Prince Charles Edward : his life, time, and fight for the crown

Front matter

f I

I presented to |

i Weston College Library ft

Preface

Some five or six years ago. Lord Rosebery told of a conversation which took place in London between himself and a very distinguished historian. " Don't you think enough has been done for the Jacobites of the eighteenth century ? said the historian. To which Lord Rosebery replied : Well, perhaps to the eye of reason it may be so ; but to the eye of sympathy I do not think we can ever do enough for the Jacobites of the eighteenth century. I hold the opinion that there is a strong underlying sympathy with, and interest in, the Jacobites to be found somewhere in the nature of every Scotsman or Scotswoman ; and, therefore, I feel certain that any one dealing with the Jacobites is meeting a constant appetite and desire in the Scottish mind." Not, it may surely be added, in the Scottish mind only, but in the minds of all who have any feeling for romance, for " old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.*'

The present book is neither a history of the rising of 1745 nor a biography of Charles Edward Stuart. It is a biography only in essential details, and the story of the rising is told only as fully as need be at this time of day. On the other hand, an effort has been made to weave around the biography and the history some outline of the

vii viii

PREFACE social and general conditions of the Scotland, especially the Edinburgh, of the *45 ; while in the sections devoted to Flora Macdonald, Clementina Walkinshaw, and Louise of Stolberg (the last Stuart " Queen I have dealt more fully than is usual with these personalities, who were so intimately connected with the Prince. The first three chapters, though not strictly connected with the main subject, will yet be foimd of interest as leading up to an intelligent xmderstanding of the whole situation and circumstances. That entitled In Search of a Queen " will be found even amusing.

It is perhaps superfluous to express my indebtedness to previous writers who have dealt with Charles Edward and the '45, especially to Mr. Andrew Lang and Professor Sandford Terry. Mr. Lang left, indeed, very little for later gleaners in the Charlie " field.

J. C. H.

Edinburgh,

Contents

CHAP. PAGX

PREFACE Vii

I. THE ROMANCE OF THE STUARTS ... 1

Chapter I The Romance Of The Stuarts

In the whole history of monarchy there is no romance like the romance of the Stuarts. A pecuhar kind of romance it is, too ; strangely blended of mystery and charm, of bloodshed and oppression, of crime and sorrow, of failure and intrigue, of humour, and pathos, and pity. How many have been fascinated by it ! How many have sought to solve the enigma of that ill-starred dynasty ! " If anything," wrote Voltaire, could justify those who believe in a fatality which nothing can escape, it would be that continuous series of misfortunes which befell the House of Stuart during three hundred years." So, in truth, it is. Over the stage passes that woeful procession of Stuarts, the finger of Doom ever pointing the way. No royal race was ever so accursed. *' What has your family done, sir, to draw down the vengeance of Heaven on every branch of it through so many yeats ? " The question was addressed to Prince Charles Edward himself, last of the Stuart line who hoped to hold the sceptre of monarchy. What, indeed, had the Stuarts done to cover themselves with such an Odyssey of miseries and misfortunes ?

Think of all the luckless wearers of the Stuart crown ! Think of James I., the poet king, the ablest of the race. Suffering patiently a long, weary imprisonment in England, he comes at last to his regality ; and, after twelve years of a wonderful reign, during which the fierce, turbulent clans of the Highlands have been assailed in their mountain fastnesses and reduced to swear fealty to the Saxon King, a band of ruffians bursts into his chamber in the old priory of the Dominicans at Perth, and leaves him hfeless with sixteen stabs in his body. The Fair City never witnessed a darker, a more desperate tragedy than this of the February of 1437. Handsome, brave, a gentleman and a scholar, a musical composer, too, in quieter times this accomplished ruler might have shown himself the best of the ancient royal house. But the hand of Fate had been raised against him ; the ban of the Stuarts had fallen upon his young life.

And, then, think of James H., beginning a troublous government by slaying his own nephews, himself slain, before he was thirtyone, by the bursting of one of his own cannon at the siege of Roxburgh. Think of James HI., held a close prisoner in the Castle of Edinburgh, making war against his own son : worsted in the battle thait ensued ; foully murdered, after being thrown from his horse, as he galloped from the field of Sauchieburn. For all that it was inaugurated with such splendour and promise, no more melancholy reign than his is recorded in the annals of Scottish history.

And what of James IV., the headstrong, the obstinate, the licentious, to whose personal beauty Holbein's miniature bears such notable witness ? Who that has heard of the Field of Flodden, when the flowers of the Forest were " a* wede awa'," can ever forget the fate of that James ? After leading his country to defeat and disgrace, his Hfe-blood ebbed out, with the blood of the best of his nobility, on that day of dule and sorrow when the sixteenth century was young. In her bower at Linlithgow, Margaret, his Queen, " lonely sat, and wept the weary hour,'* looking for the return of him who would return no more.

And James V. Consider for a moment his unhappy reign and equally unhappy end. Driven to the verge of madness by his wild barons, he had not yet reached his prime when his people were truthfully describing him as a miserable, half-demented, sorely-stricken man, dragging himself home on the tidings of the disastrous defeat at Solway Moss. We recall him, lying in Falkland Palace, imder the brow of the Lomonds (scene of that dubious disaster enacted in The Fair Maid of Perth), broken-hearted, with Death at the door, hearing of the last trouble of all, that a daughter had been born to him at Linlithgow.

It cam' wi' a lass, an' it'll gang wi' a lass, an'

the deil gang wi't/' he cried. ^ And thus the Red Tod died — died cursing England, though he had the Tudor blood in his veins, leaving the " lass whose head was one day to lie on the executioner's block at Fotheringay.

Ay, there goes a piece of romance ! Think of her, above all, the Mary Stuart of endless speculation, the lady of riddles, the Sphinx of Scottish history, the superlative fascination of whose personality is equalled only by the tragic close of her career. Mary Stuart shares with Marie Antoinette the sad pre-eminence of beauty and misfortune.

*' Dim, as through gathering mist, her charms appear, A woman's form in beauty shining."

The undying attraction of the unexplained lingers

around that figure, so made for love, yet giving

her heart to so many unworthy to possess it ;

that queen so fitted to rule, yet destined for a

kingdom where for her to rule was to be lost.

Away back in 1563, Thomas Randolph declared

her to be " the fyneste she that ever was,'* and

still to-day, as Mr. Swinburne finely said, there

beats no heart in English-speaking lands that does

not keep her memory aglow. Enigmatical as to

her character, baffling the penetration of the most

acute minds who have tried to get behind her

mask, her misfortunes at least are open to the

day. They began before she was bom, and the

^ Referring to Marjorie Bruce, daughter of Robert I., whose son by Walter the Steward, succeeded as Robert II., first of the Stuart dynasty.

society around Catherine de Medici, into which she was early transplanted, was a nursing-ground for a fresh crop.

A wife before she was sixteen, a widow at eighteen, she seemed from the first enmeshed for her inevitable end. Accused of the murder of her husband by her own brother, brought to the block after eighteen miserable years in captivity, she left a name which still moves every heart to compassionate her sorrows and forget her errors. Mary Stuart is almost as immortal in interest as Helen of Troy.

Nor does the tragedy of the baleful Stuarts exhaust itself with the Queen of Scots. Follow the dynasty into the country south of the Border, and see how it fares there. James I. of England and VI. of Scotland was the only son of Mary and the dissipated, murdered Darnley. The wisest" fool in Christendom, they called him, though, in / reality, he was only a pompous pedant, a malicious buffoon, a participator in the most pagan vices. He died peacefully in his bed, and thus achieved a distinction rare in the history of his House.

After him came his son, Charles L, of most unhappy memory, who, with all his melancholy beauty, derived from his Danish mother, essayed to play the autocrat, and paid the penalty when he bowed his comely head down, as upon a bed," before the man with the axe at Whitehall. With him was exploded for ever the fallacy that a special divinity doth hedge a king. Charles H., the merry monarch/' a vicious worldling, who did not rise to the level of contempt," escaped the more untoward fate of certain of his predecessors ; but he had been an exile in France, in Holland, and in Germany for many years before the Restoration of 1660. He, too, the mystic Junius insisted, should have died upon the scaffold. His brother, who succeeded him — James II. of England and VII. of Scotland — a bigot and a despot, was a hated man before the crown touched his head, and his tyrannical attempts to Romanise the country made all but the Highlanders of the far North sick to death of the rule of the Stuarts. William of Orange, who had married the King's daughter — the good, the 2 S gentle, the loving Mary — landed at Torbay in the November of 1688, and six weeks later James VII. was a fugitive — an exile on the Continent.

Thus we come, by a path charged with tragedy and darkened by disaster, to the Chevalier de St. George, the son of the exiled James, who looked to the fickle chances of Fate to restore him to the throne as James III. of England and VIII. of Scotland. In him we have the Old Pretender " of Jacobite history, the father of Charles Edward Stuart. He was a brother of Queen Anne, who succeeded William of Orange, and who died in 1714, the last of the Stuarts to sit on the throne. Anne had been engaged in plots to secure the succession to the melancholy James ; but at her death George Louis, Elector of Hanover, was peacefully proclaimed king as George I. The crown had passed for ever from the Stuarts, the most tragically interesting line who ever wore it, and poetry, so to speak, gave place to prose.

One has only to compare the sombre, humdrum careers of the four Georges with that record which stretches from the accession of James I. to the death of " Great Anna,*' to see why the one dominates the romantic sense and the other does not. For what romance can be drawn from the careers of the German intruders against whom the biting sarcasm of the Jacobites was so cruelly directed ? The Sybaritism of the Stuarts, with all its lavish expenditure of money, had still about it something of refinement. These rulers" of the rueful race were at least kingly and dignified, and maintained their royal office with courtly : munificence and becoming state. But how little can be said, even by the most charitable, for thosej who displaced them !

George I., the " wee, wee German lair die " — what was he but a cold, selfish, odious libertine ? His successor, the second George, was a colourless nonentity : gross, low, sensual ; having neither lordliness, learning, nor wit ; hugging his fat, ugly mistresses ; kicking his coat and wig about in his outbursts of wrath ; calling everybody thief, liar, rascal, with whom he differed. George HI., much as we pity him in his old age, blind and bereft of reason, was stubborn, bigoted : a dull man with a small intellect.

And George IV. — behold him, the first gentleman in Europe/* in Thackeray's well-known picture. In the whole of that life the novelist could discover only a bow and a grin ; taking him to pieces, could find only silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur collar, a star and blue ribbon, a pocket-handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt's best nuttybrown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth and a huge black stock, underwaictcoats, more uaderwaistcoats, and then — nothing ! Swaddled in feather beds all his life ; lazy, obese, perpetually eating and drinking ; never having a desire but he coddled and pampered it ; frittering away his time among cooks, and tailors, and barbers, and furniture-mongers, and opera -dancers. Such were the successors of the royal Une that traced its descent direct from the hero of Bannockburn.

No one wants to have the auld Stuarts back again now, but it is easy to see why the Scottish Jacobites of the '15 and the '45 intrigued and fought, and bled, leaving fathers, mothers, wives, children, loves and friends, risking all for the restoration of the House to which the saviour of their country belonged. The Stuarts, many of them, may have been personally unworthy : pigheaded, self-willed, despotic, narrow-minded, dissolute, eaten up of royal prerogative and absolute monarchy. But their yoke had never been heavy upon the Highlands ; partly because the power of the chiefs was paramount there, partly because the inaccessibility of these wild regions precluded kingly influence and interference. The Highlanders, moreover, were (as, indeed, they still are) essentially a conservative people, clinging to old customs, old friends, old associations ; shy of novelties, whether as regards men or manners ; resenting fiercely every attempt at innovation. All through the Jacobite minstrelsy one traces this characteristic of the race. The cry is constantly for the old ways, for the old insular line of kings. William of Orange and the House of Hanover were importations, a foreign graft upon the native royal tree, and that was enough.

'*Auld Scotland was owre dark a hole For nursing siccan vermin, But the very dogs o' England's Court, They barked and howled in German."

The Stuarts were the people's own kith and kin, as it were, and their dispossession was a laceration of the heart-strings, as well as a snapping of the kingly line. The personal charm, the ill-luck, the very incapacity and weaknesses of the race appealed to that vein of imaginative enthusiasm which, belying a stolid exterior, runs through the depths of the Scottish nature. The Jacobite movement, as one has said, was possible only amongst a susceptible and sympathetic race, with a sense of injustice rankling in their breasts. Thus, while the glory of the Stuarts departed with that precipitate withdrawal of James in 1688, the love and loyalty of the Jacobites

2— (2005)

revived it at intervals in flashes of lurid brilliancy which have burnt deeply, upon the open pages of history, marks that the hand of Time can never efface.

And so we return upon the point which all this is meant to emphasise. Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians : who shall say that the Stuarts do not

have it " when it comes to an appeal to human emotions, to human hearts and sympathies ? And, after Mary Stuart, who has it more surely than the bonnie Prince Charhe," of a cause for ever lost but never to be forgotten ? To the age of romance most assuredly belongs, as his pseudograndsons, the Sobieski Stuarts, observed long ago, the adventurous and concentrated character of Charles Edward Stuart — his daring designs, his patience and poverty in exile, his nebulous, perplexed projects, his years of inscrutable seclusion, eating out his heart in the despair of hope abandoned. His unsuccessful enterprise in the land of his fathers was prompted by the same spirit which carried his namesake across the Baltic and Caesar beyond the Rubicon. Conquerors have planned upon no better hopes, have won battles with greater disparity of force. Conspicuous to the great world by these adventures towards the regaining of his fathers' crown, the years of bitter, bewildered exile which followed upon the tragedy of CuUoden were no less deeply tinged with romance. His sudden, secret, and long journeys, his negotiations with Courts and adherents, his momentary apparitions in the most distant parts of Europe, left traces of occult enterprises and ceaseless activity, filled with a spirit as far from the animation of the everyday world as that which threw him alone and practically unsupported into the bosom of the clans. Even in his latest years, incognisable and extraordinary occurrences left indelible marks of a deep and troubled history, appearing like twinkling sparks through the veil which Fate compelled him to draw over his seclusion. The working of his dark, sinister designs can yet be outlined in the Cabinets of foreign Governments, in the Senate of Great Britain, in the British Navy itself — busy, mysterious phantoms of tradition, more nearly allied to the romaunt of the Middle Ages than to the history of modern times ; and leaving such evidence of his spirit and conception, that there is no event connected with his name of which it may not be said : It is credible, because it is improbable/*

There is something sad about the end of anything, whether it be the building of a palace, the writing of a great history (Hke that of Gibbon), the finishing of a child's baby-house, or the conclusion of some small, unpretending work in literature. There is something sad about the end of the House of Stuart, extinguished for ever by the fate of its latest hero. Yet this is not the prominent feeling aroused by the name which forms so brilliant a speck of romantic light in that dull, unromantic eighteenth century in

whose records it is enshrined. A hundred musical

notes, as Mr. Lang puts it, must keep green the

memory of the last Prince of Romance, the

beloved, the beautiful, the brave Prince CharUe,

the glamour of whose personahty cast a spell over

so many susceptible hearts. His story will send

a thrill through the bosoms of men and women

as long as the heather blooms on CuUoden Moor

or the lion-crowned height of Arthur's Seat looks

down on the home of his ancestors, the old royal

palace of Holyrood. Death, as the poet has said,

takes everything away ; but those whose

penchant is

**For old, unhappy, far-off things. And battles long ago,"

can never be deprived of the name and the romance of Charles Edward Stuart.

Chapter II

" O wae's my heart for Nature's change, And ane abroad that's forced to range ! God bless the lad, where'er he remains,

And send him safely over !

It's J. and S., I must confess, Stands for his name that I do bless : O may he soon his own possess.

Young Jamie they call the Rover ! "

The King was " over the water ; Geordie reigned in Jamie's stead/' Jamie had forefaulted the right to the Crown/' as the Convention of the Estates of Scotland decided in 1689. Then, for the first time, old England heard of the Jacobites, who took their name from Jacobus," the Latin form of James. The Stuarts will be back again," they kept saying to themselves, and they left nothing undone that could be done towards that end. Exile and loss of estate, death on the battlefield or the scaffold : it was all one to these ardent loyalists, if only the auld Stuarts " could be re-seated on the throne.

Killiecrankie had been fought and won, to no permanent advantage for the Stuarts. There fell the gallant Graham of Claverhouse, the bonnie Dundee " of Scottish song and story : mortally wounded by a random shot when heading a desperate but victorious charge. Aytoun's lines are familiar —

" And the evening star was shining

On SchehaUion's distant head, When we wiped our bloody broadswords,

And returned to count the dead. There we found him gashed and gory,

Stretched upon the cumbered plain, As he told us where to seek him,

In the thickest of the slain.

And a smile was on his visage.

For within his dying ear Pealed the joyful note of triumph,

And the clansmen's clamorous cheer ; So, amidst the battle's thunder,

Shot, and steel, and scorching flame In the glory of his manhood

Passed the spirit of the Graeme I "

Well might the late Jacobites exclaim : " Oh, for a single hour of Dundee ! " If Claverhouse had Hved it is more than doubtful whether the Hanoverian would ever have ascended the British throne. As it was, the Jacobite army, which carried everything before it by that mad rush in the romantic Pass,*' melted away within a few weeks, and all for want of a leader with a personality strong and individual enough to unite the clans.

Fateful also for the Jacobites was the battle of the Boyne, fought the following year. It was a' for our rightfu' king,*' said the leal-hearted loyalists. But, alas ! " a' was done in vain.*' James was there himself, but the day was not saved by his presence. He looked helplessly on, and then, when all was over,

" He turn'd him right an' round about, Upon the Irish shore, An' ga'e his bridle-reins a shake. With, Adieu for evermore, my dear, With, Adieu for evermore."

The cowardice of the Stuart sovereign on that doleful day moved the contempt even of his followers. Change kings with us,'' an Irish officer replied to an Enghshman who taunted him with the panic of the Boyne, change kings with us, and we will fight you again.'* They did better, as Green observes, in fighting without a king. The French, indeed (for Louis, feeling the importance of the struggle, had sent over 7,000 picked men, under the Count de Lauzun), withdrew scornfully from the routed army as it stood at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. Do you call these ramparts ? " sneered the Count of Lauzun : The English will need no cannon ; they may batter them down with roasted apples."

So ended that disastrous campaign in the sister isle. James' roving days were over. France made a home for him at St. Germains, and there he died in September, 1701, having vainly busied himself the while with projects for the regaining of his lost crown. A hundred gentlemen, all of good families, had volunteered to attend him in his exile : only four of them Roman Catholics, and Lowlanders by far the greater number of them. There are few more pathetic episodes in history than that. Disdaining pecuniary assistance from Louis, the faithful, high-minded hundred became private soldiers in the French service. " For the sake of your Majesty/' said they to James, we will submit to the meanest circumstances, and undergo the greatest hardships and fatigue that reason can imagine or misfortune inflict.*' And they did. Under French colours they fought most bravely in Spain, many of them dying in the field or in the hospitals there. Interest was made at home for the remainder, and leave was given to them to return to their own country. But loyalty to the old royal line was not easily exhausted in those days. Louis has been kind to our master," was the answer of the exiles,

and we will fight for him as long as we have a drop of blood to spend." It was no empty boast, no piece of mere bravado. They said what they meant, and meant what they said. Afterwards they served in the campaign against Prince Louis of Baden, on the banks of the Rhine, where they distinguished themselves with almost unparalleled bravery and devotion."

When peace was concluded in 1696, only sixteen of the hundred who had followed James from the Boyne to St. Germains remained ahve. How is it all to be explained, all this unselfish devotion to a poor, poltroon king who turned tail at the first hint of personal danger ? There is only one way of explaining it. There are those, says a Jacobite sympathiser, in effect, whose disposition and temperament incline them to loyalty. Loyalty is the very essence of their nature. The doctrine of legitimacy, of hereditary monarchy and indefeasible right, is part of their religion. The revolution of 1688 cut the line of royal continuity, and it was only to be expected that men of such temperaments, holding such principles, should rebel against the new order and seek to reunite the broken thread. They, indeed, looked upon that as a sacred duty which could only be put aside with dishonour. It was misguided heroism, no doubt, that of the honourable hundred of the Boyne ; but England's annals are full of stories of misguided heroism, and it will be an evil day for John Bull when that form of self-sacrifice fails to find its laureate.

It was said of James II., the unworthy object of this touching devotion, that he had thrown away three kingdoms for a Mass.'' The Stuarts had always been deeply attached to the old faith, whose history is itself a sort of romance. John Knox had good cause to know it when, in the course of those rude, uncourtly interviews at Holyrood, he made himself so offensive to the girlish Queen of Scots. Knox's blind intolerance prevented him from realising that it was no part of a queen's duty to change her religion because her subjects had changed theirs. A contemplated marriage with a Papist " had to be denounced by this long-bearded commoner in language as fierce as it was impertinent, notwithstanding that the commoner himself, a worn-out widower of sixty, was about to marry a girl just emerging from her teens !

Luckily for James IL, there was no bullying John Knox. After his flight, he solaced himself with a devotion almost monastic — a devotion which made even his co-reHgionists deride him. But no one worried him on account of his creed. His insistence upon the faith of his fathers had, it is true, alarmed both kingdoms, but not even the loss of the crown opened his eyes to the fact. He kept steadily looking foiward to the death of his sickly son-in-law as re-opening a way to the throne ; but the poor, defeated devot had been in his grave for six months when William passed away in 1702. Great Anna " came to the throne, and her brother — he who should have been James IH. of England and VHL of Scotland — was an exile, like his father before him.

This heir of the unhappy fortunes of the House of Stuart had been born in England in the summer of 1688, the very year of the Revolution. To his subjects he was James HL ; to his friends he was the Chevalier St. George (his incognito) ; to his foes he was the Pretender — later the Old Pretender, to distinguish him from his son, the bonnie Prince of Jacobite history. Of course, he was no pretender.*' Upon that the Jacobites were perfectly right in insisting. James Francis Edward was the legitimate heir to the

The Chevalier de St. Georges throne of these realms. No vulgar impostor he ; no Lambert Simnel or Perkin Warbeck. Descended in direct line from the Stuart kings, without a flaw in his pedigree, without the slightest taint of the bar sinister in his blood, why should he be called " pretender ?

The opprobrious epithet is said to have arisen from the circumstance that, at his birth, the baseless idea of a suppositious origin was bruited throughout the country. The Queen's delivery of a prince (whether the birth was genuine or spurious) gave great and just apprehension to the nation.'* So one reads in a book published in the year 1748. Many people appear to have believed in the spurious birth. Thus we have the contem^porary Whig rhyme —

" A bastard for King they set up, sir, Forsooth by hereditary right.

Though when all is said and done, He's but a tailor's son.

And will gain but a halter by't."

Poor James ! Better a thousand times had it been for him to have been, indeed, a tailor's son. Not much of an appeal to the romantic imagination does that figure make — the father of Charles Edward Stuart, the unhappy White Rose Prince of Wales, the "old Mr. Melancholy" of the Hanoverian wits. He was an infant in arms when his father fled from his dominions, leaving his crown to England's " Dutch ironical saviour." Surrounded by a French atmosphere, he grew up to manhood and traditions altogether ahen to the kingdom whose crown he claimed ; and the lessons instilled into him with most persistence were, gratitude to Louis and obedience to the Pope. He hved his young hfe apart, in the dreary isolation of dethroned royalty, his tender, formative years robbed of all their natural mirth and joyousness by the rigid regulations of an austere parent, whose austerity he himself copied only too well.