An 1825 Extortion Letter sent by the courtesan Harriette Wilson, the third such letter recorded

 

… we are none of us perfect have all our little sly intrigues …

On the 28 September 1825 a folded letter was despatched from Paris to London, postage paid in advance, arriving in London a few days later. At that time letters were casually addressed, but post office clerks were as knowledgeable then as London taxi drivers today and had no difficulty in identifying for whom it was intended. What the clerks may not have known was that the sender was currently causing panic at the highest government levels in London and that her husband’s involvement with General Gregor MacGregor – currently a fraudster promoting investment in the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua - was alarming the authorities in Paris. The two governments were in secret contact over their concerns and the couple’s Paris home was raided and ransacked by French authorities in the same month as this letter was written.

The letter is addressed to “ -------- Adolphus Esqr Pleader London” and intended for the prominent barrister John Adolphus. In 1820 he had defended five of the Cato Street conspirators who plotted to murder all the members of the Cabinet and in 1821 represented the Life Guards who had killed two demonstrators at the hugely disrupted funeral procession of Queen Caroline. The latter role earned him a Cruikshank caricature titled “Jew v. Jury”. But Adolphus (1768-1845) was very much an assimilated Jew. His Jewish father had married out, to the displeasure of his family, and Adolphus in turn married an Anglican clergyman’s daughter. In Adolphus’s edited diaries and memoirs published in 1871 the reader will find no discussion of a fascinating family background, and at one point he writes of a “very low Jew attorney, Barney Hart”.

Adolphus combined a stellar legal career with historical research and public engagement. He was politically a Tory who in 1798 published lengthy biographical sketches of those who made and those who suffered from the French Revolution and was savvy enough to be paid handsomely for political services when Addington was Prime Minister (1801-04). But the diaries and memoirs show someone whose experience of life was much more varied and colourful than this public persona might suggest. In 1783, an unhappy boy of fifteen, he was sent to work in St Kitts where his great-uncle Michael Adolphus had family business interests, and where he watched slave ships being unloaded. Returning to England to train as an attorney, Adolphus became well acquainted with London’s other world of gambling dens, unruly clubs and theatre life. In 1816, by then a member of the Inns of Court, he challenged a fellow bencher to a duel, fought with pistols in Calais. Adolphus was unhurt; his opponent survived the bullet which lodged in his arm.

The letter Adolphus received in 1825 was an extortion letter, one of maybe two hundred sent out by Harriette Wilson (1786-1845) in the mid-1820s, as she wrote and published in instalments and then as books the courtesan Memoirs which secured her prominent place in histories of Regency England. Her client list was a Who’s Who of the great and not so good, headed by the Prince Regent, now ruling as George IV.

The serial publication of the bestselling Memoirs was reckoned a catastrophe by the governing class and occasioned the 1825 flurry of diplomatic activity in France aimed at supressing further revelations, especially any relating to the King and his close circle. The late Professor M.R.D. Foot claimed to have seen documents in Windsor Castle granting a substantial annuity to Miss Wilson but he never published his findings; I have only a second-hand account. But if true, the annuity may well have been discontinued after the death of George the Fourth.

It made matters worse that the memoirs were not only scurrilous but enlivened by splendidly accomplished comic passages. In the extortion letters, Harriette offered her former protectors and amours the chance to buy themselves out with a lump sum or annuity before the next instalment was printed, either with a lump sum or an annuity. Many clearly did pay up and burnt their letters; others hesitated or quibbled until it was too late. Some called Harriette’s bluff. The Duke of Wellington is famously supposed to have scrawled across his letter “Write and be damned” (in the version first told by Harriette’s rival Julia Johnstone) and returned it. He duly appears in the Memoirs as a laughable character, compared to a rat-catcher. The Member of Parliament Edward Ellice (who gave his name to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands) promptly passed his letter to the press, where it was published in full. Ellice does not appear in the Memoirs.

Very few of these letters appear to have physically survived; in her biography of Harriette Wilson The Courtesan’s Revenge (2003) Frances Wilson quotes from just two correspondences, both in institutional holdings. This re-discovered letter presents its threat without preliminaries: Harriette is in possession of compromising letters to a “handsome young man” seduced by a niece, who then sought means “to destroy the infant in her bosom”. In past English usage a “niece” was not necessarily the child of a sibling, and the “handsome young man” might never have met Harriette. Adolphus himself was fifty-seven in 1825 but an affair might have dated back to his youth and he could have been the handsome young man. But the person alluded to could have been his son John Leycester Adolphus, also a barrister, who had married in 1822 and was now thirty years old. He is remembered as the person who in 1821 first identified Sir Walter Scott as the author of Waverley and went on to form an acquaintance with him; his father also met Scott and Scott once sat at the same dinner table as Harriette describing her as “far from beautiful, but a smart, saucy girl, with good eyes and dark hair, and the manners of a wild schoolboy." 

Whoever is being implicated, Harriette is confident she will be understood. The letter makes assumptions that suggest a more-than-passing acquaintance with Adolphus. He will know Henry Brougham and know of Brougham’s association with Harriette. Lord Brougham was perhaps the most longstanding and loyal of Harriette’s friends, right up to her death in 1845 when he solicited and contributed to the funds needed for her funeral. Frances Wilson comments, “Brougham appears moved by Harriette’s death, and alone of her lovers may have mourned her”. He was also one of those who paid up to be written out of the Memoirs, compromised by the fact that he had continued his liaison with Harriette after his marriage. But as significant as those indicators of familiarity is the knowing passage which reads “but veryly friend Adolphus we are none of us perfect have all our little sly intrigues either in the neighbourhood of the new Road [Euston Road] or elsewhere”. That is very much in the style of Harriette Wilson, and suggests intimacy rather than desperate scratching around for dirt. But it also identifies the neighbourhood where John Leycester Adolphus lived in the early 1820s; his home was at 81 Judd Street, directly off the Euston Road. His father lived a bit farther south in Percy Street, close to the British Museum.

This 1825 letter surfaced in 1863 at Sotheby & Wilkinson’s auction of “The Valuable Library of the late John Leycester Adolphus” who died in 1862. Among the auction lots there is listed “a characteristic letter of Harriette Wilson to John Adolphus” which sold for six guineas, a considerable sum for a letter from the recent past and assumed by the describer to require no further elucidation than the word “characteristic”. Since John Leycester’s wife and Adolphus senior’s literary-minded daughter Emily were both alive in 1863 it seems odd that such a letter was allowed to go to auction - and as a single lot item. But it could have been bought by a member of the family. The auction description naming the recipient as "John Adolphus" point squarely to the father, not the son, but still leaves open who was the "handsome young man" . 

The letter then disappears until 2023 when it turned up, unidentified, in a mixed lot of old letters sold in an English provincial auction. The letter’s authenticity is readily confirmed by the identical handwriting of another letter, sent by Harriette to Brougham from Calais in 1828 and illustrated in Kenneth Bourne’s The Blackmailing of the Chancellor (1975). Harriette’s letter lends itself to fairly ready transcription apart from a bit of crossing out and one word in doubt from damage occasioned when the letter seal was broken. Her first name does look like “Honriette” – a phonetic spelling - but it could be “Henriette” or even “Harriette”. The term “blackmail” did not come into use until the 1840s and at the time they were written the letters were referred to in the press as extortion letters. A modern equivalent would be the non-disclosure agreements public figures enter into with former lovers.

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Transcription

Addressed to: ------ Adolphus Esqr    Pleader    London

Datelined : Paris No 91 Grande Rue de Chaillot Champs Elysées

Sir

Your Family are very low better not have them shewn up to ridicule in Harriette Wilson’s memoirs with your neices [sic] affecting love letters to the handsome young man she seduced and then applied to him for means to destroy the infant in her bosom useless to deny this or cry “fie” for I have the letters in my possession – as well be quiet and oblige a lady you are growing rich I have spent all my money in furnishing my home and paying my debts will you do an act of Gallantry and send me 100 £? If you do I shall not be ungrateful – or you may publish this letter like Edward Ellice but veryly friend Adolphus we are none of us perfect have all our little sly intrigues either in the neighbourhood of the new Road or elsewhere and I might say to you in the words of Don Quixote to Sancho – “veryly friend Sancho the more thou stireth it the more it will stink ---- once more will you be my favourite and a noble man[?] of Gallantry – if so forward me 100 £ trust to my gratitude – Brougham I am sure would say you might do so safely,, - &; sign yourself The Dauphin for fun – but you must be quick about it because you are witty [?] Yours truly [?] Honriette Rochfort

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Acknowledgments and References

David Horspool and Robert Potts at the Times Literary Supplement helped me with this, an earlier version of which appeared in the TLS of February 23, 2024. As a result, Professor David Ganz wrote to tell me of a recollected conversation with the late M.R.D. Foot.

Wilson, Frances   The Courtesan’s Revenge (2004)

Harriette Wilson Memoirs. I have used the well-presented two-volume edition “Privately Printed for the Navarre Society Limited” in 1924. No editor is credited and the Navarre Society appears to be defunct. No edition is currently in print; the Print on Demand versions I bought did not photographically reproduce original page formats etc and so were of little use.