A newly discovered extortion letter from the courtesan Harriette Wilson
© YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, PAUL MELLON COLLECTION
TREVOR PATEMAN
ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1825, a folded letter was dispatched from Paris to London, postage paid in advance, arriving a few days later. At that time letters were casually addressed, but post-office clerks were as knowledgeable then as London taxi drivers are today. They had no difficulty in identifying the intended recipient. What the clerks may not have known was that the sender and her husband were currently causing panic at the highest government levels in London and Paris. The two governments were in secret contact over their concerns, and the couple’s home in the French capital was raided and ransacked by the authorities in the same month that 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 an appearance in a caricature by George Cruikshank (“The Horse-Councellor”), as a centaur-lawyer who has taken the brief marked “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 his 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”.
The letter Adolphus received in 1825 was an extortion letter, one of maybe 200 sent out by the courtesan Harriette Wilson (1786–1845) in the mid- 1820s, as she wrote and published in instalments, then as books, the Memoirs that 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 misruling as George IV. The serial publication of Wilson’s bestselling Memoirs was reckoned a catastrophe by the governing class and occasioned the flurry of diplomatic activity in France in 1825, aimed at suppressing further revelations, especially any relating to the king and his close circle. It made matters worse that the memoirs were not only scurrilous, but also enlivened by splendidly accomplished comic passages.
Adolphus had combined a stellar legal career with historical research and public engagement. He was politically a Tory who, in 1799, 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��
