The Lottery of 1753 for the Purchase of the Sloane and Harleian Collections.
Eventually, it was enacted that there should be a hundred thousand shares, at three pounds a share; that two hundred thousand pounds should be allotted as prizes, and that the remaining hundred thousand—less the expenses of the lottery itself—should be applied to the threefold purposes of the Act, namely, the purchase of the Sloane and Harleian Collections; the providing of a Repository; and the creation of an annual income for future maintenance.
By the precautionary clauses of the Bill, provision was made for the prolonged sale of shares; for the prevention of the purchase by any one adventurer of more than twenty shares, or ‘tickets,’ and for other impediments, as it was thought, to a fraudulent traffic in the combined covetousness and ignorance of the unwary.
All these precautions proved to be vain. Mr. Pelham’s opposition was abundantly justified by the result. Fraud proved to be, in that age, just as inseparable an element in a Lottery scheme, however good its purpose, as fraud has proved to be, in this age, an inseparable element (at one stage or other of the business) in a Railway scheme,—however useful the line proposed to be made.
It thus came to pass that the foundation of the British Museum gave rise to a great public scandal. When evidence was produced that many families had been brought to misery, as the first incident in the annals of a beneficent and noble foundation, a somewhat dull Session of Parliament was suddenly enlivened by an animated and angry debate.
The Prosecution of Leheup for his dealings with the Museum Lottery.
The provident clauses in the Lottery Act of 1753 were made of no effect, mainly by entrusting the chief share in working the Act to an accomplished jobber. One Peter Leheup was made a Commissioner of the Lottery. This man had held some employment or other at Hanover, from which he had been recalled with circumstances of disgrace. |1753. December.| It is to be inferred, from the way in which his name points an epigrammatic phrase in one of the letters of Bolingbroke,[[53]] and in more than one of those of Horace Walpole, that it had come, long before this appointment took place, to have a sort of proverbial currency, like the names of ‘Curll’ or of ‘Chartres.’ But, be that as it may, Mr. Commissioner Leheup set on foot as thriving and as flagitious a traffic in Sloane lottery tickets, as was ever set on foot in railway shares by a clever promoter of our own day. He wrote circular letters instructing his correspondents how most effectually to evade the Act. He sold nearly three hundred tickets to a single dealer by furnishing him with a list of ‘Roes’ and ‘Does,’ ‘Gileses’ and ‘Stileses’ at discretion. He supplied himself, with equal liberality; and contrived to close the subscription, after an actual publicity of exactly six hours—for the issue of one hundred thousand tickets. In a few days, of course, tickets in abundance were to be had, at sixteen shillings premium upon each, and in what looked to be a still rising market. The trap proved to be brilliantly ‘successful.’
The subsequent explosion of parliamentary anger was rather increased than lessened by an attempt of Henry Fox (afterwards the first Lord Holland) to extenuate Leheup’s offence by some arguments of the ‘Tu quoque’ sort. By a great majority, the House of Commons sent up an address praying the King to direct his Attorney General to prosecute the chief offender, who was accordingly convicted and fined a thousand pounds. It is not uninstructive to note that Horace Walpole—himself one of the Sloane Trustees—treats the matter in one of his letters exactly in the offhand man-of-the-world style in which Henry Fox had treated it in the House of Commons.[[54]]
By this unfortunate episode, the name of one of the best of Englishmen was brought into a sort of momentary connection with the name of one of the worst. But the chief discredit of the story does not really rest upon Leheup. A private citizen, of moderate means, had been willing to expend seventy or eighty thousand pounds—besides an inestimable amount of labour and research—upon an object essentially and largely public. Yet a British Parliament could not summon up enough of public spirit to tax its own members, in common with their tax-paying fellow subjects throughout the realm, to the extent of a hundred thousand pounds, in order to meet an obvious public want, to redeem an actual parliamentary pledge, and to secure a conspicuous national honour for all time to come. That want of public spirit did not exhaust its results with the ruin of the poor families, scattered here and there, whose scanty means had been hazarded and lost by gambling, under a parliamentary temptation. It impressed itself, so to speak, on the subsequent history of the institution for more than forty years. The Museum had been founded grudgingly. It was kept up parsimoniously.
Had that fact been otherwise, the story of the knavery of Peter Leheup would have little merited recital a century after it, and he, had passed into oblivion.