‘Can I never inspire you with what I feel?’ he asked.
‘Non!’ replied the girl, and there it ended.
The Earl made a will in her favour, in 1741, and she later—much later—married M. de Fromont. The love story is not very plausible, before 1741, as Emetté was still a girl when she accompanied the Earl to Paris, during his Embassy, in 1751.
The movements of the Earl are obscure at this period, but in 1742-43 he was certainly engaged for the Jacobite interest in France, residing now at Paris, now at Boulogne. The unhappy ‘Association’ of Scottish Jacobites had been founded in 1741. Its promoters were the inveterate traitor, Lovat, and William Macgregor, of Balhaldie, who, since 1715, had lived chiefly in France, and was a trusted agent of James. Balhaldie’s character has been much assailed by Murray of Broughton, who was himself connected with the Association. As far as can be discovered Balhaldie was sanguine, and even of a visionary enthusiasm, when enterprises concocted by himself were in question. The adventures of other leaders, especially adventures not supported by France, he distrusted and thwarted. The loyal Lochiel and the timid Traquair were also of the Association, which Balhaldie amused in 1742 with hopes of a French descent under the Earl Marischal. Balhaldie had promised to the French Court ‘mountains and marvels’ in the way of Scottish assistance, and the Earl ‘treated his assertion with the contempt and ridicule it deserved,’ says Murray of Broughton. The Earl’s own letters show impatience with Balhaldie and Lord Sempil, James’s other agent in Paris. Thus, on February 12, 1743, the Earl writes from Boulogne to Lord John Drummond, whose chief business was to get Highland clothes wherein the Duke of York might dance at the Carnival. The Earl protests, in answer to a remark of Sempil’s, that he ‘has more than bare curiosity in a subject where the interest of my King and native country is so nearly concerned (not to speak of my own), where I see a noble spirit, and where I am sensible a great deal of honour is done me, and I add, that I still hope these gentlemen will do me the honour and justice to believe that I shall never fail either in my duty to my King and country, my gratitude to them for their good opinion, or in my best endeavours to serve.’ All this was in reply to Sempil’s insinuation that the Scottish Jacobites thought the Earl lukewarm. Murray confirms the Earl by telling how Balhaldie tried to stir strife between the Earl and the Scots, who revered him, though Balhaldie styled him ‘an honourable fool.’[14]
Lord John Drummond suggested to James’s secretary, Edgar, that the Earl should supersede Balhaldie, ‘who had been obliged to fly the country in danger of being taken up for a Fifty pound note.’ Lord John’s advice was excellent. The Earl, and he alone, was the right man to deal with the party in Scotland, who could trust his sense, zeal, and honour. But James, far away in Rome, could never settle these distant and embroiled affairs. He went on trusting Balhaldie, who was also accepted by the party in England. Had James cashiered Balhaldie and instated the Earl, matters would have been managed with discretion and confidence. The Earl was determined not to beguile France into an endeavour based on the phantom hosts of Balhaldie’s imagination. Had he been minister, it is highly probable that nothing would have been done at all, and that Prince Charles would never have left Italy. For Balhaldie continued to represent James in France, and Balhaldie it was, with Sempil, who induced Louis XV. to adopt the Jacobite cause, and brought the Prince to France in 1744. While his father lived, Charles never returned to Rome.
On December 23, 1743, James sent to the Duke of Ormonde, an elderly amorist at Avignon,[15] his commissions as General of an expedition to England and as Regent till the Prince should join. The Earl received a similar commission as General of a diversion, ‘with some small assistance,’ to be made in Scotland. The Earl was at Dunkirk, eager to sail for Scotland, by March 7, 1744, and Charles was somewhere, incognito, in the neighbourhood. But the Earl, as he wrote to d’Argenson, had neither definite orders nor money enough; in short, as usual, everything was rendered futile by French shilly-shallying and by the accustomed tempest. D’Alembert and others assert that Charles asked the Earl to set forth with him alone in a sailing-boat, to which the Earl replied that, if he went, it would be to dissuade the Scottish from joining a Prince so brave but so ill-supported. It is certain that d’Argenson told Marshal Saxe that the Prince ought to retire to a villa of the Bishop of Soissons, with the Earl for his chaperon. The Earl was still anxious for an expedition in force, but d’Argenson distrusted his information on all points. Charles declined to go and skulk at the Bishop’s, and wrote that ‘if he knew his presence unaided would be useful in England he would cross in an open boat.’[16]
On this authentic evidence the Earl was anxious to make an effort, and Charles’s remark about going alone in an open boat was conditional—s’il savait que sa présence seule fut utile en Angleterre. But no energy, no hopes, no courage, could conquer the irresolution of France. By April Prince Charles was living, très caché, in Paris. Thus his long habit of hiding arose in the incognito forced on him by the Ministers of Louis XV. The Prince, as he writes to his father (April 3, 1744), was ‘goin about with a single servant bying fish and other things, and squabling for a peney more or less.’ He was anxious to make the campaign in Flanders with the French army, ‘and it will certainly be so if Lord Marschal dose not hinder it.... He tels them that serving in the Army in flanders, it would disgust entirely the English,’ in which opinion the Earl may have been wrong. Charles accuses the Earl of stopping the Dunkirk expedition (and here d’Alembert confirms), ‘by saying things that discouraged them to the last degree: I was plagued with his letters, which were rather Books, and had the patience to answer them, article by article, striving to make him act reasonably, but all to no purpose.’[17]
It was not easy to ‘act reasonably,’ where all was a chaos of futile counsels and half-hearted French schemes. They would and they would not, in the affair of the expedition of March 1744. We find the Earl now urging despatch, now discouraging the French, and, on September 5, 1744, he writes to James, from Avignon, ‘there was not only no design to employ me, but there was none to any assistance in Scotland.’[18] The Earl believed that the Prince’s incognito was really imposed on him by the devices of Balhaldie and Sempil, ‘to keep him from seeing such as from honour and duty would tell him truth.’
Through such tortuous misunderstandings and suspicions on every side, matters dragged on till Charles forced the game by embarking for Scotland secretly in June 1745. The Earl Marischal was the man whom he sent to report this step to Louis XV. ‘I hope,’ Charles writes to d’Argenson, ‘you will receive the Earl as a person of the first quality, in whom I have full confidence.’ The Earl undertook the commission.[19] On August 20, 1745, he sent in a Mémoire to the French Court. Lord Clancarty had arrived, authorised (says the Earl) to speak for the English Jacobite leaders, the Duke of Beaufort, the Earl of Lichfield, Lord Orrery, Lord Barrymore, Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, and Sir John Hinde Cotton. They offered to raise the standard as soon as French troops landed in England. When they made the offer, the English Jacobites (who asked for 10,000 infantry, arms for 30,000, guns, and pay) did not know that Charles had landed in Scotland. D’Argenson naturally asked for the seals and signatures of the English leaders, as warrants of their sincerity. He could not send a corps d’armée across the Channel on the word of one individual, and such an individual as the profane, drunken, slovenly, one-eyed Clancarty. The Earl, on October 23, 1745, tried to overcome the scruples of d’Argenson, but in vain.[20] Clancarty, it is pretty clear, came over as a result of the persuasions of Carte, the historian, in whom the leading English Jacobites had no confidence. ‘The wise men among them would neither trust Lord Clancarty’s nor Mr. Carte’s discretion in any scheme of business,’ says Sempil to James (September 13, 1745).