Exclusive:Letter shows Bonnie Prince Charlie was rallying forces in eastern Europe, says expert
Correspondence suggests Young Pretender travelled to Russia
It is a chapter in the life of one of Scotland’s most famous historical figures that has long been characterised as a sorry and wasteful period, beset by self-pity, inertia, and heavy drinking.
But now, a direct descendant of Bonnie Prince Charlie has discovered a long-lost letter which he claims shows the Young Pretender was seeking to raise a force in eastern Europe to restore the Stuart dynasty to the throne.
The newly discovered letter was purportedly written by Charles in the summer of 1759 to the Stuarts’ closest Polish cousin, Prince Michael Radziwill, a wealthy military commander who also possessed a considerable private militia.
The art historian, Peter Pininski, who discovered the letter in a Polish archive, said the find ought to prompt “serious reconsideration” of much of the conventional thinking surrounding Charles’s life and times between 1749 and 1760.
Mr Pininski, who is descended from Charles on his mother's side, said the letter was sent from Saint Petersburg, offering “astonishing” evidence that Charles had visited Russia.
He did so, Mr Pininski said, in order to garner support from empress Elizaveta Petrovna, given Russia’s influence over Poland at the time. At the time, Russia counted the French as allies in the Seven Years’ War, and Charles and others harboured hopes that France would spearhead an invasion of Britain.
Mr Pininski said that while the prevailing narrative depicted Charles as someone “broken” by the events of December 1748, when he was arrested and expelled from France to honour a treaty with Britain, the correspondence told a markedly different story.
According to Frank McLynn’s biography of Charles, stress caused him to fall ill with influenza in May 1759, followed by a painful attack of piles. Charles, McLynn’s account claims, left his secretary, Louis Thibault, to answer all his correspondence as a result.
But Mr Pininski said that while Charles was an alcoholic, he only drank heavily in times of despair, and was in fact able to rouse some of the dynamism that characterised his earlier years.
“To my mind, this letter shows that his ambition for a restoration, his determination, and his energy were still there, much later than we’ve appreciated,” he told Scotland on Sunday. “It reveals an enormous amount we didn’t know about the attitude, sobriety and dynamism of Charles at that time.”
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According to Mr Pininski, the reason Charles left Thibault to attend to his letters, and lie about his health, was because he was engaged on a “secret mission” in service of a Jacobite restoration.
While the original letter, written in French, has not survived, the Polish translation remained intact in Warsaw’s Central Archives of Historical Records, with its significance going unrecognised.
Signed ‘Prince Charles, son of the king’, and addressed to Radziwill, the correspondence sees Charles congratulate Radziwill on the birth of his son and had an “intimate, warm and friendly” tone, according to Mr Pininski, who pointed to the fact Charles calls the elder man “beloved” and wrote of a friendship which “will never cease.”
Mr Pininski, the author of multiple books about Charles and the Stuarts, said he believed Charles, then aged 38, had been staying with Radziwill in Poland before heading on to Russia, and suggested the significance of his interactions with the aristocrat pointed towards efforts to rouse troops.
“Radziwill commanded one half of the Polish-Lithuanian army, He also possessed a private militia of several thousand men,” Mr Pininski said. “And though Poland did not have a navy, it was easy to charter troop carriers in ports like Gdansk. The sea-route from the Baltic to Scotland’s east coast was safe and well-known.”
The letter also sees Charles refer to the “joy” of Radziwill appointing Thibault as a lieutenant, a decision he said “left me in awe.” That reference, Mr Pininski said, was telling. “By 1759, there was virtually no-one left whom Charles trusted. One exception was his ‘dear Thibault’,” he explained. “If Radziwill was to send a force to Scotland, Charles would have wanted Thibault alongside.”
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Mr Pininski said that to obtain Radziwill’s help, Charles would have needed the approval of the Russian empress. While it remains unclear if Charles ever made contact with her, Mr Pininski said the letter and the context surrounding it shed new light on his ambitions.
“It shows that history has badly misunderstood 1759’s events, and seriously underestimated the Stuart prince’s health and willpower to achieve that which he so nearly did in 1745,” he said.
Although the letter does not explicitly reference military assistance, Mr Pininski said Charles would never have included such details in his correspondence, with secrecy of the utmost importance.
Professor Edward Corp, who has written extensively about the Stuarts, said the letter offered a significant insight into a period of Charles’s life when his whereabouts were often unknown.
“We will never identify all the places he visited during the 1750s, but Peter Pininski’s discovery of a letter in a Polish archive has now revealed that Bonnie Prince Charlie made an unknown and unsuspected visit to Saint Petersburg in 1759,” he said. “Given its contents and recipient, there can be no doubt that this letter can be trusted, unlike the ones deliberately designed to disinform.
“The letter is important for three other reasons. It is a reminder that many documents in Prince Charles’s own papers cannot automatically be regarded as trustworthy. It also implies that the 38 year-old prince, despite being frequently drunk when in despair of a restoration, was still in a condition, both mentally and physically, to undertake a long, demanding, and perhaps dangerous journey, all the way to Russia.”
Prof Corp, who previously taught British history at the University of Toulouse and has written books on the Stuarts in exile, added: “It shows that the prince, despite his intense distrust of France, believed that a Stuart restoration could still be achieved as late as 1759 and was therefore prepared himself to travel over 1,600 miles across Europe, and back again, to obtain support.”
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