Bonnie Prince Charlie: A Biography by Carolly Erickson

than ready to listen.
    In August he sent an agent of his own, his equerry James Butler, to London, ostensibly to buy horses for the royal stables but in fact to discover at first-hand how many of the English were likely to come out for James in the event of a rising. Butler was impressed by what he found, and came back to his master with a report that a great majority of the most influential Londoners were for James, including the lord mayor and ten aldermen. Outside the capital, there were hundreds of reliable Jacobites, Butler said, and he had a partial list of them which included more than three hundred names.
    Had Louis realized how gullible his envoy Butler was, and how indiscreet (he talked so freely while on his mission in London that he revealed its true purpose to more than one government spy), he might have hesitated before going ahead with a plan to aid the Stuarts. He might have changed his mind entirely had he realized just how divided and mutually suspicious the Stuart conspirators were, with Murray of Broughton contemptuous of Balhaldie, many of the Scottish Jacobites highly critical of one another, and the English Jacobites at cross purposes from the rest, and too self-protective to commit their pledges of support to writing.
    But these handicaps were not immediately apparent, and so an invasion plan was drawn up, designed to be carried out in the following year of 1744.
    The plan called for nothing short of a French invasion of England, with a Jacobite rising timed to coincide with it and to cause chaos while the government troops tried to deal with the invading army. Marshal Saxe, France's most brilliant general, was to command the main body of troops—twelve thousand men—who were to land at Maldon in Essex, not far from London. Three thousand more troops were to land in Scotland, half at Inverness and half on the western coast. It was expected that a number of the Highland clans would come out in force to augment the French armies, but their numbers would be relatively insignificant compared with Marshal Saxe's very sizable body of men.
    The moment James had hoped for for so many years was finally drawing closer. Troops were beginning to gather at the Channel ports, and an invasion fleet was being assembled at Brest and Rochefort. This time there would be no equivocation on the part of the French, for the king was committed to the undertaking. And this time the Jacobites would rally behind a new leader, whose youth and energy would inspire and vitalize them. Charles had been summoned to France to sail with the fleet, and he could not wait to be on his way. For years he had "felt his situation acutely," trapped in the narrow confines of the pope's domains. He was as confident as his friend Murray of Broughton that he had been born for something extraordinary, and now it appeared that his extraordinary endowments were not to be wasted. His dynamic vitality had a focus; he had a definite purpose at last. "If he does not come to the fore," wrote the admiring Des Brosses, "it will not be owing to lack of energy."
     
    Chapter 6
    I am not at all ashamed to say I am in fear of the Pretender," Robert Walpole declared frequently during his twenty-one years as principal minister of George I and George II, "It is a danger I shall never be ashamed to say I am afraid of, because it is a danger we shall always be more or less exposed to."
    Walpole was deeply and sincerely fearful that Britain might be invaded by a foreign power acting on behalf of James, and he never let his countrymen forget how alarmingly easy it would be for a well-equipped force to land, gather local support, and eventually take over.
    'Five or six thousand men may be embarked in such a small number of ships, and so speedily, that it is impossible to guard against it by means of our fleet," he told the House of Commons in the late 1730s. "Such a number may be landed in some part of the island, with the Pretender at their head, there is no question