Free Bonnie Prince Charlie: Charles Edward Stuart (Pimlico) by Frank McLynn Page A

have taken that may offend purists. While leaving eighteenth-century punctuation intact, I have taken the liberty of tidying up Charles Edward’s eccentric spelling. He was an atrocious speller, and I personally find that his letters when reproduced in all their pristine orthography distract one from the content of what he is saying. The other decision I have taken is to switch from New Style dates to Old Style during the period of the ’45 itself. In the mid-eighteenth century there was an eleven-day difference in the two styles, but since the great events of the ’45 are all known by Old Style dates (e.g. ‘Black Friday’ as 5 December 1745 OS, not 16 December NS; Culloden as 16 April 1746 not 27 April), I have retained the traditional dates. All dates before and after the ’45 are New Style. Since long sea-voyages provide natural intervals both as prelude and sequel to the ’45, no confusion arises.
    Anyone attempting to write a biography of this scope is bound to end up owing a considerable debt to dozens of (usually nameless) individuals , librarians and archivists of many different tongues and cultures. But there are some individuals who have helped me ‘above and beyond the call of duty’ whom I must mention by name. Over the years I have had many interesting conversations about the Jacobites and their world with friends. In this category I would particularly like to mention Jack Lindsay, Eveline Cruickshanks and Jeremy Black. Then there are the people who helped me by smoothing the ways to archives. Here a special mention is due to Mgr Charles Burns of the Vatican Archives, Father Francis Edwards SJ, curator of the Farm Street archive, and Dom Geoffrey Scott of Douai Abbey. I have spent many fascinating hours discussing the workings of the unconscious with the distinguished Australian psychoanalyst Dr George Christie. Sir Oliver Millar generously gave me his expert advice in finding suitable illustrations. Miss Jane Langton and her successor as Registrar of the Royal Archives at Windsor, Mrs Sheila De Bellaigue, went to extraordinary lengths to help me in my quest. I must thank also those scholars with whom I corresponded and who helped me by shedding light in their particular area of expertise: Professor L. L. Bongie (the Prince’s ladies), Dr Rohan Butler (Choiseul), Dr J. Rogister (Louis XV).
    My list of acknowledgments would not be complete without mention of my editor at Routledge, Andrew Wheatcroft, who was enthusiastic about the project from the very start and who, as both a writer and an editor himself, was uniquely placed to appreciate the problems involved in writing such a work. But lastly and mostly, I must thank my wife Pauline both for her ‘in house’ editing and for her tolerance in enduring a thousand and one days and nights of Charles Edward arcana.
    Twickenham, January 1987

Conclusion
    Any assessment of Charles Edward must attempt to winnow the historical wheat from the legendary chaff and then examine their interplay. ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ is a creature of myth in more ways than one. The approach suggested by Robert Graves in
Homer’s Daughter
is a fruitful one. In order to bring Homer’s hero into sharper focus, he disentangles the ‘historical’ Odysseus from the mythical Ulysses. A similar operation has to be performed with the prince. There is the historical Charles Edward Stuart, long regarded as of little importance to serious scholars. And there is the legendary ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, the archetypal hero suffused in a golden halo, swathed in the nimbus of the imperishable memory of the ’45.
    With the recent revival in Jacobite studies, we are at last able to appreciate the deadly threat to the regime posed by the 1745 rising. 1 Some of the finest young historians at work today now rate the ‘mixed’ phenomenon of domestic rebellion and foreign invasion threat, as in 1779, 1798 and, most clearly, 1745, as more important threats to the social and economic order