Chapter 3

THE PRINCE IN FAIRYLAND

FEBRUARY 1749-SEPTEMBER 1750

WHAT THE WORLD SAID

Europe after Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle--A vast gambling establishment--Charles excluded--Possible chance in Poland--Supposed to have gone thither--'Henry Goring's letter'--Romantic adventures attributed to Charles--Obvious blunders--Talk of a marriage--Count Bruhl's opinion--Proposal to kidnap Charles--To rob a priest--The King of Poland's ideas--Lord Hyndford on Frederick the Great--Lord Hyndford's mare's nest--Charles at Berlin--'Send him to Siberia'--The theory contradicted--Mischievous glee of Frederick--Charles discountenances plots to kill Cumberland--Father Myles Macdonnell to James--London conspiracy--Reported from Rome--The Bloody Butcher Club--Guesses of Sir Horace Mann--Charles and a strike--Charles reported to be very ill--Really on the point of visiting England--September 1750.

Europe, after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, was like a vast political gambling establishment. Nothing, or nothing but the expulsion of Prince Charles from every secular State, had been actually settled. Nobody was really satisfied with the Peace. The populace, in France as in England, was discontented. Princes were merely resting and looking round for new combinations of forces. The various Courts, from St. Petersburg to Dresden, from London to Vienna, were so many tables where the great game of national faro was being played, over the heads of the people, by kings, queens, abbes, soldiers, diplomatists, and pretty women. Projects of new alliances were shuffled and cut, like the actual cards which were seldom out of the hands of the players, when Casanova or Barry Lyndon held the bank, and challenged all comers. It was the age of adventurers, from the mendacious Casanova to the mysterious Saint-Germain, from the Chevalier d'Eon to Charles Edward Stuart. That royal player was warned off the turf, as it were, ruled out of the game. Where among all these attractive tables was one on which Prince Charles, in 1749, might put down his slender stake, his name, his sword, the lives of a few thousand Highlanders, the fortunes of some faithful gentlemen? Who would accept Charles's empty alliance, which promised little but a royal title and a desperate venture? The Prince had wildly offered his hand to the Czarina; he was to offer that hand, vainly stretched after a flying crown, to a Princess of Prussia, and probably to a lady of Poland.

At this moment the Polish crown was worn by Augustus of Saxony, who was reckoned 'a bad life.' The Polish throne, the Polish alliance, had been, after various unlucky adventures since the days of Henri III. and the Duc d'Alencon, practically abandoned by France. But Louis XV. was beginning to contemplate that extraordinary intrigue in which Conti aimed at the crown of Poland, and the Comte de Broglie was employed (1752) to undermine and counteract the schemes of Louis's official representatives. {46a} As a