The Dangerous Duellist: Charles, Baron Mohun

by Margaret Porter

The 4th Baron Mohun

Charles Mohun, the 4th Baron Mohun, was born about 1675 to the 3rd Baron Mohun of Okehampton and his wife Lady Phillipa Annesley. Through the latter the infant was grandson of the 1st Earl of Angelsey, who served as Lord Privy Seal and produced political and religious treatises. Pepys referred to Anglesey as 'one of the greatest knaves in the world,' and during his life little Charles would exceed his grandsire's reputation.



His father had inherited substantial lands in Cornwall and Devon--as well as considerable debts. The marriage to Lady Phillipa was entirely mercenary, she was a termagant, and the union neither prospered nor lasted. Shortly after his heir's birth, the 3rd Baron served as Lord Cavendish's second in a duel with an Irish officer. At the conclusion of the contest Mohun insulted his friend's opponent, resulting in a second swordfight, and the brawling baron died from his severe wounds.
The infant 4th Baron and his two-year old sister Elizabeth were left to the care of a cruel, careless, and quarrelsome mother. His upbringing was hardly the sort to bestow virtue, patience, and manners. Unlike most young men of noble birth, he did not attend university. He married in 1691, aged just fifteen. His bride was Charlotte Orby, his guardian's daughter and the niece of his close friend Lord Macclesfield, and she had no dowry. In November of 1692 she bore a stillborn son.

Several weeks after this distressing event, the sixteen-year old baron fought his first duel. After a night of drinking he quarreled with Lord Kennedy, four years his senior. King William III, hearing of it, feared that a duel might ensue, and commanded both young gentlemen to remain at home. They chose not to obey their monarch's edict. In the course of their battle, each received a minor wound.

Two days later Mohun assisted his closest friend, the equally wild Captain Richard Hill, in the failed abduction of the actress Mrs Bracegirdle. Hill, who regarded actor William Mountfort as his rival for the lady's affection--quite mistakenly--ran him through with a sword late at night in the middle of a London residential street. Hill fled the country. Mohun was arrested. His response: 'Goddamme, I am glad he's not taken, but I am sorry he has no money about him, I wish he had some of mine. I do not care a farthing if I hang for him.'

The magistrates charged him with murder but after a single night in jail his bail was paid and he was released. Judged a flight risk by the House of Lords, he was confined to the Tower of London to await his fate.

In a sensational trial, the House of Lords tried the baron as an accessory to the crime, and in February 1693 he was acquitted and released. Either the weeks of his imprisonment impaired his health, or his celebrations after gaining his freedom, because by October that year it was reported that he 'lies very ill at Bath.' Mountford's outraged widow attempted to appeal what was, from her perspective, a most unjust verdict. Her father had recently been convicted of a capital crime--clipping coins--and by dropping her intended action she was able have her parent sentenced to transportation rather than execution.

Recovered from his ailment and back in London, Mohun returned to form. Drawing his sword against a hackney coachman, he was prevented from slaying the man by a member of Parliament, whom he then challenged to a duel which never actually took place.

Deciding to use his fighting instincts in the service of king and country, he joined the military. On March 10, 1694 the diarist Luttrell records, 'The Lord Mohun is made a captain of a troop of horse in Lord Macclesfield's [sic] regiment.' Three days later he noted, 'The Earl of Macclesfield goes with his majestie to Flanders, as a major general, and the Earl of Warwick and Lord Mohun as volunteers.' Warwick was one of Mohun's cronies, a partner in drinking and debauchery.

Whatever discipline the baron absorbed in the ranks, it didn't improve his behaviour. In spring 1695, he battered a member of the press in a London coffee house. Two years later his next duel took place in St James's Park. His opponent, Captain Bingham, survived the encounter--park keepers intervened--and Mohun sustained a wound to his hand.

In September of that same year, 1697, at the Rummer Tavern in Charing Cross, he engaged in a drunken quarrel with a Captain Hill. This was not the perpetrator of the Mountford murder, but another of that name and rank serving in the Coldstream Guards. Mohun stabbed him and fled; the captain later died. Mohun took refuge in the Earl of Warwick's house, where the constables seized him. At the coroner's inquest he was judged guilty of manslaughter.

According to a contemporary account, 'Yesterday [27th November] the lord Mohun appeared upon his recognizance at the King's Bench bar, and there being an indictment of murther found against him by the grand jury of Middlesex for killing Capt Hill, the court committed him to prison in order to be tryed for the same.' His place of confinement was not to his liking or  suitable to his status, and on the 13th of December 'the lord Mohun petitioned the house of peers to be removed from the King's Bench where he was committed last term for the murder of Captain Hill, to the Tower, which was granted.'

This time, however, he avoided trial--most likely because he'd reached his majority. Now twenty-one, he was entitled to take his seat in the House of Lords, and the King needed his support. At the 11th hour he received a royal pardon, which he duly presented to the House. Within days he was seated with his fellow peers as a Whig lord with good reason to approve all of His Majesty's demands for additional war funding.

Never one to learn from past crimes, Mohun committed another in late October of the very same year:

On Sunday about 3 in the morning a quarrel happened at Locket's [a tavern] near Charing Crosse between Captain Coot [sic] son to Sir Richard Coot, and Mr French of the Temple, who thereupon went and fought in Leicester Feilds. The Earl of Warwick and Lord Mohun were for the first, and Captain James and Ensign Dockwra for the 2d. Coot was killed upon the spott, and it's said French dangerously wounded but made his escape with the rest.

The House chose to try Mohun and Warwick separately, but it was uncertain which of the five men present at the altercation had struck the fatal blow. In January Mohun returned to the Tower to await trial and remained there for several months. On 28th March, 1699, 'the earl of Warwick and lord Mohun were brought by the lord Lucas from the Tower to Westminster the axe being carried before them they are now on their tryalls on account of the death of captain Coot [sic] which is like to last long.' On that day the earl was convicted of manslaughter and given the mildest of punishments: a cold branding iron in the shape of 'F' for 'felon' was applied to his hand, leaving no permanent mark upon it. The following day Mohun was unanimously acquitted but received a severe warning from Lord Chancellor Somers that he could not expect mercy in future if he continued on his disastrous path.

In 1701 the Act of Settlement designated the Protestant Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and her heirs as William III's successors to England's crown. Lord Macclesfield was the King's choice to deliver a ceremonial copy of the decree, and Lord Mohun accompanied him to Hanover. Within days of their return to London, Mohun stood at his gravely ill friend's bedside. The earl's death on 4th November was followed by the discovery that he'd disinherited his entire family in Mohun's favour.



James, 4th Duke of Hamilton

As possessor of a fortune between £40-100,000 and now a visible, active, and useful member of the House of Lords, Mohun's problems ought to have been behind him. Unfortunately, he had an enemy--James, the Scottish 4th Duke of Hamilton, husband of another of Lord Macclesfield's nieces. The duke, in desperate financial need, felt entitled to Macclesfield's estate, and legal battles ensued. Bills were filed. Chancery suits were begun. The King died. A Queen was crowned. Under the new regime, Hamilton's sometime support of the Catholic Pretender did not work in his favour. As for Mohun--he was a Whig, and Queen Anne a staunch Tory.

In 1711, Mohun, by then a widower, took his mistress as his second wife. She was Elizabeth Griffith, widow of a colonel and a daughter of Sir Thomas Lawrence, a physician to the Queen. He had hardly installed her in his residence, Macclesfield House, than he departed it to take up lodgings in Great Marlborough Street.

Not until 8th February, 1712, was his inheritance dispute with Hamilton heard by the Committee of Privileges in the House of Lords. A tie vote resulted--Mohun voting in his own interests, Hamilton absent. When proxies were counted, Mohun prevailed in a vote of 40 to 36. And still they waited for the ruling from Chancery.

But it wasn't the courts that put an end to a dispute. It was, of course, a duel. Not a polite, mannerly affair between a pair of nobleman who deemed honour at risk. What occurred in Hyde Park on the early morning of 15th November was a brutal and decisive battle between bitter adversaries.

When the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Mohun, and Macartney [Mohun's second] came to the place agreed on them to fight, the Duke and Lord Mohun had no sooner drawn their swords than Macartney drew his, as Colonel Hamilton did the same . . . he [the Colonel] striking down Macartney's sword...closed with Macartney and took his sword from him, by which time Lord Mohun was down on the ground and His Grace upon him. The Colonel, the better to help the Duke up, flung both swords upon the ground . . . Macartney came with a sword in his hand, and gave a thrust into the duke's left breast . . . the Duke at the same time saying, I am wounded, and whilst the said Colonel Hamilton was helping him Macartney escaped.

A representation of the doubly fatal duel in Hyde Park

The stab wound to the duke's chest was superfluous; one of Mohun's blows had severed the artery in his wrist. The two enemies lay dead, their blood seeping into the grass.

The Colonel stood trial, was convicted of manslaughter, branded with the cold iron, and went free. General Macartney fled England and tried to exonerate himself through pamphlets. While in Europe he gained an ally in the future George I and wished to follow the new King to England. He sought to have his outlawed status altered in order to belatedly stand trial for his role in the duel.

Two years later, when the case was finally heard, Hamilton said he couldn't swear that the accused had actually murdered the duke. Macartney likewise received a non-branding and went free--as the bad baron had done so many times in the course of his duelling career.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Margaret Porter is the award-winning and bestselling author of twelve period novels, whose other publication credits include nonfiction and poetry. One notorious incident in which Lord Mohun participated appears in A Pledge of Better Times, her highly acclaimed novel of 17th century courtiers Lady Diana de Vere and Charles Beauclerk, 1st Duke of St. Albans. Margaret studied British history in the UK and the US. As historian, her areas of speciality are social, theatrical, and garden history of the 17th and 18th centuries, royal courts, and portraiture. A former actress, she gave up the stage and screen to devote herself to fiction writing, travel, and her rose gardens.
Connect with Margaret:
Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Amazon 

Easy come, easy go - of a creative Scot and financial bubbles

by Anna Belfrage

Admit it. People start talking about Keynes and Milton, and chances are you, dear reader, will start considering what to cook for supper or how to change the subject. That’s the problem with financial theories, that no one really tends to find them interesting. Given this, it is somewhat ironic that no matter how bored we are with economics, most of us are rather interested in money. After all, money makes the world go round.

Money was not always available in electronic form as it is today. Nor was it available in bills. No, up to the late 17th century, money was mostly available as coins. Rich people, per definition, either had strong biceps or hired people with adequate musculature to lug their riches around. While not wanting to toot the nationalistic horn too much, I am rather proud to inform you that paper money was to a large extent a Swedish invention – the Swedish National Bank (the first ever National Bank, yet another cause for a bashful blush) issued paper money already in the 1650s. Quick to follow on was England – and Scotland, seeing as both these nations were major trading economies, ergo quickly saw the benefit of using paper rather than bags of coin.

Our John

Today, I’d like to introduce you to one of the early promoters of paper money. Not only was this gentleman an extremely skilled mathematician and a successful gambler, he was also to become singlehandedly responsible for one of the more disastrous financial bubbles of the early 18th century. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John Law of Lauriston.

Our hero was born in Scotland in 1671. His father was a prosperous gold-smith – rich enough to buy a castle, no less, hence the “of Lauriston” – and the expectations were that John as the eldest son would follow in dear Papa’s footsteps. Not to be. Law senior died when John was still young, and anyway, John showed little aptitude for making pretty things out of gold. No, John was in love with mathematics – and gambling.

In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution our Scotsman decided to try his luck in London. Tall, dark and handsome, possessed of excellent manners, John was something of an immediate success in London society – at least with the ladies. He gambled, lost, gambled, lost some more, gambled and began to win. Capable of extremely complex mental probability calculations, endowed with an excellent memory for cards, over time John achieved quite the reputation at gaming tables. People preferred not to meet him. Well, the sensible ones. There are always those that set out to prove they can win no matter who they’re playing against.

Other than cards, John enjoyed the ladies. Not, I’d hasten to add, in an overtly scandalous manner, but women liked him and he liked women – in particular Catherine Knollys. Catherine was married (as per some sources), which does not seem to have deterred either her or John, maybe because her husband was exiled in Paris together with the former king, James II.

However, our young man was not only a shallow card-playing rake. He had dreams. Odd dreams, his contemporaries thought, not at all understanding what he was on about when he spoke of a new type of banks and paper money. Where other people held on to coins, Law scoffed, saying paper money was the way to the future, having the added benefit of being elastic – i.e. when in need of more money, you could print it, when there was too much money, you could trash it. In Law’s opinion, there was only one financial instrument that was better than paper money: shares. Why? Because shares, as per Law, were essentially monetary equivalents with the added benefit of giving the owners dividends.

While impressed by the young man’s obvious intelligence, the movers and shakers of London’s financial world were not quite as taken by his notions of new banking systems, new money systems. Besides, who did he think he was, this young lad from the back of beyond? After all, the Bank of England had just been chartered, and any day soon, they'd be issuing paper notes - once they'd investigated the issue thoroughly. Not enough, Law attempted to explain. A central bank should control the finances, use the tools at its disposal (such as paper money, which can be printed when the need for money escalates, thrashed when things move the opposite direction). He was met with condescending smiles. A frustrated Law dreamed of truly changing the financial markets, but continued to frequent the elegant salons of London, in between nurturing the growing attraction between him and Catherine.

E Villiers

Enter Elizabeth Villiers. Well, enter and enter: Betty Villiers was very much a part of all those elegant salons, her rumoured role as the king’s mistress making her popular among those who wished to influence their new Dutch leader. Law very much wanted to somehow catch the ear of the king so as to whisper seductively about growth and trade and a bright future – all of it built on Law’s own theories regarding banks and the supply of money. What transpired next is a bit vague, but somewhere along the line John Law felt obliged to call out a certain Edward Wilson – this to safeguard his honour and that of Mrs Villiers.

Duels were illegal. A duel in which one of the parties was killed was considered murder. John Law, who had considerable skills outside his beloved numbers, killed Wilson with one thrust. One moment, he was an up-and-coming man, the next he was in Newgate, facing imminent execution. The execution was commuted to a fine, Wilson’s family protested, the death penalty was upheld, and John Law had no option but to flee the country. He would have a price on his head for the coming 23 years…

When John Law escaped to the Continent, Catherine decided to join him. Her husband does not seem to have cared one way or the other, and whatever their other faults, John and Catherine were devoted to each other, a life-long love story that would produce two children. Were they married? Once again, some sources say they lived in sin. Others say they did marry. Does it matter? Not to us, it doesn’t, and John and Catherine don’t seem the type of people who would have cared.

John continued to earn his living at the gaming tables. He became rich – very rich. Women continued to flirt and wink at him, fans waving ecstatically whenever this handsome man walked by. John smiled and bowed, twirled in his splendid clothes, and did quite some flirting back. In the European salons his ideas about banks and companies, about paper money and shares mostly fell on deaf ears, no matter how impressed people were by John’s intellectual prowess. The world was simply not ready for John’s ideas.

But there were exceptions: France, for example, was so mired in debt, the entire economy stagnating after decades of mismanagement, that there were people who listened to Law and nodded in agreement. Not so the Sun King and his advisors.

The boy king

However, no one lives for ever, and in 1715 the Sun King passed away. France’s new king was a child of five, with the Duke d’Orleans acting as the regent. And the duke was rather fond of Law, who was put in charge of revitalising the dying economy. At the time, France was a mess. People starved, people stole, people begged – years of war, years of lavish expenditure by the king on matters close to his heart, had left the state finances precariously close to bankruptcy, plus the social unrest was making people nervous. Specifically, the rich people were getting a tad antsy. What if all these disgruntled desperate people would rebel, raise the standards of revolution and colour the fields red with the blood of their oppressors? (Happened anyway, as we all know)

John Law rubbed his hands. At last an opportunity to test his grand theories. For years, he had advocated the concept of a central bank, one institution in the country responsible for all major credits, for issuing paper money with corresponding securities in land or gold. Taxes, Law argued, should be collected and handled centrally so as to increase control and enable investments for the greater good.

D'Orleans

D’Orleans listened, and in 1716 Law’s bank saw the light of the day. Investors could pay for their shares with gold and with land, and the bank was authorised to issue its own money, which, because of the solid base created by gold and land, did not fluctuate as much as the livre did.

Once the bank was in place, Law implemented a series of measures that can essentially be described as some sort of proto-Keynesian approach, namely he created jobs. How? By investing in roads, in canals, in rebuilding. The national debt rose, but the social unrest faded. Law had done what Roosevelt would do two centuries later, what all desperate governments since have attempted to do: expand a suffering economy by state-financed infrastructural investments.

There was just a teensy, weensy problem in all this: France still lacked money – or rather, the French government was more or less paralysed by lack of funds. The bank in itself created stability rather than development, and for France to rise out of its impoverished state, something had to change. Law mulled this over and came up with the brilliant idea of what was to be known as the Mississippi Company. Here, at last, he would be able to prove just how fantastic shares could be, how easily they could substitute money.

It must be said from the start: Law genuinely believed his idea would work. Being a man of honour and integrity himself, he had no understanding for such base emotions as greed, nor did he understand fully just how people would react when presented with an “easy killing”.

The Mississippi company – or, to be correct, the Companie d’Occident – was founded to exploit the vast natural riches in the French American colonies. Whether the riches were vast yes or no, no one really knew, but everyone expected them to be. Law was not entirely sure, but was confident there’d be enough riches – in land, if nothing else, to guarantee the success of the venture. The company was set up, went on to acquire the monopoly on the lucrative tobacco trade and was awarded the responsibility for all African trade. An exciting new venture was under way, and Law as one of the main shareholders stood to make a fortune.

John Law

Expansion requires money. In 1719, Law was given permission to issue 50 000 shares in the company at a nominal value of 500 livres. To make people more willing to part with their money, only 72 livres had to be paid up-front. The rest was to be paid over five years.

People rushed to buy the shares. The price went up to 1 000 livres, and a further 300 000 shares were issued, with Law expressing this would be enough to more or less wipe out France’s national debt. People screamed for shares. They traded like hot cakes, and bowing to popular pressure – and his own convictions – Law ended up issuing 600 000 shares.

Poor people scraped together everything they had to invest in this golden opportunity, widows gambled their pensions, orphans their inheritance. By the end of 1719, the shares had risen to the intoxicating price of 15 000 livres each. A new term, millionaire, saw the light of the day. People were rich – stinkingly rich – in shares.

And here, dear people, was the rub. No matter Law’s insistence that shares could be used as money, should, in fact, be accepted as payment for goods and services, most people preferred gold. When, as a consequence of all this heady economic development, prices began to rise markedly, shareholders started to sell. Those who had invested early on wanted to recoup and make that killing. Some of them did, but like any pyramid game it was those who entered first and exited first who were the winners – all the rest were losers.

Law – who as the newly appointed Controller General managed France’s entire finances, from the national debt to the collection of taxes, to the issuing of money, to the Mississippi company – attempted to control the price by setting a limit on how much actual gold the seller of a share should receive. Did not go down well.

More people insisted on selling, and, as Adam Smith (yet another Scotsman with a love for finance and economy) was to demonstrate some years later, price is affected by supply and demand. When supply exceeds demand, prices fall. Where before, everyone wanted shares in the Mississippi company, now everyone wanted to sell their shares, and accordingly, the prices plummeted. The Mississippi bubble had burst, so to say, and people who until recently were rich – on paper – now faced destitution.

Law was appalled. One desperate measure after the other was attempted to save the company and safeguard France’s fragile economy. Nothing worked, and by the summer of 1720, angry mobs were forming outside Law’s private residence. He had lost just as much as anyone else, but people didn’t care. This was all his fault, with his new-fangled ideas. Law had to flee France, reduced to virtual poverty. For the rest of his life, he was to live like an itinerant, moving from city to city, reduced to yet again making his living at the gambling tables.

In 1729, John Law died, alone and poor, in Venice. But, as he would now and then say, once he, a simple commoner, controlled all of France. At the time of his death, his reputation was in tatters, this rather brilliant man vilified as nothing but a con-man. Over the years, he has been vindicated – many of his theories were sound, a lot of his measures were the right thing to do. Had Law been less of a mathematician and more of a psychologist, chances are he’d have realised that his grand scheme had one major flaw: human nature, which rarely conforms to other theories than that of rampant self-interest.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anna Belfrage is the successful author of eight published books, all of them part of The Graham Saga. Set in 17th century Scotland, Virginia and Maryland, this is the story of Matthew Graham and his wife, Alex Lind - two people who should never have met, not when she was born three centuries after him.

Anna's books have won several awards - recently, one of her books won the HNS Indie Book of the Year Award -  and are available on Amazon, or wherever else good books are sold.

Presently, Anna is working on a new series set in 14th century England - the first installment will be published in November 2015.
For more information about Anna and her books, please visit her website. If not on her website, Anna can mostly be found on her blog.