“They Give No Cordials to Heighten the Fever”: Lady Mary, Corruption, and the Problem of Royal Influence

Abstract

This article considers the relationship between Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Turkey and her subsequent support for smallpox inoculation, her public criticism of the Royal College of Physicians and their approach to managing the outbreak of 1721, and her reputation as a woman of sexual excesses long before she left her husband in 1739. I argue that Montagu’s vilification in the press following her return from Turkey had little do to with any imagined sexual misconduct while travelling, but was rather the consequence of her vocal and insistent engagement in debates about inoculation during the 1720s. I attribute continued opinions about Montagu’s early years, including those expressed by her family after her death, to a combination of her desire for a public voice and the influence of her son-in-law, Lord Bute, whose opposition to the publication of the Turkish Embassy Letters after her death was directly tied to his own, rather than her, troubles with the public.