Jacob Bryant (1715-1804) was tutor and later private secretary to the Duke of Marlborough. He was appointed to a sinecure on the Board of Ordnance, and spent his time writing about mythology, attempting to link all the myths in the world to the stories in Genesis. He also wrote books that endeavoured to prove that the existence of Troy and the Trojan War were entirely mythological, and had no basis in fact; this led to a fierce literary controversy. He was a believer in the authenticity of Thomas Chatterton’s fabricated poems, which he claimed had been written by Thomas Rowley, a 15th century monk, but were in fact forged on old vellum by Chatterton himself.