by Colin Wilson
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 o
ppressing 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”.
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, Fran
cis 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?