Andrew Lang - Pickle the Spy; Or, the Incognito of Prince Charles

His existence was suspected by Scott, if not clearly known and understood.

In his introduction to ‘Redgauntlet,’ 1 1 Edition of 1832, i. p. x. Sir Walter Scott says that the ministers of George III. ‘thought it proper to leave Dr. Cameron’s new schemes in concealment (1753), lest by divulging them they had indicated the channel of communication which, it is now well known, they possessed to all the plots of Charles Edward.’ To ‘indicate’ that secret ‘channel of communication’ between the Government of the Pelhams and the Jacobite conspirators of 1749–1760 is one purpose of this book. Tradition has vaguely bequeathed to us the name of ‘Pickle the Spy,’ the foremost of many traitors. Who Pickle was, and what he did, a whole romance of prosperous treachery, is now to be revealed and illustrated from various sources. Pickle was not only able to keep the Duke of Newcastle and George II. well informed as to the inmost plots, if not the most hidden movements of Prince Charles, but he could either paralyse a serious, or promote a premature, rising in the Highlands, as seemed best to his English employers. We shall find Pickle, in company with that devoted Jacobite, Lochgarry, travelling through the Highlands, exciting hopes, consulting the chiefs, unburying a hidden treasure, and encouraging the clans to rush once more on English bayonets.

Romance, in a way, is stereotyped, and it is characteristic that the last romance of the Stuarts should be interwoven with a secret treasure. This mass of French gold, buried after Culloden at Loch Arkaig, in one of the most remote recesses of the Highlands, was, to the Jacobites, what the dwarf Andvari’s hoard was to the Niflungs, a curse and a cause of discord. We shall see that rivalry for its possession produced contending charges of disloyalty, forgery, and theft among certain of the Highland chiefs, and these may have helped to promote the spirit of treachery in Pickle the Spy. It is probable, though not certain, that he had acted as the agent of Cumberland before he was sold to Henry Pelham, and he was certainly communicating the results of his inquiries in one sense to George II., and, in another sense, to the exiled James III. in Rome. He was betraying his own cousins, and traducing his friends. Pickle is plainly no common spy or ‘paltry vidette,’ as he words it. Possibly Sir Walter Scott knew who Pickle was: in him Scott, if he had chosen, would have found a character very like Barry Lyndon (but worse), very unlike any personage in the Waverley Novels, and somewhat akin to the Master of Ballantrae. The cool, good-humoured, smiling, unscrupulous villain of high rank and noble lineage; the scoundrel happily unconscious of his own unspeakable infamy, proud and sensitive upon the point of honour; the picturesque hypocrite in religion, is a being whom we do not meet in Sir Walter’s romances. In Pickle he had such a character ready made to his hand, but, in the time of Scott, it would have been dangerous, as it is still disagreeable, to unveil this old mystery of iniquity. A friend of Sir Walter’s, a man very ready with the pistol, the last, as was commonly said, of the Highland chiefs, was of the name and blood of Pickle, and would have taken up Pickle’s feud. Sir Walter was not to be moved by pistols, but not even for the sake of a good story would he hurt the sensibilities of a friend, or tarnish the justly celebrated loyalty of the Highlands.

Now the friend of Scott, the representative of Pickle in Scott’s generation, was a Highlander, and Pickle was not only a traitor, a profligate, an oppressor of his tenantry, and a liar, but (according to Jacobite gossip which reached ‘King James’) a forger of the King’s name! Moreover he was, in all probability, one fountain of that reproach, true or false, which still clings to the name of the brave and gentle Archibald Cameron, the brother of Lochiel, whom Pickle brought to the gallows. If we add that, when last we hear of Pickle, he is probably engaged in a double treason, and certainly meditates selling a regiment of his clan, like Hessians, to the Hanoverian Government, it will be plain that his was no story for Scott to tell.

Pickle had, at least, the attraction of being eminently handsome. No statelier gentleman than Pickle, as his faded portrait shows him in full Highland costume, ever trod a measure at Holyrood. Tall, athletic, with a frank and pleasing face, Pickle could never be taken for a traitor and a spy. He seemed the fitting lord of that castellated palace of his race, which, beautiful and majestic in decay, mirrors itself in Loch Oich. Again, the man was brave; for he moved freely in France, England, and Scotland, well knowing that the skian was sharpened for his throat if he were detected. And the most extraordinary fact in an extraordinary story is that Pickle was detected, and denounced to the King over the water by Mrs. Archibald Cameron, the widow of his victim. Yet the breach between James and his little Court, on one side, and Prince Charles on the other, was then so absolute that the Prince was dining with the spy, chatting with him at the opera-ball, and presenting him with a gold snuff-box, at about the very time when Pickle’s treachery was known in Rome. Afterwards, the knowledge of his infamy came too late, if it came at all. The great scheme had failed; Cameron had fallen, and Frederick of Prussia, ceasing to encourage Jacobitism, had become the ally of England.

These things sound like the inventions of the romancer, but they rest on unimpeachable evidence, printed and manuscript, and chiefly on Pickle’s own letters to his King, to his Prince, and to his English employers – we cannot say ‘pay-masters,’ for Pickle was never paid ! He obtained, indeed, singular advantages, but he seldom or never could wring ready money from the Duke of Newcastle.

To understand Pickle’s career, the reluctant reader must endure a certain amount of actual history in minute details of date and place. Every one is acquainted with the brilliant hour of Prince Charles: his landing in Moidart accompanied by only seven men, his march on Edinburgh, his success at Prestonpans, the race to Derby, the retreat to Scotland, the gleam of victory at Falkirk, the ruin of Culloden, the long months of wanderings and distress, the return to France in 1746. Then came two years of baffled intrigues; next, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle insisted on the Prince’s expulsion from France; last, he declined to withdraw. On December 10, 1748, he was arrested at the opera, was lodged in the prison of Vincennes, was released, and made his way to the Pope’s city of Avignon, arriving there in the last days of December 1748. On February 28, 1749, he rode out of Avignon, and disappeared for many months from the ken of history. For nearly eighteen years he preserved his incognito, vaguely heard of here and there in England, France, Germany, Flanders, but always involved in mystery. On that mystery, impenetrable to his father, Pickle threw light enough for the purposes of the English Government, but not during the darkest hours of Charles’s incognito.

‘Le Prince Edouard,’ says Barbier in his journal for February 1750, ‘fait l’admiration et la curiosité de l’Europe.’ This work, alas! is not likely to add to the admiration entertained for the unfortunate adventurer, but any surviving curiosity as to the Prince’s secret may be assuaged. In the days of 1749–1750, before Pickle’s revelations begin, the drafts of the Prince’s memoranda, notes, and angry love-letters, preserved in Her Majesty’s Library, enable us to follow his movements. On much that is obscurely indicated in scarcely decipherable scrawls, light is thrown by the French memoirs of that age. The names of Madame de Talmond, Madame d’Aiguillon, and the celebrated Montesquieu, are beacons in the general twilight. The memoirs also explain, what was previously inexplicable, the motives of Charles in choosing a life ‘in a hole of a rock,’ as he said after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). It is necessary, however, to study the internal feuds of the Jacobites at this period, and these are illuminated by the Stuart Papers, the letters of James and his ministers.