The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain (44 page)

Surely, he suggested, his own constancy in this matter was proof that he would keep his promise to maintain the religion of his kingdoms as by law established? This was hardly good enough. Memories of his father’s conduct and policies were too recent, still warm. If he became a member of the Church of England, he might be king. While he remained a Catholic, he must remain an exile.

Anne died, and the Elector of Hanover became George I. The Tories, whom the new King disliked and distrusted, were dismissed from office and found themselves in the wilderness. Among those rejected was John Erskine, Earl of Mar, formerly a promoter of union. He took umbrage and became a Jacobite. Now a man of forty, Mar had, like others, already played both sides in his time; nevertheless, his switch surprised many, and his inconstancy would earn him the nickname of ‘Bobbing Johnnie’.

His actions may have been prompted by pique, but he was not alone in being ready to conspire or even rebel. Tory England was rife with discontent. Even the Duke of Ormonde, Marlborough’s successor as captain-general of the army, had been dismissed. The Tories were out, and saw no prospect of returning to office while George was king; they might, however, come in again with the Pretender. It was no longer only the wilder spirits among them who were tempted by the Jacobite alternative. Plans were laid for a rising in England, and both Ormonde and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, were involved. Then Bolingbroke blundered. Highly intelligent, but a poor judge of men, nervous about what might be known of his correspondence with James, he consulted Marlborough, whom he had treated shamefully, and who consequently disliked him. Marlborough, not innocent of communication with St-Germains himself, hinted that Bolingbroke was indeed in danger of arrest – though in truth there was no evidence against him. Alarmed, he now provided the evidence by fleeing to France. By July 1715 he was James’s secretary of state, a shadow minister in a shadow government-in-exile.

Unrest was widespread. In May there had been a Jacobite riot in Oxford where the authorities, being themselves sympathetic to the exiled King, took no action. The same month the Foot Guards demonstrated outside St James’s and seemed on the point of mutiny. On 10 June, the Pretender’s birthday, there were more Jacobite demonstrations: in Manchester, Leeds, Somerset and Gloucestershire. The Riot Act was renewed; impeachments of Tory leaders moved in the Commons. Troops were brought into London and billeted in Hyde Park. The Guards were purged of suspect officers and a colonel in the First Regiment of Foot Guards was arrested, accused of having accepted a commission from the Pretender and of having started to enlist men on his behalf. Ormonde was impeached, though no warrant for his arrest was issued. Then he too slipped over to France to join James at St-Germains.

Such was the mood when Mar came north to his estate on Deeside. He left plans for a simultaneous rising in England. Sir William Wyndham, formerly Secretary at War, Lord Lansdowne and Sir Richard Vyvyan would raise the West Country. Lord Derwentwater, grandson of Charles II, and the actress Mary Davis (and therefore James’s second cousin) would lead the Jacobites of northern England along with Thomas Forster, MP for Northumberland; and of course there would be help from France. No wonder there was high excitement in St-Germains, chilled only by awareness of the ubiquity of Hanoverian spies.

In the late summer of 1715, Mar sent out invitations to a hunting party in the hills above Braemar. This was a traditional event at that time of the year, and so provided adequate, if not wholly convincing, cover. Invitations were dispatched to all known sympathisers in the north-east and Highlands. Mar made what a contemporary but hostile historian described as ‘a publick speech, full of invective against the Protestant Succession in general and King George in particular’.
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He explained that though he had formerly been active in support of the Treaty of Union, he could now see his error, and would do what he could to make the Scots again a free people, enjoying their ancient liberties, now, on account of ‘that cursed Union’, delivered into the hands of the English.

He then displayed his commission from James as major-general of the army in Scotland, and promised French help and a simultaneous rising in England (which some may have thought sat oddly with his promise to end the union); and things were under way – even though James himself had not yet arrived in Scotland.

Under way but not exactly on the move. Mar dithered. Though he had some seven thousand men by mid-October and had occupied Perth, he hesitated to commit his army to battle against the much smaller Hanoverian force commanded by the Duke of Argyll, which was based at Stirling. It should have been obvious that the Jacobites had to defeat Argyll before he received reinforcements from the south, but Mar was no general. One small detachment of the Jacobite army, commanded by Mackintosh of Borlum, crossed the Forth and linked up with the English Jacobites, only to be defeated at Preston. Meanwhile the promised help from France did not appear.

At last, in November, Mar moved towards Dunblane to engage Argyll at Sheriffmuir in the foothills of the Ochils. The battle was mismanaged on both sides, Argyll, though a veteran commander under Marlborough, making almost as many mistakes as Mar. But the Jacobites had the advantage in numbers and should have won. However, Argyll held his ground and Mar withdrew. Though regarded by both sides and many historians as a drawn and inconclusive battle, Sheriffmuir was in reality a serious strategic defeat for the Jacobites.

Effectively the rising was over, in Scotland as well as England, for Argyll was now reinforced by six thousand Dutch troops commanded by another Marlborough veteran, General Cadogan. Yet there was still a last melancholy act to be played. James himself arrived in Scotland, landing at Peterhead on 22 December, six weeks after Sheriffmuir. He had been delayed, once again, by adverse weather – the Stuarts rarely had luck with the weather – and also by the attempts of the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Stair, to arrange his assassination – a grisly task for which Stair’s heredity well suited him, since his father, the first Earl, had been the prime organiser of the Massacre of Glencoe. But James was too late. There was nothing he could do – not even raise the spirits of his army, which was melting away like snow-wreaths in thaw. He left for France early in February, and never saw Scotland again.

Still, he did not give up. The failure of the ’15 rising was regarded as a check; no more. Admittedly things were running against the cause. Treatment of the captured English Jacobites had been severe enough to render others cautious in the future, uncomfortably aware that they had a joint in their neck. Moreover, Louis XIV, constant in friendship to James as to his father before him, had died in 1715, and the French government, now headed by his nephew the Duc d’Orléans as regent for the infant Louis XV, was so eager for good relations with Britain that it expelled James from the country and he withdrew to Avignon, still a possession of the Pope. But European politics were lively and there were other possible allies. There was the warrior-king of Sweden, Charles XII, who loathed the Elector of Hanover; but unfortunately a sniper’s bullet did for him in 1718. That left Spain, now at odds with France, and with an ambitious chief minister, Cardinal Alberoni, an Italian by birth, who loved intrigue and saw advantages for his adopted country in the restoration of the Stuarts. So James, in disguise and by a tortuous route, to evade English spies and assassins, made his way to Spain. Ormonde joined him there, and in 1719 a new enterprise was hatched.

A Spanish fleet would land Ormonde and Spanish troops in the west of England, while another smaller force commanded by the Earl Marischal of Scotland would be put ashore in the north. Once again the wind turned against the Jacobites. Ormonde’s fleet was scattered in a storm. Meanwhile the Earl Marischal had sailed with a few hundred Spanish soldiers. He would be joined by his brother, James Keith, and the Marquis of Tullibardine, son of the Duke of Atholl, with another small force. Tullibardine believed he had a commission to take command, and produced what purported to be one, and the Earl Marischal yielded place. Unfortunately while the Earl Marischal had had a plan of campaign – to march rapidly on Inverness – Tullibardine had none. So though his brother, Lord George Murray, came up with a detachment of the Atholl men, and the outlaw Rob Roy Macgregor appeared with a small band of ruffians, this rising, lacking any sense of direction and winning no new support, never got going. A government force met them in Glenshiel. The Jacobite leaders made off as best they could, while the wretched Spaniards were taken as prisoners to Edinburgh, whence they were in time repatriated. And that was the last Jacobite rising for a quarter of a century.

In 1719 James was thirty-one. He had devoted the dozen years of his manhood to action and had made repeated attempts to launch expeditions to regain his rightful throne. All had failed. He had narrowly escaped capture and assassination. He knew what it was to be surrounded by spies and traitors, to have his every action, and many of his words, reported by the agents of the British Crown. An exile from his own country since infancy, he had been expelled from the once-friendly France, first to Avignon, until the Royal Navy’s threat to bombard Civitavecchia in the Papal States had persuaded His Holiness to order James to remove to Italy. For a little while he resided at Urbino, then came south to Rome, where the Pope installed him in the Palazzo Muti in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli. It is an insignificant building, overshadowed not only by the Church of the Apostles but by the neighbouring palazzi belonging to the Roman noble families, the Colonna and Odealeschi. The Palazzo Muti would be the principal residence of the exiled Stuarts till they were extinct; an inscription within its little gateway records that in 1788, James’s younger son, Henry, was there proclaimed King of Great Britain, France and Ireland.

James had recently, with some difficulty, found and married a wife. She was Clementina Sobieski, the granddaughter of the Polish hero-king John Sobieski, who in 1683 had driven the armies of the Ottoman Empire back from the gates of Vienna and so repelled the last attempt of the Turks to expand their empire into the heart of Europe. Stuart and Sobieski made for a rich and foolhardy mix, and Charles Edward, the couple’s elder son, born on the last day of 1720, was to display Stuart obstinacy and that disregard for the odds characteristic of Polish gallantry.

Their second child, Henry, followed in 1725, his birth giving the lie to the British government’s agent in Rome, the art-dealing Baron von Stosch, who had assured his employers when Charles was born that Clementina could never bear another child. He was not the most reliable of agents, for he had also reported that Charles was deformed; news that was equally welcome and equally untrue.

The marriage was never happy, and, as is usually the case, its unhappiness was the fault of both husband and wife. Clementina was devout, but also light-minded and frivolous, an uncomfortable combination. James was preoccupied with his business of politics. He did not understand his young wife’s wish for a lively social life, or if he did understood it, he did not sympathise. She was baffled and bored by his gravity and industry. Moreover, she was angered by his refusal to exclude Protestants from his service. To her, they were heretics; to him, his loyal subjects who had suffered exile for his sake and for their devotion to the cause. He not only felt he owed a duty to them; he knew that a Jacobite restoration was only possible if the fears of the Protestant majority in England and Scotland were allayed. So he held out against his wife’s pious demands, and even persuaded the Pope to grant a dispensation that would allow Protestant rites to be celebrated in the little chapel of the Palazzo Muti.

For James had not abandoned hope of becoming king in reality as he already was by right. His restoration was still the task to which he devoted himself, and hours both by day and night were spent with his secretary, James Edgar, writing letters (many in cipher) to his adherents and sympathisers, and to kings and ministers all over Europe. Other states might have found it in their interest to acknowledge the German elector as King of Great Britain, or been compelled by force of circumstance to do so, but James remained a piece of some value on the chessboard of international politics. He knew it, and felt himself to be more than a mere pawn.

Yet his behaviour after he settled in Rome has puzzled some historians and aroused the contempt of others. The young man who had been so keen and active in his cause now seemed gradually to have sunk into passivity, and, as the years slipped unprofitably by, to display a fatalistic resignation. He never left the Papal States again, but moved with apparent tranquillity between the city and the Palazzo Savelli, the country house His Holiness had bestowed upon him, situated on the outskirts of the little town of Albano overlooking the Roman Campagna.

The explanation is simple. James had not changed; circumstances had. Western Europe was experiencing two decades of unaccustomed peace. In Britain the government was in the hands of Sir Robert Walpole; in France, after the regent’s death in 1723, of the aged and pacific Cardinal Fleury. Walpole and Fleury understood each other, and preferred political quiet. Both were committed to a policy of peace.

Peace was bad news for the Jacobites. Only a state of war could persuade France or Spain or any other power to give them military help. Only Britain’s danger could be the Jacobites’ opportunity. And only war, with the British army engaged on the Continent, could offer a rising any chance of success.

So there was little James could do except try to keep his party in being and his interest alive at other courts. Moreover, with France barred to him, and the British government quick to remonstrate with any state that seemed well disposed to the Jacobite cause, Rome was as good a place as anywhere for him to live. At least the Pope paid him a regular pension, while the pensions granted him by France and Spain were often in arrears, and even the rent due from his investment in the Hotel de Ville in Paris could not always be relied on. He himself paid pensions to many who had lost their estates on account of their loyalty to the cause, Ormonde and the Earl Marischal being only the most distinguished among those who depended on him.