gentleman. In 1719 he became a Westminster Scholar. Within six months
he was missing from the school, and his friends had such knowledge
of his tastes that they searched for him in the lowest purlieus of
London. They sought for this mere child in vain; till after some time
a Mr. Foster and a servant of Mr. Wortley, being in the neighbourhood
of Blackwall, heard a boy crying ‘Fish!’ The voice was familiar, the
boy, on being seen, was recognised, and his master, a fisherman, to
whom the child--so it is said--had bound himself to help to sell the
fish which they had caught together, parted from him with a regret that
was felt on both sides. The truant was reinstated at school, if not at
home, but in a brief time the bird was flown and left no trace behind
him. A year or two, perhaps more, had elapsed when the Quaker captain
of a ship trading to Oporto, and the British consul in that city, were
looking at a young fellow driving some laden asses from the vineyards
through the city gates. The captain saw in the lad a sailor who had
come on board in the Thames, and run away from his ship on its arrival
at Oporto. He had gone up country and found employment, although he was
ignorant of the language. The consul knew him in his real personality,
and the adventurous hero was shipped for home, where he was kept not
so strictly as if the keepers would be sorry at his again escaping.
Edward Wortley took a convenient opportunity to do so, and when he was
next recognised he was acting diligently, as he had always done, this
time as a common sailor in the Mediterranean. There was the making
of a hero in this resolute boy, if he had only been allowed to follow
his inclinations. On the contrary, he was exiled to the West Indies,
with Foster to attend him as teacher and guardian. They spent several
years there; and the boy, who preferred to battle with and for life,
to spending it in ease and luxury, had nothing to do but to study
the classics, which he did, as he did most things, with energy and a
certain success. How he failed, or neglected to leave Foster in the
lurch, is not explained. Neither do we know anything of his actual life
after his return to England, for many years. Had he been left at sea,
Edward Wortley would probably have distinguished himself. As it was he
abused life, but only as other ‘young sparks’ did in England; and he
filled up the measure of his offences by marrying a handsome honest
laundress, older than himself, of whom he got tired in a few weeks. A
small annuity reconciled her to living comfortably by herself. After
this, all is dark, and we cannot come again upon the trail but by the
help of Lady Mary’s letters.
There are few references made to her son by Lady Mary, except in
letters to her husband when she was living abroad, ranging from 1741
to 1752. In a letter from Genoa, in 1741, she regrets having to bring
before her husband ‘so disagreeable a subject as our son.’ The son
was then anxious to procure a dissolution of his marriage with the
laundress, but the laundress was a decent woman, living a blameless
life, and she could defy Parliament to pass an Act annulling her
marriage, even if the father had been willing to help the son to such
purpose, which he was not. The mother was unmotherly severe on the son.
‘Time,’ she writes, ‘has no effect, and it’s impossible to convince him
of his true situation.’ The son then passed by an assumed name. The
name being mentioned to Lady Mary by a stranger, with reference to the
responsibility of the bearer of it, she replied, ‘the person was, to my
knowledge, not worth a groat, which was all I thought proper to say on
the subject.’
In 1742 this ‘fool of quality’ was now wandering, now tarrying on the
Continent, under the name of M. de Durand. In the June of that year
his mother encountered him, and passed two days with him at Valence,
an ancient city on the Rhone. In various letters to her husband,
she speaks of ‘our son’ as altered almost beyond recognition, with
beauty gone, a look of age not warranted by his years, and, though
submissive, with an increase of the old wildness in his eyes that
shocked her, as it suggested some fatal termination. He had grown fat,
but was still genteel and agreeably polite. She was charmed with his
fluently-expressed French, but she noted a general volubility, yet
without enthusiasm, of speech, which inconsiderate people took for
wit; and a weakness of understanding and of purpose, exposing him to be
led by more resolute spirits. ‘With his head,’ she says, ‘I believe it
is possible to make him a monk one day and a Turk three days after.’
Flattering and insinuating, he caught the favour of strangers, ‘but,’
says the not too-indulgent lady, ‘he began to talk to me in the usual
silly cant I have so often heard from him, which I shortened by telling
him I desired not to be troubled with it; and that the only thing that
could give me hopes of good conduct was regularity and truth.’ She
credited him with ‘a superficial universal knowledge,’ as the result of
what he had seen. His acquaintance with modern languages was undoubted,
but she did not believe that he knew Arabic and Hebrew. He promised to
proceed to Flanders, and there wait his father’s orders; adding, that
he would keep secret the interview with his mother; but M. de Durand
‘rode straight to Montélimart, where he told at the Assembly that he
came into this country purely on my orders ... talking much of my
kindness to him, and insinuating that he had another name, much more
considerable than that he appeared with.’
Edward Wortley was in England in the early part of the above year.
In the latter part he went to Holland, where he resided, a sort of
prisoner at large, by desire of his father, who allowed him a small
income on condition of submission to the paternal will. ‘I hear,’ wrote
Lady Mary, ‘he avoided coming near the sharpers, and is grown a good
manager of his money. I incline to think he will, for the future, avoid
thieves and other persons of good credit.’ When persons of really ‘good
credit’ spoke well of him, as Lord Carteret did, the mother rather
doubted than accepted the testimony. ‘Whenever,’ she wrote to her
husband, ‘he kept much company, it would be right to get him confined,
to prevent his going to the pillory or the gallows;’ and she described
his excuses for his conduct as ‘those of murderers and robbers!’ Young
Wortley was desirous of joining the army in Flanders; his mother
doubted his sincerity, and insisted that he should go as a volunteer.
If his father bought him a commission, she was sure it would be ‘pawned
or sold in a twelvemonth.’ Whether as volunteer or commissioned
officer, he did serve in Flanders. No news to grieve a parent’s heart
came thence; upon which circumstance Lady Mary wrote to her husband in
1744: ‘I think it is an ill sign you have had no letters from Sir John
Cope concerning him. I have no doubt he would be glad to commend his
conduct if there were any room for it;’ and she was inclined to blame
the father for over-indulgence to his son. She had no sympathy even for
the amiable weaknesses of the latter; and yet she was so sentimentally
affected by the tragedy of ‘George Barnwell,’ the rascal hero of which
murders his real uncle in order to gratify the rapacity of a harlot,
that she said, whoever could read the story or see the play without
crying, deserved to be hanged.
Edward Wortley’s countrymen did not think so ill of Lady Mary’s son;
for in 1747 the electors of Huntingdonshire returned him, with Mr.
Coulson Fellowes, member for the county. He was a silent but highly
respectable member. In the year 1748 Mr. Wortley, the father, wrote
to his wife some pleasant news he had heard of their son. The mother
coldly replied, ‘I should be extremely pleased if I could depend on
Lord Sandwich’s account of our son. As I am wholly unacquainted with
him, I cannot judge how far he may be either deceived or interested.’
This singular mother cultivated her antipathies rather than her
sympathies. The father seems to have considered his paternal duty was
discharged by, wisely perhaps, keeping his son on a small allowance.
The son lived as if he had already his inheritance in hand, and for a
year or two he found society in London quite to his mind.
Among the ladies who figured on the Mall by day, who drew crowds around
them at Vauxhall by night, and who were never out of the ‘Scandalous
Chronicle’ of the period, was the ‘Pollard Ashe,’ as she was called.
This miniature beauty was in some measure a mysterious individual. She
was the daughter of a high personage, it was said, and such affinity
was all she had to boast of in the way of family. In the June of 1750,
Walpole thus wrote of her to George Montagu:
I had a card from Lady Caroline Petersham, to go with her to
Vauxhall. I went accordingly to her house, and found her and the
little Ashe ... they had just finished their last layer of red,
and looked as handsome as crimson could make them.... We issued
into the Mall to assemble our company, which was all the town....
We mustered the Duke of Kingston, Lord March (the old Second
Duke of Queensbury of later years), Mr. Whitehead, a pretty Miss
Beauclerc, and a very foolish Miss Sparre.... We got into the best
order we could, and marched to our barge, with a boat of French
horns attending and little Ashe singing. We paraded some time up
the river, and at last debarked at Vauxhall.... A Mrs. Lloyd,
seeing the two girls following Lady Petersham and Miss Ashe, said
aloud, ‘Poor girls! I am sorry to see them in such bad company!’
Miss Sparre, who desired nothing so much as the fun of seeing a
duel--a thing which, though she is fifteen, she has never been so
lucky to see--took due pains to make Lord March resent this ...
but he laughed her out of this charming frolic. Here we picked up
Lord Granby ... very drunk.... He would fain have made love to
Miss Beauclerc, who is very modest; and did not know what to do
at all with his whispers or his hands. He then addressed himself
to the Sparre, who was very well disposed to receive both.... At
last, we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in our front,
with the vizor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly
and handsome.... We turned some chicken into a china dish, which
Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp, with three pats of butter and a
flagon of water, stirring, and rattling, and laughing, and were
every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears....
The whole air of our party was sufficient to take up the whole
attention of the garden.... It was three o’clock before we got
home.
Very early in the year 1751 our hero made love to Miss Ashe, and at the
same time appeared in public as the first ‘macaroni’ of the day, but
with science and philosophy enough to render him worthy of being taken
into brotherhood by the Royal Society. On February 9, 1751, Walpole
writes:
Our greatest miracle is Lady Mary Wortley’s son, whose adventures
have made so much noise; his parts are not proportionate, but his
expense is incredible. His father scarce allows him anything; yet
he plays, dresses, diamonds himself, even to distinct shoe-buckles
for a frock, and has more snuff-boxes than would suffice a Chinese
idol with a hundred noses. But the most curious part of his dress,
which he has brought from Paris, is an iron wig; you literally
would not know it from hair; I believe it is on this account that
the Royal Society have just chosen him of their body.
His father, however, made no complaint of his son in his letters to his
wife. The anxious mother invariably concluded that when nothing was
said there was something to be dreaded. Accordingly, in a letter to
her husband, dated May 1751, Lady Mary writes:
(May 24, 1751.) ‘I can no longer resist the desire I have to know what
is become of my son. I have long suppressed it, from a belief that,
if there was anything good to be told, you would not fail to give me
the pleasure of hearing it. I find it now grows so much upon me, that
whatever I am to know, I think it would be easier for me to support
than the anxiety I suffer from my doubts. I beg to be informed, and
prepare myself for the worst with all the philosophy I have.’
Her son was not in such a desperate condition as his mother supposed.
The new Fellow of the Royal Society was simply making love to ‘the
Pollard Ashe.’ In the summer of this year, 1751, Vauxhall and the
Mall missed her; but the world knew very well whither she had wended,
and with whom. In September 1751 Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu wrote to
her husband: ‘Young Wortley is gone to France with Miss Ashe. He is
certainly a gentleman of infinite vivacity; but methinks he might as
well have deferred this exploit till the death of his father.’ Walpole
wrote to Mann that ‘Wortley, who, you know, has been a perfect Gil
Blas, is thought to have added the famous Miss Ashe to the number of
his wives.’
While London was busy with the story of the elopement of Miss Ashe
with Edward Wortley Montagu, and this rather airy couple were on
their amorous way to Paris, there was a young Mr. Roberts, not yet
quite twenty-one years of age, sojourning at the _Hôtel d’Orléans_ in
that city, with a Miss Rose for a companion, Miss Rose’s sister for a
friend, and various servants to wait on all three. Roberts lived like
a _milor_, and he gave out that he was about to make the grand tour to
Italy and back. Montagu’s quarters were at the _Hôtel de Saxe_. Roberts
was a stranger to him, but Montagu not only called upon the wealthy
traveller, on September 23, but sent him an invitation to dinner. The
company consisted of Roberts, Lord Southwell, Mr. Taafe, M.P., and
Montagu, who was also a member of the House of Commons. After coffee
the party adjourned to Montagu’s room. Taafe produced dice and proposed
play. Roberts declined, on the ground of being without money; but this
and other pleas were overruled, and, ‘flustered with wine,’ which he
said he had been made to drink, he sat down to tempt fortune. Fortune
used this gambler ill; when he rose to return to his hotel he had lost
870 louis d’ors--400 to Taafe, 350 to Southwell, and 120 to Montagu.
Taafe speedily demanded the amount he had won, and not finding it
forthcoming the British legislator, with Lord Southwell, broke into
his room about midnight, and under dreadful threats, made with swords
drawn, compelled him to give drafts for the entire sum. The crafty
Roberts, however, drew upon bankers with whom he had no effects; and,
probably that he might be out of reach of arrest till he could give an
explanation, he hurriedly set off for Lyons.
The bird had just flown when the three more fortunate gamblers, their
drafts having been dishonoured, forcibly entered Roberts’s rooms and
rifled them of everything valuable--a large sum in gold and silver, a
very valuable assortment of jewellery and precious stones, and the two
Miss Roses. There was 40,000 livres’ worth in all, not including the
sisters. One of these ladies consented with alacrity to accompany Mr.
Taafe, with his other booty, to his quarters at the _Hôtel de Pérou_.
The sister went thither also, for society’s sake, and after a three
days’ sojourn Taafe kissed their hands and sent them to England under
the guardianship of another gentleman.
Perfect tranquillity prevailed among those who remained in Paris, but
on Sunday night, October 25, just before one o’clock, as Montagu was
stepping into bed with, as he says, ‘that security that ought to attend
innocence,’ a commissary of police, backed by an armed force, entered
his room, and, despite all protest, carried him off to the Châtelet.
Before they locked him up for the night, the gaolers would scarcely
utter a word save a rough one, and he could not get even a cup of
water. The night was cold, and a small bit of candle enabled him the
better to see the horrors of his cell. ‘The walls were scrawled over,’
he says in the memoir he published, ‘with the vows and prayers of the
vilest malefactors before they went to the axe or the gibbet.’ Under
one of the inscriptions were the words: ‘These verses were written by
the priest who was hanged and burned, in the year 1717, for stealing a
chalice of the Holy Sacrament.’
On November 2 the charge made by Roberts--namely, that Montagu’s party
had made him half drunk, the better to cheat him at dice, and had
subsequently plundered his rooms--was made known to him. ‘I answered,’
he says, ‘in a manner that ought to have cleared my own innocence, and
to have covered my antagonist with confusion.’ But he was remanded
to prison. Some amelioration of his condition was permitted, and he
was allowed to be visited. Consequently it was the fashion to go and
look at him, but the solaces of his friends could not compensate for
the cruel wit, jeers, and sarcasms cast at him by curious strangers.
Influential persons interested themselves in this notorious case. The
English ambassador interfered with effect. The king, on being moved,
replied that he could not meddle in a private case; but a king can do
many things without appearing to meddle. The charge was again looked
into, and the method of examination may be seen in the result. The
sentence of the court, delivered on January 25, 1752, was to the
effect that the accused be discharged; that Roberts be compelled to
confess the accusation to be false, also to pay 20,000 livres damages
to Montagu and Taafe; and pay all the costs of suit on both sides,
including the expense of publishing the judgment.
As soon as Montagu was free, he published a memoir, explanatory and
defensive. It was not so much a denial as an evasion. It was made up of
assertions that he had ‘never deviated from the sentiments and conduct
of a man of honour;’ that regard ought to be had to ‘the probability
of the charges, the rank of the accused, and the character of the
prosecutor;’ that he was of ‘distinguished condition,’ and that his
accuser was infamous in character and inconsistent in his evidence;
that Lord Albemarle, the English ambassador, had told him that he was
as convinced of his innocence as he was of his own. Montagu protested
that the whole thing was a conspiracy ‘against his Honour and Person,’
at the head of which was the so-called Roberts, whom he had discovered
to be a fraudulent bankrupt Jew, Payba by name, who had fled from
England to avoid the gallows. Montagu acknowledged that he had invited
this ‘infamous bankrupt’ to dinner, but that, instead of winning 120
louis d’ors of him, he had formerly lent that sum to the Jew, who had
‘trumped up this story in order to evade payment.’ He had made the
first call on the _soi-disant_ Mr. Roberts, taking him for a man of
fashion, and it was the custom for the last comer to make such calls
in his neighbourhood, and not to wait to be called upon; and the visit
having been returned the invitation to dinner naturally followed. As
to playing after dinner, Montagu does not deny it; but he says that
the imputation of playing with loaded dice filled him with horror. The
conclusion of the so-named defence is that, as the judgment of the
court was so completely in favour of Montagu and Taafe, the innocence
of those two gentlemen was perfectly established.
Before we see if this was exactly the case, let us see what was thought
of the affair in England. The public press barely alluded to the
scandal, and were not at all grieved at the locking up of a couple of
British senators in a French prison. Private individuals noticed the
scandal in their letters.
In October 1751, Mrs. Montagu wrote to Gilbert West some details of
the gambling affair and its consequences. She described the offence
of Montagu and Taafe as ‘playing with a Jew at Pharaoh, with too much
_finesse_.’
_Finesse_ (she adds) is a pretty improvement in modern life and
modern language. It is something people may do without being
hanged, and speak of without being challenged. It is a point just
beyond fair skill and just short of downright knavery; but as the
medium is ever hard to hit, the very professors of finesse do
sometimes deviate into paths that lead to prisons and the galleys,
and such is the case of those unhappy heroes. The Speaker of the
House of Commons will be grieved to see two illustrious senators
chained at the ignoble oar. The King of France has been applied
to, but says he does not interpose in private matters. So how it
will go with them no one can tell. In the meantime, poor Miss Ashe
weeps like the forsaken Ariadne on a foreign shore.
The conduct of Edward Wortley in England was noticed by his father, in
a letter to Lady Mary, who, replying to it in a letter from Louveres
(November 10, 1751), when the Paris scandal was known, says:--‘I will
not make any reflections on the conduct of the person you mention; ’tis
a subject too melancholy to us both. I am of opinion that tallying at
bassette is a certain revenue (even without cheating) to those who
can get constant punters and are able to submit to the drudgery of
it; but I never knew any one pursue it long and preserve a tolerable
reputation.’ Therewith, the mother dismissed further notice of her
wayward son to talk of an old woman at the baths of Louveres, who
in her hundredth year had recovered sight, teeth, and hair, and who
had died ten years later, not of age, but of tumbling down a stone
staircase; something like the apocryphal Countess of Desmond:--
Who lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
And died of a fall from a cherry-tree then.
Even after the son had escaped the galleys, the mother made no
references to the circumstance in a letter to her daughter, the
Countess of Bute (February 1752), but was full of ‘Peregrine Pickle’
and of the rather lively sayings and doings of Lady Vane.
As the maternal susceptibilities were not much ruffled, the sympathy
of the public was not to be expected. We learn more from Walpole than
from Lady Mary. In November 1751, Walpole, writing to Mann, remarks
that all the letters from Paris were very ‘cautious of relating the
circumstances.’ He styles Montagu and Taafe as the ‘two _gentlemen_
who were pharaoh-bankers to Madame de Mirepoix’ in England, and ‘who
had travelled to France to exercise the same profession.’ Walpole
adds that they had ‘been released on excessive bail, are still to
be tried, and may be sent to the galleys or dismissed home, where
they will be reduced to keep the best company; for,’ says Walpole,
‘I suppose nobody else will converse with them.’ The letter-writer
describes Montagu as having been a ‘perfect Gil Blas,’ and as having
added ‘the famous Miss Ashe to the number of his wives.’ Walpole says
of Taafe, ‘He is an Irishman, who changed his religion to fight a
duel, as you know in Ireland a Catholic may not wear a sword.’ But as
Taafe was M.P. for Arundel when Catholics could not sit in Parliament,
it is quite as probable that Taafe changed, or professed to change,
his religion--if he had any religion--that he might become a borough
member. ‘He is,’ writes Walpole, ‘a gamester, usurer, adventurer,
and of late has divided his attentions between the Duke of Newcastle
and Madame de Pompadour; travelling with turtles and pineapples in
post-chaises to the latter, flying back to the former for Lewes races
and smuggling burgundy at the same time.’ The Speaker was railing at
gaming and White’s apropos to these two prisoners. Lord Coke, to whom
the conversation was addressed, replied: ‘Sir, all I can say is, that
they are both members of the House of Commons, and neither of them of
White’s.’
While ‘society’ was discussing this matter, Miss Ashe reappeared in
England and reassumed her former distinguished position. In December
1751, the town witnessed the happy reconciliation of Miss Ashe with
the gay Lady Petersham, who had been offended at the indiscretion of
the younger nymph. Lady Petersham’s principles were very elastic:
she pardoned the Pollard Ashe on her own assurances that she was ‘as
good as married’ to Mr. Wortley Montagu, who, according to Lord
Chesterfield, seemed ‘so puzzled between the _châtelet_ in France and
his wife in England, that it is not yet known in favour of which he
will determine.’