Lord Knows Who (Part Two)
Lord Knows Who (Part Two)
Rich Widows, Poor Bastards, and the Value of Anonymity
This is part two of a two part series. If you haven’t already, read part one here.
“And now that I have given my Courteous Reader several loose and incoherent Thoughts, which coming freely into my Head, were as freely sent out of it, the Lord knows what will be the Consequence of it.”
Lord Knows Who, “Lord Knows What” (1713)
I confess that I have kept something from you.
Robert Craggs-Nugent, 1st Earl Nugent, author of “Verses Addressed to the Queen with a New Year’s Gift of Irish Manufacture,” parodied by the anonymous Lord Knows Who, is not remembered today for being a politician or a poet. Rather, he is known to historians (indeed if he is known at all) for a different occupation altogether. Some may not call it an occupation, but in Nugent’s case I think an exception can be made. After all, when you do something so often that people start to refer to it by your own name, it starts to seem like a full-time gig.
This was the case with Nugent, who married so many rich widows in his lifetime that his contemporaries coined the verb “to nugentise” to refer to the act of marrying rich widows itself. Thus, before gold-diggers there were nugentisers, of whom you can be sure the great Earl was the foremost. Over successive strings of loaded widows he married his way to being one of the richest men in England, worth over a million pounds by the time of his death.
Around the time my professor told me that my previous suspect for Lord Knows Who, the infamous Junius, was wildly implausible, I started to wonder…could the identity of Lord Knows Who be tied to Earl Nugent’s dalliances? Could, in fact, this mysterious author have had it out not just for the Earl’s politics but for his personal life as well?
Even before his first marriage, Earl Nugent was already a nugentiser at heart. He showed early tendencies of sugarbabying when he got hitched with the biggest sugardaddy of them all: the Church of England. Born an Irish Catholic, Nugent clearly perceived the advantages of conversion to the Anglican church for his own political career in the British Empire. Accordingly he made quite the effort to impress his good faith upon the British literati, publishing poems that criticized Catholicism’s “dark creeds” and praised the “steady rays” of Locke.
This posturing seems essential to understanding Nugent. It would require no small amount of cunning for an Irish Catholic to propel himself into imperial favor in the 18th century, let alone to become one of the richest men in Britain. Nugent did just that at a time when most Irish Catholics scraped by as subsistence farmers. He was a player, sure, but he also (crucially) knew how to play the game. For all the sleaziness of his strategy, we ought to bear in mind that perhaps no woman got swindled in their affairs with the Earl more than Britannia herself.
But that’s no fun. We want Earl the two-timin’ scoundrel, not Earl the postcolonial pimp! Don’t tell me with critical detachment why the Earl’s story is actually quite complex. Give us the tea, man. Which one of these rich widows finally had enough and decided, to quote the Dixie Chicks, “that Earl had to die”? Let’s meet the crew.
Widow #1
Emilia Plunkett. Lady Emilia Plunkett, that is. After an undocumented (though undoubtedly active) bachelorhood, our Earl gets himself hitched at 28 to Ms. Plunkett, an Irishwoman herself and, importantly to the Nugentiser, a daughter to a wealthy lord. Plunkett is the launching point for the Earl’s conquests but a dud for our investigative purposes: she died almost fifty years before the publication of Lord Knows Who. The Anglican God (who, like Flocka, always rides for his dawgs), shined his gracious favor upon the Earl when Emilia croaked in childbirth, freeing him up to use his recently acquired land assets to quarry bigger game. (Oh get over yourself–widow-hunting isn’t for the faint of heart.)
Probability of Lord Knows Who: dead on arrival.
Widow #2
Next up is Anne Craggs, a woman older than Nugent with valuable connections to the postmaster general (father) and secretary of state (brother). Better yet, Anne had already been twice widowed by two rich Brits, making her holdings considerable. One of Nugent’s biographers sums up their relationship thusly:
“The marriage brought little happiness and no children. It did, however, bring very extensive properties, including the parish of Gosfield, $100,000, and the parliamentary borough seat of St. Mawes.”
God bless this biographer’s concern for nuptial bliss. I for one find it exceedingly difficult to believe that such an arrangement brought the Nugentiser “little happiness.” No kids, a cozy political job, an entire parish–plus a cool hundred thousand quid to shine his shoes. Nugent was so proud of his fortune that he actually took Anne’s name for his own, signing all subsequent letters “Robert Craggs-Nugent.”
Anne had enough style and wit in her writing to establish a correspondence with Alexander Pope, making her a superb candidate for Lord Knows Who, but unfortunately she too was buried before “Verses to the —” was published. I’ve no doubt that if she’d managed to have escaped the grave she might’ve donned a yellow jumpsuit and done some serious damage.
Probability of Lord Knows Who: unable to escape the casket.
Widow #3
Elizabeth Drax, Countess of Berkeley. At this point Nugent has the coolest hand in the game. His fortunes, both financial and personal, border on the outrageous. The Countess secures him an earldom and thus a permanent seat in political affairs. The Earl certainly cheats Elizabeth the most out of the three. After leaving her with two daughters, he plays his Anglican trump card and divorces her. I’m positive this treatment brewed some high-proof resentment, certainly enough to compel one to pan the Earl in public. Though the motivation is all there, I’m not sure the countess had the disposition to match it. Elizabeth was firmly an English aristocrat. She even served as “lady of the bedchamber” for the Princess of Wales. I’m not ruling out the possibility of her penning Lord Knows Who, but it would be about as surprising as if Jared Kushner turned out to be Banksy.
Probability of Lord Knows Who: you think Jared had one of those airbrush t-shirt booths at his bar mitzvah?
Widow #4
Oh no, our Earl’s not done yet. Unsatisfied with mere mortal swindles, the Earl makes his last bride an eternal one. In his final days Robert Craggs-Nugent, having juiced the Church of England for all she was worth, returns to his native Catholicism. With a simple confession, no harder to utter than a wedding vow, the Earl puts all his hard-earned earthly riches on a heavenly layaway.
Probability of Lord Knows Who: Lord only knows.
Beyond timing, what was missing in the Earl’s relationships with widows was passion. In all the relationships described above it seems obvious that the Earl, as well as the widows themselves, got married as a consequence of opportunity. Opportunistic relationships are hardly the breeding ground for vengeance. I needed to find someone whom the Earl had betrayed not just with a cool hand but a cold heart.
There was rumored to be one woman with whom the Earl had a relationship that could in no way be construed as anything other than an affaire d’amour. Around the time of his first marriage to Lady Emilia, word spread that Nugent was messing around with his cousin, Clare Nugent. (Not a distant cousin either–a first cousin.)
I could not find any record of Clare Nugent in the archives, but searching around for her led me to something revelatory. It was rumored that the young lovers broke off their affair as a result of a pregnancy, and that Clare Nugent had borne the Earl’s first son. These unsubstantiated rumors seemed to have dissipated by the time of the Earl’s second marriage, but they came roaring back in 1756 when a book called The Unnatural Father, or the Persecuted Son, written by a certain Robert Nugent Jr., hit the shelves. It was, and for our purposes remains, a bombshell.
“Since the actions of men are the strongest demonstrations of the virtue or depravity of the mind, it is with sensible concern, and great reluctance, I find myself obliged to display to the world the most UNNATURAL PARENT perhaps ever heard in these Kingdoms.”
Now we’re talking. What follows is a 65 page exposé illustrating how the Earl systematically destroyed his son’s life. The Earl has many clever ploys for ruining the young man’s fortunes, including several loans that ensnare his son in thousands of pounds of debt, but far and away my favorite scheme is a job the Earl procures for his son on a shipping vessel, whereon Nugent Jr. reports that the Earl’s servant “James Pr—n…was to keep me drunk all the time.”
The most insidious scheme, though, is an appointment the Earl establishes for his son with the East India trading company. In most circumstances this would be a dream gig for a son born out of wedlock, who in the 18th century couldn’t realistically expect much by way of support from his biological father. Young Nugent, however, is suspicious of the Earl’s graciousness and on the advice of some friends goes knocking at the East India company to ascertain the particularities of the position.
“I was to be inrolled [sic] by the fictitious name of Thomas Plunkett and in no other station than that of Captain’s Servant, as before. Good God! What pen can paint my great astonishment as the discovery of so dark a design in my own father.”
This compulsion to adopt a fictitious name is the greatest offense to Robert Nugent Jr. Even as his financial debt skyrockets, it is the imposition of the name Thomas Plunkett (derived, it seems, from the maiden name of the Earl’s first wife Lady Emilia, a total non-relation to Nugent Jr.) that most outrages him.
“The strange name of Plunkett occasioned the greatest confusion in my breast, a name I had never assumed, but on the contrary, was an utter stranger to.”
Again and again the Earl forces the name upon his son, demanding that even in legal agreements he signs with the name Thomas Plunkett. The forced adoption of the name becomes in practice exactly that: a forced adoption of Robert Nugent Jr. in the eyes of the state, thereby exculpating the Earl of financial obligation.
What we have in Robert Nugent Jr, then, is a vengeful, capable writer with a name that is not his own. A no-man’s man, someone who has been denied both the right of inheritance (family name) and individuality (chosen name). And not just a man, but a son—an imitation—and not just a son, but a bastard—a parody.
A parody of the father with a name that no one knows.
Sound like anyone familiar?
Spring in New York is hilariously beautiful if you’ve spent your whole life in the desert, where the ceremony (really mourning) of winter’s thaw begins and ends with switching on your thermostat. My first spring in the city saw me emerge from deep hibernation in my Lord Knows Who research to see the radical possibilities held by the approaching summer. I would actually go to Ireland—something I gathered was important for an Irish Studies student to do—and hopefully pick up on the breadcrumbs that aging and dying scholars in my field were leaving behind. Maybe one would hold the missing link between Robert Nugent Jr. and Lord Knows Who?
In reality, though, I was ready to think about something else. It had been a long road, and though I hadn’t yet achieved a Scooby-Doo-esque reveal it occurred to me that a more important lesson had been learned. Like a first lover, Lord Knows Who had given me the chance to learn basic methods of academic research through innocent striving (let’s forget that simile and its horrid implications of postcoital jstor sessions at once). Furthermore, my grand illusion of academic fame and glory, while fun and exciting and refreshing in the context of an increasingly dry and dull and obscure field, was rapidly deteriorating. As my second semester came to an end I began closing tabs that had been rusting away in my browser since fall.
It would be unfair to leave you here. The Nugent Jr. lead had, after all, been piping hot just a few paragraphs ago (if you’re still curious, follow the footnote
). So let me qualify what may have come off as disillusionment. It is not that I became bored with searching for Lord Knows Who. It was more that the essential lesson they had to teach me had occurred long before my manhunt even began. That central lesson, which was transmitted the moment the author’s name caught my eye, is the kinship of the past and present in regards to artistic anonymity.I was primed to notice Lord Knows Who by an experience of information overload. Information overload is by no means unique to our era, but digital manifestations of it are the most aggressive to date. University archives are one example of this, cable television another. Both involve the paradoxical transmogrification of heterogeneity into homogeneity. Like the couch surfer with 700 channels, I might’ve scrolled through hundreds of pages of library results only to complain that “there’s nothing on.”
Lord Knows Who cut through that vast multiformity by managing to be both anachronistic and modern: that is, alien to my understanding of the past yet familiar to my perception of the present. What this tells me is that print culture in the 18th century must not have been all that different from internet culture today, in that anonymity in both eras has the ability to make you laugh and grab your attention. We laugh at anonymous names on Twitter for a similar reason one laughs at Lord Knows Who. Not because those names are “funny” in and of themselves (again dril is illustrative), but because they reveal the possibility of nonsense in a realm that is supposed to make sense of everything—the internet in the case of dril, the printing press in the case of Lord Knows Who. The irony that causes us to laugh at dril or Lord Knows Who boils down to exactly this: even with seemingly unlimited information, it turns out we’re still too dumb to understand or be understood.
More important than the laughs, though, is how such writers use anonymity to draw attention to their work rather than themselves. We tend to think of anonymity exclusively as a utility against censorship, be it the heroic kind of Chinese dissidents or the corrosive kind on 4chan. Lord Knows Who was likely of the former camp given the context of King George’s tyranny in England, but I also like to think that it was just as important to Lord Knows Who—as it is to Junius and dril and Alice from Queens—to use anonymity in order to focus the public’s attention on their work itself.
People living and working in early print culture understood this attentional value of anonymity. As John Robinson says in his memoir of working on Fleet Street,
“A point not to be overlooked in considering the question of anonymity is this, that the writer of a signed article speaks only for himself, whereas an anonymous contributor speaks with the authority of his paper, which has, or should have, its own individuality.”
Anonymity, then, allows a text to speak for itself. In an age of information overload, this can be as crucial to intellectual debate as avoiding censorship. Yet there is exceedingly little anonymity in serious art today. Since the fall of the USSR, anonymous authors of Western literature are almost non-existent, while in cinema the sum total may very well be zero. Anonymity in music is oddly hard to qualify--band names, though in a literary sense pseudonyms, often don't feel like anonymous titles
--while anonymity in the visual arts tends to be limited to street artists like Jared Kushner.This to me seems like a problem. Even in relatively stable political societies without rigorous censorship laws, anonymity still serves a purpose. An anonymous author elevates ideas over information (a name after all being nothing more than a bit of data). What we can learn from authors like Lord Knows Who is how anonymity in an age of information overload becomes an effective protest against claims of total comprehension. As Lord Knows Who taught me, you’ll never really know, so don’t keep clicking. Just read.
Robert Nugent, Ode to Pulteney (1739)
Kushner’s bar mitzvah was a “black-tie event” and had members of the New York Giants on the invite list (New Yorker, 2020). So if there had been an airbrush t-shirt booth,
Robert Nugent Jr., The Unnatural Father, or the Persecuted Son (1755)
Thomas Plunkett probably–probably–isn’t Lord Knows Who. Though their styles are both cunning, Lord Knows Who is very obviously a capable satirist and there’s no evidence that Robert Nugent Jr. ever wrote any satirical verse. Robert Nugent Jr. did go on to novelize his tale in a book called The Oppressed Captive (1757), which he wrote from Fleet prison under a new pseudonym, Caius Silius Nugent, in homage to the orphaned Roman statesman who tried to adopt Britannicus. It is possible that Nugent Jr. created another pseudonym for himself in 1775, but that would also imply a twenty year gap in publications under his previous names. Given that writing seems to have been a necessary source of income, that gap feels unlikely.
I eventually found a 1713 text titled Lord Knows What attributed to a different Lord Knows Who. It too has a snarky political tone and seems the obvious inspiration for the 1775 Lord Knows Who, which tells me that our author is very likely a studied politician rather than a spurned lover or abandoned son.
There is one other possible suspect that I am burying at the bottom of this for fear of sabotaging the entire conceit of this two-part piece…Earl Nugent himself. The strongest evidence in favor of this view is that “Verses Addressed to the —” is not so much a flat out counter to Nugent’s trade-relations argument in “Verses Addressed to the Queen” as it is an intensification of it. The Latin on the frontispiece—clarior e tenebris, “I shine brighter in the dark”—could just as well apply to the Earl himself, who would only have been able to voice his full-throated opinion pseudonymously. Furthermore, if Earl Nugent is Lord Knows Who it would complete the pun of “Lord Knows Who,” given that the Earl himself was once known as Lord Clare. But then all of that seems almost too obvious, and we know for a fact that Nugent would not have been keen on upsetting his hard earned (wed) social/financial favor in the British Empire. Anyway, you’ve probably only read this if you’re the kind of person who has the horn for 18th century stuff, in which case I’m sure you’ve long dismissed me as a serious scholar, or if you’re the kind of person who due to a generally anxious or obsessive disposition reads all the footnotes, which are kind of like the proto-hyperlink, in which case, you know, read the rest.
Sir John. R Robinson, Fifty Years of Fleet Street (1904), 221.
An exception here might be Parquet Courts, which for a while could also be found on Spotify as Parkay Quartz, which lent the group the sort of titular instability I associate with anonymous titles. If you know of others (especially in film), send ‘em along.
Some might say that the presence of “untitled” as an artwork’s title has the same attention focusing effect as anonymous authorship. This practice is indeed on the rise, but it’s my experience that such titles do more to focus attention on the artist themselves rather than the work. To be blunt, it makes me think that the artist thinks their ideas speak for themselves, which with most contemporary art is an utterly laughable claim. As the writer Kelsey Ables points out, “The word’s presence in art-world spaces only underscores its ubiquity. The Whitney Museum has its restaurant, Untitled; there is a gallery called Untitled Space, and an Untitled Art Fair. In this way, “Untitled” functions as a title.”