But the French had no corresponding fault to find. The English ambassador was princely and lavish; he was spending money, as he himself owned, at the rate of £11,000 a year; he was greatly in the Queen’s favour, so greatly that he has been included by certain authorities (notably Tilly) in their lists of her lovers. Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who, although an inaccurate was yet a contemporary writer, says that this was not so, and that he has seen a letter-case, preserved by the duke, full of Marie Antoinette’s notes addressed to him. Wraxall says that they were written on private concerns, commissions that she requested him to execute for her, principally regarding English articles of dress or ornament, and other innocent and unimportant matters. Whether Dorset was or was not her lover is not of the smallest importance; and surely no one would grudge, at this distance of time, any pleasure that a princess so young and so unfortunate might have enjoyed in life.
A question in which the Duke was naturally much interested was the affair of the diamond necklace. His despatches to the Foreign Office are full of references to the story, from August 1785 onwards:
The usually credited account is, that the Cardinal [de Rohan] has forged an order from the Queen to the Jeweller of the Crown to deliver to him diamonds to the amount of 1,600,000 livres, and which diamonds he actually received. What makes this event the more extraordinary is that the Cardinal is known to be a man of extremely good parts, and is in the enjoyment of the greatest honour and revenues to which any subject in the Church can aspire.
And again:
Mme. de la Motte, from an apprehension that her life is in danger, affects to have lost her senses. The jailer, upon entering her room the day before yesterday, was some time before he discovered her, and at length found her under her bed, quite naked.
It would, of course, take up too much space to give all Dorset’s despatches on this subject. I mention them chiefly because a large proportion of the diamonds composing the original necklace are at Knole, one half having been purchased by the Duke of Dorset after the necklace had been split up and brought to England, and the other half by the Duke of Sutherland. This, at least, is the tradition; and there is some evidence to support it, in a receipt among the Knole papers:
Received of his Grace the DUKE of DORSET nine hundred and seventy-five pounds for a brilliant necklace.
| £975 | For Mr. JEFFERYS and self, W M JONES. |
and this receipt is endorsed “Paid 1790,” which tallies with the date when the necklace was sold by De la Motte to Jefferys, a jeweller in Piccadilly. They are beautiful diamonds, small, but very blue, and are set at present in the shape of a tasselled diadem.
Another topic which temporarily exercised the duke while in Paris was the “very extraordinary proposal” made to the French Government by a M. Montgolfier to