Bonnie Prince Charlie's disastrous Cumbrian friend

How the conspiratorial manoeuvrings of Francis Strickland of Sizergh helped doom the Young Pretender's 1745 bid for the English crown

The Bonnie Prince

By the side of one of Scotland’s most beautiful sea lochs lies a pile of stones. It marks the place where the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, landed in July 1745 with a tiny and already somewhat battered and disunited group of seven supporters. The inscription on the memorial records that one of the prince’s party was: “Francis Strickland an English gentleman from Westmorland”.

Together, these seven launched the Jacobite Rebellion, the most formidable and daring attempt by the exiled Stuart dynasty to regain the British throne.

Although he came ashore with only this absurdly small band of followers, Charles Edward Stewart’s timing was good because the bulk of the British army was away fighting in mainland Europe. He gained slightly equivocal support from thousands of Highland warriors and within weeks was the master of Scotland and victor of the battle of Prestonpans near Edinburgh. In that fight he annihilated the only semblance of an army the English had at a time when the London government could hardly muster enough troops on hand to guard the royal palaces, let alone fight an invasion.

He was disappointed when his English supporters failed to rise and even more downcast when the French delayed launching their promised invasion until it was too late. Even so, the speed and tactical nous of Charles’s forces wrong-footed the defenders of a succession of English cities. The Jacobites captured Carlisle and penetrated as far south as Derby. This unprecedented success by an invading army threatened to destabilise the British state. Yet the intense squabbling and internal distrust that had grown among his commanders led to the conviction they would not win and they retreated against Charles’s wishes. This allowed the English to regroup and led to the Jacobite army being crushed at the Battle of Culloden with 1,250 rebel deaths.

One possible explanation for why this heroic failure took place is that Charles, a bold, charming adventurer, recklessly flung himself into the rebellion even though he knew the chances of retrieving the crown were slender. Another explanation lies in the variable quality of Charles’s seven companions whose names are engraved in English and Gaelic on a plaque attached to the pile of stones mentioned earlier. They have passed into history as The Seven Men of Moidart.

Francis Strickland was equerry to the prince which means he was the one member of the royal household who was with young Charles constantly. His job was to perform the most sensitive, sometimes mundane and often secret tasks needed to help Charles carry out his leadership role. But whatever comfort Strickland brought the prince as a friend, servant and counsellor, he had a paranoid and suspicious personality.

The worst examples of the Cumbrian’s influence came at the most awkward moments. During the Siege of Carlisle when Jacobite forces loyal to the prince first captured the strategically vital town and its castle on 14–15 November 1745, he urged the Charles to dismiss his most able general, George Murray, as a supposedly “dangerous man”. In fact Murray was the Jacobite Rebellion’s best military advisor, having masterminded the Prestonpans triumph only weeks before.

Francis and the prince had been extremely close colleagues since childhood, friends and hard-drinking buddies. Francis was a member of an ancient Catholic family known as the Stricklands, longstanding Stuart loyalists, who have lived at Sizergh Castle near Kendal in Westmorland for 700 years. A portrait of Francis has been on display for decades at the house, celebrating the family connection to one of the key organisers of both Jacobite rebellions. Francis Strickland’s intimacy with the exiled royal family was beyond question since the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s father, was his godfather. When he was born, Francis was even given one of James’s names. Francis was unusual in that, at a time when Catholics were public enemy number one and most chose to keep their heads down to avoid severe fines and imprisonment under harsh penal laws, he risked his life by getting involved with James’s shambolic 1715 Jacobite rising.

After that disaster, Francis became an enduring embarrassment to the Cumbrian Catholic recusants (people who broke the law by refusing to attend Church of England services). They included other members of the Strickland family, who wished to distance themselves from what they saw as the hopeless Jacobite cause and guard their safety by asserting loyalty to Britain. But with Francis so prominently continuing to agitate for the Stuarts, the Catholic community’s allegiance to the crown was doubted anyway and this sabotaged the efforts of Papist Cumbrians to live a normal life.

Francis was a fanatic, one of those people who indulge in a heady and toxic concoction of self-affirming, know-it-all confidence. He arrogantly assumed he had unique access to absolute truths that were perfect and therefore should be imposed on everyone. In many ways, he thought he was more Jacobite than James Stuart himself, as we shall see.

After the collapse of the 1715 rising, Francis went off to get some proper military experience fighting in Spain. When he returned he held many different posts at the Stuart court as it moved first to Avignon, then Pesaro and Urbino. Strickland finally took up residence at the court-in-exile that James and his son set up in Rome in 1719. The would-be-royals lived there in melancholy splendour, a lifestyle paid for by James’s friend and close adviser Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio, who had been appointed by the Pope as the church’s protector of Scotland.

But despite Francis’s impeccable Catholic credentials, his willingness to face bullets for the Pretenders, his readiness to perform humble tasks and his long years of service in many places, Strickland was a shadowy and controversial figure even within the ranks of his own affinity. He sowed division as he flitted in and out of the lives of the Stuart family over a span of fifty-five years.

The hundred or more biographies of Bonnie Prince Charlie and histories of the 1745 rebellion are awash with contradictory, confusing and suppositious information about Francis. This makes it difficult to construct a reliable account of Strickland’s identity or to explain his motives. In a period of Scottish history that was rife with rumour, double cross and treachery when a stray word could mean death, this elusiveness may well be what he set out to achieve. He preserved his anonymity so that he could move around unnoticed and influence events without appearing to do so. But there came a time when James Stuart began to realise Francis was using his position to pursue his own political agenda.

To say Francis was on the extreme left of Stuart politics would be wrong since the concept of ideology would only be invented eighty years later in the French Revolution. But Francis certainly represented an ultra-pragmatist worldview that Lenin would have endorsed. He seemed prepared to dump any political principle and even the religion he was ostensibly fighting to reinstate in order to achieve power.

The final breach appears to have occurred at the height of the 1745 rebellion when Francis suggested to Charles that he convert to Protestantism to secure political backing from the English middle classes and that he should depose his father as Pretender.

When James learned that Francis was scheming to turn his son against him, he sought to have Strickland dismissed as a malign influence, referring to Francis as the biblical Obadiah, one who sowed discord. It may well be, therefore, that the Cumbrian at the court of would-be King Charles was one of the people most responsible for the internal divisions that led to the sorry shambles of 1745, from its confused beginning, its faction-ridden conduct to its scattered, disorganised and bloody end at Culloden.

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