Maundy Gregory - Selling Honours

Selling Honours

Around 1918, Gregory approached the Liberal Party to arrange payments to the party in exchange for peerages. He was actually one of many to do this. David Lloyd George hired him as a broker to gather funding for the United Constitutional Party Lloyd George was planning to form.

At the time, prices for honours ranged from £10,000 (£310,000 today) for a knighthood to £40,000 (£1.24 million) for a baronetcy. Later estimates state that Gregory transferred £1-2 million (now £31-62 million) to the Liberal and Conservative parties. He earned around £3 million a year, which he used to buy the Whitechapel Gazette newspaper and considerable real estate, including the Ambassador Club in Soho and the Deepdene Hotel in Surrey. Reportedly, Gregory gathered gossip about the sex lives of contemporary celebrities who stayed at the two properties. The hotel gained the reputation of being "the biggest brothel in southeast England", and it was also rumored that people at the Ambassador Club sold stolen jewellery. Allegedly, Gregory used this information for blackmail. The Whitechapel Gazette included anti-Bolshevik and anti-semitic articles by Basil Thomson writing as "Gellius".

Gregory made many friends who were prominent members of British society, including the Duke of York, later King George VI, and the Earl of Birkenhead. He clashed, however, with the radical left-wing politician Victor Grayson, who had reportedly discovered that Gregory was selling honours, but who refused to denounce him without further proof. Grayson also suspected Gregory of having forged the notorious diaries of Roger Casement. Many writers suspect that Gregory was involved in Grayson's disappearance in 1920, but there is no evidence to support this theory.

There are also claims that Gregory was involved in the Zinoviev Letter affair that influenced the defeat of the Labour Party in the 1924 General Election.

In 1927, the new Unionist government blocked Gregory's honours-selling scheme. He began selling non-British honours, such as noble titles from Serbia and Ukraine, and papal honours and dispensations, such as the knighthood of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. Among his victims was the Catholic father of actress Mia Farrow, to whom he had promised a marriage annulment. Gregory himself was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Holy Sepulchre.

According to published MI5 files, when Russian diplomat Ivan Korostovets tried to recruit Gregory to work against the Bolsheviks, Gregory used the Anglo-Ukrainian Fellowship as a front to continue his peerage sales and kept all the money for himself.

Gregory also continued to sell British peerages to those who were unaware he could no longer provide them. Those who paid him had no legal recourse; they could neither report him to the authorities nor sue in civil court without themselves being prosecuted under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. In 1930, Gregory was sued for £30,000 by the estate of a baronet who had died before receiving a peerage purchased from him. He was forced to return the money.