In 1747 the veteran Jacobite John Gordon of Glenbucket was living in the town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, to the west of Paris. He had gone into exile after the failure of the 1745 rising and, speaking no French, believed that he would find a Jacobite community with whom he could converse and socialize. He soon realized his mistake, so he asked to be allowed to occupy an apartment in the Château-Vieux de Saint-Germain. The letter which forwarded his request to Rome made it clear that in the town people only spoke French, whereas in the château he would be surrounded by people who spoke English. Gordon's mistake was perfectly understandable, and if he had gone to Saint-Germain at an earlier date, say 1697, 1707 or 1717, he would have found the town dominated by English-speaking Jacobite exiles like him. The intervening thirty years, however, had witnessed a steady decline in the Jacobite population, so that by 1747 it was only in the château that people were still speaking English.

From 1689 until 1712 the exiled Jacobite court had been based in the Château-Vieux de Saint-Germain, which had been the principal residence of Louis XIV before he moved the French court to Versailles. During that time the town had been occupied by the many household servants and pensioners for whom there was insufficient accommodation in the château, and by several thousand Jacobites who had joined their exiled king.