Pickle the Spy; Or, the Incognito of Prince Charles — Reading Notes

iterary 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.’ {12a} 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. {12b} 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, {13} 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.