“The Bill of Rights people that have spirited her up”

In April 1770, as recounted yesterday, the convicted murderers Matthew and Patrick Kennedy escaped hanging through the intervention of their sister Kitty’s upper-class friends.

The brothers’ death sentence was changed to transportation to the American colonies. Matthew, convicted of fatally striking a watchman named George Bigby, was to stay out of Britain for life; Patrick for fourteen years.

One of the members of Parliament who championed the Kennedys’ cause, the Earl of Fife, wrote to another, George Selwyn, on 28 April:

Just after I wrote to you this morning, I went to Mr. Stuart, on Tower Hill. I settled the free passage for Kennedy, for which I gave him fifteen guineas, and I got a letter of credit for ten, in order that the poor fellow might have something in his pocket; I also got a letter of recommendation to a person in Maryland, who will be vastly good to him.

Mr. Stuart told me he believed the ship was sailed; however, I resolved to spare no pains to relieve the poor man, and therefore directly set out for Blackwall, and very luckily found the ship not gone.

I went on board, and, to be sure, all the states of horror I ever had an idea of are much short of what I saw this poor man in; chained to a board, in a hole not above sixteen feet long; more than fifty with him; a collar and padlock about his neck, and chained to five of the most dreadful creatures I ever looked on.

What pleasure I had to see all the irons taken off, and to put him under the care of a very humane captain, one Macdougal, who luckily is my countryman, and connected with people I have done some little service to! He will be of great service to Kennedy; in short, I left this poor creature who has suffered so much, in a perfect state of happiness.

Presumably the other four “dreadful creatures” remained chained together. Neither they nor the fifty-plus other people in that hold had a sister who was a popular courtesan. Only for Kitty Kennedy would Fife have bribed John Stewart, the Contractors of Transports, to obtain special treatment.

Some people in London didn’t like that. They viewed the commutation of the Kennedys’ sentences when so many other people were being hanged for lesser crimes than murder as an example of government corruption.

In 1770 the Londoners most concerned with government corruption were the Bill of Rights Society, radical activists gathered (at least for a few more months) around John Wilkes.

Prominent among those men was the Rev. John Horne (shown above). He was also active in the case of McQuirk and Balfe, the printers’ case, and even a state trial turning on who fired first at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Those radicals found an unusual way to restore the possibility of executing the Kennedys. As Horace Walpole later wrote:

Horne, the clergyman, and other discontented persons complained of the pardon, and not only complained of it to blacken the King, but, horrible spirit of faction! instigated the watchman’s widow to appeal against it, which, if sentence should again follow, would bar all pardon; nor could the King do more than reprieve from time to time. The woman did prosecute; and the young man was again remanded to his gaol and terrors, a second punishment, unjustly inflicted; for, though probably guilty, he had satisfied the law.

The Hon. John St. John, one of the lovers and patrons of the Kennedys’ sister Kitty, told Selwyn about the widow Ann Bigby: “It is certainly the Bill of Rights people that have spirited her up.” According to the author Horace Bleackley, the recorder of London didn’t want to issue this writ for the widow, but the Wilkesite lord mayor, Sir William Beckford, insisted he do so.

This dispute reverses stances we might normally expect. Radicals interested in limiting government and guarding personal liberties were demanding the death penalty be applied without mercy. Aristocrats who wouldn’t have intervened to help any other young Irishmen convicted of a drunken murder were bending all the rules they could to preserve Kitty Kennedy’s brothers.

TOMORROW: The resolution of the case.

“Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable”

As described yesterday, on Christmas Eve in 1769 the brothers Patrick and Matthew Kennedy got drunk and stomped around the neighborhood of Westminter Bridge in London, clubbing people.

One of those people died: watchman George Bigby.

Within weeks, the Kennedys were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Matthew was about to step on the cart that would take him to the gallows when a reprieve arrived.

The brothers had a sister, Catherine or Kitty, who was one of London’s leading courtesans. (Many discussions of this case amalgamate Kitty Kennedy with another courtesan named Polly Kennedy, née Jones. There are some nice pictures of that woman, but I’m convinced by the historian Horace Bleackley that I shouldn’t use them because they show a different person.)

Kitty Kennedy’s closest gentleman friends were Lord Robert Spencer, brother of the Duke of Marlborough, and the Hon. John St. John, brother of Viscount Bolingbroke. Both men were members of Parliament. St. John, a barrister, actually testified at the brothers’ trial, claiming a prosecution witness had offered not to testify in exchange for £10; by implication, all the witnesses were dubious.

But Kitty had some prominent ex-lovers as well. And even more men who were won over by entreaties from her and her admirers. Among the aristocrats who publicly supported leniency for the Kennedys were the Duke of Manchester, until recently lord of the bedchamber to George III; the Earl of Carlisle; Viscount Palmerston; the Earl of Fife, who was in the British House of Commons because his peerage was Irish; and Sir George Savile, M.P.

But the Kennedy family’s most active champion was George Selwyn (1719–1791, shown above), yet another member of Parliament. Not because Selwyn was enamoured of Kitty Kennedy—he was gay. And not because he was against hanging—Selwyn was notorious for his fetish for watching people die. Rather, Kitty Kennedy’s admirers seem to have convinced Selwyn that her brothers were not the sort of young men who should be hanged.

There was an obvious class prejudice behind the campaign to keep the Kennedys from being executed. They weren’t street thugs, people said; they worked in an auction house, and had a sister who was a social celebrity. And hadn’t Matthew suffered enough in thinking he was about to be hanged?

Of course, other people thought the Kennedys had been drunk, cruel, and violent, and under the law of the day deserved their death sentence, even if only one could have struck the fatal blow.

Horace Walpole was among those who helped push for leniency while reveling in the insider nature of the campaign. For instance, sometime in 1770 Walpole wrote to Selwyn:

After you was gone last night, I heard it whispered about the room that a bad representation had been made at the Queen’s house against the unhappy young man. Do not mention this, as it might do hurt; but try privately, without talking of it, if you cannot get some of the ladies to mention the cruelty of the case; or what do you think of a hint by the German women [i.e., certain ladies in waiting], if you can get at them?

In his memoirs Walpole later described the case this way:

Two Kennedys, young Irishmen, had been charged with, and one of them had been condemned for, the murder of a watchman in a drunken riot. They had a handsome sister, who was kept by two young men of quality.

Out of friendship to them, Mr. George Selwyn had prevailed on six or seven of the jury to make an affidavit that, if some circumstances, which had really been neglected by the counsel for the prisoners, had appeared on the trial, they would not have brought in their verdict murder.

Mr. Selwyn applied for mercy, and the young convict was reprieved; but when the report was made in Council, Lord Mansfield prevailed to have him ordered for execution.

Mr. Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable, applied in person to the King, and represented that Lord Rochford, the Secretary of State, had under his hand assured the pardon; that such an act had always been deemed pardon, and that the prisoner had been made acquainted with it. The King immediately renewed his promise, the criminal was ordered for transportation…

That commutation was made on 17 April. Matthew Kennedy was put on a ship bound for America.

TOMORROW: Shipboard conditions.

“Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?”

As I described yesterday, in March 1769 the British writer Horace Walpole asked Thomas Chatterton for more information about the fifteenth-century manuscript he said he was transcribing.

Chatterton’s 30 March reply included more verses and some remarks about his life as a poor young law clerk in Bristol, but no solid evidence. Walpole, born into wealth, became suspicious of a scam. He asked literary friends about the Rowley writings. They told him the language and form weren’t authentic.

On 4 April, Walpole sent Chatterton what he viewed as an avuncular letter, advising him to stick to his studies instead of literary forgeries. That document doesn’t survive.

Four days later, Chatterton replied, insisting that the Rowley writings were genuine. He also admitted he was “but 16 Years of Age.” And in a snit he wrote about “destroying all my useless Lumber of Literature, and never using my Pen again but in the Law.”

Then Chatterton sent another letter on 14 April, asking Walpole to return his manuscripts. This paper has a scrawled postscript: “Apprentice to an Attorney Mr Lambert, who is a Good Master; I find engrossing Mortgages &c a very irksome employ.”

Walpole went to France before returning the documents. That prompted even angrier demands from the teenager in July and August. On his return, Walpole wrote a response accusing Chatterton of “entertaining yourself at my expense” but decided not to send it. Instead, he just bundled up the Rowley papers and mailed them to Bristol.

At some point, and it’s unclear when, Chatterton summed up his feelings in a poem about Horace Walpole being mean, snobby, and hypocritical:

WALPOLE, I thought not I should ever see
So mean a heart as thine has proved to be.
Thou who, in luxury nurst, behold’st with scorn
The boy, who friendless, fatherless, forlorn,
Asks thy high favour—thou mayst call me cheat.
Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?
Who wrote Otranto? . . .

As I noted yesterday, back in 1764 Walpole had concealed his authorship of The Castle of Otranto for a year, letting people think it was an authentic medieval story. Chatterton was apparently playing the same game, but he didn’t have the standing to pull it off.

That fall, the young man turned to political writing using the name Decimus. In 1770 he left the attorney’s office and moved to London to establish a literary career. John Wilkes and other opposition politicians admired his essays, but no one paid him for them. He penned some more Rowley poems but couldn’t publish them, either.

On 24 Aug 1770 Chatterton killed himself by drinking arsenic. He was three months shy of turning eighteen. He was evidently a person of strong moods.

Seven years later, a scholar named Thomas Tyrwhitt collected some of Chatterton’s manuscripts and published Poems Supposed to have been Written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. He was among the shrinking number of people who thought the Rowley documents were genuine.

That book prompted articles about Chatterton, the supposed young discoverer. One detail in those reports was that Walpole had discouraged him. Indeed, a writer from Bristol said that Walpole’s dismissal had led to Chatterton’s suicide “soon after,” though a year had passed between the events.

But remember how Walpole owned a printing press? He could put out his side of the story. He printed a small private edition, enough to circulate among his many literary friends.

Meanwhile, Chatterton’s work, life, and death became yet another inspiration for the Romantics.

As a result, the exchange between Chatterton and Walpole is well known to scholars of literature and literary gossip. Some documents in their brief 1769 correspondence are already in libraries. Walpole’s early biographer, Mary Berry, had access to all the letters that survived in his papers and summarized them.

Now a few more of those documents—Chatterton’s letters, Walpole’s unsent reply, and his note on when he returned the Rowley writings—have come on the auction market. Bonhams is offering the collection for sale on 14 November. The estimated price is £100,000–150,000.

Onuphrio Muralto, Ossian, and Thomas Rowley

Last week I elaborated on a news story from Britain about the rediscovery of a detail in an eighteenth-century painting that everyone knew about from documentary sources but no one had seen for many decades. Here’s a similar story about historic letters.

I think this story begins in 1764 when The Castle of Otranto appeared, described on its title page as “Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto.” Some early reviews hailed the book as an important discovery in medieval literature.

In 1765, however, a second edition was printed, and the author came forward: the Hon. Horace Walpole, M.P. (shown here). He declared this little novel was his “attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.” Literary scholars now credit Walpole with writing the first gothic novel, a precursor to Romanticism.

Meanwhile, the British literary world was debating the poems of Ossian, the first published in 1761. James MacPherson presented these verses as his translations of ancient Gaelic ballads from Scotland.

The Ossian poems attracted many devoted admirers, including Thomas Jefferson. Other people dismissed the verses on artistic and historic grounds; Samuel Johnson declared that Macpherson was “a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud.”

MacPherson produced none of the manuscripts he was supposedly translating, and in 1764 went off to Florida as the governor’s secretary before returning to Britain for a political career. He never admitted creating the poems himself, as most scholars now believe. Those same scholars credit “Ossian” with inspiring both genuine Gaelic scholarship and early Romanticism.

Into that literary atmosphere came a teenager named Thomas Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney in Bristol. He was a literary prodigy, having seen one of his poems published at age eleven.

Son of a widow who taught school, Chatterton started seeking out literary patrons, first in Bristol. He played the same game that MacPherson and Walpole had, claiming to have found manuscripts from centuries earlier. These poems, Chatterton declared, came from a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley.

In March 1769 Chatterton sent “The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wrote bie T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge” to Horace Walpole, knowing the wealthy man had an interest in painting and publishing connections. Indeed, Walpole had his own printing press and staff of printers.

Walpole replied, “Give me leave to ask you where Rowley’s poems are to be found. I should not be sorry to print them, or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed.”

TOMORROW: It all goes horribly wrong.

“Did you see Mr. Anstey’s verses at Bath-Easton?”

What happened in Batheaston didn’t stay in Batheaston.

Within three weeks after Christopher Anstey read his ode “Winter Amusements” and its pointed follow-up at the Riggs-Millers’ salon on 3 Dec 1778, those poems were circulating in manuscript. Along with knowledge of what recently remarried lady he had written about.

On 29 December, the Blue Stockings Society hostess Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her sister-in-law Mary Robinson:

I have sent you some Verse of Mr Ansteys on ye subject [of Catharine Macaulay]. The first copy he put into ye Urn at Mrs Millers at Bath Easton & being desired when he drew them to read them a second time, instead of so doing he read ye other copy.

The previous year, the artist Richard Samuel had depicted both Montagu and Macaulay, along with seven other female British authors, as the Muses.

In January 1779 Anstey’s ode appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Westminster Magazine, the Scots Magazine, and other periodicals, usually linked to the Batheaston salon.

I haven’t found any hint of Anstey’s second poem being printed until the Riggs-Millers published the fourth volume of their Poetical Amusements in 1781. But people continued to hear about it.

On 14 January, Horace Walpole (shown above) wrote to the Countess of Ossory:

Did you see Mr. Anstey’s verses at Bath-Easton? They were truly more a production of this century; and not at all too good for a schoolboy. In the printed copy they have omitted an indecent stanza or two on Mrs. Macaulay. In truth Dame Thucydides has made but an uncouth match; but Anstey has tumbled from a greater height than she. Sense may be led astray by the senses; but how could a man write the ‘Bath Guide,’ and then nothing but doggerel and stupidity?

I suspect that when Walpole wrote, “they have omitted an indecent stanza or two,” he was referring to Anstey’s follow-up rather than lines suppressed from the original ode.

Now one rule about spreading unabashed gossip in eighteenth-century Britain was that when Horace-freakin’-Walpole said you’ve gone too far, you were deep into rudeness.

But what people wrote about Macaulay’s new marriage in poems and magazines was nothing compared to what they wrote in letters.

TOMORROW: Passion’s wild career indeed.

“They hold a Parnassus-fair every Thursday”

Anna Riggs (1741–1781) was the daughter of a London Customs official, granddaughter of a wealthy Irish Privy Councilor.

Riggs’s mother was, according to the novelist Frances Burney, “a most prodigious fat old lady,…very merry and facetious.” Horace Walpole said she was “an old rough humorist who passed for a wit.”

In 1765 Riggs married John Miller (c. 1744–1798), from a genteel but poor Irish family. He served as a junior officer in a light-horse regiment during the last three years of the Seven Years’ War and then tried studying the law.

Miller was “full of good-natured officiousness,” Walpole said, but that didn’t promise financial success. Fortunately, Anna inherited a fortune from her grandfather.

The Riggs-Millers (John took on Anna’s surname in honor of her money) bought an estate in the village of Batheaston, near Bath. They spent a lot of the Riggs family money fixing up the manor and laying out ornamental gardens.

By 1770 this lifestyle had become too expensive or, in Walpole’s words, “the whole caravan were forced to go abroad”—the Riggs-Millers, their infant girl, and Anna’s mother, plus select servants. The family spent a couple of years in France and Italy, expanding with the birth of a boy in Paris. Anna Riggs-Miller bought an antique vase dug up “by a labouring man in 1769 at Frescati, near the spot where is supposed to have stood the Tusculanum of Cicero.”

The couple came back to Batheaston full of continental sophistication. Well, a version of it, per Walpole:

Alas! Mrs. Miller is returned a beauty, a genius, a Sappho, a tenth Muse, as romantic as Mademoiselle [Madeleine de] Scuderi, and as sophisticated as Mrs. [Elizabeth] Vesey. The Captain’s fingers are loaded with cameos, his tongue runs over with virtù…

Anna published her Letters from Italy in three volumes in 1776.

By 1775 the Riggs-Millers were hosting literary salons at Batheaston. The main ritual of these gatherings was a poetry contest staged around that antique vase. Once again, here’s Walpole, from a 15 Jan 1775 letter in which he also remarked on news from Massachusetts about something “called minute-men”:

They hold a Parnassus-fair every Thursday, give out rhymes and themes, and all the flux of quality at Bath contend for the prizes. A Roman vase, dressed with pink ribbons and myrtles, receives the poetry, which is drawn out every festival; six judges of these Olympic games retire and select the brightest compositions, which the respective successful acknowledge, kneel to Mrs. Calliope Miller, kiss her fair hand, and are crowned by it with myrtle, with—I don't know what.

You may think this is fiction or exaggeration. Be dumb, unbelievers! The collection is printed, published. Yes, on my faith, there are bouts-rimés on a buttered muffin, made by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland; receipts to make them, by Corydon the venerable, alias George Pitt; others, very pretty, by Lord Palmerston; some by Lord Carmarthen; many by Mrs. Miller herself, that have no fault but wanting metre; and immortality promised to her without end or measure.

In short since folly, which never ripens to madness but in this hot climate, ran distracted, there never was anything so entertaining or so dull—for you cannot read so long as I have been telling.

Between 1775 and 1781 the Riggs-Millers published four volumes of Poetical Amusements at a Villa Near Bath, along with the smaller collections On Novelty and Hobby Horses, giving the proceeds to charity. The frontispiece of the first volume showed the “Roman vase,” above.

Literary reviewers and poets who weren’t invited to the salons tended to disdain the whole enterprise. Nonetheless, notable writers like William Mason and David Garrick contributed work. The poet Anna Seward credited that biweekly salon for discovering her. In 1778 John Riggs-Miller was made a baronet (on the Irish establishment).

In October 1778, as I described back here, the celebrated historian Catharine Macaulay left Bath after sharing the Rev. Thomas Wilson’s house for years. The next month, in the town of Leicester, she married William Graham, a doctor less than half her age. By the end of the year, the posh people of Bath were gossiping about the newlyweds. And in that same period Sir John and Lady Miller hosted one of their regular salons.

TOMORROW: “Winter’s Amusement.”

“Nothing but poor dead dogs!”

This week the B.B.C.’s History Today magazine published an article by Stephanie Howard-Smith titled “The War on Dogs,” apparently boiled down from her 2018 article in the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Howard-Smith writes:

Late in the summer of 1760, London was gripped by reports of mad dogs attacking people in the streets. On 26 August the Common Council of the City of London met and the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Chitty, issued a proclamation declaring that for the next two months, any dogs in the streets of the city should be killed and buried in mass graves. Similar orders followed in the surrounding areas.

Monetary rewards were offered to the officials initially tasked with the culling, but the cull inevitably descended into mob violence. Even pets were caught up in the bloodshed. The cullers clubbed pointers standing on their doorsteps and drowned greyhounds going for walks. A dog leaving the city on a lead was reportedly bludgeoned in the street.

The dog-loving writer and antiquarian Horace Walpole described the carnage he saw during the first week of the cull in a letter to a friend:

The streets are the very picture of the murder of the innocents – One drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear, good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! How can anybody hurt them?

This sort of dog cull was not particularly unusual in itself – Edinburgh saw a cull of street dogs in 1738. Rather, it was notable because it was met with such vocal opposition.

An artist produced a satirical print of the cull depicting Thomas Chitty as King Herod and the cullers as violence-hungry thugs. Londoners began writing letters to newspapers criticising the Common Council’s order. Many were concerned that the brutality meted out to dogs might awaken latent savagery that could be transposed onto humans.

That satirical print can be viewed here, courtesy of the British Museum. Other figures in the cartoon included John Fielding and William Hogarth. The latter’s dog Trump, shown above in 1745, has his own Wikipedia page.

“The duchess’s trial for bigamy commenced…”

I recently enjoyed the History of Parliament’s recounting of the 1776 trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh (1721–1788, shown here) for bigamy.

The legal issue, which determined where a couple of large inheritances would go, was: Had Chudleigh been legally married to (though long estranged from) the third Earl of Bristol in 1744? Or, based on a marriage in 1769, was she the legal widow of the second Duke of Kingston?

Because this matter involved the wife of at least one peer, it was tried before the House of Lords.

The webpage says:

…the duchess’s trial for bigamy commenced in Westminster Hall on 15 April 1776. It quickly became the event of the season. Horace Walpole was expectant, as he was sure ‘her impudence will operate in some singular manner’, and he provided his correspondents with detailed and mocking commentary. He had to admit though that ‘The Duchess-Countess has raised my opinion of her understanding… for she has behaved so sensibly and with so little affectation’. . . .

The moralist Hannah More was less impressed by the spectacle. ‘You will imagine the bustle of five thousand people getting into one hall’, she wrote to a friend. ‘There was a great deal of ceremony, a great deal of splendour, and a great deal of nonsense’. Of the duchess’s performance, More pronounced ‘Surely there never was so thorough an actress’, and her friend the actor David Garrick even commented that the duchess ‘has so much out-acted him, it is time for him to leave the stage’.

The House of Lords reached a unanimous verdict on Lady Bristol or Lady Kingston. However, as Lord Chief Justice Mansfield had predicted, she pled her privilege as a lady and escaped punishment, beyond having to travel Europe with a large fortune.

The History of Parliament page comes to a fitting close: “She died in France on 26 August 1788, from bursting a blood vessel while in a rage after hearing she had lost a legal action.”

“No beings in human shape could resemble each other less”

And still speaking of Horace Walpole, Lady Louisa Stuart, daughter of the Earl of Bute, had more to say about him.

In 1837, Lady Louisa wrote in the introduction to a volume of her grandmother Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters and works:

In a word, Horace Walpole himself was generally supposed to be the son of Carr Lord Hervey, and Sir Robert not to be ignorant of it. One striking circumstance was visible to the naked eye; no beings in human shape could resemble each other less than the two passing for father and son; and while their reverse of personal likeness provoked a malicious whisper. Sir Robert’s marked neglect of Horace in his infancy tended to confirm it.

All that would have happened well before Lady Louisa was born in 1757, so she was recording previous generations’ gossip.

The story starts with the rise of a couple of politicians in the last decades of the Stuart dynasty. John Hervey (1665–1751) followed his father into Parliament, then became Baron Hervey in 1703 and Earl of Bristol in 1714. By his first wife he had a son named Carr Hervey in 1691, and by his second a son named John Hervey in 1696.

After Hervey became Earl of Bristol, his eldest son and heir received the courtesy title of Lord Hervey based on the father’s lesser peerage. That meant Carr Hervey was called Lord Hervey from 1714 until his death in 1723. At that point the younger John Hervey became his father’s eldest son and thus also Lord Hervey until his own death in 1743. In fact, through a special law John Lord Hervey got to be Baron Hervey in the House of Lords all on his own in 1733. But he never inherited his long-lived father’s earldom; instead, the second Earl of Bristol was his son.

John Lord Hervey was a major figure during Walpole’s years in power, as a Member of Parliament, a political writer, and a close friend and then enemy of Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. Thus, when people remembered “Lord Hervey,” they usually meant him. Carr Lord Hervey didn’t leave such a big mark.

Meanwhile, Robert Walpole (1676–1745) was climbing the political ranks as a Whig. He joined Parliament in 1701, served as chancellor of the exchequer 1715–1717, and then dominated Britain as prime minister from 1721 to 1742. He was knighted in 1725. As part of his exit deal, Walpole was kicked up into the House of Lords as the first Earl of Orford.

Robert Walpole married Catherine Shorter in 1700. They had four children soon after marriage, then none for eleven years until Horace appeared in 1717. By the late 1720s Sir Robert was living openly with his mistress, Maria Skerritt, and their affair probably began earlier. In 1737 Catherine Walpole died. Sir Robert then married Maria, but she died in 1739. Their daughter was retroactively made legitimate and became Lady Mary Walpole.

According to the rumor that Lady Louisa Stuart set down, Catherine Walpole had given up on her marriage because of her husband’s infidelities and took her own lover in Carr Lord Hervey. Horace Walpole was supposedly the result of that affair.

It’s true that Sir Robert Walpole and Horace Walpole didn’t look much alike. Sir Robert had a square chin while Horace always had a long, lean face. However, the one surviving portrait of Carr Lord Hervey (shown above) depicts him as a youth with a completely round face, even less like Horace’s.

When people talked about how Horace Walpole resembled Lord Hervey, they usually end up pointing to the younger and more famous John Lord Hervey, not the paternity candidate. In particular, authors have pointed out two major similarities.

First, both Baron Hervey and Horace Walpole wrote gossipy, iconoclastic memoirs about the politics of their day. Hervey’s memoirs were so juicy that the family suppressed their publication until 1848. Therefore, unless he got a secret peek at that manuscript (and, even more improbably, managed to leave no record of that peek), Horace Walpole couldn’t have used the Hervey memoir as a model for his own.

The second similarity, which authors found different ways to express, is that both John Lord Hervey and Horace Walpole were queer.

For Hervey, this took the form of sex with both men and women. He had eight children with his wife; affairs with Anne Vane and perhaps Princess Caroline; infatuations or affairs with Henry Fox, Stephen Fox, Count Francesco Algarotti, and perhaps Prince Frederick. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, another likely lover, declared, “this world consisted of men, women, and Herveys.”

Horace Walpole appears to have been attracted only to men, and it’s unclear whether he had any happy sexual relationships. He did have close friendships with many women, but they were all either married or uninterested in men. People saw Walpole as effeminate. The novelist Laetitia Matilda Hawkins recalled:

His entrance into a room was in that style of affected delicacy, which fashion had made almost natural, chapeau bras between his hands as if he wished to compress it, or under his arm; knees bent, and feet on tip-toe, as if afraid of a wet floor.

Thus, when Horace Walpole scholar Peter Cunningham wrote in 1861, “he was unlike a Walpole, and in every respect, figure and formation of mind, very like a Hervey,” he meant mostly that neither Horace Walpole nor John Lord Hervey were straight.

But how significant was that supposed similarity to the question of Horace’s paternity? Baron Hervey was the putative father’s half-brother. There was only a thin genetic connection between him and Horace Walpole, so their resemblances were likely no more than coincidence.

On the other hand, Horace Walpole was such a gossip that it’s only fair to have this sort of discussion about him.

Horace Walpole at Ten Years Old

Speaking of Horace Walpole, last week I received a packet of postcards from Strawberry Hill, that gentleman’s British estate, in thanks for supporting a fundraising initiative.

The Antiques Trade Gazette told the story:

The Strawberry Hill Trust appealed for help to buy the painting by William Hogarth (1697-1784). Walpole – the 4th Earl of Orford (1717-97) – lived at the Twickenham house and the portrait was on loan there from a private collection.

The trust had an opportunity to buy the painting from the private collection as it has been offered to the nation in lieu of death duties.

However, the painting had been valued at more than the tax due which meant there was a £230,000 funding gap.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund donated £115,000 and the Art Fund has given £90,000. The remaining £25,000 was raised via the Art Fund’s crowdfunding platform, Art Happens. . . .

The trust said the picture was of “exceptional interest” as it is the earliest surviving oil portrait of Walpole; a rare and significant example of Hogarth’s early mature pictorial work; the earliest-known commissioned picture of an identifiable sitter by Hogarth and his first-known portrait of a child. The painting was commissioned by Horace’s father, Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745), the first British prime minister, when his youngest son was aged 10 and a pupil at Eton.

The portrait can now be viewed at Strawberry Hill. One day I’ll go there and feel pride in contributing to that display.

At Museum Crush, Richard Moss wrote on article on “Decoding the Hogarth portrait of the young Horace Walpole.” The boy points to a sundial indicating the number ten, his age. One of the many spaniels he loved over his lifetime runs below. And he looks fabulous in his embroidered blue waistcoat.

But that article doesn’t note what might be the most significant aspect of this portrait: it signaled that his father was actually interested in him at last. As Horace was growing up, his parents were estranged. Horace lived with his mother while, from 1723 on, his father kept house with Maria Skerritt, eventually his second wife. According to Lady Louisa Stuart (1757–1851), a daughter of the Earl of Bute, “Sir Robert Walpole took scarcely any notice of him, till his proficiency at Eton school, when a lad of some standing, drew his attention…” And that’s when the portrait was made.

“Whitmore, usually a courtier, spoke for the Opposition”

Here’s a brief return to the series of postings about George III’s speech to Parliament on 31 Oct 1776 and the Whig opposition’s responses to it.

As I composed those, I was relying on the close-to-official record of the legislature’s debate, the Parliamentary Register published by John Almon.

I supplemented that with comments from Horace Walpole’s Journal of the Reign of King George the Third, from the Year 1771 to 1783. Walpole was the son of Britain’s first prime minister and a keen political observer.

Not until I got back from a trip was I able to confirm an odd detail: Walpole (shown here) recorded one more Member of Parliament speaking in the debate than the Parliamentary Register. His précis included:

Mr. [Thomas] Whitmore, usually a courtier, spoke for the Opposition; asked if the Houses had any terms to propose to the Americans?—if they had, what terms? Were the present measures Lord North’s, or were they forced upon him?

Whitmore didn’t make that volume of the Register at all, despite questioning Lord North—or because he usually didn’t.

By “usually a courtier,” I believe Walpole meant that Whitmore was normally part of Britain’s “court party,” a pejorative term for those supporting those in power in London. (Their opponents called themselves the “country party.” American Whigs often used the same terms since they were an acceptable way of discussing factional political organizing.)

I’m not sure who Whitmore was implicating when he asked if someone had “forced” the prime minister to adopt his American policy.

Later, in 1784, Whitmore was part of the St. Alban’s Tavern group, a caucus of members urging an alliance between William Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox. Those legislators presented themselves as independent of parties, and apparently that’s how Whitmore was also acting back in 1776.

“How would those advantages accrue to us, if America was conquered?”

The last major speech in the House of Commons on 31 Oct 1776 about the American War came from Charles James Fox, an opposition Whig (but one who didn’t get along well with some other Whigs).

Fox spoke at length about what had brought on the war, how badly the ministry had executed it, and, at the end, how it could not win:

What have been the advantages of America to this kingdom? Extent of trade, increase of commercial advantages, and a numerous people growing up in the same ideas and sentiments as ourselves.---

Now, Sir, how would those advantages accrue to us, if America was conquered? Not one of them. Such a possession of America must be secured by a standing army; and that, let me observe, must be a very considerable army.

Consider, Sir, that that army must be cut off from the intercourse of social liberty here, and accustomed, in every instance, to bow down and break the spirits of men, to trample on the rights, and to live on the spoils cruelly wrung from the sweat and labour of their fellow subjects;---such an army, employed for such purposes, and paid by such means, for supporting such principles, would be a very proper instrument to effect points of a greater, or at least more favourite importance nearer home; points, perhaps, very unfavourable to the liberties of this country.

Horace Walpole later wrote about this occasion:

Charles Fox answered Lord George [Germain] in one of his finest and most animated orations, and with severity to the answered person. He made Lord North’s conciliatory proposition be read, which, he said, his Lordship seemed to have forgotten, and he declared he thought it better to abandon America than attempt to conquer it.

Mr. [Edward] Gibbon, author of the “Roman History,” a very good judge, and, being on the Court side, an impartial one, told me he never heard a more masterly speech than Fox’s in his life; and he said he observed [Edward] Thurlow and [Alexander] Wedderburne, the Attorney and Solicitor Generals, complimenting which should answer it, and, at last, both declining it.

That left only one member interesting in speaking, the government opponent Gen. Henry Seymour Conway. He said he respected King George III but opposed the speech he had delivered on behalf the ministry.

The Commons then voted on whether to amend the response to that speech proposed by supporters of the government. The vote was 242 in favor of Lord North’s position, 87 against. (A second vote followed, close to midnight: 232 to 83. The House of Lords had a similar debate, which the government won 82 to 26.)

In sum, for all the speeches, answered and unanswered; for all the wit and telling points; for all the Parliamentary Register reports favoring the Whigs, Lord North’s government carried the day because it had an almost 3-to-1 advantage in Parliament. The opposition’s rhetoric and logic and being ultimately right about the American War were no match for the party that had the most votes in the room.

Something to remember as we proceed through our own election season.

[ADDENDUM: It turns out the Parliamentary Register left out a speaker that Walpole recorded. I added his remarks here.]

“You then possessed the capital of North America, Boston”

After King George III had opened Parliament on 31 Oct 1776 with the speech quoted yesterday, the House of Commons debated how to respond.

Richard Aldworth-Griffin proposed to thank the monarch with an address echoing all the points he and the government ministers had delivered. George Finch-Hatton seconded that motion.

Then the opposition seized the opportunity to express their views on the American War and how the ministry was carrying it out. At the time, most parliamentary opponents were clustered around the Marquess of Rockingham, who had been prime minister briefly in the 1760s.

The first to speak was Lord John Cavendish, who proffered the opposition’s draft address. His whole speech was longer than the king’s and made several points like this:

Every act which has been proposed as a means of procuring peace and submission, has become a new cause of war and revolt; and we now find ourselves almost inextricably involved in a bloody and expensive civil war; which, besides exhausting at present the strength of all his Majesty’s dominions, exposing our allies to the designs of their and our enemies, and leaving this kingdom in a most perilous situation, threatens, in its issue, the most deplorable calamities to the whole British race.

The Marquess of Granby seconded that. (According to Horace Walpole, Granby was supposed to have offered the motion, “but his youthful diffidence got the better.”) Though both Lord John and Granby had aristocratic titles, they weren’t members of the House of Lords. The first was the younger brother of a duke, the latter the son of a duke. They were thus both eligible to serve in the House of Commons.

George Johnstone, former governor of West Florida (shown above), then got blunt and personal:

The minister’s speech he declared to be an entire compound of hypocrisy. It made his Majesty talk of peace, at the very moment when not only all Europe, but this kingdom, gave the most evident appearances of preparation for war. In short, it was like a deceptious mirror reflecting a false image of truth. That part of it which talked of giving the Americans law and liberty, he conceived to be a mere turn of wit and humour, which would not bear a serious interpretation. It was an insidious hypocritical speech that held out law and liberty at the point of the sword.

George Wombwell, a government supporter and director of the East India Company, replied to one of Johnstone’s points, about sailors being impressed for the Royal Navy, by insisting that “no press was better conducted than the present.” The printed report on the debate stated: “He censured the Americans as a bragging, cowardly banditti, &c.”

The Parliamentary Register for this year was published by printer John Almon, and he leaned decidedly toward the Whigs. One result of that, I suspect, was that opposition speeches were recorded more fully than speeches in favor of the government. Wombwell’s remarks were summarized in four lines and “&c.” while Johnstone’s filled a page and a half.

The next speaker was John Wilkes, and he got six pages. Among his remarks to the government:

Nothing decisive can follow from the late successful affair on Long Island, no more than from the defeat at Sullivan’s Island. New York will probably fall into your hands, but your situation will in that case be scarcely mended since the last year, for you then possessed the capital of North America, Boston. Is that great and important town advantageously exchanged for New York? I forgot that we still possess the fishing hamlet of Halifax.

The Hon. Temple Luttrell, son of an earl, offered a speech full of historical allusions both ancient and modern. He insisted:

It is a very unfair argument to alledge that the Americans fight for independency---You must be sensible, Sir, that the only way to straighten a bow is to wrest it with vigour to an opposite curve: the acts of this legislature affecting the colonists were so warped from rectitude, that their only chance to recover a right line of justice was by proceeding to contrary extremities, to announce disunion and absolute freedom. . . .

If you empower the commissioners in America [Adm. Richard Howe and Gen. Sir William Howe] to propose peace on equitable conditions, offer to restore their charters, and relinquish the unsustainable claim of taxation with a good grace---even now while your armies figure in the field, under hitherto triumphant generals---and I make no doubt, but by so laudable a step, you will obtain from your colonies, through the Howe’s, as fair and magnanimous an answer, as that which was sent from the Falerii to the Roman senate, by the great Camillus---“The Romans in having preferred justice to conquest, have taught us to be satisfied with submission instead of liberty.”

The supporters of the American cause were thus not much better informed about the state of the new U.S. of A. than the government ministers. They believed the Declaration of Independence was just a bargaining position and might yet be withdrawn.

TOMORROW: The debate rolls on.

Dining with the “agreable society” of Paris

In the fall of 1777, the historian Catharine Macaulay and her companion Elizabeth Arnold arrived in Paris.

They were supposed to proceed to Nice for Macaulay’s health, but she discovered a reason to stay in the capital, as she later told the Earl of Harcourt:

When I arrived at Paris the Physician to whom Mr. [Horace] Walpole recommended me said that I should certainly perish on the road if I attempted to go farther.

Happily for me the Bark which I had before repeatedly tried in vain about a week after I was at Paris began to have so good an effect as to abate my fever sufficiently for me to partake of that agreable society.

Arnold later reported that the “agreable society” included the authors Anne-Marie du Boccage (shown above) and Marmontel, Madame Helvetius, Count Sarsfield, the Duc de Liancourt, the Duc de Harcourt, Abbé Seignelay Colbert de Castlehill, the British ambassador Lord Stormont, and the recently ousted government minister Turgot. (Plus a lady named “Madame Grigson” whom I couldn’t identify.)

As a British Whig, Macaulay expected to find the French capital under the oppression of an absolute monarchy. Instead, she heard a lot of people agreeing with her own ideas about republicanism.

I must tell your Lordship that after the French had paid me compliments on my genius and on my literary powers, the quality which they regarded as the next highest compliment was that I was a hater of kings.

In regard to the part they take in our civil wars, they are all American mad; and I do assure you, my Lord, that even your Lordship would not be well received in France if you were not an American. All the enlightened French wish ardently to see a large empire established on a republican basis to keep the monarchies of the world in order; and all the vulgar have the same earnest desire, through hatred and jealousy of the English.

By “our civil wars,” Macaulay meant the British government’s conflict with the thirteen breakaway colonies in North America.

To be sure, Macaulay wasn’t seeing a cross-section of French society. She met mainly with progressive intellectuals and aristocrats who knew of her as an anti-government author in Britain. And as she acknowledged, even Frenchmen who supported the traditional order (“the vulgar”) saw a reason to support the new U.S. of A.—in order to weaken Britain.

There was one thing Macaulay couldn’t stand about France, however, and after a few weeks it sent her back to Bath:

it was sad necessity which drove me away; as my stomach was always unfortunately delicate, I nauseated from the first, tho’ I was prejudiced in its favor, at all the food I met with in France; their meat is carrion, their poultry and even their game insipid, and their cookery most detestable. They have no good sources to season their meats with, and they use them too sparingly; their made dishes are a collection of gravy drawn from bad meat, fat, &c., without over flavour but what a little onion gives; thus the stomach is loaded with everything which is baneful to it without the assistance of warm spices to help digestion; and, in addition to these mortifications, as my stomach was very weak after my illness, all their wines turned sour upon it.

Thus all the juices of my body, vitiated by my long and important illness, was deprived of that nourishment which can alone restore the decayed strength and yield fresh balm to the oppressed constitution.

Macaulay thus found the French national constitution less oppressive than she expected, but her own constitution oppressed by French cuisine. Once again, her health was on a knife’s edge.

TOMORROW: A note to Dr. Franklin.

Campaigns for Two Portraits in the U.K.

A couple of news stories about British art caught my eye recently.

In 1727 Sir Robert Walpole, then defining the post of prime minister, commissioned the thirty-year-old engraver William Hogarth to paint a portrait of his youngest son, Horace.

The result is “the earliest-known commissioned picture of an identifiable sitter by Hogarth and his first-known portrait of a child.” The painting’s creator, subject, and commissioner were three of the century’s most notable Britons.

Horace Walpole grew up to design and commission his Strawberry Hill mansion, a pioneering Gothic Revival structure. He also pioneered the Gothic in fiction with The Castle of Otranto.

Horace Walpole’s childhood portrait is still in private hands, and Strawberry Hill House & Garden, now a museum, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to buy it. The trust that runs the museum says:

The National Heritage Memorial Fund has generously awarded the Trust £115k and Art Fund has kindly offered £90k, but we now need to raise the final £25k by 14 April 2022, to meet the total cost of £230k.

For a look at the portrait and the fundraising campaign, go to this page.

In 1774, a young man called Omai (Mai to his compatriots) from Raiatea, one of the Society Islands, arrived in London. He had traveled on H.M.S. Adventure, commanded by Capt. James Cook, and was introduced to London society by the naturalist Joseph Banks.

Several leading British artists made portraits of Omai. In 1776 Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a full-length picture of the young man in robes and turban (shown above). In 1777 Omai returned to the South Pacific, and he reportedly died two years later.

In 2001 the Earl of Carlisle sold the Reynolds portrait of Omai to an Irish horse-racing magnate, John Magnier, for £10.3 million ($15 million). A few years later the British government sought to buy the painting for £12.5 million for the Tate Museum, but Magnier declined. He was able to have the picture displayed in Ireland from 2005 to 2011. Since then it has been in a “secure art storage facility” in London.

According to ArtNews, it’s unclear if Magnier still owns the painting, but last year the owner applied to export the picture from Britain again. The U.K. government temporarily barred its removal, designating Raynolds’s portrait as of “outstanding significance in the study of 18th-century art, in particular portraiture,” and “a signal work in the study of colonialism and empire, scientific exploration and the history of the Pacific.”

The latest estimate of the painting’s market value is £50 million ($65 million). Under British law, if any of Britain’s public museums commits by 10 July to try to raise that money, the painting will stay in the U.K. until next March to allow time for that campaign. But the Art Newspaper says, “it is unlikely any cash-strapped national museum can afford the hefty price tag.”

The Secret of Sir Barrington Beaumont

While reading about Count Axel von Fersen for yesterday’s posting, I saw some intriguing anecdotes in his Wikipedia entry, quoted from The Reminiscences of Sir Barrington Beaumont, Bart., published in 1902.

I followed those up, finding a text with a lot about Von Fersen and a little about Horace Walpole, Charles James Fox, Marie Antoinette, and other famous figures that was much too good to be true.

Indeed, the reviewers of 1902 quickly caught on to that book as a fictional memoir of the eighteenth century.

The Irish Monthly reviewer wrote:

It pretends to be a real diary, the writer of which arranged that it should not be read till seventy years after his death; but one perceives at once that it is in reality a novel, bringing in such real persons as George Selwyn, Horace Walpole, Count Fersen, Marie Antoinette, and others. The writer has evidently studied the period well, though we suspect that Macaulay or Abraham Hayward would detect sundry inaccuracies and anachronisms. There is plenty of incident, lively conversations, epigrams original and selected, and a clear and correct style that is never dull.

Other readers, however, were not so pleased with the book. The Spectator stated:

No one, we imagine, is likely to be deceived by Memoirs of Sir Barrington, which profess on the title-page to be “now, by permission of his great grandson, published for the first time.” In spite of a serious preface, some notes by an editor, and the information that the names of the writer and the two chief personages have been altered, the imposture (if it deserves such a grave title) is so crudely and clumsily carried out that one scarcely thinks the writer or his publisher can expected it to be taken seriously. . . . [These pages] tell us little which was not well known, and that which is not well known in them is of little interest. The truth is they do not bear even upon the surface the stamp of genuineness.

And the critic in The Academy and Literature groused:

If the public greedily swallowed bogus love letters, the author probably argued, why should it not revel in bogus reminiscences? And we can only echo, Why not? The taste would not be more remarkable than that which finds savour in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy. But to be successful the literary practical joke requires to be played with a nice combination of dash and dexterity. The creator of Sir Barrington Beaumont is not wanting in audacity,…but his attempt to imitate the style and reproduce the atmosphere of his chosen period is almost ludicrous in its inadequacy. . . .

This biographical joke might have been amusing if it had been better played, but unfortunately the author had no qualifications for his self-imposed task beyond a superficial knowledge of his period, and he has neglected to use use such simple devices as might have given his work external resemblance to a genuine memoir. He should have clothed the volume in imitation calf, and provided an elaborate index, copious foot-notes, and an appendix.

If a conscientious attempt had been made to imitate the style of 1812, and if the wits had been made to discuss contemporary tittle-tattle instead of paraphrasing their printed witticisms, the work might have mystified a section of the public. As it is, the author will probably fall between two stools, for his book is not a sufficiently good imitation of a last-century memoir to appeal to lovers of biography, nor a sufficiently good imitation of a novelette to appeal to lovers of light fiction.

The British Library now credits the book as a novel by Michael J. Barrington, a name that doesn’t appear anywhere in the printed volume.

Of course, some copies of this book got into larger library collections. Google Books scanned them. The Hathi Trust and Internet Archive took up one of the imperfect Google scans. Automated publishers of “classic” (i.e., public-domain) literature have vacuumed up the files and offer the book through online retailers.

As a result, The Reminiscences of Sir Barrington Beaumont, Bart. is more widely available today than it’s ever been, and most forms of the text carry no warning that it’s fiction. It is not and has never been a historical source about the eighteenth century.

A New Government in Britain in 1770

As the year draws to a close, I’m looking back on some of the notable events of 1770 that I didn’t discuss on their Sestercentennial anniversaries.

In January 1770, the Duke of Grafton’s government collapsed in London.

The duke had become prime minister in 1768 after William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, retired in a depression and Charles Townshend died unexpectedly. There was a lot of in-fighting among his fellow ministers, and sniping from both the left and right.

On 9 January, the lord chancellor, the Earl of Camden, ticked off all the other ministers but Grafton so much they decided he had to be replaced. Grafton asked an experienced government lawyer long allied with Pitt, Charles Yorke (shown above), to take the lord chancellor’s position. But Yorke had promised another Whig faction, under the Marquess of Rockingham, that he wouldn’t join Grafton’s government, so he declined.

At that point George III got personally involved. He invited Yorke to a private audience on 16 January and urged him to take the chancellorship. The king repeated the advice at a levee the next day, hinting that there would be no second chance. Yorke gave in, agreeing to the post in return for the usual peerage.

Almost immediately Yorke had second thoughts. (Or, given the way he’d wavered over the decision for days, seventh thoughts.) He moved from “the most violent agitation of spirits” to “a fixed state of melancholy.” On 19 January, he vomited blood. On 20 January, he died. Yorke had received the paperwork to elevate himself to be Baron Morden but had refused to put the chancellor’s seal on it.

Soon there were rumors that Yorke had committed suicide, and the debate continues. In the late nineteenth century the Dictionary of National Biography stated:

It was asserted, and came to be widely believed, that, goaded to frenzy by the resentment with which his defection was regarded by his party, the chancellor had committed suicide; and, as there was no post-mortem or other equivalent autopsy of the corpse, the lugubrious surmise remained alike uncorroborated and unrefuted.

As of this week Wikipedia says:

He went to his brother’s house, where he met the leaders of the Opposition, and feeling at once overwhelmed with shame, fled to his own house, where three days later he committed suicide (20 January 1770).

But the History of Parliament website argues:

The extraordinary circumstances of his death made it inevitable that there should be rumours of suicide. Indeed, in his Memoirs of the reign of George III [Horace] Walpole states as a fact that Yorke died ‘by his own hand’, though when he wrote to Mann, 22 Jan. 1770, he had attributed the death to natural causes. It is perhaps suspicious that the letters from Joseph Yorke to Hardwicke which must have referred to these events should have disappeared. But the case for a natural death is strong. Yorke had been in poor health for some time. On 8 Jan. 1770 he had written to Hardwicke that a ‘severe cold’ and ‘feverish heat…disables me from coming to town: I shall hardly be fit to stir before the end of the week’. On the 11th he had received Grafton’s letter asking to meet him. The succeeding days had been extremely taxing. Levett Blackborne passed on to a friend the account he had received from ‘a young lady—a relative of Mrs. Yorke’:

He ate voraciously and beyond his usual manner—which latterly was generally too much. Before the taking away of the cloth he complained of sickness and indigestion ... growing worse, he retired into a back dressing room, where he was heard retching with vehemence. After some time the family in the parlour was alarmed, and he was carried to bed having, as supposed, broke a blood vessel in vomiting.

This agrees in the main with Agneta Yorke’s account of her husband’s last days.

However he died, everyone agrees that the strain of the appointment was too much for Yorke.

Soon the Duke of Grafton resigned. The king pressed the chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the House of Commons to form a new government, which he managed to do by the end of January. That man was Lord North.

The Duke of Grafton’s government had been widely criticized for not preventing France from taking over Corsica in 1769. In contrast, Lord North’s government faced down Spain over the Falklands later in 1770. That foreign policy victory gave him standing to remain prime minister even as the crisis in the North American colonies got worse and worse.

Walpole on Young Washington

Horace Walpole, the son of British prime minister Robert Walpole and at the end of his life the fourth Earl of Orford, died in 1797.

A quarter-century later, Baron Holland edited and published Walpole’s review of the 1750s, ultimately titled Memoirs of the Reign of King George II.

In his manuscript, Walpole wrote this about the year 1754:

In August came news of the defeat of Major [George] Washington in the Great Meadows on the western borders of Virginia: a trifling action, but remarkable for giving date to the war. The encroachments of the French have been already mentioned; but in May they had proceeded to open hostilities. Major Washington with about fifty men attacked one of their parties, and slew the commanding Officer. In this skirmish he was supported by an Indian half king [Tanacharison] and twelve of his subjects, who in the Virginian accounts, is called a very considerable Monarch.

On the third of July, the French being reinforced to the number of nine hundred, fell on Washington in a small fort, which they took, but dismissed the Commander with military honours, being willing, as they expressed it in the capitulation, to show that they treated them like friends!

In the express which Major Washington dispatched on his preceding little victory, he concluded with these words; “I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”

On hearing of this letter, the King said sensibly, “He would not say so, if he had been used to hear many.” However, this brave braggart learned to blush for his rodomontade, and desiring to serve General [Edward] Braddock as Aid-de-camp, acquitted himself nobly.

Young Washington’s comment about whistling bullets didn’t appear in an official dispatch about this event but in an earlier letter to his little brother, as discussed here. That letter made it into the press in both Virginia and London. Walpole appears to be our only source for George II’s response, but there’s solid evidence Londoners were talking about Washington’s callow bravado.

Walpole immediately went on to discuss another episode in the coming of the Seven Years’ War in the same gossipy style:

The violence of this proceeding gave a reverberation to the stagnated politics of the Ministry: in a moment, the Duke of Newcastle assumed the hero, and breathed nothing but military operations: he and the Chancellor held Councils of War; none of the Ministers, except Lord Holderness, were admitted within their tent. They knew too well how proper the Duke was to be consulted: of course they were jealous, and did not consult him.

Instead of him, they summoned one [Horatio] Gates, a very young officer just returned from Nova Scotia, and asked his advice. He was too sensible of their absurdity, and replied, that he had never served but in Nova Scotia, and it would be impertinent to give his opinion; he was ready to answer any questions.

In this manuscript, Walpole never mentioned that the “very young officer” he wrote about was his own godson, named after him. Walpole’s mother had employed Gates’s mother as a housekeeper.

Source of “the volley fired by a young Virginian”?

In The Fight with France for North America (1902), Arthur Granville Bradley wrote:

The killing of Jumonville raised a great commotion not only in the colonies but in Europe. “It was the volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America,” says Horace Walpole, “that set the world on fire.”

That line referred to George Washington, then a young major in the Virginia militia, ordering his men to fire on the French officer Jumonville in 1754.

That’s the earliest example I’ve found of that quotation attributed to Walpole. In the following decades it was whittled down to: “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.” I see it appearing mainly in local histories of places important in the French and Indian War, but in the late twentieth century it started to appear in biographies of Washington. Lots of them.

So far as I can tell, those biographies cite previous biographies rather than any collection of Walpole’s writings. I’ve seen the line quoted by such authoritative authors as Peter Henriques, Ron Chernow, Russell Shorto, and various National Park Service resources.

In The Loyal Son (2017), Daniel Mark Epstein noted the similarity of that line to one attributed to Voltaire (shown above), and suggested “the belletrist Horace Walpole [was] translating the words of Voltaire.”

Indeed, in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), Voltaire wrote:

La complication des intérets politique est venuë au point qu’un coup de canon tiré en Amérique peut être le signal de l’embrasement de l’Europe.

That was translated a few years later by the Scottish editor and novelist Tobias Smollett as:

So complicated are the political interests of the present times, that a shot fired in America shall be the signal for setting all Europe together by the ears.

That idiom about ears not only means nothing today but it didn’t replicate Voltaire’s metaphor. “Embrasement” means setting on fire. In 1884, the historian Francis Parkman offered a better translation in Montcalm and Wolfe:

Such was the complication of political interests, that a cannon-shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe in a blaze.

There was, to be sure, no cannon involved in Washington’s action. But Voltaire was playing on readers’ knowledge of signal cannon.

How did Walpole come into the picture? I can’t tell. He and Voltaire did correspond about Maj. Washington’s attack on the Jumonville party in 1768, but Walpole’s letters of 21 June and 27 July don’t contain the phrase about “a young Virginian in the backwoods.”

Some authors cite Walpole’s Memoirs of the Reign of George II for the line about Washington. That long book does include one paragraph about young Washington, but not this line.

I’ve found some French versions of the line about “a young Virginian in the backwoods.” However, they all render “backwoods” differently, suggesting that they’re modern translations from the English rather than a phrase that Voltaire set down in French centuries ago.

At this point, therefore, I suspect that the oft-repeated line attributed to Walpole was actually created by A. G. Bradley, mixing up what Parkman said Voltaire wrote about the Jumonville incident with what Walpole wrote about Washington.

If anyone can find the quotation in question in Walpole’s voluminous writings, or anywhere else before Bradley’s book, I’d welcome the additional information.

TOMORROW: What Walpole definitely wrote about young Washington.

What Do We Know about Gen. de Steuben’s Sexuality?

Last month The Nib published Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings’s comic about Gen. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as a gay man.

I found it inaccurate at several spots. Yet the core message—that Steuben was both important to the Continental Army’s success and sexually attracted to other men—is almost certainly correct. It’s just that a lot of the details, especially those supporting that conclusion, are wildly exaggerated.

Most of the evidence about the Baron de Steuben’s sexuality appears in John Macauley Palmer’s 1937 biography, General von Steuben. Palmer admired Steuben greatly and disliked the idea of the baron being gay, so he tried hard to refute the evidence, leaving logical circles in the ground as he spun. But he did publish the relevant sources in English translation.

Many of the original European documents were probably destroyed in World War 2, along with others that might have been helpful. It’s therefore unlikely that we’ll find new evidence from Steuben’s lifetime. But we can do a better job than Palmer of interpreting those documents and spotting the most likely conclusions.

This comic instead overstates the evidence in various ways. It doesn’t cite sources but appears to have been based on articles written for American newspapers, magazines, and websites over the past twenty-five years since Randy Shilts’s Conduct Unbecoming focused attention on Steuben as a gay man.

I’ll go through the statements I think are exaggerated.

“Steuben lived openly as a homosexual before the term was even invented.”

It’s true that the word “homosexual” was coined in 1868. More important (as Trujillo and Hastings later acknowledge), people’s understanding of sexuality and expectations of how gay men behave were different in the Baron de Steuben’s lifetime and in our own. So what does it mean to say he “lived openly as a homosexual”?

Gen. de Steuben was a lifelong bachelor. He didn’t marry a woman while having affairs with men, as it was and is said of his monarch Frederick the Great of Prussia, Frederick’s brother Prince Henry, and Lord George Germain in Britain. The baron’s title was too new, his estate too small, to make a direct heir necessary. In that respect, Steuben was more like Horace Walpole or Charles Paxton.

But neither is there any evidence of Gen. de Steuben claiming a longtime partner or expressing sexual interest in males. When he set up a household with a young man late in life, he presented that man as his secretary.

Some of Gen. de Steuben’s letters express affection for other men more plainly than 20th-century male correspondents did, but there are similar letters between eighteenth-century men who had active heterosexual lives. Even in the baron’s circle, there’s a lot of joshing about young ladies, whether sincere or not.

So the comic’s statement that Steuben “lived openly as a homosexual” is highly questionable at best.

“Steuben was expelled from Germany on charges of sodomy.”

There was of course no political entity called “Germany” in Steuben’s lifetime. He was born in Prussia, but in the late 1760s and early 1770s he was a powerful government minister in the small principality of Hohenzollern-Hechingen. And then suddenly he wasn’t.

The baron met with American envoys Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin in Paris in the summer of 1777, but they couldn’t promise him a rank and good pay in the Continental Army. He instead sought a position in Baden. An official from that small country wrote to the prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen on 13 Aug 1777:

It has come to me from different sources that M. de Steuben is accused of having taken familiarities with young boys which the laws forbid and punish severely. I have even been informed that that is the reason why M. de Steuben was obliged to leave Hechingen and that the clergy of your country intend to prosecute him by law as soon as he may establish himself anywhere.

That’s the principal contemporaneous evidence for Gen. de Steuben’s homosexuality. We might even say the baron wasn’t accused of “sodomy” but of molesting children (in the original French, “d’avoir pris avec de jeunes garçons des familiaritiés, que les Loix defendent & punissent sévérément”). Again, the period’s understanding of sexual behavior is significant: the Prussian court appears to have revived the classical Greek admiration of adolescent boys as a noble way of expressing homosexual desire.

About five days after this letter was drafted, Steuben was back in Paris, over 300 miles away. Now he was quite interested in the Americans’ offer. By 4 September the baron had signed on to their cause, on 10 September he left Paris for Marseilles, and on 26 September he sailed for America, never to return.

All that said, no one has found evidence that Baron de Steuben faced formal “charges of sodomy” or that he was officially “expelled” from any country. Palmer even argued that the real problem in Hohenzollern-Hechingen was a budget crunch, and that the accusations of sexual misconduct were trumped up by Steuben’s court enemies—though he offered no evidence for such enmity. But the most likely explanation is that Baron de Steuben left his post and then Europe under a cloud because of those accusations of sexual misconduct, thus removing himself in a bid to keep the scandal as quiet as possible.

So again, The Nib’s comic takes the incomplete, somewhat murky evidence from Steuben’s lifetime and offers readers a definite statement reflecting modern expectations.

TOMORROW: What Franklin, Washington, and others knew.