There is mention of the Duke in another letter of Lady Mary to Lady Mar, dated February, 1724:
"In general, gallantry never was in so elevated a figure as it is at present. Twenty very pretty fellows (the Duke of Wharton being president and chief director) have formed themselves into a committee of gallantry. They call themselves Schemers; and meet regularly three times a week, to consult on gallant schemes for the advantage and advancement of that branch of happiness…. I consider the duty of a true Englishwoman is to do what honour she can to her native country; and that it would be a sin against the pious love I bear the land of my nativity, to confine the renown due to the Schemers within the small extent of this little island, which ought to be spread wherever men can sigh, or women wish. 'Tis true they have the envy and curses of the old and ugly of both sexes, and a general persecution from all old women; but this is no more than all reformations must expect in their beginning."
More than one writer has asserted that it was the wit and beauty of Lady Mary that drew him thither. At the time the Duke was twenty-four and the lady nine years older. Certainly he paid her marked attention, but as he paid marked attention to all women who had not a hump or a squint— sometimes, maybe, he even overlooked the squint—it is as impossible to say whether he was in love with her as it is to assert that she was in love with him. From the little that is known of their intimacy, it would seem that they were merely good comrades—good comrades of the type that might bite or scratch at any moment. Horace Walpole, who was more than usually malicious where Lady Mary was concerned, could scarcely induce himself to allow her any qualities. "My Lady Stafford,"[5] he wrote to George Montagu in 1751, "used to live at Twickenham when Lady Mary Wortley and the Duke of Wharton lived there; she had more wit than both of them. What would I give to have had Strawberry Hill twenty years ago! I think anything but twenty years. Lady Stafford used to say to her sister, 'Well, child, I have come without my wit to-day'; that is, she had not taken her opium, which she was forced to do if she had any appointment, to be in particular spirits."
[Footnote 5: Claude Charlotte, Countess of Stafford, wife of Henry, Earl of
Stafford, and daughter of Philibert, Count of Grammont, and Elizabeth
Hamilton, his wife.]
Horace Walpole alluded to Lady Mary and the Duke in "The Parish Register of Twickenham":
"Twickenham, where frolic Wharton revelled
Where Montagu, with locks dishevelled.
Conflict of dirt and warmth combin'd,
Invoked—and scandalised the Nine."
What Pope thought of the Duke he expressed with the utmost vigour:
"Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days,
Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise:
Born with whate'er could win it from the wise,
Women and fools must like him, or he dies:
Though wondering senates hung on all he spoke.
The club must hail him master of the joke.
Shall parts so various aim at nothing new?
He'll shine a Tully and a Wilmot too.
Then turns repentant, and his God adores
With the same spirit that he drinks and whores;
Enough, if all around him but admire,
And now the punk applaud, and now the friar.
Thus with each gift of nature and of art,
And wanting nothing but an honest heart;
Grown all to all; from no one vice exempt,
And most contemptible, to shun contempt:
His passion still, to covet general praise,
His life, to forfeit it a thousand ways;
A constant bounty which no friend has made;
An angel tongue, which no man can persuade;
A fool, with more of wit than half mankind;
Too rash for thought, for action too refined:
A tyrant to his wife his heart approves;
A rebel to the very king he loves;
He dies, sad outcast of each church and state,
And, harder still! flagitious, yet not great.
Ask you why Wharton broke through every rule?
'Twas all for fear the knaves should call him fool."
The Duke wrote a play on Mary Queen of Scots—of which only four lines have been preserved:
"Sure were I free, and Norfolk were a prisoner,
I'd fly with more impatience to his arms,
Than the poor Israelite gaz'd on the serpent.
When life was the reward of every look."