Whilst Berlin was in gala trim to celebrate the return of her monarch in triumph, Europe had her eyes fixed upon the unparalleled enterprise of a young man, winning, courageous, and frivolous as he was, attempting to recover by himself alone the throne of his fathers. For nearly three years past, Charles Edward Stuart, son of Chevalier St. George, had been awaiting in France the fulfilment of the promises and hopes which had been flashed before his eyes. Weary of hope deferred, he had conceived the idea of a bold stroke. “Why not attempt to cross in a vessel to the north of Scotland?” had been the question put to him by Cardinal Tencin, who had, some time before, owed his cardinal’s hat to the dethroned King of Great Britain. “Your presence will be enough to get you a party and an army, and France will be obliged to give you aid.”
Charles Edward had followed this audacious counsel. Landing, in June, 1745, in the Highlands of Scotland, he had soon found the clans of the mountaineers hurrying to join his standard. At the head of this wild army, he had in a few months gained over the whole of Scotland. On the 20th of September he was proclaimed at Edinburgh Regent of England, France, Scotland, and Ireland, for his father, King James III. George II. had left Hanover; the Duke of Cumberland, returning from Germany, took the command of the troops assembled to oppose the invader. Their success in the battle of Preston-Pans against General Cope had emboldened the Scots; at the end of December, 1745, Prince Charles Edward and his army had advanced as far as Derby.
It was the fate of the Stuarts, whether heroes or dastards, to see their hopes blasted all at once, and to drag down in their fall their most zealous and devoted partisans. The aid, so often promised by France and Spain, had dwindled down to the private expeditions of certain brave adventurers. The Duke of Richelieu, it was said, was to put himself at their head. “As to the embarkation at Dunkerque,” writes the advocate Barbier, at the close of the year 1745, “there is great anxiety about it, for we are at the end of December, and it is not yet done, which gives every one occasion to make up news according to his fancy. This uncertainty discourages the Frenchman, who gives out that our expedition will not take place, or, at any rate, will not succeed.” Charles Edward had already been forced to fall back upon Scotland. As in 1651, at the time of the attempt of Charles II., England remained quite cold in the presence of the Scottish invasion. The Duke of Cumberland was closely pressing the army of the mountaineers. On the 23d of April, 1746, the foes found themselves face to face at Culloden, in the environs of Inverness. Charles Edward was completely beaten, and the army of the Highlanders destroyed; the prince only escaped either death or captivity by the determined devotion of his partisans, whether distinguished or obscure; a hundred persons had risked their lives for him, when he finally succeeded, on the 10th of October, in touching land, in Brittany, near St. Pol de Leon. His friends and his defenders were meanwhile dying for his cause on scaffold or gallows.
The anger and severity displayed by the English government towards the Jacobites were aggravated by the checks encountered upon the Continent by the coalition. At the very moment when the Duke of Cumberland was defeating Charles Edward at Culloden, Antwerp was surrendering to Louis XV. in person: Mons, Namur, and Charleroi were not long before they fell. Prince Charles of Lorraine was advancing to the relief of the besieged places; Marshal Saxe left open to him the passage of the Meuse. The French camp seemed to be absorbed in pleasures; the most famous actors from Paris were ordered to amuse the general and the soldiers. On the 10th of October, in the evening, Madame Favart came forward on the stage. “To-morrow,” said she, “there will be no performance, on account of the battle: the day after, we shall have the honor of giving you Le Coq du Village.” At the same time the marshal sent the following order to the columns which were already forming on the road from St. Tron to Liege, near the village of Raucoux: “Whether the attacks succeed or not, the troops will remain in the position in which night finds them, in order to recommence the assault upon the enemy.”
The battle of October 11 left the battle-field in the hands of the victors, the sole result of a bloody and obstinate engagement. Marshal Saxe went to rest himself at Paris; the people’s enthusiasm rivalled and indorsed the favors shown to him by the king. At the opera, the whole house rose at the entrance of the valiant foreigner who had dedicated his life to France; there was clapping of hands, and the actress who in the prologue took the character of Glory leaned over towards the marshal with a crown of laurel. “The marshal was surprised, and refused it with profound bows. Glory insisted; and as the marshal was too far off in the boxes for her to hand it to him, the Duke of Biron took the crown from Glory’s hands and passed it under Marshal Saxe’s left arm. This striking action called forth fresh acclamations, ‘Hurrah! for Marshal Saxe!’ and great clapping of hands. The king has given the marshal Chambord for life, and has even ordered it to be furnished. Independently of all these honors, it is said that the marshal is extremely rich and powerful just now, solely as the result of his safe-conducts, which, being applicable to a considerable extent of country, have been worth immense sums to him.” The second marriage of the dauphin—who had already lost the Infanta—with the Princess of Saxony, daughter of the King of Poland, was about to raise, before long, the fortune and favor of Marshal Saxe to the highest pitch: he was proclaimed marshal-general of the king’s armies.
So much luck and so much glory in the Low Countries covered, in the eyes of France and of Europe, the checks encountered by the king’s armies in Italy. The campaign of 1745 had been very brilliant. Parma, Piacenza, Montferrat, nearly all Milaness, with the exception of a few fortresses, were in the hands of the Spanish and French forces. The King of Sardinia had recourse to negotiation; he amused the Marquis of Argenson, at that time Louis XV.‘s foreign minister, a man of honest, expansive, but chimerical views. At the moment when the king and the marquis believed themselves to be remodelling the map of Europe at their pleasure, they heard that Charles Emmanuel had resumed the offensive. A French corps had been surprised at Asti, on the 5th of March; thirty thousand Austrians marched down from the Tyrol, and the Spaniards evacuated Milan. A series of checks forced Marshal Maillebois to effect a retreat; the enemy’s armies crossed the Var, and invaded French territory. Marshal Belle-Isle fell back to Puget, four leagues from Toulon.
The Austrians had occupied Genoa, the faithful ally of France. Their vengefulness and their severe exactions caused them to lose the fruits of their victory. The grandees were ruined by war-requisitions; the populace were beside themselves at the insolence of the conquerors; senators and artisans made common cause. An Austrian captain having struck a workman, the passengers in the streets threw themselves upon him and upon his comrades who came to his assistance; the insurrection spread rapidly in all quarters of Genoa; there was a pillage of the weapons lying heaped in the palace of the Doges; the senators put themselves at the head of the movement; the peasants in the country flew to arms. The Marquis of Botta, the Austrian commandant, being attacked on all sides, and too weak to resist, sallied from the town with nine regiments. The allies, disquieted and dismayed, threatened Provence, and laid siege to Genoa. Louis XV. felt the necessity of not abandoning his ally; the Duke of Boufflers and six thousand French shut themselves up in the place. “Show me the danger,” the general had said on entering the town; “it is my duty to ascertain it; I shall make all my glory depend upon securing you from it.” The resistance of Genoa was effectual; but it cost the life of the Duke of Boufflers, who was wounded in an engagement, and died three days before the retreat of the Austrians, on the 6th of July, 1747.
On the 19th of July, Common-Sense Belle-Isle (Bon-Sens de Belle-Isle), as the Chevalier was called at court, to distinguish him from his brother the marshal, nicknamed Imagination, attacked, with a considerable body of troops, the Piedmontese intrenchments at the Assietta Pass, between the fortresses of Exilles and Fenestrelles; at the same time, Marshal Belle-Isle was seeking a passage over the Stura Pass, and the Spanish army was attacking Piedmont by the way of the Apennines. The engagement at the heights of Assietta was obstinate; Chevalier Belle-Isle, wounded in both arms, threw himself bodily upon the palisades, to tear them down with his teeth; he was killed, and the French sustained a terrible defeat;—five thousand men were left on the battle-field. The campaign of Italy was stopped. The King of Spain, Philip V., enfeebled and exhausted almost in infancy, had died on the 9th of July, 1746. The fidelity of his successor, Ferdinand VI., married to a Portuguese princess, appeared doubtful; he had placed at the head of his forces in Italy the Marquis of Las Minas, with orders to preserve to Spain her only army. “The Spanish soldiers are of no more use to us than if they were so much cardboard,” said the French troops. Europe was tired of the war. England avenged herself for her reverses upon the Continent by her successes at sea; the French navy, neglected systematically by Cardinal Fleury, did not even suffice for the protection of commerce. The Hollanders, who had for a long while been undecided, and had at last engaged in the struggle against France without any declaration of war, bore, in 1747, the burden of the hostilities. Count Lowendahl, a friend of Marshal Saxe, and, like him, in the service of France, had taken Sluys and Sas-de-Gand; Bergen-op-Zoom was besieged; on the 1st of July, Marshal Saxe had gained, under the king’s own eye, the battle of Lawfeldt. As in 1672, the French invasion had been the signal for a political revolution in Holland; the aristocratical burgessdom, which had resumed power, succumbed once more beneath the efforts of the popular party, directed by the house of Nassau and supported by England. “The republic has need of a chief against an ambitious and perfidious neighbor who sports with the faith of treaties,” said a deputy of the States-general on the day of the proclamation of the stadtholderate, re-established in favor of William IV., grand-nephew of the great William III., and son-in-law of the King of England, George II. Louis XV. did not let himself be put out by this outburst. “The Hollanders are good folks,” he wrote to Marshal Noailles: “it is said, however, that they are going to declare war against us; they will lose quite as much as we shall.”