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

The plan of our narrative, therefore, will be arranged in the following manner. First, we sketch the character of Prince Charles in boyhood, during his Scottish expedition, and as it developed in cruelly thwarting circumstances between 1746 and 1749. In illustrating his character the hostile parties within the Jacobite camp must be described and defined. From February 1749 to September 1750 (when he visited London), we must try to pierce the darkness that has been more than Egyptian. We can, at least, display the total ignorance of Courts and diplomatists as to Charles’s movements before Pickle came to their assistance, and we discover a secret which they ought to have known.

After the date 1752 we give, as far as possible, the personal history of Pickle before he sold himself, and we unveil his motives for his villany. Then we display Pickle in action, we select from his letters, we show him deep in the Scottish, English, and continental intrigues. He spoils the Elibank Plot, he reveals the hostile policy of Frederick the Great, he leads on to the arrest of Archibald Cameron, he sows disunion, he traduces and betrays. He finally recovers his lands, robs his tenants, dabbles (probably) in the French scheme of invasion (1759), offers further information, tries to sell a regiment of his clan, and dies unexposed in 1761.

Minor spies are tracked here and there, as Rob Roy’s son, James Mohr Macgregor, Samuel Cameron, and Oliver Macallester. English machinations against the Prince’s life and liberty are unveiled. His utter decadence is illustrated, and we leave him weary, dishonoured, and abandoned.

to Rome; and the refusal there of even a titular kingship.

The whole book aims chiefly at satisfying the passion of curiosity. However unimportant a secret may be, it is pleasant to know what all Europe was once vainly anxious to discover. In the revelation of manners, too, and in tracing the relations of famous wits and beauties with a person then so celebrated as Prince Charles, there is a certain amount of entertainment which may excuse some labour of research. Our history is of next to no political value, but it revives as in a magic mirror somewhat dim, certain scenes of actual human life. Now and again the mist breaks, and real passionate faces, gestures of living men and women, are beheld in the clear-obscure. We see Lochgarry throw his dirk after his son, and pronounce his curse. We mark Pickle furtively scribbling after midnight in French inns. We note Charles hiding in the alcove of a lady’s chamber in a convent. We admire the ‘rich anger’ of his Polish mistress, and the sullen rage of Lord Hyndford, baffled by ‘the perfidious Court’ of Frederick the Great. The old histories emerge into light, like the writing in sympathetic ink on the secret despatches of King James.

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.’ 2 2 History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle . London, 1838, iii. 279. 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. 3 3 An authentic account of the conduct of the Young Chevalier , p. 7. Third edition, 1749. 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, 4 4 London, 1879. 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.