Pickle the Spy; Or, the Incognito of Prince Charles

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, who outlined Charles’s profile and applied it to another of Her present Majesty in youth, tells me that they 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 his enemies were concerned, with a sense of honour most unusual in his generation. His care for the wounded, after Prestonpans, is acknowledged by the timid and Whiggish Home, in his ‘History of the Rebellion,’ and is very warmly and gracefully expressed in a letter to his father, written at Holyrood.’ 19 He could not be induced to punish miscreants who attempted his life and snapped pistols in his face. He could hardly be compelled to retort to the English offer of 30,000l. for his head by issuing a similar proclamation about ‘the Elector.’ ‘I smiled and created it’ (the proclamation of a reward of 30,000l. for his head) ‘with the disdain it deserved, upon which they’ (the Highlanders) ‘flew into a violent rage, and insisted upon my doing the same by him.’ This occurs in a letter from Charles to James, September 10, 1745, dated from Perth. A copy is found among Bishop Forbes’s papers. Here Charles deplores the cruelties practised under Charles II. and James II., and the consequent estrangement of the Duke of Argyll. 20

In brief, the contest between Charles and Cumberland was that of a civilised and chivalrous commander against a foe as treacherous and cruel as a Huron or an Iroquois. On this point there is no possibility of doubt. The English Government offered a vast reward for Charles, dead or alive. The soldiers were told significantly, by Cumberland, that he did not want prisoners. On the continent assassins lurked for the Prince, and ambassadors urged the use of personal violence. Meanwhile the Prince absolutely forbade even a legitimate armed attack directed mainly against his enemy, then red-handed from the murder of the wounded.

With this loyalty to his foes, with this clemency to enemies in his power, Charles certainly combined a royal grace, and could do handsome things handsomely. Thus, in 1745, some of the tenants of Oliphant of Gask would not don the white cockade at his command. He therefore ‘laid an arrest or inhibition on their corn-fields.’ Charles, finding the grain hanging dead-ripe, as he marched through Perthshire, inquired the cause, and when he had learned it, broke the ‘taboo’ by cutting some ears with his sword, or by gathering them and giving them to his horse, saving that the farmers might now, by his authority, follow his example and break the inhibition. 21

Making every allowance for an enthusiasm of loyalty on the part of the narrators in Bishop Forbes’s MS. ‘Lyon in Mourning’ (partly published by Robert Chambers in ‘Jacobite Memoirs’ 22), it is certain that the courage, endurance, and gay content of the Prince in his Highland wanderings deserve the high praise given by Smollett. Thus, in many ways we see the elements of a distinguished and attractive character in Charles. His enemies, like the renegade Dr. King, of St. Mary’s Hall (ob. 1763), in his posthumous ‘Anecdotes,’ accused the Prince of avarice. He would borrow money from a lady, says King, while he had plenty of his own; he neglected those who had ruined themselves for his sake. Henry Goring accused the Prince of shabbiness to his face, but assuredly he who insisted on laying down money on the rocks of a deserted fishers’ islet to pay for some dry fish eaten there by himself and his companions – he who gave liberally to gentle and simple out of the treasure buried near Loch Arkaig, who refused a French pension for himself, and asked favours only for his friends – afforded singular proofs of Dr. King’s charge of selfish greed. The fault grew on him later. After breaking with the French Court in 1748, Charles had little or nothing of his own to give away. His Sobieski jewels he had pawned for the expenses of the war, having no heart to wear them, he said, ‘on this side of the water.’ He was often in actual need, though we may not accept d’Argenson’s story of how he was once seen selling his pistols to a gun-maker. 23 If ever he was a miser, that vice fixed itself upon him in his utter moral ruin.

Were there, then, no signs in his early life of the faults which grew so rapidly when hope was lost? There were such signs. As early as 1742, James had observed in Charles a slight inclination to wine and gaiety, and believed that his companions, especially Francis Strickland, 24 were setting him against his younger brother, the Duke of York, who had neither the health nor the disposition to be a roysterer. 25

Again, on February 3, 1747, James recurs, in a long letter, to what passed in 1742, ‘because that is the foundation, and I may say the key, of all that has followed.’ Now in 1742 Murray of Broughton paid his first visit to Rome, and was fascinated by Charles. This unhappy man, afterwards the Judas of the cause, was unscrupulous in private life in matters of which it is needless to speak more fully. He was, or gave himself the air of being, a very stout Protestant. James employed him, but probably liked him little. It is to be gathered, from James’s letter of February 3, 1747, that he suspected Charles of listening to advice, probably from Murray, about his changing his religion. ‘You cannot forget how you were prevailed upon to speak to your brother’ (the devout Duke of York) ‘on very nice and delicate subjects, and that without saying the least thing to me, though we lived in the same house.. You were then much younger than you are now, and therefore could be more easily led by specious arguments and pretences… It will, to be sure, have been represented to you that our religion is a great prejudice to our interest, but that it may in some measure be remedied by a certain free way of thinking and acting.’ 26

In 1749 James made a disagreeable discovery, which he communicated to Lord Lismore. A cassette, or coffer, belonging to Charles, had, apparently, been left in Paris, and, after many adventures on the road, was brought to Rome by the French ambassador. James opened it, and found that it contained letters ‘from myself and the Queen.’ But it also offered proof that the Prince had carried on a secret correspondence with England, long before he left Rome in 1744. Probably his adherents wished James to resign in his favour. 27

As to religion, Dr. King admits that Charles was no bigot, and d’Argenson contrasted his disengaged way of treating theology with the exaggerated devoutness of the Duke of York. Even during the march into England, Lord Elcho told an inquirer that the Prince’s religion ‘was still to seek.’ Assuredly he would never make shipwreck on the Stuart fidelity to Catholicism. All this was deeply distressing to the pious James, and all this dated from 1742, that is, from the time of Murray of Broughton’s visit to Rome. Indifference to religious strictness was, even then, accompanied by a love of wine, in some slight degree. Already, too, a little rift in the friendship of the princely brothers was apparent; there were secrets between them which Henry must have communicated to James.

As for the fatal vice of drink, it is hinted at on April 15, 1747, by an anonymous Paris correspondent of Lord Dunbar’s. Charles had about him ‘an Irish cordelier,’ one Kelly, whom he employed as a secretary. Kelly is accused of talking contemptuously about James. ‘It were to be wished that His Royal Highness would forbid that friar his apartment, because he passes for a notorious drunkard.. and His Royal Highness’s character, in point of sobriety, has been a little blemished on this friar’s account.’ 28

The cold, hunger, and fatigue of the Highland distresses had, no doubt, often prompted recourse to the national dram of whiskey, and Charles would put a bottle of brandy to his lips ‘without ceremony,’ says Bishop Forbes. The Prince on one occasion is said to have drunk the champion ‘bowlsman’ of the Islands under the table. 29

What had been a jovial feast became a custom, a consolation, and a curse, while there is reason, as has been seen, to suppose that Charles, quite early in life, showed promise of intemperance. In happier circumstances these early tastes might never have been developed into a positive disease. James himself, in youth, had not been a pattern of strict sobriety, but later middle age found him almost ascetic.

We have sketched a character endowed with many fine qualities, and capable of winning devoted affection. We now examine the rapid decline of a nature originally noble.

Returned from Scotland in 1746, Prince Charles brought with him a head full of indigested romance, a heart rich in chimerical expectations. He now prided himself on being a plain hardy mountaineer. He took a line of his own; he concealed his measures from the spy-ridden Court of his father in Rome; he quarrelled with his brother, the Duke of York, when the Duke accepted a cardinal’s hat. He broke violently with the French king, who would not aid him. He sulked at Avignon. He sought Spanish help, which was refused. He again became the centre of fashion and of disaffection in Paris. Ladies travelled from England merely to see him in his box at the theatre. Princesses and duchesses ‘pulled caps for him.’ Naturally cold (as his enemies averred) where women were concerned, he was now beleaguered, besieged, taken by storm by the fair. He kept up the habit of drinking which had been noted in him even before his expedition to Scotland. He allowed his old boyish scepticism (caused by a mixed Protestant and Catholic education) to take the form of studied religious indifference. After defying and being expelled by Louis XV., he adopted (what has never, perhaps, been observed) the wild advice of d’Argenson (‘La Bête,’ and Louis’s ex-minister of foreign affairs), he betook himself to a life of darkling adventures, to a hidden and homeless exile. In many of his journeys he found Pickle in his path, and Pickle finally made his labours vain. The real source of all this imbroglio, in addition to an exasperated daring and a strangely secretive temperament, was a deep, well-grounded mistrust of the people employed by his father, the old ‘King over the water.’ Whatever James knew was known in London by next mail. Charles was aware of this, and was not aware that his own actions were almost as successfully spied upon and reported. He therefore concealed his plans and movements from James, and even – till Pickle came on the scene – from Europe and from England. The result of his reticence was an irremediable rupture between ‘the King and the Prince of Wales – over the water,’ an incurable split in the Jacobite camp.

The general outline here sketched must now be filled up in detail. The origo mali was the divisions among the Jacobites. Ever since 1715 these had existed and multiplied. Mar was thought to be a traitor. Atterbury, in exile, suspected O’Brien (Lord Lismore). The Earl Marischal and Kelly 30 were set against James’s ministers, Lord Sempil, Lord Lismore, and Balhaldie, the exiled chief of the Macgregors. Lord Dunbar (Murray, brother of Lord Mansfield) was in James’s disgrace at Avignon. Sempil, Balhaldie, Lismore were ‘the King’s party,’ opposed to Marischal, Kelly, Sheridan, Lally Tollendal, ‘the Prince’s party.’ Each sect inveighed against the other in unmeasured terms of reproach. This division widened when Charles was in France, just before the expedition to Scotland.

One of James’s agents in Paris, Lord Sempil, writes to him on July 5, 1745, with warnings against the Prince’s counsellors, especially Sir Thomas Sheridan (Charles’s governor, and left-handed cousin) and Kelly. They, with Lally Tollendal and others, arranged the descent on Scotland without the knowledge of James or Sempil, whom Charles and his party bitterly distrusted, as they also distrusted Lord Lismore (O’Brien), James’s other agent. While the Prince was in Scotland (1745–1746), even before Prestonpans, the Jacobite affairs in France were perplexed by the action of Lismore, Sempil, and Balhaldie, acting for James, while the old Earl Marischal (who had been in the rising of 1715, and the Glenshiel affair of 1719) acted for the Prince. With the Earl Marischal was, for some time, Lord Clancarty, of whom Sempil speaks as ‘a very brave and worthy man.’ 31 On the other hand, Oliver Macallester, the spy, describes Clancarty, with whom he lived, as a slovenly, drunken, blaspheming rogue, one of whose eyes General Braddock had knocked out with a bottle in a tavern brawl! Clancarty gave himself forth as a representative of the English Jacobites, but d’Argenson, in his ‘Mémoires,’ says he could produce no names of men of rank in the party except his own. D’Argenson was pestered by women, priests, and ragged Irish adventurers. In September 1745, the Earl Marischal and Clancarty visited d’Argenson, then foreign minister of Louis XV. in the King’s camp in Flanders. They asked for aid, and the scene, as described by the spy Macallester, on Clancarty’s information, was curious. D’Argenson taunted the Lord Marischal with not being at Charles’s side in Scotland. To the slovenly Clancarty he said, ‘Sir, your wig is ill-combed. Would you like to see my perruquier? He manages wigs very well.’ Clancarty, who wore ‘an ordinary black tie-wig,’ jumped up, saying in English, ‘Damn the fellow! He is making his diversion of us.’ 32 The Lord Marischal was already on bad personal terms with Charles. Clancarty was a ruffian, d’Argenson was the adviser who suggested Charles’s hidden and fugitive life after 1748. The singular behaviour of the Earl Marischal in 1751–1754 will afterwards be illustrated by the letters of Pickle, who drew much of his information from the unsuspicious old ambassador of Frederick the Great to the Court of Versailles. It is plain that the Duke of Ormonde was right when he said that ‘too many people are meddling in your Majesty’s affairs with the French Court at this juncture’ (November 15, 1745). The Duke of York, Charles’s brother, was on the seaboard of France in autumn 1745. At Arras he met the gallant Chevalier Wogan, who had rescued his mother from prison at Innspruck. 33 Clancarty, Lord Marischal, and Lally Tollendal were pressing for a French expedition to start in aid of Charles. Sempil, Balhaldie, Lismore, were intriguing and interfering. Voltaire wrote a proclamation for Charles to issue. An expedition was arranged, troops and ships were gathered at Boulogne. Swedes were to join from Gothenburg. On Christmas Eve, 1745, nothing was ready, and the secret leaked out. A million was sent to Scotland; the money arrived too late; we shall hear more of it. 34 The Duke of York, though he fought well at Antwerp, was kneeling in every shrine, and was in church when the news of Culloden was brought to him. This information he gave, in the present century, to one of the Stair family. 35 The rivalries and enmities went on increasing and multiplying into cross-divisions after Charles made his escape to France in August 1746. He was filled with distrust of his father’s advisers; his own were disliked by James. The correspondence of Horace Mann, and of Walton, an English agent in Florence, shows that England received all intelligence sent to James from Paris, and knew all that passed in James’s cabinet in Rome. 36 The Abbé Grant was suspected of being the spy.

Among so many worse than doubtful friends, Charles, after 1746, took his own course; even his father knew little or nothing of his movements. Between his departure from Avignon (February 1749) and the accession of Pickle to the Hanoverian side (Autumn 1749 or 1750), Charles baffled every Foreign Office in Europe. Indeed, Pickle was of little service till 1751 or 1752. Curious light on Charles’s character, and on the entangled quarrels of the Jacobites, is cast by d’Argenson’s ‘Mémoires.’ In Spring, 1747, the Duke of York disappeared from Paris, almost as cleverly as Charles himself could have done. D’Argenson thus describes his manœuvre. ‘He fled from Paris with circumstances of distinguished treachery’ (insigne fourberie) towards his brother, the Prince. He invited Charles to supper; his house was brilliantly lighted up; all his servants were in readiness; but he had made his escape by five o’clock in the afternoon, aided by Cardinal Tencin. His Governor, the Chevalier Graeme, was not in the secret. The Prince waited for him till midnight, and was in a mortal anxiety. He believed that the English attempts to kidnap or assassinate himself had been directed against his brother. At last, after three days, he received a letter from the Duke of York, ‘explaining his fatal design’ to accept a cardinal’s hat. ‘Prince Charles is determined never to return to Rome, but rather to take refuge in some hole in a rock.’