The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (50 page)

Next, Junius turned his attention to Britain’s most popular soldier, the Marquis of Granby, whose victories in the seven-year war with France had fired British patriotism and led hundreds of pubs and inns to call themselves the Marquis of Granby. At the battle of Minden, Granby wanted to charge the French, but his superior, Lord Sackville, ordered him not to. It later became obvious that if Granby had been allowed to charge, the French would have been utterly routed. Sackville was dismissed and Granby took his place.

But like many fine soldiers, he was out of his depth in politics, and when he was made peacetime commander-in-chief, he was less than brilliant. Even so, when Junius remarked with suave malice: “Nature has been sparing of her gifts to this noble lord”, it was as shocking as if someone had dismissed Winston Churchill or General Eisenhower as a dithering idiot after the Second World War. And when Junius went on to accuse Granby of using his position to “heap promotion on his favourites and dependants” and ignore merit in the rest of the army, he was virtually accusing Britain’s war hero of being a crook.

It is not clear whether Junius made these accusations to produce shock and outrage. But he could hardly have chosen a better way to make himself famous – or infamous. For one of Granby’s most distinguished fellow soldiers, Sir William Draper, quickly leapt to his defense and wrote an indignant letter to
The Public Advertiser
, whose owner must have been rubbing his hands with glee. Draper began by furiously accusing Junius of being a “felonious robber of private character”, a “cowardly base assassin” who did not have the courage to sign his real name. Then Draper went on to defend his commander-in-chief, saying, in essence, that he was a “decent chap” whom everybody liked and who was too generous for his own good.

This kind of thing must have made readers groan with boredom. As to not keeping his promises – another of Junius’s slanders – there were some cases, said Draper, where it was better not to keep promises. He was obviously thinking of some scheming friend of Granby’s who had persuaded the general to make rash promises when he had had too much to drink – a person, says Draper indignantly, “who would pervert the open, unsuspecting moments of convivial mirth into sly, insidious applications for preferment . . . and who would
endeavour to surprise a good man who cannot bear to see anyone leave him dissatisfied”.

Junius, of course, had achieved his goal. He was being treated seriously by a famous soldier, and the delighted public was being allowed to witness their squabble. Junius’s next letter began with deceptive benevolence and generosity: “Your defense of Lord Granby does honour to the goodness of your heart”. He went on to praise Draper’s “honest unreflecting indignation” – although the word
unreflecting
gave warning of what was to come. Then he took the gloves off and went straight for the chin: “It is you, Sir William, who makes your friend appear awkward and ridiculous, by giving him a laced suit of tawdry qualifications which nature never intended him to wear”. And he became positively murderous when he answered Draper’s ill-advised remarks about promises made in “convivial mirth”. “It is you, Sir William Draper, who have taken pains to represent your friend in the character of a drunken landlord, who deals out his promises as liberally as his liquor, and will suffer no man to leave his table sorrowful or sober. None but an intimate friend, who must have seen him frequently in these unhappy, disgraceful moments, could have described him so well”.

Draper must have winced. But he lacked the common sense to see that he was giving Junius exactly the kind of publicity he wanted. Besides, he had been an academic and felt he could exchange urbane insults with the best of them. So back he came for more, this time accusing Junius (probably correctly) of being a bitter and disappointed man who “delights to mangle carcasses with a hatchet”. Then he took up the impossible task of defending his friend Granby against the hatchet, failing to realize that he was only succeeding in making him look like a helpless dummy. He went on to answer Junius’s charges that he had feathered his own nest and entered into precise details about his income that only revealed how much Junius had him on the defensive.

Junius came back in his smoothest and deadliest form: “I should justly be suspected of acting upon motives of more than common enmity to Lord Granby, if I continued to give you fresh materials or occasion for writing in his defense”. But then he proceeded to indulge in another of his favourite tricks: an appearance of omniscience. He went on to talk about Draper’s income and career as if he knew more about them than Draper did. Then he accused Draper of being a money-grubbing liar who had turned his back on the army in exchange for a pension – which Junius called a “sordid provision for himself and his family”.

Now we can begin to see Junius’s technique. There can be no doubt
that he
was
bitter and twisted. He was a man with a grievance, and his specialty was libelous accusations that would cause maximum suffering to the accused, as well as maximum glee to the general public. One gets the impression that he was a kind of sadist who didn’t care what he said so long as it hurt; but he was clever enough to make his accusations sound plausible – as if he was an insider with a secret source of knowledge.

The general public, of course, loves to see authority attacked and ridiculed. Things have not changed in the slightest in the two centuries or so that have passed since the days of Junius; any kind of scandal about a politician can still sell newspapers. In present-day America, politicians have no legal redress against libel – provided malice cannot be established – so that journalists can invent virtually what they like. After the Kennedy assassination, a play called
Macbird
accused Lyndon Johnson of being the murderer; it was pure invention, but its author, a dissident academic, must have been bewildered when it became the hit of the season on Broadway. In England, a magazine called
Private Eye
has specialized since the sixties in libelous and insulting stories that might have been concocted by Junius; but although the magazine has been sued to the verge of bankruptcy, it continues to flourish as the public appetite for malicious “dirt” remains insatiable. Junius was simply the first to discover that there is a permanent demand for “dirt”.

The naïve Draper went on to increase Junius’s fame by writing more pained and explanatory letters; Junius continued to treat him with ferocious contempt. In his third letter he dismissed him partronizingly: “And now, Sir William, I shall take my leave of you for ever . . . In truth, you have some reason to hold yourself indebted to me. From the lessons I have given you, you may collect a profitable instruction for your future life”.

Junius ignored Draper’s third reply and turned his attention to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Grafton. True to form, Junius accused him of being a scheming politician who preferred his own interests to the public good. Then he turned his attention to a recent scandal concerning the Middlesex by-election, which the government had fervently hoped that Wilkes would lose – and which, in fact, Wilkes had won with the aid of a drunken rabble. (Wilkes was now, of course, in jail.)

A man named Clarke had been killed in a brawl, and an Irishman named MacQuirk, a local chairman of the anti-Wilkes party, was accused of his murder, together with another man named Balf. Both were sentenced to death, but this was obviously unfair; the evidence against Balf was weak, and MacQuirk had obviously not intended to
commit murder. Both were pardoned by Grafton. Junius pretended to think that this was an outrageous interference in the course of justice, a deliberate tampering with the evidence; a murderer went free because he was against Wilkes. He ended by asking: “Has it never occurred to you that, while you were withdrawing this desperate wretch from justice . . . that there is another man, who is the favourite of the country, whose pardon would have been accepted with gratitude”?

He meant, of course, John Wilkes, and he went on to use his favourite technique of invention: “Have you quite forgotten that this man was once your Grace’s friend”? Grafton was to protest again and again that Wilkes was only a casual acquaintance; Junius ignored him and went on repeating his charge; that Grafton had stabbed his friend in the back. Subsequent investigation by historians indicates that Grafton was telling the truth. But Junius never let the truth spoil a good accusation.

What so alarmed the government – and the King – was that Wilkes’s imprisonment had made him potentially the most dangerous man in England. Junius went on to accuse Grafton of fleeing London for two nights during the Wilkes riots and leaving the city to be defended by two of his incompetent underlings. Grafton had apparently spent those two nights with his mistress, Nancy Parsons, and Junius jeered at her “faded beauty” – although he later pretended to be shocked when Grafton broke with her and married someone else, declaring: “His baseness to this woman is beyond description or belief”. When Grafton married, Junius sneered at him as a reformed rake who had tired of debauchery.

Junius’s next letter to Grafton reached new heights of malice: “Let me be permitted to consider your character and conduct”, he wrote ominously, “merely as a subject of curious speculation”. And after calling him lazy, dishonest, and inconsistent, he added generously: “For the sake of your mistress, the lover shall be spared. I will not lead her into public, as you have done, nor will I insult the memory of her departed beauty. Her sex, which alone made her amiable in your eyes” – he is implying that Grafton will mount anything that wears a skirt – “makes her respectable in mine”.

He went on to give what he claimed to be a sympathetic account of Grafton’s ancestors – “those of your Grace . . . left no distressing examples of virtue” – and of his own career – “grave and plausible enough to be thought fit for business; too young for treachery”. But, he claimed, Grafton lost no time in stabbing his patron William Pitt in the back, then grabbing power under Rockingham and betraying his friend Wilkes. Like Dr Goebbels, Junius felt that the best way to make people believe a lie was to repeat it.

After more than two centuries these insults make us smile. But if we try to put ourselves in the place of his victims, we can see that they must have felt choked with hopeless rage. Junius was not a man so much as a scorpion. When one angry victim challenged Junius to a duel, Junius declined politely: “You would fight, but others would assassinate”. He was probably right. The sheer malice and unfairness of his attacks would have led some of his victims to make sure he was stabbed in the dark.

In December 1769 Junius shocked everyone, including his own supporters, by launching an attack on the King himself. His success in evading exposure had obviously given him the confidence to risk imprisonment. In earlier letters he had been careful to speak of the King with the deepest respect, referring to him in a letter to Grafton as “an amiable, accomplished prince”. Now he addressed the King directly, reminding him of one of his earliest utterances when he came to the throne: “I glory in the name of Briton”. The King undoubtedly meant that he regarded himself as a Briton rather than a German; Junius pretended to think that he was deliberately making a distinction between Britons and Englishmen, to emphasize his affection for the Scots: “While the natives of Scotland are not in actual rebellion, they are undoubtedly entitled to protection; nor do I mean to condemn the policy of giving some encouragement to the novelty of their affections”.

He patronizingly told the King that he attributed his blunders to inexperience. He went on to defend Wilkes and to describe the King’s campaign against him as mean and ridiculous. After taking swipes at the King for oppressing the Irish and the Americans, he warned him against the “fawning treachery” of the Scots. Finally, he told him condescendingly that “the affections of your subjects may still be recovered” but that this would mean ceasing to be driven by petty resentments. The King, wrote Junius, should face his subjects like a gentleman and “tell them you have been fatally deceived” by crooked ministers. He ended on a note of warning that sounded dangerously like sedition. The people were loyal to the House of Hanover, he wrote, because they expected justice. The House of Stuart – to which Bonnie Prince Charlie belonged – was “only contemptible”, but armed with royal power it would become formidable. “The prince who imitates their conduct should be warned by their example” (i.e., by King Charles losing his head), “and while he plumes himself upon the security of his title to the crown, should remember that, as it was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost by another”.

That made everyone gasp. The novelist Horace Walpole – son of a
former Prime Minister – described it as “the most daring insult ever offered to a prince but in times of open rebellion”. The printer, Woodfall, was arrested on a charge of seditious libel. The jury refused to convict, and he was released on payment of costs. Recognizing his own danger, Junius warned Woodfall to take every possible precaution, as “I would not survive a discovery three days”.

How
had
he survived discovery for so long? By an elabourate system of concealment. It was easy to get his letters to the
Public Advertiser –
he could send them by messenger or by post. But communications from the newspaper were altogether more dangerous. Many people wrote to Junius and sent him “sensitive” information. Junius had letters addressed to him, via the printer, under various pseudonyms at various coffeehouses (there were literally hundreds), and the printer would signal that a letter was waiting by inserting a coded advertisement in the newspaper. Junius frequently changed his poste restante address at short notice, informing Woodfall with messages like: “Change to the Somerset Coffee House, and let no mortal know the alteration”. And he obviously spent some time worrying about what would happen if Woodfall became careless: “I am persuaded that you are too honest a man to contribute to my destruction”.