[2] Graham first appeared in London in 1782. He was a graduate of Edinburgh, wrote in a bombastic style, and possessed a great fluency of elocution. He opened in Pall Mall a mansion which he called the ‘Temple of Health.’ The front was ornamented with an enormous gilt sun, a statue of Hygeia, &c. The rooms were superbly furnished, and the decorations, mirrors, &c., gave to the whole the appearance of an enchanted palace. Single admission to his lectures on health and the birth of children cost two guineas—a sum readily given. The Goddess of Health usually delivered a supplementary lecture when the doctor concluded. When two guinea auditors were exhausted, his two gigantic porters, decked in gorgeous liveries, deluged the town with bills stating that the lectures would be delivered at one guinea each. The descending scale ultimately reached half-a-crown, and at last he exhibited the Temple of Health itself at one shilling per head. Its chief attraction was a ‘celestial bed,’ with rich hangings and glass legs. The quack promised such results from merely sleeping on this enchanted couch that married persons of high rank and respectability were known to have given one hundred pounds for the accommodation. Persons more foolish still and as highly exalted were found who gave him one thousand pounds for a supply of his ‘elixir of life.’ He then, when dupes were not grown scarce, but required variety in the means of imposition, took to the practice and public exhibition of earth-bathing. He and his goddess stood an hour each day immersed to the chin in earth, above which their heads appeared, dressed in the extravagant fashion of the day. In this position he delivered a lecture on the salubrity of the practice at sums for single admissions which commenced at a guinea and ended at a shilling. When all London had heard and seen him he made a provincial tour; but, in spite of his elixir of life, he died at the early age of fifty-two; and, in spite of the facility with which he gained money, he died in poverty. The famous Mrs. Macaulay married his brother, and Dr. Arnold, of Leicester, the author of an able treatise on insanity, married his sister. In the profession of the most impudent quackery Dr. Graham has never been equalled, either for impudence or the success which attended it.
EDWARD WORTLEY MONTAGU.
Lady Mary Pierrepont, when she wrote to Mr. Wortley touching the death of his sister, said she had lost what she loved most, and could thenceforth only love those who were nearest and dearest to her departed friend. Out of this hint, it may be, came the marriage of Lady Mary and Mr. Wortley. It seemed a disinterested match on both sides, but it was not fruitful in happiness. Of this union were born a son and daughter; the mother reserved all her love for the latter.
The son was born in May 1713. Within two months from that date Lady Mary had left her firstborn to mercenary, but perhaps efficient and kindly care. In July she wrote to her husband, ‘I heard from your little boy yesterday, who is in good health.’ In that phrase, so cold in its unmotherly temper, may perhaps be found the cause why that ‘little boy’ became so wayward, and why he developed into a man so wilful and so irreclaimable. In 1717 the boy was taken by his parents to Constantinople, where Mr. Wortley acted, for a few months, as English representative. On the return from this embassy, Lady Mary tarried for a while at Belgrade. At that time the small-pox was a deadly scourge in England. In Turkey it was less mortal. The infidel Turk anticipated and modified the disease by inoculation. Lady Mary had the courage to submit her child to the novel system of ‘engrafting,’ as it was called. In a letter written at Belgrade in March 1718 she says: ‘The boy was engrafted last Tuesday, and is at this time singing and playing, very impatient for his supper. I pray God my next may give as good an account of him.’ For society at large the step which Lady Mary took was most beneficial; but few mothers, however courageous, would have had the heart, in a foreign land too, to suffer such an experiment to be made on an only son, not yet five years of age. She had, however, full confidence in the efficacy of the proceeding: and she remarked that she would have imparted the matter to the doctors generally, only that they were too selfish to sanction a course which would diminish their incomes!
In the following year commenced the daring escapades of this young 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.