Montagu Edward W
Montagu, Edward Wortley.
ACHIEVEMENTS: Explorer in the Middle East.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None.
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: May or June 1713.
DATE /PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: 29thApril 1776, Padua, Italy. Aged 63
DISCIPLINE: Writer.
FIELD: Literature.
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Father: Edward Wortley Montagu, Member of Parliament.
Mother: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
SIBLINGS: Sister, Mary.
SPOUSE: Several bigamous marriages including those to Elizabeth Ashe, Caroline Dormer
CHILDREN: Several illegitimate children.
EDUCATION: Westminster School, London; University of Leiden Holland.
MAJOR WORK: None.
LIFE AND TIMES:
In 1717 Montagu was the first British citizen to be inoculated for smallpox. In Turkey his mother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu* discovered that the local population could give themselves immunity by infecting themselves with a slight prophylactic dose and she inoculated Montagu.
His early life is little documented, but by his mid-twenties by his own account he had been a labourer, a ploughman, a Lutheran divine and a Catholic priest. In 1739 he was in gaol for debt in Holland and in 1741 he was registered for Leyden University, to study Arabic, Persian and Turkish.
In September 1743, he became a cornet in the 7th Hussars and was transferred to the Royal Scots in 1745, in which regiment he fought in the battle of Fontenoy in May 1745. In this battle, Austrian, British, Dutch and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of Cumberland were defeated by the French. He was briefly a prisoner of war in 1746.
While still out of England, Montagu was elected to the parliamentary seat of Huntingdon in 1747, supported by Edward Montagu, his father’s cousin, who was married to the famous bluestocking hostess, Mrs Elizabeth Montagu*. As a Member of Parliament, Montagu could not be pursued by his creditors in England.
In July 1748, he was made one of the commissioners to act as secretary at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle.
From 1754-1762 he was Member of Parliament for Bossiney in Cornwall. He never visited the constituency and failed to make his maiden speech in the House of Commons. In 1759 he published an essay “Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics. Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain”.
In 1762, he left for Italy, where he met Winckelman*, who was impressed by Montagu’s scholarship and conversation.
In 1763 he arrived in Egypt and there met Caroline Dormer, the Irish Roman Catholic wife of a Protestant Dane. Montagu managed to convince her that her husband was dead and went through a form of marriage to her. Pursued by her husband, they fled to Jerusalem.
In November 1764, Montagu was received into the Church of Rome to please his ‘wife’ whom he then deserted, to spent the winter of 1765 in Pisa, from where he sent the Royal Society an account of his journey from Cairo to Sinai.
From the island of Zante in 1767 he sent the Royal Society “New Observations on what is called Pompey’s Pillar in Egypt”. In the next two years he travelled in Greece and the Middle East, visiting Turkey for the first time since a boy.
In 1773, he returned to Venice. Many of his visitors were young men doing the Grand Tour, taken there by their tutors. One of these was the young Duke of Hamilton, whose tutor recounted that they were received by Montagu in Turkish costume, sitting on a carpet with his legs crossed, and given coffee and also given dried figs and cubes of coloured jelly by a handsome young black dressed in turquoise satin.
Romney* painted a picture of him in Turkish costume. In 1776 he received news that his first wife, Sally, had died. Montagu set off hotfoot for England and his inheritance, but died in Padua in 1776 after swallowing a fishbone.
ASSESSMENT: Montagu was an eccentric who travelled widely in the Middle East and wrote scholarly accounts for the Royal Society about his travels.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: He travelled with Elizabeth Carter*
ONELINER: Edward Wortley Montagu, Middle East explorer
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Curling, Jonathan, Edward Wortley Montagu, 1713-1776, The Man in the Iron Wig, Andrew Melrose, London, 1954