Maundy Gregory
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(Arthur) Maundy Gregory (1 July 1877 – 28 September 1941) was a British theatre producer and political fixer who is most famous for selling honours. He has also been rumoured to have been involved with the Zinoviev Letter and the disappearance of Victor Grayson and he also claimed to have been a spy for the British intelligence.
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[edit] Earlier life
Gregory was born the son of a clergyman in Southampton and went to Banister Court school in Southampton (where a classmate was Harold Davidson, the infamous Rector of Stiffkey) and Oxford University but left before graduation. He became a teacher but later began to work as an actor and producer in a theatre.
The rest of what we know about the background of Maundy Gregory comes from himself and the papers and CVs he wrote later in life and their veracity is questionable. According to Gregory, Vernon Kell, head of MI5, recruited him in 1909 as a spy, possibly due to his connections in London nightlife. His main task was to compile dossiers of foreign spies living in London. Later Sidney Reilly would have recruited him for the recently formed MI6. He later used these claims to state that he collected money for the fight against Bolshevism. Officially he was just a private in the Irish Guards.
[edit] Selling of peerages
Around in 1918 Gregory approached the Liberal Party in order to arrange payments to the party in exchange for peerages (he was actually one of many to do so). David Lloyd George hired him as a broker to gather funding from the United Constitutional Party he was planning to form.
Prices for honours ranged from contemporary £10,000 (£310,000 in modern terms) for a knighthood to £40,000 (£1.24 million) for a baronetcy. Later estimates state that Gregory transferred money worth £1-2 million (now £31-62 million) to the Liberal and later Conservative parties. He earned around £3 million a year he used to buy his own newspaper and many properties including the Ambassador Club in Soho and Deepdene Hotel in Surrey, both of which he reputedly used for gathering gossip about the sex life of contemporary celebrities. Reputedly he used this information for blackmail.
Gregory made friends with prominent people. They included the Duke of York, later King George V and the Earl of Birkenhead. He also clashed with the radical left-wing politician Victor Grayson who reputedly found out that Gregory was selling honours but refused to name him without further proof. Many writers suspect that Gregory was involved of Grayson's later disappearance but the evidence is lacking.
In 1927 new Unionist government blocked Gregory's scheme but he switched to selling also non-British honours like noble titles of now-defunct monarchies of Serbia and Ukraine and knighthoods of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. According to later published MI5 files, when Russian diplomat Ivan Korostovets tried to recruit Gregory to work against the Bolsheviks, Gregory just used his Anglo-Ukrainian Fellowship as a front to continue his peerage sales and took all the money for himself.
However, Gregory still kept selling peerages to British even if he no longer had any influence in the government to arrange them. Those who had paid him money expecting a favour in return could not sue him because they would have been prosecuted under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 as well. So Gregory could now keep all the money without transferring it to anywhere else.
There are also claims that Gregory was involved with the affair of the Zinoviev Letter that influenced the defeat of the Labour Party in the 1924 General Election.
[edit] Collector
A significant part of chapter XX (“The End of the Quest”) in The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons concerns the author’s meetings with Gregory, who at that time (the late twenties) was interested in collecting manuscripts of British author Baron Corvo (aka Frederick Rolfe and Fr. Rolfe). Never explaining his occupation nor source of his income, but living well, Gregory told Symons that “money was no object” in getting what he wanted. He was successful in acquiring several of Corvo’s manuscripts.
[edit] Further schemes and exposure
In 1930 the estate of a baronet who had died before receiving the peerage sued Gregory and he had to return £30.000. Later he persuaded his live-in companion, actress Edith Rosse, to change her will and when she died couple of days later, he inherited £18.000.
In 1932 Gregory tried to sell Lieutenant Commander Billyard Leake a peerage for £12.000. Leake pretended to be interested but informed the police and Gregory was arrested. Gregory could now threaten to name in court those who had bought peerages. He pleaded guilty, possibly persuaded to do so by Tories, and therefore did not have to give evidence in court. He also gave interviews to the press trying to convince them of his point of view.
In 1933 Gregory was convicted under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 of selling honours, fined £50 and jailed for two months. As of 2007 he remains the only person to have been convicted under this statute. The names of those who bought their peerages are still unknown. His case file was moved to National Archives in 2002.
[edit] Later life
After Gregory was released, he moved to Paris where he lived with the £2000 pension from sources close to the Conservative Party. British historian Andrew Cook claims that Gregory took his records with him. After the German occupation of France in 1940, he was captured and sent to a labor camp.
Sources disagree on the death of Gregory. He reputedly died on September 28, 1941, either at a labor camp or at the Val de Grace Hospital in Paris.
[edit] References in popular fiction
In his 1993 novel Closed Circle the author Robert Goddard writes of the main character, Guy Horton, having a meeting with Gregory in which Gregory employs Horton to 'encourage' wealthy businessmen to uses his services to obtain peerages. Goddard writes (in the words of Horton) "I felt an immediate loathing for everything about him - the egg-shell charm, the wafts of cologne, the dandyish dress, the monocle, the rings, the voice; and especially the hungry fish-like eyes."
[edit] Sources
- Andrew Cook - Hawking Peerages (History Today November 2006)
[edit] Further reading
- Tom Cullen - Maundy Gregory: Purveyor of Honours (1974) ISBN 0-370-01373-5
- John Walker - The Queen Has Been Pleased: The British Honours System at Work (1986) ISBN 0-436-56111-5
