Chapter 2

CHARLES EDWARD STUART

Prince Charles--Contradictions in his character--Extremes of bad and good--Evolution of character--The Prince's personal advantages--Common mistake as to the colour of his eyes--His portraits from youth to age--Descriptions of Charles by the Duc de Liria; the President de Brosses; Gray; Charles's courage--The siege of Gaeta--Story of Lord Elcho--The real facts--The Prince's horse shot at Culloden--Foolish fables of David Hume confuted--Charles's literary 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,