ever seeing her. She invested money for him in South Sea stock at his desire, and as was expressly stated, at his own risk. The value fell to half the price, and he tried to extort the original sum as a debt by a threat of exposing the correspondence to her husband. She seems to have been really alarmed, not at the imputation of gallantry, but lest her husband should discover the extent of her own speculations. This disposes of the second half of Pope’s line “Who starves a sister, or forswears a debt” (Epilogue to the Satires, i. 113), and the first charge is quite devoid of foundation. She did in fact try to rescue her favourite sister, the countess of Mar, who was mentally deranged, from the custody of her brother-in-law, Lord Grange, who had treated his own wife with notorious cruelty, and the slander originated with him.
In 1739 she went abroad, and although she continued to write to her husband in terms of affection and respect they never met again. At Florence in 1740 she visited Horace Walpole, who cherished a great spite against her, and exaggerated her eccentricities into a revolting slovenliness (see Letters, ed. Cunningham, i. 59). She lived at Avignon, at Brescia, and at Lovere, on the Lago d’Iseo. She was disfigured by a painful skin disease, and her sufferings were so acute that she hints at the possibility of madness. She was struck with a terrible “fit of sickness” while visiting the countess Palazzo and her son, and perhaps her mental condition made restraint necessary. As Lady Mary was then in her sixty-third year, the scandalous interpretation put on the matter by Horace Walpole may safely be discarded. Her husband spent his last years in hoarding money, and at his death in 1761 is said to have been a millionaire. His extreme parsimony is satirized in Pope’s Imitations of Horace (2nd satire of the 2nd book) in the portrait of Avidieu and his wife. Her daughter Mary, countess of Bute, whose husband was now prime minister, begged her to return to England. She came to London, and died in the year of her return, on the 21st of August 1762.
Her son, Edward Wortley Montagu (1713–1776), author and traveller, inherited something of his mother’s gift and more than her eccentricity. He twice ran away from Winchester School, and the second time made his way as far as Oporto. He was then sent to travel with a tutor in the West Indies, and afterwards with a keeper to Holland. He made, however, a serious study of Arabic at Leiden (1741), and returned twenty years later to prosecute his studies. His father made him a meagre allowance, and he was heavily encumbered with debt. He was M.P. for Huntingdon in 1747, and was one of the secretaries at the conference of Aix-la-Chapelle. In 1751 he was involved in a disreputable gaming quarrel in Paris, and was imprisoned for eleven days in the Châtelet. He continued to sit in parliament, and wrote Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republics . . . (1759). His father left him an annuity of £1000, the bulk of the property going to Lady Bute. He set out for extended travel in the East, and George Romney describes him as living in the Turkish manner at Venice. He had great gifts as a linguist, and was an excellent talker. His family thought him mad, and his mother left him a guinea, but her annuity devolved on him at her death. He died at Padua on the 29th of April 1776.
Lady Mary’s “Town Eclogues” were published in a pirated edition as Court Poems in 1716. Of her famous Letters from the East she made a copy shortly after her return to England. She gave the MS. to Benjamin Sowden, a clergyman of Rotterdam, in 1761. After Lady Mary’s death this was recovered by the earl of Bute but meanwhile an unauthenticated edition, supposed to have been prepared by John Cleland, appeared (1763), and an additional volume, probably spurious, was printed in 1767. The rest of the correspondence printed by Lord Wharncliffe in the edition of her letters is edited from originals in the Wortley collection. This edition (1837) contained “Introductory Anecdotes” by Lady Bute’s daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart. A more critical edition of the text, with the “Anecdotes,” and a “Memoir” by W. Moy Thomas, appeared in 1861. A selection of the letters arranged to give a continuous account of her life, by Mr A. R. Ropes, was published in 1892; and another by R. Brimley Johnson in “Everyman’s Library” in 1906. See also George Paston, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her Times (1907), which contains some hitherto unpublished letters. Lady Mary’s journal was preserved by her daughter, Lady Bute, till shortly before her death, when she burnt it on the ground that it contained much scandal and satire, founded probably on insufficient evidence, about many distinguished persons. There is a full and amusing account of Edward Wortley Montagu in Nichols’s Anecdotes of Literature, iv. 625-656.
MONTAGU, RALPH, 1st Duke of (c. 1638—1709), English diplomatist, was the second son of Edward, 2nd Baron Montagu of Boughton (1616–1684), whose peerage was one of several granted in the 17th century to different members of the Montagu family (q.v.). Sir Edward Montagu, chief justice of the king’s bench in the time of Henry VIII., was grandfather of the first earl of Manchester (see Manchester, Earls and Dukes of), and of Edward, 1st Baron Montagu of Boughton (1562–1644), who was imprisoned in the Tower by the parliament on account
of his loyalty to Charles I. The eldest son of the latter, Edward,
who succeeded him as 2nd baron, took the side of the parliament
in the Civil War, and was one of the lords who conducted
the king from Newark to Holmby House after his surrender
by the Scots in January 1647. He had two sons, of whom
Ralph was the younger. The eldest son, Edward, was master of
the horse to Queen Catherine, wife of Charles II., a post from
which he is said to have been dismissed by the king for showing
attention to the queen of too ardent a nature. Catherine immediately
appointed the younger brother, Ralph, to the vacant
situation, and the latter soon acquired a reputation for gallantry
at the court of Charles II. He took an active part in the negotiations
in which Louis XIV. purchased the neutrality of England
in the war between France and Holland. Having quarrelled
with Danby and the duchess of Cleveland, who denounced him
to the king, Montagu was elected member of parliament for
Northampton in 1678, with the intention of bringing about
the fall of Danby; but, having produced letters seriously compromising
the minister, the dissolution of parliament placed
him in such danger of arrest that he attempted to fly to France.
Foiled in this design, he continued to intrigue against the government,
supporting the movement for excluding the duke of York
from the succession and for recognizing Monmouth as heir to
the crown. His elder brother having predeceased his father,
Ralph became Baron Montagu of Boughton on the death of the
latter in 1684. Notwithstanding his former intrigues he gained
the favour of James II. on his accession to the throne; but
this did not deter him from welcoming William of Orange, who
created him Viscount Monthermer and earl of Montagu in 1689.
Montagu was no less avaricious than unscrupulous. In 1673 he had married the wealthy widow of the earl of Northumberland, Elizabeth Wriothesley, daughter of the earl of Southampton, who brought him a large fortune; and after her death in 1690 he married the still more wealthy Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the duke of Newcastle, and widow of Christopher Monk, 2nd duke of Albemarle. Montagu’s position was further strengthened in 1705 by the marriage of his son and heir to Mary, daughter of the great duke of Marlborough. In the same year he was raised to the dukedom as duke of Montagu and marquess of Monthermer. He died on the 9th of March 1709. His London residence, Montagu House, Bloomsbury, was bought by the government in 1753 to hold the national collection of antiquities, and on its site was built the British Museum.
The duke was succeeded by his son John, 2nd duke of Montagu (1689–1749), who in 1745 raised a cavalry regiment known as Montagu’s Carabineers, which, however, was disbanded after Culloden. He was made a K.G. in 1719, and was a fellow of the Royal Society. As neither of his two sons survived him the title became extinct at his death in 1749, but in 1730 his daughter Mary married George Brudenell, 4th earl of Cardigan (1712–1790), who on his father-in-law’s death assumed the name and arms of Montagu, and in 1766 was created duke of Montagu. On his death, in 1790, this second dukedom of Montagu also became extinct; his only son, who was created Baron Montagu of Boughton, having predeceased him. His daughter Elizabeth married Henry, 2nd duke of Buccleuch, who thus acquired all the unentailed property of the dukes of Montagu, the entailed portion passing to the earls of Cardigan.
