An Irish adventurer, Moore was said to have begun life as a footman, which gave rise to the story that the elder Craggs,
who had worn livery too and who was getting into a coach with him, turned about and said ‘God! Arthur, I am always going to get up behind; are not you?’
Walpole to Mann, 1 Sept. 1750.
Speaker Onslow describes him as
of very extraordinary parts, with great experience and knowledge of the world, very able in parliament, and capable in the highest parts of business ... His acquisitions had been very great by trade and afterwards by every method, as it has been said, that his interest and power and opportunities opened to him; but his profusion consumed all.
Onslow’s note to Burnet’s Hist. of his own Time, vi. 162-3.
He figured prominently in the financial scandals of the last days of Anne’s reign, when he was accused in the House of Lords of corruptly helping Bolingbroke and Lady Masham to fill their pockets at the public expense and was simultaneously expelled from his directorship of the South Sea Company for attempting to use one of their ships for his private trade. Defeated at Grimsby in 1715, he was among the Members and agents of the late Tory Government who were expressly excepted from the Indemnity Act of 1717. He seems to have made his peace with the Government in 1718, when his two younger sons were jointly granted the reversion of their grandfather’s place of paymaster of the gentlemen pensioners.