

      In this mood, and in this situation at Avignon, he carried into practice the counsel which d’Argenson had elaborated in a written memoir. ‘I gave them’ (Charles and Henry) ‘the best possible advice,’ says La Bête. ‘My “Mémoire” I entrusted to O’Brien at Antwerp. Therein I suggested that the two princes should never return to Italy, but that for some years they should lead a hidden and wandering life between France and Spain. Charles might be given a pension and the vicariat of Navarre. This should only be allowed to slip out by degrees, while England would grow accustomed to the notion that they were not in Rome, and would be reduced to mere doubts as to their place of residence. Now they would be in Spain, now in France, finally in some town of Navarre, where their authority would, by slow degrees, be admitted. Peace once firmly established, it would not be broken over this question. They would be in a Huguenot country, and able to pass suddenly into Great Britain.’ 46

      This was d’Argenson’s advice before Henry fled Rome to be made a cardinal, and before the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, closing Europe against Charles, was concluded. The object of d’Argenson is plain; he wished to keep Charles out of the Pope’s domains, as England wanted to drive the Prince into the centre of ‘Popery.’ If he resided in Rome, Protestant England would always suspect Charles; moreover, he would be remote from the scene of action. To the Pope’s domains, therefore, Charles would not go. But the scheme of skulking in France, Spain, and Navarre had ceased to be possible. He, therefore, adopted ‘the fugitive and hidden life’ recommended by d’Argenson; he secretly withdrew from Avignon, and for many months his places of residence were unknown.

      ‘Charles,’ says Voltaire, ‘hid himself from the whole world.’ We propose to reveal his hiding-places.

      CHAPTER III

      THE PRINCE IN FAIRYLAND FEBRUARY 1749-SEPTEMBER 1750 – I. WHAT THE WORLD SAID

      Europe after Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle – A vast gambling establishment – Charles excluded – Possible chance in Poland – Supposed to have gone thither – ‘Henry Goring’s letter’ – Romantic adventures attributed to Charles – Obvious blunders – Talk of a marriage – Count Brühl’s opinion – Proposal to kidnap Charles – To rob a priest – The King of Poland’s ideas – Lord Hyndford on Frederick the Great – Lord Hyndford’s mare’s nest – Charles at Berlin – ‘Send him to Siberia’ – The theory contradicted – Mischievous glee of Frederick – Charles discountenances plots to kill Cumberland – Father Myles Macdonnell to James – London conspiracy – Reported from Rome – The Bloody Butcher Club – Guesses of Sir Horace Mann – Charles and a strike – Charles reported to be very ill – Really on the point of visiting England – September 1750.

      Europe, after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, was like a vast political gambling establishment. Nothing, or nothing but the expulsion of Prince Charles from every secular State, had been actually settled. Nobody was really satisfied with the Peace. The populace, in France as in England, was discontented. Princes were merely resting and looking round for new combinations of forces. The various Courts, from St. Petersburg to Dresden, from London to Vienna, were so many tables where the great game of national faro was being played, over the heads of the people, by kings, queens, abbés, soldiers, diplomatists, and pretty women. Projects of new alliances were shuffled and cut, like the actual cards which were seldom out of the hands of the players, when Casanova or Barry Lyndon held the bank, and challenged all comers. It was the age of adventurers, from the mendacious Casanova to the mysterious Saint-Germain, from the Chevalier d’Eon to Charles Edward Stuart. That royal player was warned off the turf, as it were, ruled out of the game. Where among all these attractive tables was one on which Prince Charles, in 1749, might put down his slender stake, his name, his sword, the lives of a few thousand Highlanders, the fortunes of some faithful gentlemen? Who would accept Charles’s empty alliance, which promised little but a royal title and a desperate venture? The Prince had wildly offered his hand to the Czarina; he was to offer that hand, vainly stretched after a flying crown, to a Princess of Prussia, and probably to a lady of Poland.

      At this moment the Polish crown was worn by Augustus of Saxony, who was reckoned ‘a bad life.’ The Polish throne, the Polish alliance, had been, after various unlucky adventures since the days of Henri III. and the Duc d’Alençon, practically abandoned by France. But Louis XV. was beginning to contemplate that extraordinary intrigue in which Conti aimed at the crown of Poland, and the Comte de Broglie was employed (1752) to undermine and counteract the schemes of Louis’s official representatives. 47 As a Sobieski by his mother’s side, the son of the exiled James (who himself had years before been asked to stand as a candidate for the kingdom of Poland), Charles was expected by politicians to make for Warsaw when he fled from Avignon. It is said, on the authority of a Polish manuscript, ‘communicated by Baron de Rondeau,’ that there was a conspiracy in Poland to unseat Augustus III. and give the crown to Prince Charles. 48 In 1719, Charles’s maternal grandfather had declined a Russian proposal to make a dash for the crown, so the chivalrous Wogan narrates. In 1747 (June 6), Chambrier had reported to Frederick the Great that Cardinal Tencin was opposed to the ambition of the Saxon family, which desired to make the elective crown of Poland hereditary in its house. The Cardinal said that, in his opinion, there was a Prince who would figure well in Poland, le jeune Edouard (Prince СКАЧАТЬ