Wolfe! Wolfe!

By John Skow

PRINCE CHARLIE'S BLUFF

by DONALD THOMAS 280 pages. Viking Press. $7.95.

Donald Thomas is one of a very small school of strong-minded historians whose members* scorn the mild contrariness of revisionism. Revisionists, after all, merely prove that Stalin was a fine fellow, Henry VIII a picky eater and the U.S. started the cold war. Thomas and his ilk go much further. In this book, for example, Thomas reveals the fact that British General James Wolfe never took Quebec from the French in 1759 at all. The American colonies never banded together against King George III either. What actually happened was that Wolfe--no hero, but a mincing, vindictive incompetent--lost to Montcalm at Quebec and was later executed for his disgrace. Thereafter, all through the 1760s, the French hung on to Canada and the Ohio River valley, threatening colonial Virginia with invasion. The British meanwhile fell back on Boston and New York.

Well, then, a reader concludes, did the French win the French and Indian War? Not really, says Historian Thomas. A third force, not taken into account by either side, entered the picture. This was the royal house of Stuart, in the glittering person and presence of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender and son of the exiled Stuart King James III. The handsome, 39-year-old prince was beaten at Culloden in 1746, when the infamous Duke of Cumberland broke the power of the Scottish clans. He fled to France with the price of -L- 30,000 on his head, and traveled quietly to Virginia (says Thomas) under an assumed name.

Why should Prince Charles expect to be welcomed in Virginia? Because the colony was heavily populated by Highlanders, many of whom had fought under him at Culloden. An additional force of Highlanders was captured by the French at Quebec, paroled, and then marched South to vex their former British masters. The British were unpopular in Virginia anyway, since they taxed whisky stills and kept recruiting farm boys to fight the French in howling wilderness.

Assassination Plot. Thomas tells this startling tale with style through the journals of one Lovatt Frazier, a young Highlander who is wounded at Quebec, and then in Virginia joins Prince Charlie's court. Frazier has a gift for language ("Colonel Byrd, a man of vast parade") and a sharp eye for cracks in fine facades ("It seems that Mr. Randolph would declare for King James if only the King would then make nun comfortable in the office of attorney general"). The diarist, it develops, had the rare good luck to overhear a hitherto unrecorded conversation between Colonel George Washington and Prince Charles in which the master of Mount Vernon, although not hostile, remained uncharmed and uncommitted. Samuel Johnson is found to have made an otherwise unnoticed trip to the New World, and Patrick Henry and Tom Paine are implicated in a plot to assassinate Bonnie Prince Charlie!

The author, 41, lectures in English at the University of Wales. His work is not so detailed as that of some other anti-historians when it comes to recording the events of subsequent decades. The book closes with the House of Stuart well established in Virginia, and offers a few contented allusions to the later reign of remaining Stuarts. Charles' daughter Henrietta proved a dull but effective monarch who brought the Kingdom of Virginia 50 years of peace. Her nephew Prince Casimir was a corrupt and disastrous regent for the young King Richard the Fourth, who succeeded to the throne as a child in 1846. The tragic death in 1868 of Richard, Queen Mary Margaret Fairfax and the young Prince Edward and Princess Louise, are too familiar, Thomas evidently feels, to require elaboration.

But here an attentive reader cannot entirely concur. Surely it is past time to re-examine the tumultuous history of the Kingdom of Virginia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it is to be hoped that the author undertakes this challenging task soon. .JohnSkow

* Among them: the late James Thurber, whose classic spoof, "If Grant had been drinking at Appomattox," had the Yankee general surrendering to Lee, and Robert Sobel, who last year told of the development of the New World, in For Want of a Nail, after General Burgoyne won the Battle of Saratoga and the American Revolution to boot.

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