Part 4

He talked to me like a man who expected every moment to set out for England or Scotland, but who did not very well know for which. And when he entered into the particulars of his affairs I found that concerning the former he had nothing more circumstantial nor positive to go upon than what I had already heard. The advices which were sent from thence contained such assurances of success as it was hard to think that men who did not go upon the surest grounds would presume to give. But then these assurances were general, and the authority seldom satisfactory. Those which came from the best hands were verbal, and often conveyed by very doubtful messengers; others came from men whose fortunes were as desperate as their counsels; and others came from persons whose situation in the world gave little reason to attend to their judgment in matters of this kind.

The Duke of Ormond had been for some time, I cannot say how long, engaged with the Chevalier. He had taken the direction of this whole affair, as far as it related to England, upon himself, and had received a commission for this purpose, which contained the most ample powers that could be given. After this, one would be apt to imagine that the principles on which the Pretender should proceed, and the Tories engage, in this service had been laid down; that a regular and certain method of correspondence had been established; that the necessary assistances had been specified; and that positive assurances had been given of them. Nothing less. In a matter as serious as this, all was loose and abandoned to the disposition of fortune. The first point had never been touched upon; by what I have said above you see how little care was taken of the second; and as to the third, the Duke had asked a small body of regular forces, a sum of money, and a quantity of arms and ammunition. He had been told in answer by the Court of France that he must absolutely despair of any number of troops whatever, but he had been made in general to hope for some money, some arms, and some ammunition; a little sum had, I think, been advanced to him. In a case so plain as this it is hard to conceive how any man could err. The assistances demanded from France at this time, and even greater than these, will appear, in the sequel of this relation, by the sense of the whole party, to have been deemed essentially necessary to success. In such an uncertainty, therefore, whether even these could be obtained, or rather with so much reason to apprehend that they could not, it was evident that the Tories ought to have lain still. They might have helped the ferment against the Government, but should have avoided with the utmost care the giving any alarm or even suspicion of their true design, and have resumed or not resumed it as the Chevalier was able or not able to provide the troops, the arms, the money, etc. Instead of which those who were at the head of the undertaking, and therefore answerable for the measures which were pursued, suffered the business to jog merrily on. They knew in general how little dependence was to be placed on foreign succour, but acted as if they had been sure of it; while the party were rendered sanguine by their passions, and made no doubt of subverting a Government they were angry with, both one and the other made as much bustle and gave as great alarm as would have been imprudent even at the eve of a general insurrection. This appeared to me to be the state of things with respect to England when I arrived at Commercy.

The Scots had long pressed the Chevalier to come amongst them, and had of late sent frequent messages to quicken his departure, some of which were delivered in terms much more zealous than respectful. The truth is, they seemed in as much haste to begin as if they had thought themselves able to do the work alone; as if they had been apprehensive of no danger but that of seeing it taken out of their hands and of having the honour of it shared by others. However, that which was wanting on the part of England was not wanting in Scotland; the Scots talked aloud, but they were in a condition to rise. They took little care to keep their intentions secret, but they were disposed to put those intentions into immediate execution, and thereby to render the secret no longer necessary. They knew upon whom to depend for every part of the work, and they had concerted with the Chevalier even to the place of his landing.

There was need of no great sagacity to perceive how unequal such foundations were to the weight of the building designed to be raised on them. The Scots, with all their zeal and all their valour, could bring no revolution about unless in concurrence with the English; and among the latter nothing was ripe for such an undertaking but the temper of the people, if that was so. I thought, therefore, that the Pretender’s friends in the North should be kept from rising till those in the South had put themselves in a condition to act; and that in the meanwhile the utmost endeavours ought to be used with the King of France to espouse the cause; and that a plan of the design, with a more particular specification of the succours desired, as well as of the time when and the place to which they should be conveyed, ought to be written for;—all which I was told by the Marshal of Berwick, who had the principal direction at that time of these affairs in France, and I daresay very truly, had been often asked, but never sent. I looked on this enterprise to be of the nature of those which can hardly be undertaken more than once, and I judged that the success of it would depend on timing as near as possible together the insurrection in both parts of the island and the succours from hence. The Pretender approved this opinion of mine. He instructed me accordingly, and I left Lorraine after having accepted the Seals much against my inclination. I made one condition with him; it was this—that I should be at liberty to quit a station which my humour and many other considerations made me think myself very unfit for, whenever the occasion upon which I engaged was over, one way or other; and I desire you to remember that I did so.

I arrived at Paris towards the end of July, 1715. You will observe that all I was charged with, and all by consequence that I am answerable for, was to solicit this Court and to dispose them to grant us the succours necessary to make the attempt as soon as we should know certainly from England in what it was desired that these succours should consist and whither they should be sent. Here I found a multitude of people at work, and every one doing what seemed good in his own eyes; no subordination, no order, no concert. Persons concerned in the management of these affairs upon former occasions have assured me this is always the case. It might be so to some degree, but I believe never so much as now. The Jacobites had wrought one another up to look on the success of the present designs as infallible. Every meeting-house which the populace demolished, every little drunken riot which happened, served to confirm them in these sanguine expectations; and there was hardly one amongst them who would lose the air of contributing by his intrigues to the Restoration, which, he took it for granted, would be brought about, without him, in a very few weeks.

Care and hope sat on every busy Irish face. Those who could write and read had letters to show; and those who had not arrived to this pitch of erudition had their secrets to whisper. No sex was excluded from this Ministry. Fanny Oglethorpe, whom you must have seen in England, kept her corner in it, and Olive Trant was the great wheel of our machine.

I imagine that this picture, the lines of which are not in the least too strong, would serve to represent what passed on your side of the water at the same time. The letters which came from thence seemed to me to contain rather such things as the writers wished might be true, than such as they knew to be so: and the accounts which were sent from hence were of the same kind. The vanity of some and the credulity of others supported this ridiculous correspondence; and I question not but very many persons, some such I have known, did the same thing from a principle which they took to be a very wise one: they imagined that they helped by these means to maintain and to increase the spirit of the party in England and France. They acted like Thoas, that turbulent Ætolian, who brought Antiochus into Greece: “quibus mendaciis de rege, multiplicando verbis copias ejus, erexerat multorum in Græcia animos; iisdem et regis spem inflabat, omnium votis eum arcessi.” Thus were numbers of people employed under a notion of advancing the business, or from an affectation of importance, in amusing and flattering one another and in sounding the alarm in the ears of an enemy whom it was their interest to surprise. The Government of England was put on its guard: and the necessity of acting, or of laying aside with some disadvantage all thoughts of acting for the present, was precipitated before any measures necessary to enable you to act had been prepared, or almost thought of.

If his Majesty did not, till some short time after this, declare the intended invasion to Parliament it was not for want of information. Before I came to Paris, what was doing had been discovered. The little armament made at the Havre, which furnished the only means the Chevalier then had for his transportation into Britain, which had exhausted the treasury of St. Germains, and which contained all the arms and ammunition that could be depended upon for the whole undertaking, though they were hardly sufficient to begin the work even in Scotland, was talked of publicly. A Minister less alert and less capable than the Earl of Stair would easily have been at the bottom of the secret, for so it was called, when the particulars of messages received and sent, the names of the persons from whom they came, and by whom they were carried, were whispered about at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.

In short, what by the indiscretion of people here, what by the rebound which came often back from London, what by the private interests and ambitious views of persons in the French Court, and what by other causes unnecessary to be examined now, the most private transactions came to light: and they who imagined that they trusted their heads to the keeping of one or two friends, were in reality at the mercy of numbers. Into such company was I fallen for my sins; and it is upon the credit of such a mob Ministry that the Tories have judged me capable of betraying a trust, or incapable of discharging it.

I had made very little progress in the business which brought me to Paris, when the paper so long expected was sent, in pursuance of former instances, from England. The unanimous sense of the principal persons engaged was contained in it. The whole had been dictated word for word to the gentleman who brought it over, by the Earl of Mar, and it had been delivered to him by the Duke of Ormond. I was driving in the wide ocean without a compass when this dropped unexpectedly into my hands. I received it joyfully, and I steered my course exactly by it. Whether the persons from whom it came pursued the principles and observed the rules which they laid down as the measures of their own conduct and of ours, will appear by the sequel of this relation.

This memorial asserted that there were no hopes of succeeding in a present undertaking, for many reasons deduced in it, without an immediate and universal rising of the people in all parts of England upon the Chevalier’s arrival; and that this insurrection was in no degree probable unless he brought a body of regular troops along with him: that if this attempt miscarried, his cause and his friends, the English liberty and Government, would be utterly ruined: but if by coming without troops he resolved to risk these and everything else, he must set out so as not to arrive before the end of September, to justify which opinion many arguments were urged. In this case twenty thousand arms, a train of artillery, five hundred officers with their servants, and a considerable sum of money were demanded: and as soon as they should be informed that the Chevalier was in condition to make this provision, it was said that notice should be given him of the places to which he might send, and of the persons who were to be trusted. I do not mention some inconveniences which they touched upon arising from a delay; because their opinion was clearly for this delay, and because that they could not suppose that the Chevalier would act, or that those about him would advise him to act, contrary to the sense of all his friends in England. No time was lost in making the proper use of this paper. As much of it as was fit to be shown to this Court was translated into French, and laid before the King of France. I was now able to speak with greater assurance, and in some sort to undertake conditionally for the event of things.

The proposal of violating treaties so lately and so solemnly concluded, was a very bold one to be made to people, whatever their inclinations might be, whom the war had reduced to the lowest ebb of riches and power. They would not hear of a direct and open engagement, such as the sending a body of troops would have been; neither would they grant the whole of what was asked in the second plan. But it was impossible for them, or any one else, to foresee how far those steps which they were willing to take, well improved, might have encouraged or forced them to go. They granted us some succours, and the very ship in which the Pretender was to transport himself was fitted out by Depine d’Anicant at the King of France’s expense. They would have concealed these appearances as much as they could; but the heat of the Whigs and the resentment of the Court of England might have drawn them in. We should have been glad indirectly to concur in fixing these things upon them: and, in a word, if the late King had lived six months longer, I verily believe there had been war again between England and France. This was the only point of time when these affairs had, to my apprehension, the least reasonable appearance even of possibility: all that preceded was wild and uncertain: all that followed was mad and desperate. But this favourable aspect had an extreme short duration. Two events soon happened, one of which cast a damp on all we were doing, and the other rendered vain and fruitless all we had done. The first was the arrival of the Duke of Ormond in France, the other was the death of the King.

We had sounded the duke’s name high. His reputation and the opinion of his power were great. The French began to believe that he was able to form and to head a party; that the troops would join him; that the nation would follow the signal whenever he drew his sword; and the voice of the people, the echo of which was continually in their ears, confirmed them in this belief. But when, in the midst of all these bright ideas, they saw him arrive, almost literally alone, when, to excuse his coming, I was obliged to tell them that he could not stay, they sank at once from their hopes, and that which generally happens happened in this case: because they had had too good an opinion of the cause, they began to form too bad a one. Before this time, if they had no friendship for the Tories, they had at least some consideration and esteem. After this, I saw nothing but compassion in the best of them, and contempt in the others.

When I arrived at Paris, the King was already gone to Marly, where the indisposition which he had begun to feel at Versailles increased upon him. He was the best friend the Chevalier had: and when I engaged in this business, my principal dependence was on his personal character. This failed me to a great degree; he was not in a condition to exert the same vigour as formerly. The Ministers who saw so great an event as his death to be probably at hand, a certain minority, an uncertain regency, perhaps confusion, at best a new face of Government and a new system of affairs, would not, for their own sakes, as well as for the sake of the public, venture to engage far in any new measures. All I had to negotiate by myself first, and in conjunction with the Duke of Ormond soon afterwards, languished with the King. My hopes sank as he declined, and died when he expired. The event of things has sufficiently shown that all those which were entertained by the duke and the Jacobite party under the Regency, were founded on the grossest delusions imaginable. Thus was the project become impracticable before the time arrived which was fixed by those who directed things in England for putting it in execution.

The new Government of France appeared to me like a strange country. I was little acquainted with the roads. Most of the faces I met with were unknown to me, and I hardly understood the language of the people. Of the men who had been in power under the late reign, many were discarded, and most of the others were too much taken up with the thoughts of securing themselves under this, to receive applications in favour of the Pretender. The two men who had the greatest appearance of favour and power were D’Aguesseau and Noailles. One was made Chancellor, on the death of Voisin, from Attorney-General; and the other was placed at the head of the Treasury. The first passes for a man of parts, but he never acted out of the sphere of the law: I had no acquaintance with him before this time; and when you consider his circumstances and mine, you will not think it could be very easy for me to get access to him now. The latter I had known extremely well whilst the late King lived: and from the same Court principle, as he was glad to be well with me then, he would hardly know me now. The Minister who had the principal direction of foreign affairs I lived in friendship with, and I must own, to his honour, that he never encouraged a design which he knew that his Court had no intention of supporting.

There were other persons, not to tire you with farther particulars upon this head, of credit and influence with whom I found indirect and private ways of conversing; but it was in vain to expect any more than civil language from them in a case which they found no disposition in their Master to countenance, and in favour of which they had no prejudices of their own. The private engagements into which the Duke of Orleans had entered with his Majesty during the life of the late King will abate of their force as the Regent grows into strength, and would soon have had no force at all if the Pretender had met with success: but in these beginnings they operated very strongly. The air of this Court was to take the counterpart of all which had been thought right under Louis XIV. “Cela resemble trop à l’ancien système” was an answer so often given that it became a jest and almost a proverb. But to finish this account with a fact which is incredible, but strictly true; the very peace which had saved France from ruin, and the makers of it, were become as unpopular at this Court as at the Court of Vienna.

The Duke of Ormond flattered himself, in this state of things, that he had opened a private and sure channel of arriving at the Regent, and of bending him to his purposes. His Grace and I lived together at this time in an house which one of my friends had lent me. I observed that he was frequently lost, and that he made continual excursions out of town, with all the mysterious precaution imaginable. I doubted at first whether those intrigues related to business or pleasure. I soon discovered with whom they were carried on, and had reason to believe that both were mingled in them. It is necessary that I explain this secret to you.

Mrs. Trant, whom I have named above, had been preparing herself for the retired abstemious life of a Carmelite by taking a surfeit of the pleasures of Paris, when, a little before the death of the Queen, or about that time, she went into England. What she was entrusted either by the Chevalier, or any other person, to negotiate there, I am ignorant of; and it imports not much to know. In that journey she made or renewed an acquaintance with the Duke of Ormond. The scandalous chronicle affirms that she brought with her, when she returned into France, a woman of whom I have not the least knowledge, but who was probably handsome, since without beauty such a merchandise would not have been saleable, nor have answered the design of the importer; and that she made this way her court to the Regent. Whatever her merit was, she kept a correspondence with him, and put herself upon that foot of familiarity which he permits all those who contribute to his pleasures to assume. She was placed by him, as she told me herself, where I found her some time after that which I am speaking of, in the house of an ancient gentlewoman who had formerly been Maid of Honour to Madame, and who had contracted at Court a spirit of intrigue which accompanied her in her retreat.

These two had associated to them the Abbé de Tesieu in all the political parts of their business; for I will not suppose that so reverend an ecclesiastic entered into any other secret. This Abbé is the Regent’s secretary; and it was chiefly through him that the private treaty had been carried on between his master and the Earl of Stair in the King’s reign. Whether the priest had stooped at the lure of a cardinal’s hat, or whether he acted the second part by the same orders that he acted the first, I know not. This is sure, and the British Minister was not the bubble of it—that whilst he concerted measures on one hand to traverse the Pretender’s designs, he testified on the other all the inclination possible to his service. A mad fellow who had been an intendant in Normandy, and several other politicians of the lowest form, were at different times taken into this famous Junto.

With these worthy people his Grace of Ormond negotiated; and no care was omitted on his part to keep me out of the secret. The reason of which, as far as I am able to guess at, shall be explained to you by-and-by. I might very justly have taken this proceeding ill, and the duke will not be able to find in my whole conduct towards him anything like it; I protest to you very sincerely I was not in the least moved at it.

He advanced not a step in his business with these sham Ministers, and yet imagined that he got daily ground. I made no progress with the true ones, but I saw it. These, however, were not our only difficulties. We lay under another, which came from your side, and which embarrassed us more. The first hindered us from working forward to our point of view, but the second took all point of view from us.

A paper was sent into England just before the death of the King of France, which had been drawn by me at Chaville in concert with the Dukes of Ormond and Berwick, and with Monsieur de Torcy. This paper was an answer to the memorial received from thence. The state of this country was truly represented in it: the difference was fixed between what had been asked, and what might be expected from France; and upon the whole it was demanded what our friends would do, and what they would have us to do. The reply to this came through the French Secretary of State to our hands. They declared themselves unable to say anything till they should see what turn affairs would take on so great an event as the death of the King, the report of which had reached them.

Such a declaration shut our mouths and tied our hands. I confess I knew neither how to solicit, nor what to solicit; this last message suspending the project on which we had acted before, and which I kept as an instruction constantly before my eyes. It seemed to me uncertain whether you intended to go on, or whether your design was to stifle, as much as possible, all past transactions; to lie perfectly still; to throw upon the Court the odium of having given a false alarm; and to wait till new accidents at home, and a more favourable conjuncture abroad, might tempt you to resume the enterprise. Perhaps this would have been the wisest game you could have played: but then you should have concerted it with us who acted for you here. You intended no such thing, as appeared afterwards: and therefore those who acted for the party at London, whoever they were, must be deemed inexcusable for leaving things on the foot of this message, and giving us no advice fit to be depended upon for many weeks. Whilst preparations were to be made, and the work was to be set a-going by assistance from hence, you might reasonably expect to hear from us, and to be determined by us: but when all hopes of this kind seemed to be gone, it was your part to determine us; and we could take no resolution here but that of conforming ourselves to whatever should come prescribed from England.

Whilst we were in this condition, the most desperate that can be imagined, we began to receive verbal messages from you that no more time was to be lost, and that the Chevalier should come away. No man was, I believe, ever so embarrassed as I found myself at that time. I could not imagine that you would content yourselves by loose verbal messages, after all that had happened, to call us over; and I knew by experience how little such messages are to be depended on. For soon after I engaged in these affairs, a monk arrived at Bar, despatched, as he affirmed, by the Duke of Ormond, in whose name he insisted that the Chevalier should hasten into Britain, and that nothing but his presence was wanting to place the crown on his head. The fellow delivered his errand so positively, and so circumstantially, that the resolution was taken at Bar to set out, and my rendezvous to join the Chevalier was appointed me. This method to fetch a King, with as little ceremony as one would invite a friend to supper, appeared somewhat odd to me, who was then very new in these affairs. But when I came to talk with the man, for by good luck he had been sent for from Bar to Paris, I easily discerned that he had no such commission as he pretended to, and that he acted of his own head. I presumed to oppose the taking any resolution upon his word, though he was a monk: and soon after we knew from the Duke of Ormond himself that he had never sent him.

This example made me cautious; but that which determined my opinion was, that I could never imagine, without supposing you all run mad, that the same men who judged this attempt unripe for execution, unless supported by regular troops from France, or at least by all the other assistances which are enumerated above, while the design was much more secret than at present; when the King had no fleet at sea, nor more than eight thousand men dispersed over the whole island; when we had the good wishes of the French Court on our side, and were sure of some particular assistances, and of a general connivance; that the same men, I say, should press for making it now without any other preparation, when we had neither money, arms, ammunition, nor a single company of foot; when the Government of England was on its guard, national troops were raised, foreign forces sent for, and France, like all the rest of the Continent, against us. I could not conceive such a strange combination of accidents as should make the necessity of acting increase gradually upon us as the means of doing so were taken from us.

Upon the whole matter, my opinion was, and I did not observe the Duke of Ormond to differ from me, that we should wait till we heard from you in such a manner as might assure us of what you intended to do yourselves, and of what you expected from us; and that in the meanwhile we should go as far as the little money which we had, and the little favour which was shown us would allow, in getting some embarkations ready on the coast.

Sir George Byng had come into the road of Havre, and had demanded by name several ships which belonged to us to be given up to him. The Regent did not think fit to let him have the ships; but he ordered them to be unloaded, and their cargoes were put into the King’s magazines. We were in no condition to repair the loss; and therefore when I mention embarkations, you will please to understand nothing more than vessels to transport the Pretender’s person and the persons of those who should go over with him. This was all we could do, and this was not neglected.

We were thus employed when a gentleman arrived from Scotland to represent the state of that country, and to require a definitive answer from the Chevalier whether he would have the insurrection to be made immediately, which they apprehended they might not be able to make at all if they were obliged to defer it much longer. This gentleman was sent instantly back again, and was directed to let the persons he came from know that the Chevalier was desirous to have the rising of his friends in England and Scotland so adjusted that they might mutually assist each other and distract the enemy; that he had not received a final answer from his friends in England, but that he was in daily expectation of it; that it was very much to be wished that all attempts in Scotland could be suspended till such time as the English were ready; but that if the Scots were so pressed that they must either submit or rise immediately, he was of opinion they should rise, and he would make the best of his way to them.