The Road to Culloden Moor Page 2

  Of course, in the Highlands themselves the legend lived on in a different and deeper way. The Gaelic songs and poems which descended from the ’45 captured the poignant sadness of a past age. Tearlach was gone and ‘Charlie’s Year’ was over, but neither would be forgotten. The story would always be inextricably bound up with the Highlands.

  This book tells the story of ‘Charlie’s Year’.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘A FAR MORE DANGEROUS ENEMY …’

  Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria was born on a cold December night in the Palazzo Muti in Rome. The year was 1720 and it was New Year’s Eve, a fact of enormous significance to the Jacobites who had crammed into the chamber to witness Charles’s birth. As the lusty little boy’s first yells rang out storms raged over Hanover, boding ill for German George on the British throne, and a shining new star appeared in the skies heralding a new era — or so the stories went. Whatever the case this was no ordinary event and certainly no ordinary baby.

  Bonnie Prince Charlie, as we know him, was born right into the middle of his own legend. The celebrations were immense among the Jacobites and their supporters across Catholic Europe. The cannon of the Castello St Angelo in Rome thundered in royal salute while fireworks lit up the Roman sky. The Pope sent the pick of his relics to the happy parents together with 10,000 scudi — a sizeable sum. Bonfires were lit at Saint-Germain, and Versailles surpassed itself in jollity. Jacobite poets reached for their quills to pour out their emotions in dreadful, but heartfelt, verses, welcoming he who had been ‘lang o’coming’. A provocative thanksgiving medal was struck hailing this tiny dab of humanity as the ‘spes Britanniae’ — Britannia’s hope.

  Enemies to the cause, however, were apprehensive. One of these was Baron Philip von Stosch, Compton MacKenzie’s ‘expatriated Prussian Sodomite’. His less exotic code name was ‘John Walton’ and he was the principal Hanoverian agent in Rome. He had been prying into the Stuart family and supplying his masters in England with exactly the kind of reports they wanted. Having predicted that Charles’s mother Clementina would never be able to bear any children, he had bribed the maids to check her dirty laundry for signs of pregnancy. Charles’s birth was extremely public precisely to avoid the likes of Walton fabricating the sort of stories about babies smuggled in warming-pans that had dogged his father James’s birth. Walton had to content himself with claiming that Charles was so deformed that he would probably never be able to walk. He also predicted with confidence that Clementina would never be able to bear another child — Charles’s brother Henry was to be born in the spring of 1725.

  So Charles was the centre of gossip, intrigue and speculation from the moment of his birth. He was also heir to a difficult legacy. The Stuarts had a dubious track-record as monarchs. Leaving aside the travails of his father (the Old Pretender), his grandfather (James II of England and VII of Scotland), and the execution of his great grandfather Charles I, a catalogue of misfortune stretched back into the middle ages. Robert III died of grief. His elder son was murdered and his second son James I, the poet-king, died by an assassin’s knife. James II was killed by a bursting canon. James IV on Flodden field in 1513. Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded. Looking back the Stuarts seem like the Kennedys of their day — glamorous but curiously unlucky.

  Charles’s parents had had their own share of drama. His father James had been bundled out of England as a baby when his Catholic parents, James II and Mary of Modena, were forced to flee from Protestant William of Orange, the husband of his half-sister Mary, at the end of 1688. He had since lived in exile seeing the throne pass from William and Mary to his other half-sister Anne, and on her death in 1714 to his distant cousin George I, the first of the Hanoverians. Charles’s mother, ‘fair Clementina’, was a heroine in her own right. This beautiful and elfin seventeen-year-old daughter of Prince James Sobieski of Poland was arrested on her way to her wedding with James in 1719. The villain of the piece was her cousin Emperor Charles VI of Austria who succumbed to English bullying and locked her up in the Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck.

  She was rescued by a hot-blooded and daring Irishman, Charles Wogan, who had encouraged James to choose her on the grounds that she was ‘sweet, amiable, of an even temper, and gay only in season’. He disguised himself as a travelling merchant and gathered a small team of helpers — his ‘Three Musketeers’ — Gaydon, Misset and O’Toole. Mrs Misset, though about to give birth, and her maid Jeanneton came too, the one to act as a chaperone, the other to be a substitute for Clementina. Together they crossed the Rhine ‘and declared war on the Emperor’. The scheme was to smuggle Jeanneton into Clementina’s quarters and to remove the Princess disguised as the maid.

  It had all the elements of romantic farce. Clementina duly disguised herself and escaped but proceeded to fall into a gutter so that dry clothes had to be found. In the confusion her jewels were left behind — no ordinary gems but crown jewels of England sent to her by James. O’Toole had to ride back cursing under his breath to retrieve them. He also did sterling work, once the alarm was raised, by luring the courier carrying the news into a tavern and entertaining him so well that he collapsed drunk under the table, mission forgotten. After a memorable journey of snowbound roads, plunging precipices, near starvation and flea-ridden inns, Clementina’s companions — her ‘faithful marmosets’ as she called them — brought the young princess safely over the snow-covered Brenner Pass and into the Papal States.

  At first all went well. James and Clementina were very happy together and the birth of Charles set a seal on their relationship. However, they were basically incompatible as time began to show. James was a gentle rather lugubrious character — the ‘old Mr Melancholy’ of the cartoonists and ‘not always inclined to savour jokes or give himself up to gaiety’. Considerably older than his young bride, his various disappointments had made him philosophical. Attempts to regain the English throne in 1708, 1715 and 1719 had all come to nothing. Clementina, on the other hand, was excitable and volatile. As a child she had played at being Queen of England. While she loved James she longed for the glamour of the real thing rather than a make-believe court of displaced exiles. Rome fostered the sense of unreality with its hundred and fifty feast days a year, its gaudy carnivals and masked balls, its elaborate Papal rituals, its squalor and its magnificence. Like the Jacobites’, Rome’s past was worthier than its present. As Clementina grew older she became progressively more unstable and obsessively religious, her attendance at mass and her penances growing ever more frequent.

  The atmosphere of the Jacobite court did not help. With its factions of Scots and Irish, Protestants and Catholics, it pulsed with jealousy, intrigue and rumour. One moment hopes ran high, the next they were dashed. The anxious Jacobites constantly watched the political barometer in Europe scheming to take advantage of events and wondering where help might come from — France or Spain or maybe even Russia … in short from any country with an interest in destabilising or merely embarrassing the British Whig Government. The Whigs were the upholders of parliamentary supremacy and toleration for Nonconformists. As such they had initiated the Hanoverian succession and abhorred the Catholic Stuarts with their strong adherence to the divine right of kings. Their name, originally used as a term of abuse by their Tory opponents, derived from a Scottish word for a horse-thief.

  Charles was groomed from birth to play his part in all of this. Like his mother he was highly suggestible and had difficulty in separating reality from what he wanted to believe. This was not surprising since he grew up surrounded by courtiers ready to fill his head with all sorts of romantic notions, tales of heroism and the divine right of the Stuarts. They told him that the Catholic Stuarts were the rightful kings of Britain and that the Hanoverians were cruel unprincipled usurpers. Every decision about Charles’s upbringing was carefully weighed. It was important that nothing was done which would exacerbate the divisions within the little court. Any sign of weakness or discord in this volatile camp would immediate
ly be reported by the spies who buzzed about Rome’s dusty streets like the paparazzi of today. Anything would be quickly analysed for its political significance, like the reports of three-year-old Charles refusing to kneel before the Pope in the Vatican garden.

  The lady chosen as Charles’s governess was Mrs Sheldon, a Catholic lady from a family of unimpeachable loyalty. She took charge of the royal baby in March 1711 and was firm and sensible about his various infantile ailments, including the weak knee joints which meant he could barely walk until he was nearly three. Under her care he made good progress. By the age of two he was talking well and by three he was already showing a liking for music. There is a delightful description of him at three and a half: ‘He eats, sleeps and drinks mightily well. One can’t see a finer child every way, neither can one wish him better in every respect than he is.’ However, Mrs Sheldon had to contend with James who had firm views about his son’s upbringing, fussed dreadfully and grew to mistrust her.

  1725 saw a major crisis in the little Prince’s household. James announced the appointment of the Protestant James Murray as governor to Charles and the Catholic Thomas Sheridan as sub-governor and dismissed Mrs Sheldon. Clementina reacted angrily to the dismissal. She saw no reason to get rid of her friend. Neither did she want her son taught by a Protestant. She also suspected that her husband was having an affair with Marjorie Hay whose husband he had recently made Earl of Inverness and Secretary of State and whose brother was James Murray, the Prince’s new governor.

  The cumulative result was a fit of emotional fireworks. In 1725, just before Charles’s fifth birthday and just after the birth of his brother Henry, Clementina sought refuge in one nunnery and Mrs Sheldon in another. This all too public marital rift caused a sensation and was ‘the severest stroke’ to the cause in years, according to James’s agent in Scotland. Clementina wept constantly and declared that her husband wanted to bring their children up as heretics. Rather than allow such infamy she would stab them with her own hands. She said she was afraid to return to James in case she was poisoned.

  Hitherto the Stuart family had been a model of domestic happiness, particularly in comparison with the vicious feuding and loose morals of their Hanoverian cousins — George I had locked up his wife until her death for adultery, he and George II lived openly with their mistresses, and Frederick Prince of Wales, George II’s son, was cordially loathed by both his parents. His mother later called her firstborn ‘the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the whole world’ and said she heartily wished him out of it. There could not have been a greater contrast between the two rival houses, but now there was scandal in the Palazzo Muti. James blamed it on the ‘malice and the finesse’ of his enemies.

  For Charles this was the beginning of a disjointed time. Even as a very young child he had experienced Clementina’s brittle nerves and now he was deeply upset by her withdrawal. Later, at the age of seven, he was to write a sad and telling little letter to his father, promising to be very dutiful to Clementina and ‘not jump too near her’. In many ways his relationship with his highly-strung mother was a disaster for him. In later life he was to display many of the traits of a child who had suffered rejection, especially his inability to form close relationships and his insistence on unquestioning loyalty. He was also to show increasing symptoms of insecurity, depression and paranoia.

  However, these traumatic events provided Charles with an early opportunity to exercise that famous charm which was to be such a factor in his life both as a weapon and a defence against the world. James decamped with his sons to Bologna where Charles was ‘admired by all the nobility for his gallantry and wit’. His sixth birthday was celebrated with a sumptuous ball. It proved to be excellent public relations. So did the ball held in James’s honour where the ladies of the Jacobite court danced in the Spanish style to win favour with the Spanish court who would no doubt hear about it. Yet it must also have been a strange and disconcerting time for the young Charles. He was lionised and petted by foreign courtiers who talked to him of a destiny it was difficult for the little boy to grasp. This destiny achieved a sharper focus in 1727 with the sudden death of George I. Charles saw his father scurrying off on a round of diplomatic missions to see how the land lay. However, much more important to Charles was the fact that Clementina arrived at Bologna in his absence to be reunited with her sons. The following year the family were at last together again in the Palazzo Muti.

  Charles was growing up a sophisticated child but also a woefully under-educated and wilful one. His tutors struggled to teach him the rudiments but he found it hard to concentrate. Murray complained that it was impossible to get him to apply to any study. The Earl Marischal observed in 1735 that the Prince ‘had got out of the hands of governors’ and, according to the malicious Walton, the young Prince had in the same year actually been locked in his room for kicking and threatening to kill Murray. Whatever the case his Latin was awful and his spelling worse — ‘God knows’ came out as ‘God nose’ to James’s despair. In fact, spelling was never to be his strong point. As late as 1744, the year before he set off for Scotland, he was writing to his father as ‘Geems’ and signing himself ‘Charls P.’

  Yet in all other respects he was the outward model of a young prince designed to charm. Handsome, athletic and strong he became an avid sportsman, as at home on horseback as on the tennis-court. He also showed a fondness for ‘a Scotch game called goff’. His natural talent for languages meant he could speak French and Italian fluently, as well as English, while the royal performances on the viola apparently had the power to move great nobles and dignitaries to tears. He danced gracefully to the admiration of all who beheld him.

  The development of this young hero was watched with alarm by the Hanoverian camp. His attractiveness was undeniable even to that consummate liar John Walton. Furthermore he was groomed from his earliest moments to become a prince to appeal to the English. James had decided that his ‘brave, lusty boy shall be dressed and looked after as much as the climate will allow in the English Way; for though I can’t help his being born in Italy, yet as much as in me lyes he shall be English for the rest over’. English was accordingly the language of the Jacobite court and the habits of the family were as English as possible, even down to the food. A traveller to Rome was surprised to notice that James only ate ‘of the English Dishes, and made his Dinner of Roast Beef and what we call Devonshire Pye: He also prefers our March Beer, which he has from Leghorn, to the best Wines’.

  Charles quickly learned how important appearances were. He also revelled in the adulation and the sense of his own destiny. His tutor Murray — by then Earl of Dunbar — described how ‘Since he was 10 years old, his Majesty had admitted him to full confidence and with orders not to reveal anything to anyone. Which orders the Prince minutely observed …’ A Whig account went further stating that Charles had ‘formed a Resolution of attempting the Recovery of the British throne’ since the age of seven. If the young Charles hadn’t been so charming his self-importance could well have seemed insufferable.

  It became clear as Charles grew into his teens that his exuberant energies needed harnessing. At the age of thirteen he was sent to join his cousin the Duke of Berwick commanding the Spanish forces at the siege of Gaeta midway between Rome and Naples. It was his first real adventure. Charles travelled incognito under his father’s old alias of the Chevalier de Saint George accompanied by Sheridan and Dunbar. Charles made a great impression. One day at court the cockade fell from his hat and a courtier refixed it in the wrong position. Seeing this, Don Carlos, son of the King of Spain and soon to be King of Naples, put it in the correct position. Charles thanked him effusively, promising to keep the cockade for ever in memory of his courtesy. Don Carlos, was ‘perfectly ravished’ with the ‘lively and charming’ young man and the French ambassador dashed off eulogies to the French court.

  It was inevitable that Charles would also seek the opportunity to display his cour
age. The Duke of Berwick reported how: ‘The Prince was scarce arrived when he entered the trenches with me, where neither the noise of cannon nor the hiss of bullets could produce any sign of fear in him … In a word, this Prince shows that souls born for great and noble achievements always outwing the commonsense of years …’ Charles was suitably cool in his own comments about the danger, telling enchanted bystanders that ‘the noise of the cannon was more pleasant music to him than the opera at Rome’.

  To the alarm of his tutors he was soon carousing with the soldiers and officers who ‘adored’ the romantic young prodigy. Basking in all this Charles neglected to write to his mother. Neither did he reply to the letters sent by his deeply envious young brother Henry whose tutors had already complained of Charles’s unkindness towards their charge.

  It was enough to ring alarm bells with James and was a forerunner of what was to happen to his relationship with his ‘dear Carlucchio’. He wrote to Charles telling him off for not writing to his family and warning that if he did not cultivate the talents Providence had given him he would ‘lose that good character which your present behaviour is beginning to gain you’. However, that ‘good character’ was gaining popular credence all the time. As one observer wrote: ‘The Prince exceeds anything I was capable of fancying about him, and meets here with as many admirers as he hath spectators. When talking to this and the other person about their respective employments, one would imagine that he had made the inclinations of those with whom he conversed his particular study.’ And all this from a fourteen-year-old. Walton wrote gloomily that ‘Everyone says that he will be in time a far more dangerous enemy to the present establishment of the Government of England than ever his father was’. Charles clearly thought so too and was beginning to relish the power he had over people. The problem was how to apply it. At about this time he was painted by the Swedish painter Hans Hysing. The portrait shows a graceful boy — shrewdly clad in tartan.