Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Mackreth, Robert
MACKRETH, Sir ROBERT (1726–1819), club proprietor, began life as a billiard-marker at White's Club. With money put by as a waiter in the same club he acquired a vintner's business in St. James's Street, and became a valued assistant of Robert Arthur, the original proprietor of White's, who on his death, 6 June 1761, left the property to Mackreth, then about to marry his only child, Mary Arthur (the wedding took place in October). Mackreth apparently retained this property until his death, but managed the club through an agent, a near relation of his whom he calls 'Cherubim' (Jesse, Selwyn and his Contemporaries, i. 217). His chief energies he now directed to operations in the city, frequenting Change Alley, but finding equal scope for his talents as usurer and bookmaker. Gilly Williams, writing to George Selwyn in 1768, mentions him as dealing heavily in the bets for and against the success of Wilkes when the latter stood for the city in that year (ib. ii. 265). In October 1774 he was nominated for the pocket borough of Castle Rising by the third Earl of Orford, who had found him useful in business relations, and was largely in his debt. Horace Walpole wrote earnestly to Sir Horace Mann in the following month, disclaiming any share in 'this disgraceful transaction' (Corresp. ed. Cunningham, vi. 152); he assured Conway only a little later that Wilkes was prepared to propose 'Bob' for speaker. Mackreth's evil repute as a money-lender was accentuated in 1786, when he was defendant in a suit preferred by Fox-Lane, an aristocratic member of White's, who charged Mackreth with defrauding him of his patrimony. The master of the rolls found that he had taken undue advantage of a young man, who was also a minor, and he had to refund 20,000l. He appealed without success, first to the lord chancellor, and then to the House of Lords. Fox-Lane's counsel throughout the case was Sir John Scott, afterwards Lord Eldon, against whom Mackreth cherished the bitterest resentment. In 1792 Mackreth accosted Scott in Lincoln's Inn Fields as a liar and a scoundrel, and finally challenged him to a duel for an alleged insult in one of his speeches in 1786. Eldon ignored the challenge, remarking that after three courts had considered Mackreth's conduct so bad as to make him pay his victim about 17,000l. and costs, 'the fellow is fool enough to suppose he can retrieve his character by insulting me.' Eldon brought an action for assault against Mackreth, who was sentenced by the court of king's bench to six weeks' imprisonment and a fine of 100l. for a breach of the peace. But Mackreth's services in the House of Commons (he sat for Ashburton from 1784 to 1802) seem to have soon effaced the recollections of his various peccadilloes, and he was on 8 May 1795 knighted by George III. On withdrawing from parliamentary life in 1802, Mackreth retired to his estate at Ewhurst, near Southampton, to which before his death he had added, besides his house property in London, an estate in Cumberland and a plantation in the West Indies. He died in London in February 1819, in his ninety-fourth year. Mrs. Mackreth predeceased him, dying at Putney on 3 June 1784.
[Bourke's History of White's, i. 117-20, 140-147; Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. ii. 127-8, 199; Gent Mag. 1819, i. 282; Annual Register, 1793; Return of Members of Parliament; Sporting Magazine, i. 336; Elegant Extracts in Poetry, 1816, p. 877; Sir E. Brydges's Autobiography, i. 194; Duke of Bedford's Corresp. ii. 108; Wheatleyand Cunningham's London, in. 492-3; Walpole's Corresp. passim.]