It will thus be seen that the war provided H.B. with an excellent source of revenue. The expenditure of nervous and physical energy involved in the lecture tour was enormous. Every night when I got him away from a meeting to the hotel I had to strip him and give him a thorough towelling. He was invariably saturated right through to his morning coat with perspiration. And then, surprisingly, the man who had prided himself so greatly on being the county’s most effective recruiting sergeant adds: Messinger, Gary S. (1992). British Propaganda and the State in the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-3014-5.

Horatio wound up relying on the charity of one of the same women he had showered with gifts decades before – Peggy Primrose, the one mistress who had stood by him through the years. Peggy was an actress and she might have been the one who got him his last public appearance, a one man show at the Windmill Theatre where he told stories of his life and recreated some of his greatest speeches. Reports vary as to how this was received – some say that he only succeeded in baffling the crowd at the shows, others that he was popular enough that he might have been able to spin yet another fortune out of his stories. It was a moot point – his health went into decline, and in 1933 at the age of 73 he died. A large crowd attended the funeral, where he was lauded for the contribution his poisonous brand of patriotism had made to the war effort. In accordance with his wishes, he was cremated and had his ashes scattered in Sussex. He was remembered as a symbol of wasted talent, a man who had all his achievements destroyed by his own corruption. In the end, everything he built was like his ashes, just dust in the wind. Worst Britons". www.newstatesman.com. Archived from the original on 19 September 2018 . Retrieved 19 September 2018. In 1916 Bottomley helped Noel Pemberton Billing, get elected as the independent MP at the East Hertfordshire by-election. Billing was also the editor of The Imperialist. Both men used their newspapers to claim the existence of a secret society called the Unseen Hand. Bottomley even claimed that this group was responsible for the death of Lord Kitchener. Other supporters of this campaign included Lord Northcliffe (the owner of The Times and The Daily Mail), Leo Maxse (the editor of The National Review), the journalist, Arnold Henry White (the author of The Hidden Hand) and Ellis Powell (the editor of the Financial News). Bottomley claimed that members of the Unseen Hand were working behind the scenes to obtain a peace agreement with Germany.

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Norman’s pamphlet sold very widely, and the problem for Bottomley was that all its allegations were true. But he was a resourceful and inventive man, admirably so in a way: he persuaded a printer in Birmingham, for a fee, to print six copies of the pamphlet, and then to offer no defense in a suit against him for libel. The judge and jury in the case were completely taken in, and Bottomley was awarded substantial damages that he never claimed, instead paying the printer the sum agreed beforehand. Fearing a suit against them, the publishers of Norman’s original pamphlet issued an apology to Bottomley; thus was the pamphlet discredited, though it contained nothing but the truth. O ne thing is certain. When Bottomley was penniless and ailing unto death, he was looked after by his favorite mistress, Peggy Primrose, the love of his life, a minor failed actress upon whose career he had spent a fortune trying to promote. She stayed with him until he died. She provided a wreath of red roses at his funeral (for which she paid) with the message “Rest, beloved. I am so glad you worked out the Karma.” She was overcome with grief as they led the coffin away.

gpi: General Paralysis of the Insane, the last stage of neurosyphilis. Bottomley’s description exactly fits one of the only two cases I ever saw as a doctor, and her dreadful screams ring in my mind’s ear still; I can conjure them up mentally forty-five years later. Independents remain common in local politics. In the 1970s, around 20% of England’s local councillors described themselves in this way. Today there is another revival, with local independents controlling district councils in places such as Ashfield in Nottinghamshire and Boston in Lincolnshire, and other independents having shared power at county level, including in Cornwall and Herefordshire.Eliza Norton was a dressmaker’s assistant and the daughter of a debt collector. Not exactly a socially ambitious marriage for Horatio, but she was pretty and proved a supportive wife to Horatio. She gave him a daughter, and more importantly she tolerated his many, many infidelities over the next fifty years. His marriage also made him respectable enough to be given a partnership in the shorthand company, where his immense natural charm and apparent business acumen had clearly impressed the owners. But Horatio had bigger ambitions than just running a shorthand firm. And he saw two routes to achieve them – publishing, and politics. Charles Bradlaugh After the war had ended, Bottomley determined on returning to Parliament. He was still, as he had been throughout the War, an undischarged bankrupt, and he was determined to make a sufficient large fortune so as to clear his debts, and to live in the style which his wartime lectures had subsidised. The method he chose was to issue a private “Victory Bond”, linked in theory to the government’s Victory Loan. Hyman, Alan (1972). The Rise and Fall of Horatio Bottomley. Littlehampton, West Sussex: Cassell & Co. ISBN 0-304-29023-8.