The Young Pretender

Some causes are lost on the battlefield. A few are lost in a small room, around a table, in the half-light of a winter morning, by men who have read the same letters and counted the same numbers and arrived at the only conclusion a sober man can arrive at. The cause that dies in such a room dies more completely than the one that dies under cannon, because there is no charge to remember it by, only a vote, and a door closing upstairs, and a column of men turning the next morning in the road.

THE BOY IN THE PALAZZO MUTI

Charles Edward Stuart was born in Rome on the last day of 1720, in a borrowed palace on the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, to a father who had been a king in the language of his own household and nowhere else. The Palazzo Muti was a court of waiting. The plate was Stuart plate; the chaplain said mass for a King James the Third whose writ ran no further than the chapel door; the pension came from the Pope. The boy grew up trilingual, slight, a good shot, a passable dancer, told from the cradle that the three kingdoms of his grandfather were a property held in trust for him by Providence and would, in the fullness of time, be restored. His father had waited fifty years. His grandfather, James the Seventh and Second, had died in exile at Saint-Germain when his son was thirteen. The boy was raised inside an inheritance that consisted entirely of grievance and a coronation that had not yet happened.

In July of 1745, with seven companions and a hundred broadswords loaded at Nantes, he sailed for Scotland against the explicit advice of the French court, the cautious advice of his father, and the better judgement of every Jacobite agent who had ever counted muskets. He landed at Eriskay on the twenty-third of July. By September he had taken Edinburgh; at Prestonpans he scattered Cope's regulars in less than a quarter of an hour; on the first of November he crossed the border at Carlisle. By the fourth of December the vanguard of his army was in Derby, one hundred and twenty-four miles from a London where, the gazettes said, King George had loaded his royal barge at Westminster Stairs and the Bank of England was paying out in sixpences to slow the run on its gold.

THE ROAD TO DERBY

The march south had been a kind of miracle of weather and nerve. Eight thousand Highlanders, ill-shod, in the wet of a Midlands November, had walked through Carlisle and Penrith and Lancaster and Preston and Manchester without a serious engagement. Wade was somewhere behind them on the eastern road; Cumberland was somewhere to the west with the regulars recalled from Flanders; a third army was being scraped together on Finchley Common between them and the capital. The country they passed through stared and did not rise. Manchester produced two hundred men and a regiment's worth of colours. Lancashire, which had been promised, was silent. The French invasion fleet at Dunkirk, which had been promised, lay becalmed in its harbour. The promised twenty thousand of the English south existed only on paper passed between agents in Paris and in Rome.

Derby on the fourth of December was bells and billets and a town that did not know whether to bake bread for the prince or hide its plate. The officers were quartered at Exeter House in Full Street, a tall narrow town house with a panelled hall. The fire in the council room smoked. Outside, the river Derwent ran black under a sky the colour of pewter. The men in the streets were tired in the particular way of men who have walked six hundred miles in wet shoes and have not yet been paid.

A SECOND OF TIME AT EXETER HOUSE

On the morning of the fifth of December the senior officers of the army assembled around the table in the low room. Lord George Murray, the lieutenant-general, set out the letters fanned in front of him: Wade closing from the east, Cumberland closing from the west, a third force forming on Finchley Common, no rising in the English shires, no fleet from Dunkirk, eight thousand men five days from the south coast and three armies in the way. He spoke, by the recollection of those present, calmly and at length, and he proposed the retreat to Scotland. The Duke of Perth, Tullibardine who had been out in the fifteen and was dying of dropsy, Lochiel of the Camerons, the MacDonald chiefs whose corn was still in the ground at Moidart, the colonels of the regiments who had done the campaigning of the autumn, all of them, one by one, voted with Murray. Only old O'Sullivan, the Irish staff officer, voted with the prince.

And in that hush between the eighth voice and the ninth, the rising lay on the table like a coin that has not yet come down. Charles was twenty-five. He had been told from the nursery that the three kingdoms were his by right, and for five months the road had agreed with him; the road had been kind, the towns had opened their gates, Cope's regulars had run at Prestonpans, the bells of Carlisle had rung. He looked at Murray, who had been at every action of the autumn and who had, what he himself had not, the figures. He thought of his father in Rome, sixty-four years old, who had given him at Belle-Isle a sealed letter for the parliament at Westminster that he had not yet been able to deliver. He thought of the men in the street outside, sitting on the kerb-stones unlacing their shoes. He thought, as a young man does when the older men in the room are uniformly against him, that they were jealous, that Murray had been waiting since Edinburgh to be the great captain who saved the army by turning it round. He thought one more night, one more day, and could not say it without shouting. He shouted. He told the chiefs they had betrayed him, the chiefs whose tenants and brothers had carried the rising on their backs from Glenfinnan to this room. He told Murray, by Lord Elcho's later record, that he would no longer ask their advice but would summon them only to receive his orders. He went up the stairs to his lodging on the floor above and closed the door.

THE TURN

The retreat began at first light on the sixth of December. The army was told nothing of the destination until the columns had formed; then the order came to face north, and the men understood. Some wept openly in the road. The drums were muffled. From Derby to Ashbourne to Leek to Macclesfield they went back through the same towns that had watched them pass south the week before, and the towns now jeered where they had stared. The country that had not risen for the march south rose for the harrying of the retreat. Cumberland's cavalry came up at Clifton on the eighteenth of December and was beaten off by Murray in the last action ever fought on English soil. They crossed the Esk into Scotland on the twentieth, the pipes playing, the water to their waists. The rising had eight hundred miles left to live.

THE LONG ROOM IN LONDON

Of what passed in London on the fifth and sixth of December the prince's army knew nothing. The Bank of England continued to pay in sixpences. The Duke of Newcastle, by the account of Horace Walpole, spent the day of the fifth in his closet considering whether to declare for the Stuarts and emerged having declared for nothing. The royal barge was at Westminster Stairs. The militia on Finchley Common was, by every honest account afterwards, a rabble in greatcoats. Whether London on the eleventh of December would have opened its gates to a Highland army of eight thousand, or closed them and waited for Cumberland to come up behind, is the question that the council at Exeter House asked and answered for itself, and that has been asked again by every historian since, and answered differently each time. The men in the small room had to answer it once, on the figures they had, in the hour they had, with a fire that smoked.

THE HEATHER

They held Edinburgh through Christmas. They won at Falkirk in January in a sleet storm. They lost at Culloden on the sixteenth of April 1746 in forty minutes of grapeshot and bayonet on a moor chosen against Murray's advice. After the battle there was a price of thirty thousand pounds on the prince's head and five months of heather. He was passed from croft to cave to island by men and women, Flora MacDonald of Milton, Donald MacLeod of Galtrigill, the seven men of Glenmoriston, who were hanged or transported or ruined afterwards for the protecting of him and who, when questioned, none of them gave him up. On the twentieth of September 1746 he went aboard a French frigate, L'Heureux, at Loch nan Uamh, within sight of the beach where he had landed fourteen months before. He did not come back.

THE PALAZZO MUTI AGAIN

He drifted for forty-two years between Paris and Avignon and Bouillon and Florence and at last Rome, the same rooms his father had drifted between, and he drank. He married Louise of Stolberg when he was fifty-one and treated her badly enough that she ran to a convent and then to a poet. His father died in 1766 and the Pope, who had recognised James the Third in the chapel of the Palazzo Muti for half a century, did not recognise Charles the Third, and the plate stayed on the sideboard and was used for ordinary dinners. He died in the same palace he had been born in, on the thirty-first of January 1788, in his sixty-eighth year, attended by his illegitimate daughter Charlotte. His brother Henry, Cardinal York, the last man of the male Stuart line, lived another nineteen years on a quiet pension from George the Third and was buried in Saint Peter's under a monument carved by Canova at the expense of the English king.

THE COIN COMES DOWN

Causes lost in small rooms do not have monuments, only arguments. Whether the country would have come in on the road to London, or whether the army would have been broken in three days between Cumberland and Wade and the Finchley militia, has been argued for two hundred and eighty winters in the same language Murray and the prince used at Exeter House and will not be settled in another two hundred and eighty. What is settled is that the vote was eight to two, that the column turned at first light, and that a young man who had been raised inside a coronation that had not yet happened lived out the rest of his life inside the coronation that never would. At Exeter House in Full Street, Derby, the panelled room is still there. The fire still smokes when it is lit. There is a chair set at the head of the table and one chair empty beside it, and a card on the cloth with the date, the fifth of December 1745, written in a copperplate hand.