1718–1792 · First Lord of the Admiralty · Georgian political grandee
John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, ran the Royal Navy through three spells as First Lord of the Admiralty, the last of them (1771–1782) covering the American War of Independence, and he is the peer the modern sandwich is named after ↗. He was also a reliable target for jokes about his morals: for years his mistress was Fanny Murray, the subject of John Wilkes’s scandalous Essay on Woman, which is exactly why the retort about ‘your lordship’s mistress’ landed. In this anecdote he is the aggressor, not the wit — the laugh belongs to Samuel Foote.