Fair winds and a little bit of luck

THE first three attempts from France in the summer of 1746 to rescue the fugitive Prince Charles Edward Stuart from the Highlands had failed. However, French resolve to find the Bonnie Prince remained undimmed

In the last days of July, from Tobermory, Commodore Smith of the Royal Navy reported to General Campbell that his frigate, the Glasgow, had brought in that day a French brigantine of 80 tons. He enclosed a list of her passengers who had been made prisoner: ``Officers and gentlemen, cadet volunteers of the Marine, designed as a guard for Prince Charles Edward.''

Reporting this success to its readers, the Scots Magazine in Edinburgh would add that all were dressed ``in rich laced cloathes'', the royal blue of the Prince's would-be bodyguard.

This, seemingly, was the sorry end of the fourth rescue attempt. The brigantine was Le Bien Trouve, ``The Lucky Find'', of King Louis's navy. Her passengers were ``all of noble birth'' as their second-in-command and chronicler the Chevalier de Dupont would maintain; all were dedicated to ``the sacred task'' of rescuing the true heir to the British throne from his enemies.

She had sailed from Dunkirk two months previously. Like her predecessors she had made first of all for Loch Broom, only to be shooed away by the Coigach MacKenzies to Loch Ewe where a meeting of the MacKenzie gentry dispatched them to the relative safety of Priest Isle - Eilean na Chleirich off the Wester Ross coast.

There they had set up camp, exposed to the winds and rains of a Hebridean summer, living ``like Theban anchorites'', as the classically educated de Dupont would write. Fugitive Jacobites, among them the Prince's erstwhile aide-de-camp, came to assure them their mission was hopeless.

But they also said that the Camerons in distant, devastated Lochaber might know where Charles Edward, now somewhere on the mainland, was to be found; and the company's commander, the Chevalier de Lancize, decided that two marching parties, one of which he himself would lead, must leave Priest Isle forthwith and make for ``Lochaber, wherever that might be''.

Meanwhile, the brigantine, with the rest of the cadets, should cruise to open sea but keep doubling back to Loch Ewe for news. So the camp on Priest Isle was broken up. But by now the Commodore's frigates and sloops from Tobermory were on the track of Le Bien Trouve. The Glasgow frigate and the Tryal sloop found her, boxed her in and enforced surrender. ``The stormy weather,'' wrote Dupont apologetically, ``gave us no chance to run ashore.''

Now comes the crux of the saga of the ships from France. One of the marching parties was quickly rounded up, the Chevalier de Nangis imprisoned at Fort Augustus, and the Irishman Captain Bellew, his uniform exchanged for a highland plaid, hanged as a spy.

Ill and exhausted, Lieutenant Dudepet had surrendered to a tacksman in Kintail, and was now undergoing interrogation (feeding his captors disinformation). Then, in late August, General Blakeney at Inverness had placed before him two letters taken from one Euan McVee in Glenshiel on his way to a MacKenzie laird in Wester Ross. Both bore de Lancize's signature and were to the same effect, one of them written in French that its meaning might be more readily grasped by the master of any French ship coming on the coast. Though he had given McVee ``a hundred good lashes with a Catt of Nine Tails'' in a vain attempt to make him talk, Blakeney could make nothing of the letters. Despite the veiled wording, to us their purport is clear. De Lancize had found the Prince in Cameron country.

On leaving Le Bien Trouve, de Lancize and his cadet companion had pressed on through the hills having, as they thought, a narrow escape from the treacherous MacDonell of Barrisdale as he sought to ingratiate himself with the Royal Army at Fort Augustus by handing them over. The steadfastly loyal MacDonell of Lochgarry, on finding them, took them to Dr Archie Cameron, Cameron of Lochiel's brother, skulking in the fir woods around Achnacarry.

News of the arrival of two French officers in Lochaber now brought the Prince south from the Chisholm country of Strath Glass. Word of a French ship being at Poolewe had taken him north, but as this was Le Bien Trouve with a Royal Navy crew sporting Jacobite cockades, and acting as a decoy, it had been as well that he did not persist.

Now the Prince with Dr Cameron, de Lancize and the MacDonald gentry who had been the Prince's companions for the past month, had a lengthy debate on what to do. They resolved that the Prince and de Lancize should join Lochiel in the fastness of Ben Alder while the gentlemen of Clanranald kept watch on the coast for a ship from France. So was built the platform for eventual success.

There remained the twin problems of the Royal Navy's formidable presence in West Highland waters, and that any further attempt from France would not know where to begin its quest of the Prince. As it happened, O'Sullivan would answer both.

Le Hardi Mendiant, swiftly repaired, put out from Bergen in early August, her intention to resume the search for Charles Edward. O'Sullivan had prevailed on the captains of two 20-gun Dunkirk privateers he had found there to accompany him. But the Dunkirkers, getting wind of prizes to be taken from the Virginia trade coming north about for the Thames, deserted the little cutter. She could make no headway against the persistent westerlies and rations ran short. ``We were,'' said O'Sullivan, ``stented to a busquit a day'' as they made their crestfallen way to the Flanders coast.

But in war you never can tell from where success will come. It happened that word came to Commodore Smith at Tobermory of depredations to the Virginia trade caused by a French privateer, ``a long snug vessel with a black fiddle-head, very square and taut-rigged'' - one of Le Hardi Mendiant's unreliable escorts.

On his own initiative the Commodore decided that the protection of trade should take precedence over the hunt for the Prince, and he sailed with his frigates for Scapa Flow in Orkney. The back door was now ajar.

Before he sailed from Bergen, O'Sullivan had written to Versailles in veiled language saying that the Prince had had friends on Uist. From the Flanders coast he himself arrived at Paris on August 18 to press that any further rescue attempts should begin with South Uist and MacDonald of Boisdale, ``who would certainly have news - he has been very useful to the Prince in his misfortunes''. On August 20, the sixth rescue attempt sailed from the Brittany coast.

Meanwhile, the Chevalier de Dupont and his comrades were having a hard time abroad HMS Glasgow, as it made its way first to Orkney, then to the Thames, and so repatriation. ``Throughout we slept on the hard deck, hourly victims of the impertinence of the merest cabin boy. Foul water was our only drink. Salt beef and bisquits, disgusting in the severest famine, all we had for food.''

The sixth rescue attempt was, like the first, by two big 36-gun privateers, L'Heureux and Le Prince de Conti. Captain Richard Warren, the engaging Irishman in overall command, had hoped for four such ships to ensure success but, he reflected in a letter he sent to King James in Rome before he sailed, ``half a loaf is better than no bread''. They shaped a course by the west of Ireland; Francois Dumay of the second attempt was pilot.

On September 6, a little meal-ship, the May of Glasgow, storm-delayed in Loch nan Uamh, watched the two big privateers come into the loch. The May quickly came under their armed guard. L'Heureux and Le Prince de Conti had indeed made first for South Uist and MacDonald of Boisdale's house, but learned that he was by now a prisoner of the Royal Navy.

However, the gentlemen of Clanranald were quick to advise them to go over to Arisaig where other watchful MacDonalds would make contact with them. From Arisaig the pre-arranged chain of communications was now activated and, with some luck, the Prince on distant Ben Alder soon learned of their arrival. His party set out for the coast within the hour.

At two in the morning of September 20, Lachlan Maclean, master of the May, was wakened by Warren ``in top spirits, telling us plainly that he had now got the Prince on board with Lochiel - and so they sailed at two or three in the morning, the wind very fresh at north''. The sixth and last rescue attempt from France had succeeded.

There would, however, be no recognition by the King of the efforts of de Lancize and the Compagnie Voluntaire, of the gallant Irish officers or of the Dunkirk privateer masters.

An importunate Charles Edward quickly became an embarrassment to the French Court, and peace with King George's Britain was now in prospect, France having got all she wanted out of the European war.

One may imagine Maurepas in audience with his King insisting that the story of the ships from France must now be suppressed (as it was). Might we also imagine that the lovely Marquise de Pompadour, ever a friend to Charles Edward, listening to the audience as was her wont, would murmur to herself: ``No matter. A story as good as theirs can't be hid for ever.''

n John S Gibson is the author of Ships of the '45: The Escape of the Young Pretender; Summer Hunting a Prince (with Alasdair MacLean); and more recently Lochiel of the '45.