The Queen's Chameleon:The Life of John Byrom: A Study of Conflicting Loyalties

John Byrom (1691-1763) was an enigma, a playboy, a philosopher, a poet and possibly a spy. On the one hand a pillar of the Establishment Byrom was also an active and secret Jacobite who conducted a wild affair with Queen Caroline. At least one of Byrom's close associates went to the gallows to protect his good name in high society while George II, unaware of the traitor at the gate, granted him by Act of Parliament a monopoly license top teach his new system of phonetic shorthand to leading political and social figures who might have caused to conceal their communications. Not content with being a member of the Royal society with Isaac Newton as well as the Freemasons. Byrom formed a secret society known as the Cabala Club through which he amassed a collection of mystical drawing and architectural designs in his search for a new model of the universe. Through the poems he published in the leading journals of the day he planted oblique references to his seditious ideas and yet he survived again and again, returning to the bosom of his loving family, tormented in his later years by the trail of duplicity he had left in his quest for a more just and honest mode of thought than the prevailing Hanovarian mores.