Edward Wortley’s countrymen did not think so ill of Lady Mary’s son; for in 1747 the electors of Huntingdonshire returned him, with Mr. Coulson Fellowes, member for the county. He was a silent but highly respectable member. In the year 1748 Mr. Wortley, the father, wrote to his wife some pleasant news he had heard of their son. The mother coldly replied, ‘I should be extremely pleased if I could depend on Lord Sandwich’s account of our son. As I am wholly unacquainted with him, I cannot judge how far he may be either deceived or interested.’ This singular mother cultivated her antipathies rather than her sympathies. The father seems to have considered his paternal duty was discharged by, wisely perhaps, keeping his son on a small allowance. The son lived as if he had already his inheritance in hand, and for a year or two he found society in London quite to his mind.
Among the ladies who figured on the Mall by day, who drew crowds around them at Vauxhall by night, and who were never out of the ‘Scandalous Chronicle’ of the period, was the ‘Pollard Ashe,’ as she was called. This miniature beauty was in some measure a mysterious individual. She was the daughter of a high personage, it was said, and such affinity was all she had to boast of in the way of family. In the June of 1750, Walpole thus wrote of her to George Montagu:
I had a card from Lady Caroline Petersham, to go with her to Vauxhall. I went accordingly to her house, and found her and the little Ashe ... they had just finished their last layer of red, and looked as handsome as crimson could make them.... We issued into the Mall to assemble our company, which was all the town.... We mustered the Duke of Kingston, Lord March (the old Second Duke of Queensbury of later years), Mr. Whitehead, a pretty Miss Beauclerc, and a very foolish Miss Sparre.... We got into the best order we could, and marched to our barge, with a boat of French horns attending and little Ashe singing. We paraded some time up the river, and at last debarked at Vauxhall.... A Mrs. Lloyd, seeing the two girls following Lady Petersham and Miss Ashe, said aloud, ‘Poor girls! I am sorry to see them in such bad company!’ Miss Sparre, who desired nothing so much as the fun of seeing a duel—a thing which, though she is fifteen, she has never been so lucky to see—took due pains to make Lord March resent this ... but he laughed her out of this charming frolic. Here we picked up Lord Granby ... very drunk.... He would fain have made love to Miss Beauclerc, who is very modest; and did not know what to do at all with his whispers or his hands. He then addressed himself to the Sparre, who was very well disposed to receive both.... At last, we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in our front, with the vizor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly and handsome.... We turned some chicken into a china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp, with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring, and rattling, and laughing, and were every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears.... The whole air of our party was sufficient to take up the whole attention of the garden.... It was three o’clock before we got home.
Very early in the year 1751 our hero made love to Miss Ashe, and at the same time appeared in public as the first ‘macaroni’ of the day, but with science and philosophy enough to render him worthy of being taken into brotherhood by the Royal Society. On February 9, 1751, Walpole writes:
Our greatest miracle is Lady Mary Wortley’s son, whose adventures have made so much noise; his parts are not proportionate, but his expense is incredible. His father scarce allows him anything; yet he plays, dresses, diamonds himself, even to distinct shoe-buckles for a frock, and has more snuff-boxes than would suffice a Chinese idol with a hundred noses. But the most curious part of his dress, which he has brought from Paris, is an iron wig; you literally would not know it from hair; I believe it is on this account that the Royal Society have just chosen him of their body.
His father, however, made no complaint of his son in his letters to his wife. The anxious mother invariably concluded that when nothing was said there was something to be dreaded. Accordingly, in a letter to her husband, dated May 1751, Lady Mary writes:
(May 24, 1751.) ‘I can no longer resist the desire I have to know what is become of my son. I have long suppressed it, from a belief that, if there was anything good to be told, you would not fail to give me the pleasure of hearing it. I find it now grows so much upon me, that whatever I am to know, I think it would be easier for me to support than the anxiety I suffer from my doubts. I beg to be informed, and prepare myself for the worst with all the philosophy I have.’
Her son was not in such a desperate condition as his mother supposed. The new Fellow of the Royal Society was simply making love to ‘the Pollard Ashe.’ In the summer of this year, 1751, Vauxhall and the Mall missed her; but the world knew very well whither she had wended, and with whom. In September 1751 Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her husband: ‘Young Wortley is gone to France with Miss Ashe. He is certainly a gentleman of infinite vivacity; but methinks he might as well have deferred this exploit till the death of his father.’ Walpole wrote to Mann that ‘Wortley, who, you know, has been a perfect Gil Blas, is thought to have added the famous Miss Ashe to the number of his wives.’
While London was busy with the story of the elopement of Miss Ashe with Edward Wortley Montagu, and this rather airy couple were on their amorous way to Paris, there was a young Mr. Roberts, not yet quite twenty-one years of age, sojourning at the Hôtel d’Orléans in that city, with a Miss Rose for a companion, Miss Rose’s sister for a friend, and various servants to wait on all three. Roberts lived like a milor, and he gave out that he was about to make the grand tour to Italy and back. Montagu’s quarters were at the Hôtel de Saxe. Roberts was a stranger to him, but Montagu not only called upon the wealthy traveller, on September 23, but sent him an invitation to dinner. The company consisted of Roberts, Lord Southwell, Mr. Taafe, M.P., and Montagu, who was also a member of the House of Commons. After coffee the party adjourned to Montagu’s room. Taafe produced dice and proposed play. Roberts declined, on the ground of being without money; but this and other pleas were overruled, and, ‘flustered with wine,’ which he said he had been made to drink, he sat down to tempt fortune. Fortune used this gambler ill; when he rose to return to his hotel he had lost 870 louis d’ors—400 to Taafe, 350 to Southwell, and 120 to Montagu. Taafe speedily demanded the amount he had won, and not finding it forthcoming the British legislator, with Lord Southwell, broke into his room about midnight, and under dreadful threats, made with swords drawn, compelled him to give drafts for the entire sum. The crafty Roberts, however, drew upon bankers with whom he had no effects; and, probably that he might be out of reach of arrest till he could give an explanation, he hurriedly set off for Lyons.
The bird had just flown when the three more fortunate gamblers, their drafts having been dishonoured, forcibly entered Roberts’s rooms and rifled them of everything valuable—a large sum in gold and silver, a very valuable assortment of jewellery and precious stones, and the two Miss Roses. There was 40,000 livres’ worth in all, not including the sisters. One of these ladies consented with alacrity to accompany Mr. Taafe, with his other booty, to his quarters at the Hôtel de Pérou. The sister went thither also, for society’s sake, and after a three days’ sojourn Taafe kissed their hands and sent them to England under the guardianship of another gentleman.