The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (51 page)

Junius also corresponded with Wilkes, who was released from jail in 1770 and promptly returned to Parliament; Wilkes made a few tactful attempts to persuade Junius to reveal his identity but respected his determination to have no confidantes.

In fact, Junius was beginning to feel tired; the sheer strain of taking on opponent after opponent, like a masked swordsman, was obviously beginning to tell. Besides, when Grafton resigned in 1770 – undoubtedly rattled by Junius’s insults – and Wilkes was released in the same year, Junius had achieved his basic purpose. The King refused to be stampeded into making more concessions to the Libertarian Party and appointed the efficient and good-natured Lord North as his First Minister Junius had earlier attacked Lord North: “It may be candid to suppose that he has hitherto voluntarily concealed his talents; intending, perhaps, to astonish the world when we least expect it”. But he proved wrong, and Lord North developed into an excellent administrator.

Junius wrote his last public letter in January 1772. When, a year later, Henry Woodfall did his best to induce Junius to return to the fray with hints in the
Public Advertiser
, Junius replied: “If I were to write again I must be as silly as any of the horned cattle that run mad through the City . . . The cause and the public – both are given up”. In fact, the world
had heard its last of Junius – although his collected letters, in book form, achieved considerable popularity. In this collection Junius wrote: “I am the sole depository of my own secret, and it shall perish with me”. And as far as we know, he kept his word.

So who was Junius? In the days of Rockingham’s Prime Ministership, the chief suspect was the brilliant Irishman Edmund Burke, who was passionately liberal – although by no means radical, like Wilkes. He was a friend of Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and David Garrick (the most famous actor of his time). Like Wilkes, he wanted to curb the corrupt practices in the royal court and so was detested by the King. He argued strongly against the King’s policies in America, suggesting – correctly – that they would lead to revolution, and after the Boston tea party he argued for the repeal of the tea tax. If Burke had been listened to, America might well still be a British colony. He was later horrified by the French Revolution and became one of its most passionate opponents, thus endearing himself to all his former enemies.

Burke was brilliant enough to have written the Junius letters. But he was also a man of immense integrity. So when he wrote to a friend, Charles Townshend, “I now give you my word and honour that I am not the author of Junius”, we may take it to be the truth.

In the nineteenth century book after book about Junius appeared; speculations about his identity became as popular as speculations about the identity of Jack the Ripper did a century later. (In his edition of the Junius letters, Professor John Cannon offers a “short list” of sixty-one names.) An obvious possibility is Wilkes himself; but the exchange of letters between Wilkes and Junius that later came to light makes it clear that this is out of the question.

One writer announced confidently that Junius was George III himself, averting revolution by giving his subjects a chance to let off steam. Another writer identified Junius as the historian Edward Gibbon, resting his case upon the sheer absence of evidence, which, the writer claimed, only went to prove how far the historian had gone to conceal his guilty secret. Another staked the claim of Lord George Sackville, the military commander who had been dismissed after the battle of Minden in favour of the Marquis of Granby; certainly, Junius’s attacks on Granby make this plausible, if unlikely. (Sackville was a warm supporter of the King.) Lord Chesterfield, the author of the famous
Letters to His Son
, is another candidate; but his health at the time was so poor – he was half-blind and bedridden – that it is virtually impossible that he was Junius. Perhaps the unlikeliest nominee was Thomas Paine, the
author of
The Rights of Man
(1791), a polemic directed at Burke. At the time of the Junius letters, Paine was still struggling to make a start in life – as a grocer, a tobacconist, a schoolmaster, and an exciseman – and still had a number of years to go before he learned to write; it was not until 1774 that Benjamin Franklin persuaded him to emigrate to America.

All this seems to suggest that Junius was one of the lesserknown names of the period. Charles Everett, the editor of the 1927 edition of the letters, devotes a long introduction to proving that Junius was Lord Shelburne, a member of the opposition and later Prime Minister; the historian Sir Lewis Namier destroyed that case in a brief review in which he pointed out that Shelburne was on the Continent in the summer of 1771 when Woodfall received two private letters from Junius that had to have been written in London. Shelburne’s private secretary, Laughlin Macleane, has been strongly suggested by two recent academics, one of whom has claimed to have a statement, signed by Shelburne, identifying Macleane as Junius. The chief problem here is that Macleane was attacked by Junius, who made fun of his stammer. This could have been a deliberate attempt to mislead; but Junius did not use his own name in this attack but another of his pseudonyms, Vindex. And since no one but Woodfall knew that Vindex was Junius, this seems to dispose of Macleane – whether or not Shelburne believed his secretary to be Junius. Besides, Macleane was an ardent Scottish patriot, and Junius clearly loathed the Scots, losing no opportunity to jeer about their corruption, stupidity, and cowardice.

This brings us to the chief suspect: Sir Philip Francis, who was at the time a twenty-eight-year-old senior civil servant in the War Office. Francis came under suspicion in 1812, when the private letters of Junius to Woodfall were published in a new edition. They revealed that Junius used various other pseudonyms, including Vindex and Veteran. These letters pay close attention to the affairs of the War Office and indicate that Junius knew far more about it than any outsider could learn.

In 1772, the year the Junius letters ceased, Francis went to India, where he clashed with Warren Hastings – the chief servant of the East India Company, which virtually governed India. On his return to England, he entered Parliament as a Liberal, was knighted, and pursued Hastings with considerable vindictiveness, being largely instrumental in having him impeached for corruption and exceeding his powers.

In 1813, when he was seventy-three, Francis was identified as Junius in a book by a man named John Taylor. He flatly denied it, calling the accusation “silly and malignant”. Yet when he married again in the
following year, he gave his wife the Junius letters as a wedding present. He also gave her Taylor’s book on the mystery of Junius. His wife took the hint; she had no doubt that he was Junius. And Francis was aware of this. He had only, she remarked, to deny it, and she would have given up the idea; but he never did.

Professor Cannon has no doubt whatever that Francis was Junius. He points out that in 1772 – before Francis was posted to India at the huge salary of £10,000 a year – Junius changed his pseudonym to
Veteran
. In 1771 Christopher D’Oyly, a friend of Francis, told him he intended to resign as Deputy Secretary of War; it is obvious from their correspondence that both disliked their chief, Lord Barrington. Francis hoped to succeed D’Oyly but was passed over in favour of a man named Chamier. “Veteran” was soon writing to his printer: “Having nothing better to do, I propose to entertain myself and the public with torturing that bloody wretch Barrington. He has just appointed a French broker his deputy. I hear from all sides it is looked upon as a most impudent insult to the army. Be careful not to have it known to come from me. Such an insignificant creature is not worth the generous rage of Junius”. In which case, why bother with such small fry?

In March 1772 Francis resigned his post. Junius wrote to the printer: “The enclosed is fact, and I wish it could be printed tomorrow. The proceedings of this wretch are unaccountable. There must be some mystery in it, which I hope will soon be discovered to his confusion. Next to the Duke of Grafton, I verily believe that the blackest heart in the kingdom belongs to Lord Barrington”. The “enclosed” declared: “I desire you will inform the public that the worthy Lord Barrington, not contented with having driven Mr D’Oyly out of the War Office, has at last contrived to expel Mr Francis”.

Handwriting evidence also links Francis and Junius. In 1771 a Miss Giles in Bath was the recipient of some polite verses, and the handwriting on the cover was that of Junius. In 1870 a handwriting expert, Charles Chabot, identified the verses as being written by Francis’s cousin, Richard Tilman. Francis’s second wife later produced copies of the verses in her husband’s handwriting, saying that he had given them to her as examples of his own early verses. In letters discovered in the late nineteenth century, Francis’s authorship was confirmed by his cousin.

This raises an obvious question: Surely we have only to compare the handwriting of Junius with that of Francis to have our solution? But it is not as simple as that. Junius must have known that unless he went to considerable lengths to disguise his handwriting, it could be his
downfall. It was only after careful study that Charles Chabot concluded that the handwriting of Junius was a disguised version of Francis’s.

Another piece of evidence emerged in 1969, when French research revealed that a French ambassadorial report sent to Louis XVI in the 1770s attributed the letters to one Thaddeus Fitzpatrick, a man-about-town. Now in fact, we know this is impossible because Fitzpatrick died in 1771, while Junius was still writing. But the report declares that Fitzpatrick obtained his information from his friend Philip Francis, a clerk in the War Office.

Fitzpatrick had quarreled with the actor David Garrick and with Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, two men who were savaged by Junius. So there is a strong case to be made for Fitzpatrick being a collabourator of Junius. This does not contradict Junius’s assertion that he was “the sole depository of his own secret”, since this was made in the year after Fitzpatrick’s death.

Wherever the French ambassador obtained his information – information that seems to have been denied to his British colleagues – it certainly has the ring of plausibility. One of the reasons that posterity has found the Junius problem so fascinating is that he seems to be a solitary outsider figure, a man with a truly awesome gift for savage invective and the cut and thrust of polemic, who succeeded, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, in keeping his light hidden under a bushel. It is a fascinating and romantic conception, but the major objection to it is that it is too romantic. Scarlet Pimpernels exist only in the imagination of novelists.

What seems far more plausible is that a middle-aged man-about-town, who nurses powerful grudges against people he actually knows, should decide to deliver some sharp rebukes under the cloak of anonymity and should take into his confidence a sarcastic and disaffected young clerk from the War Office who can provide inside information. (One of Francis’s jobs was to report speeches in the House of Lords, so he had the opportunity to overhear much political gossip.) The picture of two men chuckling and egging one another on is somehow more believable than the picture of a solitary misanthrope nursing his own secret. Moreover, if Thaddeus Fitzpatrick was the initiator of the project, this would also explain why the later Junius letters – those that followed his death in 1771 – show a falling off in quality. The rear end of the pantomime horse found himself sadly missing his partner.

This could also explain Francis’s curious attitude toward the book that accused him of being Junius. More than forty years after the smoke of battle had cleared and most of his victims were dead – including
Grafton himself – surely there could have been no harm in acknowledging that he was Junius? But if this meant acknowledging that he was merely a
half
of Junius – and the lesser half at that – then it would obviously be far better to keep silent and allow his contemporaries – and posterity – to give him the full credit, while continuing to deny it in a manner that convinced nobody. It was a way of having his cake and eating it.

Certainly, everything we know of Francis indicates that he could have been Junius (or half-Junius). Cannon describes him as “a man of fierce animosities, harsh and sarcastic”. He quarreled with most of his friends and benefactors, says his biographer Herman Merivale, with all “those who wished well to him, defended him, showered benefits on him”. All “appear . . . in his written records, branded with some unfriendly or contemptuous notice, some insinuated or pronounced aspersion”. Francis broke with two of his former patrons, Henry Fox and John Calcraft, and when they quarreled, made his typically stinging and ungenerous assessment of them: “There was not virtue enough in either of them to justify their quarreling. If either of them had common honesty he could never have been the friend of the other”. The phrase has the typical Junian ring. Dining with Francis in the last year of his life, Cannon reports, the philosopher Sir James Mackintosh was led to comment, “The vigorous hatreds which seemed to keep Francis alive were very amusing”.

In other words, Francis had a streak of paranoia. And this is how Cannon summarizes Junius: “Junius believed . . . that it was necessary to save the constitution from violation, but the desperate plot to destroy the liberties of the subject existed only in his own mind”.

There is not enough space here to describe the affair of the impeachment of Warren Hastings and Francis’s part in it; but it confirms that Francis was a man who, like Junius, was a good hater with little generosity.

Finally, in the 1950s, a Swedish philologist, Alvar-Ellegard, undertook a computer analysis of the writing of Junius and of forty of his contemporaries, looking for recurrent words, tricks of style, and so on. Ellegard began by being a skeptic about Francis; he ended by being totally convinced that he was Junius: “The statement that Sir Philip Francis was Junius may henceforth be allowed to stand without a question mark”.