Pickle the Spy; Or, the Incognito of Prince Charles. Lang Andrew
it revives as in a magic mirror somewhat dim, certain scenes of actual human life. Now and again the mist breaks, and real passionate faces, gestures of living men and women, are beheld in the clear-obscure. We see Lochgarry throw his dirk after his son, and pronounce his curse. We mark Pickle furtively scribbling after midnight in French inns. We note Charles hiding in the alcove of a lady’s chamber in a convent. We admire the ‘rich anger’ of his Polish mistress, and the sullen rage of Lord Hyndford, baffled by ‘the perfidious Court’ of Frederick the Great. The old histories emerge into light, like the writing in sympathetic ink on the secret despatches of King James.
CHAPTER II
CHARLES EDWARD STUART
Prince Charles – Contradictions in his character – Extremes of bad and good – Evolution of character – The Prince’s personal advantages – Common mistake as to the colour of his eyes – His portraits from youth to age – Descriptions of Charles by the Duc de Liria; the President de Brosses; Gray; Charles’s courage – The siege of Gaeta – Story of Lord Elcho – The real facts – The Prince’s horse shot at Culloden – Foolish fables of David Hume confuted – Charles’s literary tastes – His clemency – His honourable conduct – Contrast with Cumberland – His graciousness – His faults – Charge of avarice – Love of wine – Religious levity – James on Charles’s faults – An unpleasant discovery – Influence of Murray of Broughton – Rapid decline of character after 1746 – Temper, wine, and women – Deep distrust of James’s Court – Rupture with James – Divisions among Jacobites – King’s men and Prince’s men – Marischal, Kelly, Lismore, Clancarty – Anecdote of Clancarty and Braddock – Clancarty and d’Argenson – Balhaldie – Lally Tollendal – The Duke of York – His secret flight from Paris – ‘Insigne Fourberie’ – Anxiety of Charles – The fatal cardinal’s hat – Madame de Pompadour – Charles rejects her advances – His love affairs – Madame de Talmond – Voltaire’s verses on her – Her scepticism in religion – Her husband – Correspondence with Montesquieu – The Duchesse d’Aiguillon – Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle – Charles refuses to retire to Fribourg – The gold plate – Scenes with Madame de Talmond – Bulkeley’s interference – Arrest of Charles – The compasses – Charles goes to Avignon – His desperate condition – His policy – Based on a scheme of d’Argenson – He leaves Avignon – He is lost to sight and hearing.
‘Charles Edward Stuart,’ says Lord Stanhope, ‘is one of those characters that cannot be portrayed at a single sketch, but have so greatly altered as to require a new delineation at different periods.’ 2 Now he ‘glitters all over like the star which they tell you appeared at his nativity,’ and which still shines beside him, Micat inter omnes, on a medal struck in his boyhood. 3 Anon he is sunk in besotted vice, a cruel lover, a solitary tippler, a broken man. We study the period of transition.
Descriptions of his character vary between the noble encomium written in prison by Archibald Cameron, the last man who died for the Stuarts, and the virulent censures of Lord Elcho and Dr. King. Veterans known to Sir Walter Scott wept at the mention of the Prince’s name; yet, as early as the tenth year after Prestonpans, his most devoted adherent, Henry Goring, left him in an angry despair. Nevertheless, the character so variously estimated, so tenderly loved, so loathed, so despised, was one character; modified, swiftly or slowly, as its natural elements developed or decayed under the various influences of struggle, of success, of long endurance, of hope deferred, and of bitter disappointment. The gay, kind, brave, loyal, and clement Prince Charlie became the fierce, shabby, battered exile, homeless, and all but friendless. The change, of course, was not instantaneous, but gradual; it was not the result of one, but of many causes. Even out of his final degradation, Charles occasionally speaks with his real voice: his inborn goodness of heart, remarked before his earliest adventures, utters its protest against the self he has become; just as, on the other hand, long ere he set his foot on Scottish soil, his father had noted his fatal inclination to wine and revel.
The processes in this change of character, the events, the temptations, the trials under which Charles became an altered man, have been very slightly studied, and, indeed, have been very obscurely known. Even Mr. Ewald, the author of the most elaborate biography of the Prince, 4 neglected some important French printed sources, while manuscript documents, here for the first time published, were not at his command. The present essay is itself unavoidably incomplete, for of family papers bearing on the subject many have perished under the teeth of time, and in one case, of rats, while others are not accessible to the writer. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this work elucidates much which has long been veiled in the motives, conduct, and secret movements of Charles during the years between 1749 and the death, in 1766, of his father, the Old Chevalier. Charles then emerged from a retirement of seventeen years; the European game of Hide and Seek was over, and it is not proposed to study the Prince in the days of his manifest decline, and among the disgraces of his miserable marriage. His ‘incognito’ is our topic; the period of ‘deep and isolated enterprise’ which puzzled every Foreign Office in Europe, and practically only ended, as far as hope was concerned, with the break-up of the Jacobite party in 1754–1756, or rather with Hawke’s defeat of Conflans in 1759.
Ours is a strange and melancholy tale of desperate loyalties, and of a treason almost unparalleled for secrecy and persistence. We have to do with the back-stairs of diplomacy, with spies and traitors, with cloak and sword, with blabbing servants, and inquisitive ambassadors, with disguise and discovery, with friends more staunch than steel, or weaker than water, with petty jealousies, with the relentless persecution of a brave man, and with the consequent ruin of a gallant life.
To understand the psychological problem, the degradation of a promising personality, it is necessary to glance rapidly at what we know of Charles before his Scottish expedition.
To begin at the beginning, in physical qualities the Prince was dowered by a kind fairy. He was firmly though slimly built, of the best stature for strength and health. ‘He had a body made for war,’ writes Lord Elcho, who hated him. The gift of beauty (in his case peculiarly fatal, as will be seen) had not been denied to him. His brow was high and broad, his nose shapely, his eyes of a rich dark brown, his hair of a chestnut hue, golden at the tips. Though his eyes are described as blue, both in 1744 by Sir Horace Mann, and in later life (1770) by an English lady in Rome, though Lord Stanhope and Mr. Stevenson agree in this error, brown was really their colour. 5 Charles inherited the dark eyes of his father, ‘the Black Bird,’ and of Mary Stuart. This is manifest from all the original portraits and miniatures, including that given by the Prince to his secretary, Murray of Broughton, now in my collection. In boyhood Charles’s face had a merry, mutinous, rather reckless expression, as portraits prove. Hundreds of faces like his may be seen at the public schools; indeed, Charles had many ‘doubles,’ who sometimes traded on the resemblance, sometimes, wittingly or unwittingly, misled the spies that constantly pursued him. 6 His adherents fondly declared that his natural air of distinction, his princely bearing, were too marked to be concealed in any travesty. Yet no man has, in disguises of his person, been more successful. We may grant ‘the grand air’ to Charles, but we must admit that he could successfully dissemble it.
About 1743, when a number of miniatures of the Prince were done in Italy for presentation to adherents, Charles’s boyish mirth, as seen in these works of art, has become somewhat petulant, if not arrogant, but he is still ‘a lad with the bloom of a lass.’ A shade of aspiring melancholy marks a portrait done in France, just before the expedition to Scotland. Le Toque’s fine portrait of the Prince in armour (1748) shows a manly and martial but rather sinister countenance. A plaster bust, done from a life mask, if not from Le Moine’s bust in marble (1750), was thought the best likeness by Dr. King. This bust was openly sold in Red Lion Square, and, when Charles visited Dr. King in September 1750, the Doctor’s servant observed the resemblance. I have never seen a copy of this bust, and the medal struck in 1750, an intaglio of the same date, and a very rare profile in the collection of the Duke of Atholl, give a similar idea of the Prince as he was at thirty. A distinguished artist,
London, 1879.
A false Charles appeared in Selkirkshire in 1745. See Mr. Craig Brown’s