On June 17, King George graciously made the shoemaker’s son a baronet, a title that survives to this day. Sir John, as he was henceforth known, received wildly extravagant praise from much less exalted quarters too. Nicholas Amhurst, expelled from St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1719, was trying to make a living with his pen as both a poet and a political polemicist. In July 1720, he tried a familiar trick, publishing a poem of praise aimed at getting in on a good thing: his “Epistle to Blunt” is testimony to the public’s enthusiasm in the glorious adventure that, as of its writing, had been
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