Pickle the Spy; Or, the Incognito of Prince Charles. Lang Andrew
are almost exact counterparts.
Next we come to the angry eyes and swollen features of Ozias Humphreys’s miniature, in the Duke of Atholl’s collection, and in his sketch published in the ‘Lockhart Papers’ (1776), and, finally, to the fallen weary old face designed by Gavin Hamilton. Charles’s younger brother, Henry, Duke of York, was a prettier boy, but it is curious to mark the prematurely priestly and ‘Italianate’ expression of the Duke in youth, while Charles still seems a merry lad. Of Charles in boyhood many anecdotes are told. At the age of two or three he is said to have been taken to see the Pope in his garden, and to have refused the usual marks of reverence. Walton, the English agent in Florence, reports an outbreak of ferocious temper in 1733. 7 Though based on gossip, the story seems to forebode the later excesses of anger. Earlier, in 1727, the Duc de Liria, a son of Marshal Berwick, draws a pretty picture of the child when about seven years old: —
‘The King of England did not wish me to leave before May 4, and I was only too happy to remain at his feet, not merely on account of the love and respect I have borne him all my life, but also because I was never weary of watching the Princes, his sons. The Prince of Wales was now six and a half, and, besides his great beauty, was remarkable for dexterity, grace, and almost supernatural cleverness. Not only could he read fluently, but he knew the doctrines of the Christian faith as well as the master who had taught him. He could ride; could fire a gun; and, more surprising still, I have seen him take a crossbow and kill birds on the roof, and split a rolling ball with a shaft, ten times in succession. He speaks English, French, and Italian perfectly, and altogether he is the most ideal Prince I have ever met in the course of my life.
‘The Duke of York, His Majesty’s second son, is two years old, and a prodigy of beauty and strength.’ 8
Gray, certainly no Jacobite, when at Rome with Horace Walpole speaks very kindly of the two gay young Princes. He sneers at their melancholy father, of whom Montesquieu writes, ‘ce Prince a une bonne physiononie et noble. Il paroit triste, pieux.’ 9 Young Charles was neither pious nor melancholy.
Of Charles at the age of twenty, the President de Brosses (the author of ‘Les Dieux Fétiches’) speaks as an unconcerned observer. ‘I hear from those who know them both thoroughly that the eldest has far higher worth, and is much more beloved by his friends; that he has a kind heart and a high courage; that he feels warmly for his family’s misfortunes, and that if some day he does not retrieve them, it will not be for want of intrepidity.’ 10
Charles’s gallantry when under fire as a mere boy, at the siege of Gaeta (1734), was, indeed, greatly admired and generally extolled. 11 His courage has been much more foolishly denied by his enemies than too eagerly applauded by friends who had seen him tried by every species of danger.
Aspersions have been thrown on Charles’s personal bravery; it may be worth while to comment on them. The story of Lord Elcho’s reproaching the Prince for not heading a charge of the second line at Culloden, has unluckily been circulated by Sir Walter Scott. On February 9, 1826, Scott met Sir James Stuart Denham, whose father was out in the Forty-five, and whose uncle was the Lord Elcho of that date. Lord Elcho wrote memoirs, still unpublished, but used by Mr. Ewald in his ‘Life of the Prince.’ Elcho is a hostile witness: for twenty years he vainly dunned Charles for a debt of 1,500l. According to Sir James Stuart Denham, Elcho asked Charles to lead a final charge at Culloden, retrieve the battle, or die sword in hand. The Prince rode off the field, Elcho calling him ‘a damned, cowardly Italian – .’
No such passage occurs in Elcho’s diary. He says that, after the flight, he found Charles, in the belief that he had been betrayed, anxious only for his Irish officers, and determined to go to France, not to join the clans at Ruthven. Elcho most justly censured and resolved ‘never to have anything more to do with him,’ a broken vow! 12 As a matter of fact, Sir Robert Strange saw Charles vainly trying to rally the Highlanders, and Sir Stuart Thriepland of Fingask gives the same evidence. 13
In his seclusion during 1750, Charles wrote a little memoir, still unpublished, about his Highland wanderings. In this he says that he was ‘led off the field by those about him,’ when the clans broke at Culloden. ‘The Prince then changed his horse, his own having been wounded by a musket-ball in the shoulder.’ 14
The second-hand chatter of Hume, in his letter to Sir John Pringle (February 13, 1773), is unworthy of serious attention.
Helvetius told Hume that his house at Paris had sheltered the Prince in the years following his expulsion from France, in 1748. He called Charles ‘the most unworthy of mortals, insomuch that I have been assured, when he went down to Nantz to embark on his expedition to Scotland, he took fright and refused to go on board; and his attendants, thinking the matter gone too far, and that they would be affronted for his cowardice, carried him in the night time into the ship, pieds et mains liés.’
The sceptical Hume accepts this absurd statement without even asking, or at least without giving, the name of Helvetius’s informant. The adventurer who insisted on going forward when, at his first landing in Scotland, even Sir Thomas Sheridan, with all the chiefs present, advised retreat, cannot conceivably have been the poltroon of Hume’s myth. Even Hume’s correspondent, Sir John Pringle, was manifestly staggered by the anecdote, and tells Hume that another of his fables is denied by the very witness to whom Hume appealed. 15 Hume had cited Lord Holdernesse for the story that Charles’s presence in London in 1753 (1750 seems to be meant) was known at the time to George II. Lord Holdernesse declared that there was nothing in the tale given by Hume on his authority! That Charles did not join the rallied clans at Ruthven after Culloden was the result of various misleading circumstances, not of cowardice. Even after 1746 he constantly carried his life in his hand, not only in expeditions to England (and probably to Scotland and Ireland), but in peril from the daggers of assassins, as will later be shown.
High-spirited and daring, Charles was also hardy. In Italy he practised walking without stockings, to inure his feet to long marches: he was devoted to boar-hunting, shooting, and golf. 16 He had no touch of Italian effeminacy, otherwise he could never have survived his Highland distresses. In travelling he was swift, and incapable of fatigue. ‘He has,’ said early observer, ‘the habit of keeping a secret.’ Many secrets, indeed, he kept so well that history is still baffled by them, as diplomatists were perplexed between 1749 and 1766. 17
We may discount Murray of Broughton’s eulogies Charles’s Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and his knowledge of history and philosophy, though backed by the Jesuit Cordara. 18 Charles’s education had been interrupted by quarrels between his parents about Catholic or Protestant tutors. His cousin and governor, Sir Thomas Sheridan (a descendant of James II.), certainly did not teach him to spell; his style in French and English is often obscure, and, when it is clear, we know not whether he was not inspired by some more literary adviser. In matters of taste he was fond of music and archæology, and greatly addicted to books. De Brosses, however, considered him ‘less cultivated than Princes should be at his age,’ and d’Argenson says that his knowledge was scanty and that he had little conversation. A few of his books, the morocco tooled with the Prince of Wales’s feathers, remain, but not enough to tell us much about his literary tastes. On these, however, we shall give ample information. In Paris, after Culloden, he bought Macchiavelli’s works, probably in search of practical hints on state-craft. In spite of a proclamation by Charles, which Montesquieu applauded, he certainly had no claim to a seat in the French Academy, which Montesquieu playfully offered to secure for him.
In brief, Charles was a spirited, eager boy, very capable of patience, intensely secretive, and, as he showed in 1745–1746, endowed with a really extraordinary clemency, and in one regard, where
Ewald, i. 41.
See authorities in Ewald, i. 48–50.
Ewald, ii. 30. Scott’s Journal, i. 114.
Dennistoun’s
Stuart Papers, in the Queen’s Library. Also the Lockhart Papers mention the wounding of the horse.
State Papers Domestic. 1745. No. 79.