The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (27 page)

Meanwhile John Blunt, one of the founders of the South Sea Company, had been taken into custody on 23 January. When the Committee reconvened after the weekend and Knight’s flight was established, Blunt, alarmingly, began to tell all. He made known the full extent of the bribe list, probably believing that the Commons Committee would give him a lesser punishment if he cooperated. He revealed that Knight had kept two books of accounts; he had taken the real book, ‘the green book’, with him into exile. This green book held the true names of those who had received bribes, whereas the false book listed pseudonyms. He stunningly revealed that: ‘More than £1 million had been spent on bribes . . . Blunt could not remember all the recipients; but certainly he said, he had followed the instructions of Craggs the younger by paying the Duchess of Kendal £10,000 in return for her “good offices” in bending the King’s ear when the Company launches its scheme . . .’
²⁶
Carswell notes:

he named Aislabie, Postmaster Craggs, Sunderland, Charles Stanhope [the minister James Stanhope’s cousin], the Duchess of Kendal, and Countess von Platen [Sophia Charlotte] . . . ‘What!’ exclaimed the bewildered Deputy Governor [Charles Joye, Deputy Governor of the South Sea Company]. ‘Royal ladies and all?’ Blunt was at his sanctimonious best. ‘Yes’, he replied; ‘the examination is very strict and nothing but the whole truth will do.’
²⁷

In February the crisis took a turn for the worse for Melusine, amongst others. The Tory Edward Harley rather gleefully reported to his father the Earl of Oxford:

This day Mr Brodrick, chairman of the Secret [Select] Committee, made his report, which took up four hours in the reading at the bar and the table. It discloses the greatest scene of corruption and villainy that ever was plotted in any civilized nation, wherein many members of both houses are concerned, the principal Ministers of State are named, and several ladies at court, who have had large stakes in this iniquity . . .
²⁸

It was imperative that Knight should never return, and George asked Melusine to intervene. She made it clear to the French diplomat Destouches that while parliament was baying to have Knight extradited, he should tell his master the Regent to ignore them; the king desired his government’s official requests for Knight’s return to be refused.
²⁹

But the caper continued as Knight unwittingly removed himself from the Regent’s clandestine protection. The House of Commons placed a bounty of £2,000 on Knight’s return and when he turned up in Brussels the British chargé d’affaires arranged for the issue of an Imperial arrest warrant. (Brussels was under the jurisdiction of the Emperor.) Knight, warned of his imminent arrest, fled to Liège, outside of Imperial authority. However, he was arrested before he arrived and imprisoned in Antwerp, firmly under the Emperor’s control.

In March a debate in the House of Lords accused Melusine, Sophia Charlotte, Bernstorff and Bothmer of accepting bribes from the South Sea Company. Lord Guildford leapt to the defence of Melusine and Sophia Charlotte, saying: ‘The ladies had had the right to receive such favours’, although he did not speak up for George’s Germans, specifically Bernstorff and Bothmer.

Now Melusine summoned her influence with the Emperor and her friendship with the Empress to block Knight’s extradition. Events descended into farce. The Commons’ demands for his
return reached a crescendo when 300 MPs descended on St James’s Palace in March, in an attempt to persuade George to press harder with the Emperor. (As with the Regent in France, behind the scenes Melusine was persuading Imperial diplomats of George’s desire that Knight should be kept imprisoned in Antwerp.) George however assured the MPs: ‘I am very well pleased that the instances which I have made for obtaining the delivering up of Mr Knight have given you satisfaction . . . I shall continue to employ my utmost endeavours for obtaining what you desire, and hope they will prove effectual.’
³⁰

But the Emperor, heeding Melusine and George, refused to comply, and in an elaborate subterfuge Knight was eventually allowed to escape from the Antwerp Citadel where he was being held, to France, on George’s express orders. In September 1721 the British envoy, William Leathes, wrote to the Imperial envoy: ‘he [George] is pleased to express the wish that Your Excellency should order the Governor of the Antwerp Citadel to enlarge Knight from confinement, allowing him not only to have liberty to walk on the Citadel, but to escape.’
³¹

Knight did not suffer in exile. He bought a comfortable house in Paris, a country estate, and thrived financially as a banker. But he was homesick. In 1730 Lady Irwine, who met him in Paris, wrote:

Mr Knight lives always here, and is quite metaporphised [
sic
] into a fine gentleman; from being a man of business he is now become a gallant home, which character just as ill becomes him as a suit of embroidery would a country bumpkin. He keeps a great table, has always a vast deal of company, and being both generous and rich, is much visited and esteemed; but amidst all these caresses and plenty, he . . . is perfectly unhappy he can’t breathe the air of dear England.
³²

Knight was only allowed to return in 1742, after Walpole’s fall from power.

While Melusine had managed to keep scandal away from George’s intimate circle, sacrifices had to be made to satisfy MPs and the public. The faithful Aislabie was one such casualty, victimized for his role in pushing the scheme through. He was accused of the ‘most notorious, dangerous, and infamous corruption’,
³³
imprisoned in the Tower and forced to relinquish all funds and property he had acquired since 1718.

Aislabie in fact received better treatment than others who were found guilty, who were obliged to surrender everything they had made since 1716, and not, as in Aislabie’s case, since 1718. Some historians believe that he received favourable treatment because the investments he made in the South Sea Company in his own name were actually made on behalf of various members of the royal family – George effectively gave him as lenient a sentence as possible to keep him quiet. For his part, Aislabie wrote in gratitude to Walpole in February 1722: ‘I am extremely sensible of your generosity and am more ashamed of my own follies and mistakes, than any severe treatment I might deserve at your hands could make me. Since you have been so good to promise to forget what is past, I shall not put you in mind of it any further, than to return my most hearty thanks.’
³⁴

Charles Stanhope, the cousin of George’s favourite English minister James Stanhope, was also accused. Stanhope was dismayed at the smearing of his cousin’s name. He saw the ruin of all he had achieved for George with his careful diplomacy in Europe. He was so humiliated at the baying of the Lords, he fainted in the House. He died three days later. George was deeply affected by his death. He visited Stanhope’s widow and ‘assured her that next to her, he was the person who had suffered the greatest loss in being deprived of a good servant and good friend, that there was nothing she could
ask he would not do for her and her children’. George arranged for a pension of £3,000 a year for her.
³⁵
He also used his influence to have cousin Charles acquitted, although the young man was compelled to resign his junior position at the treasury.

Yet another ministerial death, that of James Craggs of smallpox only days after James Stanhope’s, further depleted a shocked government. It was now essential that Sunderland, although accused, must survive or else the government would fall. He was saved, in a move of political expediency, by his old enemy Robert Walpole. The rash of casualties continued; James Craggs the elder chose to take his own life soon after his son’s death to avoid the scandal – his guilt was known to all.
³⁶

Thomas Harley, hostile to the ministry, reported everything to the Earl of Oxford:

London: the deaths of Stanhope and Craggs have much perplexed Lord Sunderland. Walpole is to have the Treasury and choose his own creatures. And Lord Townshend will have Methuen in Craggs’ place . . . The report of the secret committee made yesterday lays open Lord Sunderland for taking 40,000 l. Munster’s nieces 5,000 l. each. Aislabie a vast deal in several shapes, Charles Stanhope 50,000 l . . . Walpole undertakes to screen Sunderland, and the German ladies, and to let Aislabie and the rest take their chance.
³⁷

He continued next day: ‘The women are named, Aislabie very deep; never was such a group of felons ever got together.’
³⁸

As Harley so aptly put it, Walpole managed to ‘screen’ Melusine. Her predicament passed. Walpole was portrayed as the redeemer of the nation by many contemporaries and by his first biographer, Coxe. But his scheme to rescue the economy by merging part of it with the Bank of England never passed the House of Commons, and in fact an economy with strong underpinnings reasserted itself
by the middle of the year, independent of his efforts. By the end of March the crisis was over; people and Commons had had their fill of blood. Walpole’s course of remaining calm and shielding George, Melusine and Sophia Charlotte, as well as his sheer luck, both in not being associated with the passing of the original scheme and failing to purchase South Sea shares on the third subscription – his more financially cautious banker had not allowed him to – meant he was in the clear and free from scandal.

But he was not in fact unscathed. It is likely that he suffered huge losses, not least through his loans of £27,000 to Sir Caesar Child and Lord Hillsborough. They were financially ravaged by the Bubble and could not repay.

The next two decades would belong to Walpole politically. After Sunderland’s death in 1722 he was very much in the ascendancy. By the end of 1722 he was beginning to be thought of as the first minister, and known by the nickname ‘The Great Man’. George and Melusine would work closely with him until the end of George’s reign in 1727.

14.
Venality

Money was with her [Melusine] the principal and prevailing consideration, and he [Robert Walpole] was often heard to say, she was so venal a creature, that she would have sold the king’s honour for a shilling to the best bidder.

– William Coxe in his editorial reports on Reverend Etough’s minutes of a conversation with Sir Robert Walpole
¹

The Bubble debacle did not leave Melusine as rich as she had hoped. As she grew older, she grew more and more anxious about money. Her pension from George was £7,500 per annum. She had £10,000 in Bank of England stock, and an estate in Holstein, which she had purchased in 1720.
²
But still she believed herself poor. She had too many dependents not to be driven in large part by money, and events between 1722 and 1725, perhaps unfairly, put the seal on her reputation for venality.

To make up for her losses with the Bubble, in 1722 George granted her the patent to produce copper coinage in Ireland. Her disposal of the rights to an ironmaster, William Wood, for a profit of £10,000, led to one of the biggest scandals of George’s reign.

Melusine’s actions were not illegal (although they were perhaps immoral). Sunderland had arranged for her to receive the patent and she was perfectly within her rights to sell it, following a centuries-old tradition in using her position at court to bolster her income. And equally she was not legally obliged to screen whom she sold it to. William Wood purchased the rights in July 1722, and began to mint the coins in London in January 1723. The coins were well made, but the brass content was low. Furthermore the Irish were up in arms because they were forced to accept English coins, and they resented the tax of between £6,000 and £7,000 that the measure entailed.

The Irish parliament was enraged, as was Jonathan Swift, who believed the coins to be inferior. In his role as dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, he fanned the flames with his tuppenny pamphlets, which he wrote under the pseudonym M. B. Drapier. They were produced in their thousands and amongst the charges of
bribery, corruption and the destabilization of the Irish economy levelled at William Wood, they implicitly attacked Walpole’s government and blamed Melusine.

In October 1723 Walpole lamented Lord Carteret’s attacks on himself and Melusine in parliament.
³
He complained to Town-shend, who was with the king and Melusine in Hanover, that ‘Lord Carteret . . . flings dirt upon me, who passed the patent, and makes somebody [Melusine] uneasy, for whose sake it was done . . .’
⁴

And in another letter written to Townshend later in the month, Walpole justified and explained the careful process behind the production of the coins:

Sir Isaac [Newton – Master of the Mint] was consulted in every step in passing the patent, that was to assay, try, and prove the finesse and goodness of the copper, and the weight of the coin, Sir Isaac Newton was himself made the first controller; but at his request Mr Barton, his nephew, was made the controller in his room. Upon the first apprehension of this trouble, the controller was directed to try and prove the coin; and he has reported, that it answered in all respects; this report of the controller’s was, by order of the treasury, transmitted to Ireland; and I understand, was laid before the parliament of Ireland, but not at all regarded . . .
⁵