followers, thanking them for their devotion, explaining that he was deserting them for their own good, and promising to write more in a short time. The letter aroused bitter indignation.
On reaching France the chevalier proceeded by Boulogne and Abbeville to St. Germains, but the regent declined to grant him an interview, and desired him to return to his old quarters at Bar-le-Duc. He made a pretence of acceding to the request, but instead of doing so he went, according to Bolingbroke, ‘to a little house where his female ministers resided.’ Thence he sent a letter to Bolingbroke dismissing him from his service, apparently on the ground of remissness in raising supplies, but probably on account of Mar's influence. Mar succeeded Bolingbroke in the chief management of the chevalier's affairs. Finding it impossible to continue living near Paris, the chevalier withdrew to Avignon, and subsequently retired to Rome. In 1718 an attempt was made by Mar, in his name, to induce Charles XII of Sweden—then at enmity with George I on account of the seizure by the English of the duchies of Bremen and Verden—to send a deputation to Scotland; and, as an earnest of their sincerity, he advised the Scottish Jacobites to send to Charles five or six thousand bolls of oatmeal for the support of his troops (Lockhart, ii. 7). Charles, however, was killed on 11 Dec. Directly afterwards Cardinal Alberoni offered the chevalier the help of Spain, and on Alberoni's invitation he left Rome secretly in February 1719, arriving in Madrid in the beginning of March. Before his arrival the king of Spain, at the instance of Alberoni, had begun preparations at Cadiz for an expedition. The Duke of Ormonde was to lead the main expedition to England with five thousand men, and arms for over thirty thousand more. A subsidiary expedition under the Earl Marischal, of only two frigates, carrying a single battalion of men and over three thousand stands of arms, was to raise the highlands. The main expedition was, however, driven back to port by a storm. The smaller force reached Stornoway, in the Lewis, in safety, but surrendered after the action in the pass of Glenshiels on 1 April. The chevalier had judiciously remained at Madrid, where a residence in the palace of Buen Retiro was assigned him, and he received the honours due to sovereigns. While still at Madrid he was, on 28 May, married by proxy at Avignon to the Princess Maria Clementina, daughter of Prince James Sobieski, eldest son of the king of Poland. There had been a previous proposal to marry him to a niece of the Emperor Charles VI (cf. Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 20311 ff. 268, 281, 20312 ff. 144, &c.) On learning the fate of the expedition he again retired to Rome. In 1722 another Jacobite expedition was contemplated, without foreign aid, but it was abandoned, owing partly to want of money and partly to dissension among the Jacobites in England (Stuart Papers, App. p. 6). To remedy these evils it was proposed to constitute the Earl of Oxford and Bishop Atterbury the heads of the Jacobite movement; but, owing in all probability to the treachery of Mar, the correspondence in connection with the scheme was intercepted. On the proposal of Lockhart of Carnwath (Papers, ii. 26), the affairs of the chevalier in Scotland were entrusted to a body of trustees. When Mar's treachery was discovered, Hay [see Hay, John, titular Earl of Inverness] succeeded him in the office of secretary to the chevalier (1724); but the appointment was very displeasing to the chevalier's wife, the Princess Sobieski, who, irritated perhaps chiefly by jealousy of the wife of Hay, retired in November to a nunnery (Lockhart, ii. 265; see also the chevalier's two letters of remonstrance against the princess's resolution, dated Rome, 5 and 11 Nov. 1725, in Memorial of the Chevalier de St. George on occasion of the Princess Sobieski retiring to a Nunnery, London, 1726). His wife's desertion helped to confirm in the prince those habits which were the original cause of the estrangement, and he became a prey to mingled melancholy and dissipation. His conduct towards his wife tended, moreover, to alienate many of his supporters, whose hopes gradually turned towards his son, Charles Edward. The chevalier, who had a grant of a papal pension in 1727 (Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 20313, f. 261), freely gave his savings to aid in fitting out the expedition of 1745, but his interest in it was languid and his anticipations of success were not sanguine. His son Charles, on parting from him, expressed the confidence that he would soon be able to lay three crowns at his feet; but his staid reply was: ‘Be careful, my dear boy, for I would not lose you for all the crowns in the world.’ Writing of him in 1756, the traveller Keysler states that the pope had ‘issued an order that all his subjects should style him king of England; but the Italians make a jest of this, for they term him “the local king,” or “king here,” while the real possessor is styled “the king there,” that is, in England.’ Keysler also states that the chevalier had ‘lately assumed some authority at the opera by calling encore when a song that pleased him was performed; but it was not till after a long pause that his order was
