The dispirited and deserted Highland army moved North, and the Earl was sent to ask Huntly whether he would join them—in which case they would fight at Inverness—or not. ‘He easily perceived by Huntly’s answer that nothing was to be expected from him.’ They, therefore, marched to Ruthven, whence they scattered, Keith and the Earl fared westwards with Clanranald’s men, and made for the Islands. Hence they sailed in a French ship on May 1, and reached St. Pol de Léon on May 12. There were a hundred officers of them together, and all this destroys d’Alembert’s romance, modelled on the adventures of Prince Charles, about the Earl’s dangers and the noble behaviour of the crofters among whom he was wandering. An English force was, indeed, at one time within thirty miles of the fugitives, but there was nobody to whom Clanranald’s men could have been betrayed, not that any one was likely to betray them, and the Earl Marischal and James Keith with them. In truth, d’Alembert confused this occasion with another, after Glenshiel fight, in 1719.
Many of the fugitives went to James at Avignon, but Keith stayed in Paris, where Mary of Modena received him well. ‘Had I conquered a kingdom for her she could not have said more.’ She gave him 1,000 livres, while James granted what he could, 200 crowns yearly. Keith does not say that the Earl was in Paris, where his portrait was probably painted at this date. There, however (as is known from an unpublished MS.), he certainly was, and he might even, by Stair’s mediation, have obtained his pardon. But he supposed that the cause would presently triumph, and declined to make any advances to George I. He was now in correspondence with General Dillon, James’s military representative in Paris. In August, 1717, Dillon writes to him about one ‘Prescot,’ who is suspected of intending to murder James in Italy; he refers to Lord Peterborough, who was arrested on this impossible charge at Bologna in September 1717.[6] In 1719 the Earl and his brother went to Spain. There was then war between Spain and England, Ormonde was with Alberoni, and was to be employed. Keith would have gone thither earlier, but ‘I was then too much in love to think of quitting Paris.’
Here, in Paris, 1717-18, if ever, would have to be fixed the Earl’s legendary romance with Mademoiselle de Froullay (Madame de Créquy). The story, a very pretty one, is given in this lady’s Mémoires, an ingenious but fraudulent compilation.
An author best known for his plagiarisms seized on Madame de Créquy as a likely old person to have left memoirs behind her. By aid of gossip and books he patched up the amusing but mythical records which he attributed to the lady. Why he selected the Earl as the lover of her girlhood we can only guess; but dates and facts make the pretty tale incredible, though it has found its way into Chambers’s account of the Earl’s career. Thus, for example, it is averred by Sainte-Beuve, on the authority of her man of business, M. Percheron, that Madame de Créquy was born in 1714. The love story of 1717, told in her Memoirs, beginning in the Earl’s attempt to teach her Spanish and English, and interrupted by the fact that he was a ‘Calvinist,’ is therefore improbable. The lady was but three years old when her affections, according to her apocryphal Memoirs, were blighted. The lovers met again, when the Earl was Prussian Ambassador at Versailles in 1753. ‘We had not had the time to discover each other’s faults, we had not suffered each by the other’s imperfections, both remained under that illusion which experience destroyed not: we were happy in the sweet thought of ineffable excellence, and when we met in the wane of life, and either saw the other’s white hair, we felt an emotion so pure, so tender, and so solemn, that no other sentiment, no other impression known to mortals, can be compared to it.’ All this is charming, but it cannot conceivably be true! The Earl composed his one madrigal under the influence of this elderly emotion (say the pseudo-Memoirs), a tear stole down his withered cheek, and he assured Madame de Créquy that they would meet in Heaven. ‘I loved you too much not to embrace your religion.’ So runs the romance of the pseudo-Madame Créquy.
In fact, the Earl remained a member of the persecuted Episcopal Church in Scotland. In Rome a priest tried to convert him, beginning with the Trinity. ‘Your Lordship believes in the Trinity?’ ‘I do,’ said the Earl; ‘but that just fills up my measure. A drop more and I spill all.’
Madame de Créquy’s Mémoires are obviously a daring forgery, but the ‘violet of a legend’ has a fragrance of its own. The Earl was in 1716, as his portrait shows, a singularly handsome young man, with large hazel eyes and an eager face, with a complexion like a girl’s beneath his brown curls. Madame de Créquy is made to say, by way of giving local colour, that he greatly resembled a portrait of le beau Caylus, a favourite of Henri III. The portrait was in her family.
In 1719, to return to facts, the two Keiths were received in Spain by the Duc de Liria, son of the Duke of Berwick, who had heard of an intended expedition to England. In Barcelona the splendour of their welcome, they travelling incognito, amazed them. They had been, in fact, mistaken for their rightful King and one of his officers, who were expected. From Barcelona they went to Madrid, whence Alberoni sent the Earl posting all about the country after Ormonde, who was to command the invading forces. Ormonde was a kind of figure-head of Jacobite respectability. He was presumed to be the idol of the British army at the time of Queen Anne’s death; he had added his mess to the general chaos of Tory imbecility in 1714, and, in place of playing Monk’s part in a new Restoration, had fled abroad. A few of his letters of 1719 to the Earl survive: he hopes for ‘the justice which the Cause deserves,’ and when his fleet is scattered in the usual way, reports the uneasiness of James about the Earl.[7]
The Earl in Spain arranged what he could with the Cardinal, while Keith passed through France, then hostile to Spain, and met the exiled Tullibardine in Paris. Here all was confusion, the Jacobites—Seaforth, Glendarule, and Tullibardine—being deep in the accustomed jealousies. They sailed, however, and reached the Lewes, where Keith met his brother, the Earl; but here divided counsels and squabbles about rank and commissions arose. The Earl succeeded in bringing the Spanish auxiliary forces to the mainland, and was for marching at once against Inverness. The other faction, that of Seaforth and Tullibardine, dallied: the ammunition, stored in a ruinous old castle on an island, was mostly seized by English vessels. News arrived that Ormonde’s fleet, sailing from Spain, had been dispersed on the seas, and the Highlanders came in very reluctantly. The Jacobites landed at the head of Loch Duich, and were posted on a hillside in Glenshiel, commanding the road to Inverness. Hence the English forces drove them to the summit of the mountain, and night fell. They had neither food, powder, nor any confidence in their men, so the Spaniards surrendered, the Highlanders dispersed, and Keith thus began his glorious military career in a style somewhat discouraging.
Lord George Murray, later the general in the Rising of 1745, was also in this rather squalid engagement. Keith was suffering from a fever, and he with his brother ‘lurcked in the mountains.’ On this occasion, no doubt, the Earl profited by the loyalty of his countrymen, among whom (says an anonymous informant of d’Alembert’s) he moved without disguise. He is even said to have been present when a proclamation was read aloud offering a reward for his apprehension. His adventures increased his love for his own people: indeed, he certainly espoused the Jacobite cause as a national Scottish patriot, not for dynastic reasons.
Keith and his brother, after ‘lurcking’ for months in the Northern wilds, escaped from Aberdeen to Holland, in September 1719. Thence they made for Spain, intending to enter France by Sedan. But as they had no passports they were stopped in France and imprisoned. Keith hit on an ingenious way of getting rid of their Spanish commissions, which would have been compromising, and a letter to the Earl from the Princesse de Conti served as a voucher for their respectability, and procured their release. They reached Paris when the fever of the Mississippi Scheme was at its height. Jacobites as needy as they, the Oglethorpe girls and George Kelly, probably got hints from Law, the great financial adventurer, and founder of the Mississippi Scheme. The young Jacobite ladies bought in at par and sold at a huge premium. They thus won their own dots, and married great French nobles. Even poor George Kelly had a success in speculation. He was, at this time, Atterbury’s secretary, and being involved in his fall, passed fourteen years in the Tower. In 1745 he was one of the famed Seven Men of Moidart, but none the dearer on that account to the Earl, who never trusted him, and, in 1750, caused him to be banished from the service of the Prince. All these adventurers, Law, the Oglethorpes, Olive Trant, Kelly, and the Keiths, may have met in Paris, after Glenshiel. But the Earl and his brother did not make their fortunes in the Mississippi Scheme. They had no money, and Keith frankly expresses his contempt for the speculations after which all the world was running mad. The brothers passed to Montpellier, Keith attempted to enter Spain by Toulouse, the Earl by the Pyrenees. Months later Keith tried the Pyrenees passes, and there, at an inn, met his brother, who had been arrested and imprisoned for six weeks. The King of France had just set him free, with orders to leave the kingdom, and the wandering pair of exiles went to Genoa, then a focus of Jacobite intrigue, whence they sailed to Rome, to see ‘the King, our Master.’