claim. The first earl died in 1344 and was buried in the Whitefriars Church in London. His wife, Katherine, daughter of William de Graunson, and co-heir, in her issue, of her brothers, is connected by a legend of no value with the foundation of the Order of the Garter. Between William, his son and heir, the second earl (1328–1397) and Joan of Kent, daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, there was a contract of marriage which was made null by the pope’s bull in 1349. William was one of the knights-founders of the Order of the Garter, fought at Crecy, and commanded the rearward battle at Poitiers. According to Froissart he attended the young Richard in Smithfield when the king faced the mob after the death of Wat Tyler. His only son was killed in 1383 at a tournament, and in 1393 the earl sold the lordship and crown of Man to William Scrope of Bolton. He was succeeded by his nephew John, the third earl (c. 1350–1400), son of Sir John Montagu by Margaret, the heir of the barons of Monthermer. The new earl was notorious as a Lollard, and was accused, after Henry IV.’s accession, of a share in Gloucester’s death, from which he was to have cleared himself in combat with the Lord Morley. But he joined Kent, Huntingdon and Rutland in their plot against Henry, and was beheaded with the earl of Kent by the Cirencester mob. By his wife Maude, daughter of Sir Adam Francis, he had Thomas (1388–1428), who was summoned as an earl in 1409, his father’s dignities being restored to him in 1421, by which time his services at Harfleur and Agincourt had earned him French lordships, the lieutenant-generalship of Normandy and the earldom of Perche. The last of a race of warriors, he ended his service at the famous siege of Orleans, a cannon-ball dashing into his face the stone and ironwork of the window from which he was gazing at the city. By his second wife, the daughter of Thomas Chaucer the Speaker, he had no issue. By his first wife, Eleanor, daughter of Thomas Holand, earl of Kent, he had an only daughter Alice, wife of Richard Neville, a younger son of the first earl of Westmorland, who claimed and was allowed the earldom of Salisbury in right of his marriage. The famous “ Richard Make-a-King,” earl of Warwick and Salisbury, was the grandson of the last of the Montagu earls.
Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton, a chief justice of the king’s bench who died in 1557, was ancestor of three lines of peers, the dukes of Montagu, the dukes of Manchester, and the earls of Sandwich. These Montagus of Boughton claimed, by a false pedigree, descent from the third earl of Salisbury. It is possible that there may have been some kinship between the two families, but none, apparently, that could justify the persistent quartering by these later Montagus of the arms of Monthermer.
Authorities.—Collinson’s Somerset; G. E. C.’s Complete Peerage; Victoria County History of Somerset (J. H. Round’s introduction to Domesday); Rymer’s Foedera; Palgrave’s Parliamentary Writs; Rolls of Parliament; Ramsay’s Lancaster and York; Gesta Henrici V. (English Hist. Soc.); Chronicles of Walsingham, Knighton, Capgrave Wavrin, Frousart, Monstrelet, &c. Inquests, Post mortem, Close, Patent, Charter and Fine Rolls; Dugdale’s Monasticon Publications of Somerset Record Society; Charters in British Museum and Public Record Office. (O. Ba.)
MONTAGU, ELIZABETH ROBINSON (1720–1800), English
leader of society, was born at York on the 2nd of October 1720.
In 1742 she married Charles Montagu, cousin of Edward Wortley
Montagu and son of the earl of Sandwich—a wealthy man,
considerably her senior. Thanks to her, his Mayfair house
became the social centre of intellectual society in London, and
her breakfast parties and evening conversaziones gained for her
from her admirers the title of “The Madame du Deffand of the
English capital.” In other quarters the term “blue-stocking”
was applied to her guests. From her husband, who died in 1775,
she inherited a considerable fortune and large estates, in the
management of which she showed much ability. In 1781 she
built Sandleford Priory, near Newbury, and Montagu House,
now 22 Portman Square, London, the latter from designs by
James Stuart. With the colliers in the north she was extremely
popular, and every May-day she entertained the London chimney-sweeps.
She died on the 25th of August 1800. There is an
admirable portrait of her by Reynolds.
See Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blue Stockings: Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, edited by E. J. Climenson (2 vols., 1906); and R. Huchon, Mrs Montagu and her Friends, 1720–1800 (Eng. trans., 1907).
MONTAGU, LADY MARY WORTLEY (1680–1762), English
letter-writer, eldest daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, afterwards
duke of Kingston, was baptized at Covent Garden on the 26th
of May 1689. Her mother, who died while her daughter was
still a child, was a daughter of William Feilding, earl of Denbigh.
Her father was proud of her beauty and wit, and when she was
eight years old she is said to have been the toast of the Kit-Kat
Club. He took small pains with the education of his children,
but Lady Mary was encouraged in her self-imposed studies by
her uncle, William Feilding, and by Bishop Burnet. She formed
a close friendship with Mary Astell, who was a champion of
woman’s rights, and with Anne Wortley Montagu, granddaughter
of the first earl of Sandwich. With this lady she carried
on an animated correspondence. The letters on Anne’s side,
however, were often copied from drafts written by her brother,
Edward Wortley Montagu, and after Anne’s death in 1709 the
correspondence between him and Lady Mary was prosecuted
without an intermediary. Lady Mary’s father, now marquess
of Dorchester, declined, however, to accept Montagu as a son-in-law
because he refused to entail his estate on a possible heir.
Negotiations were broken off, and when the marquess insisted on
another marriage for his daughter the pair eloped (1712). The early years of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s married life were spent in rigid economy and retirement in the country. Her husband was M.P. for Westminster in 1715, and shortly afterwards was made a commissioner of the treasury. When Lady Mary joined him in London her wit and beauty soon made her a prominent figure at court. Early in 1716 Montagu was appointed ambassador at Constantinople. Lady Mary accompanied him to Vienna, and thence to Adrianople and Constantinople. He was recalled in 1717, but they remained at Constantinople until 1718. The story of this voyage and of her observations of Eastern life is told in a series of lively letters full of graphic description. From Turkey she brought back the practice of inoculation for small-pox. She had her own children inoculated, and encountered a vast amount of prejudice in bringing the matter forward. Before starting for the East she had made the acquaintance of Alexander Pope, and during her absence he addressed to her a series of extravagant letters, which appear to have been chiefly exercises in the art of writing gallant epistles. Very few letters passed after Lady Mary’s return, and various reasons have been suggested for the subsequent estrangement and violent quarrel. Mr Moy Thomas suggests that the cause is to be found in the last of the “Letters during the embassy to Constantinople.” It is addressed to Pope and purports to be dated from Dover, the 1st of November 1718. It contains a parody on Pope’s “Epitaph on the Lovers struck by Lightning.” The MS. collection of these letters was passed round a considerable circle, and Pope may well have been offended at the circulation of this piece of satire. Jealousy of her friendship with Lord Hervey has also been alleged, but Lady Louisa Stuart says Pope had made Lady Mary a declaration of love, which she had received with an outburst of laughter. In any case Lady Mary always professed complete innocence of all cause of offence in public. She is alluded to in the Dunciad in a passage to which Pope affixed one of his insulting notes. A Pop upon Pope was generally supposed to be from her pen, and Pope thought she was part author of One
Epistle to Mr A. Pope (1730). Pope attacked her again and again, but with especial virulence in a gross couplet in the “Imitation of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” as Sappho. She asked a third person to remonstrate, and received the obvious answer that Pope could not have foreseen that she or any one else would apply so base an insult to herself. Verses addressed to an Imitator of Horace by a Lady (1733), a scurrilous reply to these attacks, is generally attributed to the joint efforts of Lady Mary and her sworn ally, Lord Hervey. She had a romantic correspondence with a Frenchman named Rémond, who addressed to her a series of excessively gallant letters before
