February 21, 2024 • 38 mins
John Mytton is often called an eccentric, but that doesn’t really capture his whole story. Despite his wild behavior, he's something of a local hero, and sometimes a joke, but his life is sort of sad in many ways.
Research:
- Bibby, Miriam. “Mad Jack Mytton.” Historic UK. https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Mad-Jack-Mytton/
- Haskin, Frederic J. “John Mytton – Madcap.” Quad-City Times. June 8, 1938. https://www.newspapers.com/image/301169605/?terms=john%20mytton&match=1
- “Joh Mytton’s Follies.” Mnchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser. March 1, 1907. https://www.newspapers.com/image/800081799/?terms=john%20mytton&match=1
- “The Late John Mytton, Esq. of Halston.” The Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald. May 10, 1834. https://www.newspapers.com/image/410154461/?terms=john%20mytton&match=1
- Ludington, C. “Happily, inebriety is not the vice of the age”. In: The Politics of Wine in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. 2013. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306226_12
- “Madcap’s Progress.” Liverpool Daily Post. March 24, 1938. https://www.newspapers.com/image/891779638/?terms=john%20mytton&match=1
- “Memoirs of the Life of the Late John Mytton, Esq. of Halston, Shropshire, formerly M. P. for Shrewsbury, high sheriff for the counties of Salop and Merioneth and major of the North Shropshire yeomanry cavalry; with notices of his hunting, shooting, driving, racing, eccentric and extravagant exploits.” London. Methuen. 1903. https://archive.org/details/memoirsoflifeofl00nimriala/page/n3/mode/2up
- “On the 29th In the King’s Bench Prison … “ Gloucestershire Chronicle. April 5, 1834. https://www.newspapers.com/image/793256607/?terms=john%20mytton&match=1
- “The remains of the late John Mytton … “ The Morning Post. April 23, 1834. https://www.newspapers.com/image/396894049/?terms=%20LATE%20JOHN%20MYTTON%22&match=1
- F.H. “John Mytton, Junior.” The Standard. March 28, 1900. https://www.newspapers.com/image/409754772/?terms=john%20mytton&match=1
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And before we get
into today's topic, we have a little housekeeping, which is
to mention that we have our Stuff you Missed in
(00:25):
History Class international trip ready to go. Yep. The dates
for that trip are November two to the eighth, twenty
twenty four. You can sign up if you want and
if you want to go to the wonderful and delightful
country of Iceland. Very excited about Iceland. I love Iceland desperately.
We are going to spend time in Rayyivic, but we
(00:45):
are also going to vic which is where the beautiful
black beaches are. We are going to do some fun activities.
There will be glacier time. Yeah, there will be interesting
fun things to eat. There will be visiting Blue Lagoon.
There will be visiting a different lagoon that's an actual lagoon,
(01:10):
lagoon with glaciers in it. Yes, we're gonna do walking tours,
you know. We'll see the oldest parliament site in Europe,
which is pretty fun. We have both been in recent
years and I am obsessed with Iceland. I had the
best time in raykievic Yeah, way more than I ever anticipated.
(01:32):
I really fell in love with it. Yeah. We went
for our honeymoon in twenty sixteen, and our intent had
been to return for our five year anniversary, but instead
that was COVID incredibly excited about returning in November of
twenty twenty four instead. Yeah. There will be waterfalls, There
(01:57):
will be I mean probably rain There are a lot
of rainbows in US. Yeah, and if if all things cooperate,
we have a good chance of seeing the Northern Lights,
which I did get to see completely at a random
time of year. But it was quite My understanding is
it was the Northern lights light like, it was not
(02:20):
as intense as it normally would be. Yeah, So it
was quite late in the season and a little surprising
that we could see them at all. So I am
very excited to go and spend time. All of these
trips are always so incredibly fun and delightful, and the
people that go with us are just as much a
part of making the experience great as anything that we
have planned for it. So if you think this sounds
(02:43):
interesting to you as well, you can check it out
with all the details at Defined Destinations dot com slash
Iceland twenty twenty four. You can also just go to
define Destinations dot com and they will have the Iceland
Tour listed on their homepage that you can click into
and get all of the details, including photos of some
(03:03):
of the beautiful things we're going to see. We will
mention it several more times, but if this sounds really
interesting to you, you might want to jump on it.
If you have any specific questions about what's going to
be going on on the tour, you want to go
through Defined Destinations. Our tour organizer, Michael, who has been
with us on all of our trips, is really really
(03:25):
wonderful and he does all of the planning. We kind
of get the benefit of having Michael do all the
legwork so that we can just go and have fun
with all of you. So if you have questions or
need clarification on anything, that is your place to go.
And now we can hop right into today's episode. So
(03:46):
perhaps exactly correctly, I don't know how I stumbled across
this person. It's John Mitton. He is one of those
figures who is pretty well known in some places. He
is at times funny other times to me kind of insufferable.
He's definitely the kind of person who is like a
poster child for having more money than since Mitton is
(04:09):
often called an eccentric that doesn't really capture his story.
And despite his very wild stories of like incredibly bad
behavior in some cases, he's also something of a local
hero in the area where he lived, and I ran
across several instances of people talking about his story in
kind of a comedic way, and some of it is funny.
(04:32):
It's so outlandish that I can understand that approach, but
like in the bigger picture, if you look at his
whole life, it's also really sad in some ways. So
I also want to include a brief heads up here.
This person kept a lot of animals, but some of
his behavior towards and with those animals are things we
would consider animal cruelty. Today, we're not going to linger
(04:54):
on any of that, but just know if you're especially
sensitive to it, it's yucky. I'm leaving out the worst parts.
I'm pretty sensitive to that stuff, and I think I
think we have a pretty cleaned up version of it
where you you're not going to get any any gory details.
So but heads up just as we go in the
best way to introduce John Mitton maybe to look at
(05:15):
how he was talked about after he was gone and
people were looking at his short life as a whole.
A memoir of John Mitton that was published just after
his death, written by a friend, opens this way after
noting a similar effort by another writer, quote, as no
subject is so interesting to man as man, I have
(05:36):
a good theme for my pen inasmuch as there is
one present to my mind who's equal as a private
English gentleman the world never before saw. Neither is it,
for some reasons desirable that the world should ever again see.
My only fear is that I may be deficient in
strength of pencil to draw the picture to the life
(05:59):
and to represent the anomaly in human nature which the
character of the late John Mitton presents, at one time
an honor to his nature, at another a satire on humanity.
What more can be done than to strike the balance
with an even hand, And as the brightness of the
sun hides its blemishes, let me hope the greater part
(06:22):
of his faults will be lost amid the virtues with
which they are mingled. At all events, my purpose is
not to hold up the torch to the failings of
my old and never forsaken friend, my chief object being
to account for them, and leave his virtues to speak
for themselves. I owe him pity on the score of
(06:42):
human nature. He claims it by his own acts and deeds,
and above all by one act of him, to whose
will all men must bow, and by whom all men's
deeds will be weighed. Let not the lash of censure
then fall too heavy upon one who himself carried charity
to excess. Let the greatness of his fall be unto
(07:06):
him as a shield. Let it be remembered he died
in a prison, an epitome of human misery. A glance
over his history, however, may not be unprofitable. It will
point a moral if it do not adorn a tale.
So that friend who wrote that memoir titled Memoirs of
the Life of the Late John Mitton, Esquire of Halston, Shropshire,
(07:29):
formerly MP for Shrewsbury, hi Sheriff for the Counties of
Celup and Marioneth and Major of the North Shropshire Yeoman Recavalry,
with notices of his hunting, shooting, driving, racing, eccentric and
extravagant exploits. So on one title that was The Writer
who Goes by Nimrod. His actual name was Charles James Apperley.
(07:51):
He was a sporting writer. He used the pen name Nimrod,
presumably after the biblical king who commissioned the Tower of Babel,
and as he noted, Apperly was a friend of John Mitton,
who was also known as mad Jack because he was
a lot. Minton is typically described as an eccentric and
(08:11):
a rake. His life history plays out like a William
Hogarth morality engraving on bad behavior, although Mitton was born
about one hundred years after Hogarth. I note that because
when I was first reading his stuff, I was like, wait,
did Hogarth base all of his work on him? No?
Came wait before he seems to have learned absolutely nothing
from that artist's works. When a new biography of Minton
(08:35):
was written more than one hundred years after he was gone,
a review of the book, which was titled mad CAP's Progress,
said this quote, mad Cap is a kindly word to
use for John Mitton. In his short life, he got
through an immense amount of money, did many reckless and
foolish things, and did as far as one can see
(08:55):
very little good to anybody. It is true that he
was popular for a time, but even in the idle
and extravagant society in which he turned, John Mitton seems
to have been regarded as a man who carried things
too far. John Minton was born on September thirtieth, seventeen
ninety six, two months premature, at Halston Hall in Shropshire,
(09:18):
not far from the Welsh border. His father, who was
also named John Mitton, died when his son was still
a baby, and Nimrod and other friends and biographers have
made the case over the years that his mother's inability
to say no to the young child was to some
degree the source of his eventual ruin parent blamey, but honestly,
(09:38):
he clearly never learned boundaries. One writer and friend going
by the name J. W. C, who published his version
of Mitton's life after his death, wrote quote, is it
a marvel that his career should be erratic whose infancy
was never subjected to restraint? The death of John Mitton
Senior left little John, who wasn't yet too incredibly wealthy.
(10:01):
He was named inheritor of Halston Hall, and he got
a cash bequeathment of three hundred thousand pounds and an
annual allowance of one hundred thousand pounds. The family estate
he inherited included land in England and Wales. He was
not just given all of this as a child, of course,
the Mitten family had solicitors who looked after the fortune
(10:23):
until John came of age. As for schooling, he was
expelled from both Westminster and Harrow for bad behavior. As
an example of that bad behavior, he once wrote to
the chancellor at Westminster to explain that he was about
to be married and he was going to need to
have his annual allowance increase to support his wife. This
(10:43):
was before he was getting that huge sum. I have
seen various amounts reported, but it was something like six
thousand pounds a year, which was a lot. The chancellor
replied to him, quote, sir, if you can't live on
your allowance, you may starve, and if you marry, I'll
commit you to prison. If that sounds like an extreme response,
is because Minton was enjoying far more money than anyone
(11:06):
else in his class. And also he was thirteen at
this time, so marriage was preposterous. And while this was
kind of a pretty benign prank to basically make the
case to the Chancellor Westminster that he needed more money,
and I guess he wanted him to intercede with his family.
This was apparently the kind of thing he did constantly,
which led to a lot of ongoing friction with the Chancellor.
(11:28):
There is even a story that this kind of culminated
in him putting a horse in the Chancellor's bed and
that that was the final straw. I don't know if
that's a true story or not. He did move on
to higher education though, and enrolled at Cambridge, but that
didn't hold his attention and he decided to try a
military career. He joined a local volunteer regiment in Oswistree
(11:49):
when he was sixteen, then moved to the Shropshire Yeomanry
Cavalry after a reorganization that folded in his prior unit.
To be clear, this was a part time commitment and
it did not stop Mitton from taking a grand tour
of Europe, which was a custom for wealthy young men
at the time. Yeah, he definitely had an attention issue
(12:11):
and it was like I'm going to do this. Wait now,
I want to go on a ground tour and then
when he was nineteen, Mitton went to France to join
the seventh Husser Cavalry in the Napoleonic Wars. The fighting
was pretty much over by the time he got there,
although he was reportedly, according to some accounts, writing with
them when that regiment joined the Army of Occupation. And
(12:33):
although this was a brief foray into a military career,
Mitton apparently talked about it for the rest of his life.
According to an account written by a friend other than Nimrod, quote,
he used to talk of those days with rapture. I
remember while at breakfast in his drawing room he took
from a wardrobe a uniform jacket of the seventh and
holding it before me, he exclaimed, Ah, if this old
(12:57):
skin could speak, as the Swan of Avon say, it
could a tail unfold. We mentioned that John Mitton was
in France after most of the actual action of the
war was done, so he found other ways to amuse himself,
which were mostly exactly the sorts of things that a
spoiled rich kid would be expected to do. To give
(13:19):
a sense of the reckless lifestyle that Mitton engaged in
from a young age during his time in France, he
lost a billiard's bet so extravagant that it was talked
about in sporting circles for years. In one match of billiards,
he lost ten thousand pounds. That is a lot. Today
we always talk about how converting currency over such a
(13:44):
stretch of time is really guesswork at bests, but the
UK National Archives converter puts that at close to six
hundred thousand pounds in modern value, So no wonder this
became legendary. Yeah, on one billiard's match. He also got
into a lot of fights, seemingly for fun. Mitton was,
(14:06):
by all accounts naturally very strong and courageous to an
almost stupid degree. He was not a skilled fighter, but
he was powerful enough that he often won fights despite
his own clumsiness, and was robust enough that he was
able to easily shake off the ones he lost. His
friend Nimrod wrote of his incredibly hearty nature quote, never
(14:27):
was constitution so murdered as mister Mitten's was. For what
but one of adamant could have withstood the shocks independent
of wine, to which it was almost daily exposed. His
dress alone would have caused the death of nine hundred
of one thousand men who passed one part of the
day and night in a state of luxury and warmth.
(14:48):
He never wore any but the thinnest and finest silk stockings,
with very thin boots or shoes, so that in winter
he rarely had dry feet. To flannel, he was a
stranger since he left off his petticoats. Even his hunting
breeches were without lining. He wore one small waistcoat, all
was open in the front from about the second of
(15:09):
the lower buttons, and about home he was as often
without his hat as with one. His winter shooting gear
was a light jacket, white linen trousers without lining, our
drawers of which he knew not the use, and in
frost and snow he waded through all water that came
in his way. Minton may not seem like the type
(15:29):
to start a family based on these descriptions, but he did,
and we will talk about that right after we pause
or a sponsor break. After leaving the army and returning
home to England, Minton got married to a young woman
(15:51):
named Harriet Emma Jones on May twenty first, eighteen eighteen,
at Saint George's Hanover Square. Harriet was, like John, from
a family of means. Her father was Baronet Sir Thomas
Cherwitt Jones. The couple had a daughter a year into
the marriage, but Harriet died after an illness in eighteen twenty.
(16:12):
During his marriage, Mitton ran for MP as a Tory
and was elected to Parliament to represent Shrewsbury. He was
twenty three at the time. This role got even less
attention and discipline than his other endeavors. He reportedly spent
exactly thirty minutes in the House of Commons before he
got bored and left and never came back. Yeah, and
(16:32):
he may have purchased those votes, like he may have
promised everyone who voted for him ten pounds. That's one
version of how he got elected. The year after Harriet's death,
Mitton became interested in Caroline Mallett Gifford, the seventeen year
old sister of one of his friends, and he suggested
a marriage to Caroline's mother, Lady Charlotte Gifford. This was
(16:55):
something that was actually pretty difficult to decide for the
Gifford family. John was good friends with the family and
they adored him. A lot of people seem to really
love him, but there had also been a lot of
unsavory rumors about him mistreating Harriet during their short marriage,
and he already had a reputation as a rake who
had little regard for money. When his friend Charles Apperly
(17:19):
was asked by Caroline's mother if he would marry off
his own daughter to Mitton, his reply was quote, in
my opinion, Lady Charlotte, mister Minton has no business with
a wife at all. But should he marry your daughter, Caroline,
there is a greater prospect of his making a good
husband to her than any other woman in the whole world.
(17:39):
The wedding went ahead and the couple were married in
October of eighteen twenty one. In the beginning of the marriage,
they do seem to have been doing all right. Caroline
is described by Mitton's friends as being an incredibly good
wife who did seem to love her husband. That eventually changed, though.
The couple had five children together from eighteen twenty two
(18:01):
to eighteen twenty seven. These were Barbara John, Charles Euphrates,
and William John. Was Sheriff of Mariannath in Wales starting
in eighteen twenty one. You will also see him reported
as high sheriff for shrupture, and he was, but that
was after he served his first high sheriff role for
two years. And to be clear, he was not really
(18:22):
a lawman. This is a little bit, you know, one
of those things where the words mean different things, because
by this point that title was largely ceremonial, but it
did lend an air of respectability to Mitton, at least
for a time. After that, he seems to have thrown
himself headlong into amusements. One of his very favorites was
(18:43):
fox hunting. In that earlier quote we read about his clothes,
it mentioned how he would completely disregard any kind of
normal human needs for being out in the brush chasing
down foxes or other prey. It seems as though hunting,
like box was something that he did with more enthusiasm
than skill. He had done it since he was a boy.
(19:05):
But he seemed to actually love when things went wrong
as much or even more maybe than when things went right.
He got injured pretty frequently and did not seem to mind.
Just about every account written by people who knew him
notes that he never even complained when he had injuries,
like broken ribs after being thrown from a horse. Yeah,
(19:27):
there are. I don't even dozens, at least his stories
about him like going out hunting and his clothes get
torn in the brush, so he just keeps hunting naked,
and he doesn't even care that it's cold or you know,
getting swacked by something while he's out, and he just
keeps going. He definitely had a high tolerance for discomfort.
(19:48):
He also loved, loved, loved a bet. Horse racing was
an especially engaging sport for him. It was one in
which he loved to wager. We mentioned earlier than he
had a son named Euphrates. That child was not named
for the river. He was named after a race horse
that Minton owned that won a lot of races and
(20:08):
continued to compete until that horse was thirteen. Just as
with his other enthusiasms, though Minton didn't really know a
lot about horses, he was an excellent rider and he
knew them really well in that way, and he would
spend a lot of money to purchase a horse if
someone he trusted recommended it. But he didn't know anything
about breeding. So while he had a stable that was
(20:32):
incredibly large and could have potentially produced a lineage of champions,
he never managed it like he never got that part
of it together, which a normal person would do if
you were making those investments. He also apparently had a
similar problem with the hounds that he used for fox hunting.
At one point had said he had two thousand dogs,
but he never put a breeding program together. That's so
(20:54):
many dogs. It's so many dogs. He had so many
of everything. As a young man, Mitton is said to
have drunk six bottles of port every day. As he aged,
he switched from drinking port to drinking brandy, but the
volume that he consumed remained the same. And there are
innumerable tales of Mitten's intense and careless behavior, some of
(21:18):
which was surely the result of drinking all that alcohol.
His friend Nimrod wrote to this behavior, quote that John
Mitton saw his thirty eighth year must either be attributed
to the good genius that accompanied him or to the
signal interposition of providence. For scarcely a day passed over
his head in which he did not put his life
(21:39):
to the hazard. Some of his escapes indeed border closely
on the miraculous, but it would fill a volume were
I to enumerate them. How often has he been run
away with by horses in gigs, how often struggling in
deep water without being able to swim. How was it
that he did not get torn into peace? Is in
(22:01):
the countless street broils in which he was engaged. And lastly,
how did he avoid being shot in a duel? The
latter question is soon answered he never fought one. Nimrod
goes on to say that while Mitton loved a brawl,
he had a rather gentle spirit and never could have
fired on a man if he was called to in
(22:23):
one of these wild stories. This is like one of
the most famous. He was riding with a friend in
a gig, and he asked that friend if he had
ever been hurt by a gig flipping over, And when
the friend said he had not he had never been
in such an accident, Minton suggested that he had not
really lived unless he had had that experience, And then
he purposely and violently wrecked the gig that they were
(22:45):
in by running one of the wheels up a steep embankment,
so it flipped. Luckily, both of the men walked away
from that incident. On another occasion, Mitton was testing a
horse he was considering buying by running him in tandem
in front of an another horse that was attached to
a gig. But as they were traveling, he started wondering
(23:05):
if this new horse could jump, and gave him a
whip on the flank as they approached a gate. This
horse cleared the jump, but the second horse, Mitten, and
the horse dealer were all left behind with the gig
in the process. He also liked to do a trick
with one of his horses that was basically the gig
equivalent of popping a wheelie. So on command, the horse
(23:25):
would rear up while attached to this gig. The cart
would then tip back until the back touched the ground.
When it came to money, he was not only cavalier
about spending it, but also about handling it at all.
This sounds completely bananas, so brace he has said to
have put high denomination pound notes on sandwiches and eat them.
(23:51):
Given how dirty money is, we always see these discussions
about if you test a bill of money, that makes
me completely nauseous. It's disgusting. Also left money lying everywhere everywhere.
Apparently he didn't like paper currency. People who visited Halston
Hall would often find it just on the ground or
in bushes. It's unclear nobody knows to this day whether
(24:13):
he was dropping money accidentally because he was just so
completely casual about handling things, or if he purposely was
throwing it on the ground because of his disdain for it.
And then there's the bear. Mitten had a pet bear,
as much as one can have a pet bear. He
purchased this bear, along with a monkey, for thirty five
(24:34):
pounds when both of them were quite young, and raised
them in the house. He also had a horse that
routinely slept in the house, as well as innumerable dogs.
We just mentioned the extraordinary number of dogs. He's said
to have ridden this bear, using spurs to drive it
into the middle of one of his parties while yelling
(24:55):
tally hoe. His guests were panicked, and rightly so. This
bear is described in this incident as pretty calm until
Mitton got her with a spur, at which point the
bear whipped around and bit Mitton right through his calf.
Minton thought this was hilarious, even though he was seriously wounded.
(25:18):
At one point, he also got a horse dealer drunk,
and when the man passed out, Mitton put him to
bed with the bear and two bulldogs, and he liked
to have dogfights in the dining room to entertain guests
while they ate. Yeah, he he had boundary issues. When
(25:41):
a horse dealer named George Underhill visited Mitton in search
of money that he was owed, Mitton gave him a
sealed letter with instructions to take it to an address
in Shrewsbury to see a banker who would give him
the money. This is basically an order of payment, but
that banker was also a governor in the Lunatic Assylum,
as it was called, and the note was not in
(26:02):
order for payment, but a letter which read quote admit
the bearer, George Underhill, into the Lunatic Asylum, your obedient servant,
John Minton. It appears that the banker knew this was
a joke and George Underhill was not in any real danger.
But oh Man and Minton also could be kind in
his own way. He was lenient with the tenants on
(26:24):
his land when they struggled financially. He gave away grain
so people could eat. He would borrow money only to
give it or lend it to someone else, and he
often got in hot water because the recipient would vanish
with no intention of repayment. Coming up, we're going to
talk about how Minton's life shifted considerably to one far
(26:44):
less grand. But first we will pause for a sponsor break.
Minton's cavalier attitude about my me, both in spending it
for his own amusements and in giving it to others,
led to his great fortune dwindling away. And as this
(27:09):
happened and his drinking became more and more problematic, his
behavior with his wife Caroline became unkind. In the stilted
writing of the day, it is never spelled out exactly
what happened between them. The Nimrod biography we've been talking
about includes the information that Caroline confided in the writer
about it once quote recounting some of his acts which
(27:31):
only a madman would have committed, But it doesn't state
what any of those acts were, only that from the
biographer and friend's point of view, quote, were my life
to endure a thousand years? I could never lose my
recollection unless I lost my reason. Of that distressing scene,
Caroline left Mitton in eighteen thirty. She's often described as
(27:52):
running away, and the two of them never reconciled. By
this point, Mitton had accrued a massive debt, and he
had started selling off property to meet his obligations. But
in the wake of Caroline's exit, he decided he might
once again like to attempt to run for parliament, this
time representing Shropshire. His first address to the voters was
(28:15):
as follows, quote, Gentlemen, domestic affliction of no slight or
common nature has latterly limited my intercourse with you. My
wishes for the prosperity of my native country have ever
in absence held their usual sway, Having once had the
honor of representing your county town in Parliament. Feeling that
(28:35):
various avocations precluded the conscientious performance of my duty to
my constituents, I declined the representation that the dissolution of
that parliament. I have now no wife, no family, no hounds,
no horses. Some will say no steadiness of purpose. But
feeling that I can devote myself to your service, should
you honor me with your support and confidence, I venture
(28:59):
to offer myself to your notice as a candidate for
the county, totally unshackled by prejudice or otherwise, and a
strenuous advocate for reform, Relying upon the strength of the cause.
I shall advocate, I throw myself upon your favor, and
shall assuredly take the sense of the county. I shall
(29:19):
look to the vote of every independent freeholder, without making
further professions. Uh. He did not win the seat. It
was not long after that Mitton fled his creditors, landing
eventually in France and Calais, specifically where he had spent
most of his brief military career. When his friend Apperly
(29:41):
saw him there, he found Mitten to be a much
changed man. He described him as quote a round shouldered, decrepit, tottering,
old young man, if I may be allowed such a term.
There was a mind as well as a body in ruins.
The one had partaken of the injury done to the other,
and it was and at once apparent that all was
(30:01):
a wreck. In fact, he was a melancholy spectacle of
fallen man, of one over whom all the storms of
life seemed to be engendered in one dark cloud. But
Minton didn't seem dejected or sad, and he seemed to
think his finances were on the brink of turning around.
But Apperley saw through all of this, and he noted
(30:22):
to Mitton's valet and their mutual friends that he feared
that John may quote either go mad or die, and
very shortly too. Mitton's behavior was as erratic as ever
in France, and sometimes even more so. In an infamous story,
he set fire to his night shirt in an effort
to scare his hiccups away. When Apperly asked him why
(30:45):
he did such a thing, he said quote that he
wished to show me how he could bear pain. According
to Apperley's account, he drank even more heavily to medicate
as he was badly burned. In this episode. His doctor
thought he could die at any moment, but he somehow recovered,
at least physically. But in the Nimrod biography, Applely described
(31:09):
spending days with Mitten as he behaved in ways that
were just inscrutable and sometimes terrifying. This included an incident
where he took six knives into bed, believed to be
with the intent of self harm. His mother and his
friends went to great lengths to nurse him back to health.
They eventually moved him to a chateau in the country,
(31:30):
where he very much improved, both physically and mentally, until
he escaped from his friends and managed to get his
hands on a bottle of brandy. Eventually he was able
to connect with some of the less noble characters he
had been associating with in his Calaet circle, who thought
they should take him back to England so they could
sign over his remaining property to them. Yeah, he had
(31:52):
clearly fallen in with people that wanted to take advantage
of his not robust and healthy state of mind. Of course,
once he was back in England, Mitton was arrested and
he was taken first to Shrewsbury Jail and then to
the King's Bench Prison, which was a debtor's prison in London.
He was released after serving his sentence, and right after
(32:13):
that he met up on Westminster Bridge with a young
woman that he had never seen before named Susan, and
right there, at the moment they met, he told her
he would give her five hundred pounds a year if
she stayed with him, and she did. This is a
weird thing. Sometimes it's described as he fell in love
with her at first sight, but it honestly reads as
just something of like a lonely desperate person. But she
(32:36):
is described by his friends as being incredibly kind to Mitton.
She even kind of won the favor of his mother,
who thanked her later on for having been so invested
in caring for him. The two of them left for France.
He was then arrested in France for his debts. Once
(32:56):
he was released from his prison time there, he went
back to England and then he was back in King's
Bench prison almost immediately. John Mitton died in prison on
March twenty ninth, eighteen thirty four, at the age of
thirty seven. A coroner's inquest was called to determine his
cause of death. According to the notice in the Gloucester Chronicle, quote,
(33:18):
two medical attendants stated that the immediate cause of death
was disease of the brain delirium tremens caused by the
excessive use of spiritust liquors, verdict natural death. Mitton's mother
was with him when he died and arranged for his
remains to be buried at the Halston property. Three thousand
people attended his burial at the family crypt, and the
(33:40):
shops in Shrewsbury were closed that day in his honor.
As a coda to John Mitton's story, in The Standard
Newspaper of London in nineteen hundred, a reader wrote in
regarding an encounter they had had with his son some
years earlier. This letter to the editor included the setup
that he'd the writer and a friend had dined one
(34:02):
evening at the Bedford Hotel, but at the end of
the meal they found that they were short on the bill,
and the manager was kind enough to overlook the small gap.
It wasn't a big a big short on the bill,
but they did have to move out of the fancy
or private dining room and into the coffee room, which
was a little less fancy, and there they met John
Minton junior. He, according to this account, bought them each
(34:24):
oranges from the waiter, and then gave each of them
half a sovereign for pocket money. And then he left.
And the writer of this tale, identified as SFH, said
they heard that he had just ridden a horse up
a flight of hotel stairs on a wager, without injury
to himself or the horse. This account summarizes this entire
incident by saying, quote, though he had a kind heart,
(34:47):
he was not free from his father's faults and follies,
nor I fear did he escape from the ruinous results
which were the natural consequence that story, incidentally about riding
a horse up the hotel stairs is something that his
father definitely did. It is a little unclear whether his
son repeated that same act or if this was a
(35:07):
confusion of local lore on the writer's part since they
were both named John Mitton. But this does kind of
explain why he has this strange hero status because everyone
recognizes that he was completely out of control, that he
also had this desire and proclivity to be kind to
people when he could, and apparently his son was also
(35:28):
similarly living his life. I have so many thoughts about
him that we could talk about on the behind the scenes. Okay,
I have a listener mail from our listener, Shanila. I
hope that's how she pronounces it. I live next to
someone with this name growing up who pronounced it that way,
so if I got it wrong, I apologize. Schwritz Hi
(35:51):
Alian Tracy. I discovered your podcast several years ago and
have been intermittently listening to episodes in any quiet moment
when my kids weren't around. Now that the youngest in
full time non virtual school, I am starting at the
beginning and working my way through all your old episodes.
I recently listened to the one about how a war
between Canada and the US was almost started over a pig,
(36:11):
and was delighted to hear Holly mentioned she had lived
in the pew wall Up, Tacoma area as a child.
Qe all Up is my hometown, and it brings me
so much joy to hear of someone else from here,
especially someone I listened to and admire. Several years ago,
I moved to my husband's hometown of Boise, Idaho, and
I deeply missed the Pacific Northwest. Thank you for the
unexpected smile you gave me. My husband and I are
(36:32):
regular watchers of Jeopardy, and I feel compelled to suggest
that you both should apply to be on the show.
Hardly an episode goes by that I don't say, oh,
I know that I just listened to this history podcast
about it, regarding at least one clue if I am
ever on Jeopardy and when it will be because of
your podcast. She mentions another interesting story we might talk about,
and then some sum mates by saying, thank you always
(36:54):
for being so delightful. We don't have any pets because
keeping four children alive is all I can handle. They
are pretty cute, even if they're not free, so I
attached a picture of them. Cheers. I'm so so delighted
that you have this beautiful family. I kind of wanted
to say this to say I could never be on Jeopardy.
I choke in the moment of being questioned. I have
(37:15):
taken the Jeopardy test a couple times and didn't pass it. Yeah.
I would be like, I don't know about that, but
do you want to hear about this other weird thing
I know? And then they'd be like, no, man, please
go away. But you know, always good to hear someone
from pewall Up. People in pewall Up don't tam they rest.
That's one of the many slogans you can usually find
(37:37):
on a T shirt there. I too miss the Pacific Northwest.
It's so beautiful and I love it so I hope
you get to visit often and take your kids. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
also find us on social media as Missed in History,
and if you have not yet subscribed, that is easy
as pie to do. Just do it on the iHeartRadio
(37:58):
app or anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And before we get
into today's topic, we have a little housekeeping, which is
to mention that we have our Stuff you Missed in
(00:25):
History Class international trip ready to go. Yep. The dates
for that trip are November two to the eighth, twenty
twenty four. You can sign up if you want and
if you want to go to the wonderful and delightful
country of Iceland. Very excited about Iceland. I love Iceland desperately.
We are going to spend time in Rayyivic, but we
(00:45):
are also going to vic which is where the beautiful
black beaches are. We are going to do some fun activities.
There will be glacier time. Yeah, there will be interesting
fun things to eat. There will be visiting Blue Lagoon.
There will be visiting a different lagoon that's an actual lagoon,
(01:10):
lagoon with glaciers in it. Yes, we're gonna do walking tours,
you know. We'll see the oldest parliament site in Europe,
which is pretty fun. We have both been in recent
years and I am obsessed with Iceland. I had the
best time in raykievic Yeah, way more than I ever anticipated.
(01:32):
I really fell in love with it. Yeah. We went
for our honeymoon in twenty sixteen, and our intent had
been to return for our five year anniversary, but instead
that was COVID incredibly excited about returning in November of
twenty twenty four instead. Yeah. There will be waterfalls, There
(01:57):
will be I mean probably rain There are a lot
of rainbows in US. Yeah, and if if all things cooperate,
we have a good chance of seeing the Northern Lights,
which I did get to see completely at a random
time of year. But it was quite My understanding is
it was the Northern lights light like, it was not
(02:20):
as intense as it normally would be. Yeah, So it
was quite late in the season and a little surprising
that we could see them at all. So I am
very excited to go and spend time. All of these
trips are always so incredibly fun and delightful, and the
people that go with us are just as much a
part of making the experience great as anything that we
have planned for it. So if you think this sounds
(02:43):
interesting to you as well, you can check it out
with all the details at Defined Destinations dot com slash
Iceland twenty twenty four. You can also just go to
define Destinations dot com and they will have the Iceland
Tour listed on their homepage that you can click into
and get all of the details, including photos of some
(03:03):
of the beautiful things we're going to see. We will
mention it several more times, but if this sounds really
interesting to you, you might want to jump on it.
If you have any specific questions about what's going to
be going on on the tour, you want to go
through Defined Destinations. Our tour organizer, Michael, who has been
with us on all of our trips, is really really
(03:25):
wonderful and he does all of the planning. We kind
of get the benefit of having Michael do all the
legwork so that we can just go and have fun
with all of you. So if you have questions or
need clarification on anything, that is your place to go.
And now we can hop right into today's episode. So
(03:46):
perhaps exactly correctly, I don't know how I stumbled across
this person. It's John Mitton. He is one of those
figures who is pretty well known in some places. He
is at times funny other times to me kind of insufferable.
He's definitely the kind of person who is like a
poster child for having more money than since Mitton is
(04:09):
often called an eccentric that doesn't really capture his story.
And despite his very wild stories of like incredibly bad
behavior in some cases, he's also something of a local
hero in the area where he lived, and I ran
across several instances of people talking about his story in
kind of a comedic way, and some of it is funny.
(04:32):
It's so outlandish that I can understand that approach, but
like in the bigger picture, if you look at his
whole life, it's also really sad in some ways. So
I also want to include a brief heads up here.
This person kept a lot of animals, but some of
his behavior towards and with those animals are things we
would consider animal cruelty. Today, we're not going to linger
(04:54):
on any of that, but just know if you're especially
sensitive to it, it's yucky. I'm leaving out the worst parts.
I'm pretty sensitive to that stuff, and I think I
think we have a pretty cleaned up version of it
where you you're not going to get any any gory details.
So but heads up just as we go in the
best way to introduce John Mitton maybe to look at
(05:15):
how he was talked about after he was gone and
people were looking at his short life as a whole.
A memoir of John Mitton that was published just after
his death, written by a friend, opens this way after
noting a similar effort by another writer, quote, as no
subject is so interesting to man as man, I have
(05:36):
a good theme for my pen inasmuch as there is
one present to my mind who's equal as a private
English gentleman the world never before saw. Neither is it,
for some reasons desirable that the world should ever again see.
My only fear is that I may be deficient in
strength of pencil to draw the picture to the life
(05:59):
and to represent the anomaly in human nature which the
character of the late John Mitton presents, at one time
an honor to his nature, at another a satire on humanity.
What more can be done than to strike the balance
with an even hand, And as the brightness of the
sun hides its blemishes, let me hope the greater part
(06:22):
of his faults will be lost amid the virtues with
which they are mingled. At all events, my purpose is
not to hold up the torch to the failings of
my old and never forsaken friend, my chief object being
to account for them, and leave his virtues to speak
for themselves. I owe him pity on the score of
(06:42):
human nature. He claims it by his own acts and deeds,
and above all by one act of him, to whose
will all men must bow, and by whom all men's
deeds will be weighed. Let not the lash of censure
then fall too heavy upon one who himself carried charity
to excess. Let the greatness of his fall be unto
(07:06):
him as a shield. Let it be remembered he died
in a prison, an epitome of human misery. A glance
over his history, however, may not be unprofitable. It will
point a moral if it do not adorn a tale.
So that friend who wrote that memoir titled Memoirs of
the Life of the Late John Mitton, Esquire of Halston, Shropshire,
(07:29):
formerly MP for Shrewsbury, hi Sheriff for the Counties of
Celup and Marioneth and Major of the North Shropshire Yeoman Recavalry,
with notices of his hunting, shooting, driving, racing, eccentric and
extravagant exploits. So on one title that was The Writer
who Goes by Nimrod. His actual name was Charles James Apperley.
(07:51):
He was a sporting writer. He used the pen name Nimrod,
presumably after the biblical king who commissioned the Tower of Babel,
and as he noted, Apperly was a friend of John Mitton,
who was also known as mad Jack because he was
a lot. Minton is typically described as an eccentric and
(08:11):
a rake. His life history plays out like a William
Hogarth morality engraving on bad behavior, although Mitton was born
about one hundred years after Hogarth. I note that because
when I was first reading his stuff, I was like, wait,
did Hogarth base all of his work on him? No?
Came wait before he seems to have learned absolutely nothing
from that artist's works. When a new biography of Minton
(08:35):
was written more than one hundred years after he was gone,
a review of the book, which was titled mad CAP's Progress,
said this quote, mad Cap is a kindly word to
use for John Mitton. In his short life, he got
through an immense amount of money, did many reckless and
foolish things, and did as far as one can see
(08:55):
very little good to anybody. It is true that he
was popular for a time, but even in the idle
and extravagant society in which he turned, John Mitton seems
to have been regarded as a man who carried things
too far. John Minton was born on September thirtieth, seventeen
ninety six, two months premature, at Halston Hall in Shropshire,
(09:18):
not far from the Welsh border. His father, who was
also named John Mitton, died when his son was still
a baby, and Nimrod and other friends and biographers have
made the case over the years that his mother's inability
to say no to the young child was to some
degree the source of his eventual ruin parent blamey, but honestly,
(09:38):
he clearly never learned boundaries. One writer and friend going
by the name J. W. C, who published his version
of Mitton's life after his death, wrote quote, is it
a marvel that his career should be erratic whose infancy
was never subjected to restraint? The death of John Mitton
Senior left little John, who wasn't yet too incredibly wealthy.
(10:01):
He was named inheritor of Halston Hall, and he got
a cash bequeathment of three hundred thousand pounds and an
annual allowance of one hundred thousand pounds. The family estate
he inherited included land in England and Wales. He was
not just given all of this as a child, of course,
the Mitten family had solicitors who looked after the fortune
(10:23):
until John came of age. As for schooling, he was
expelled from both Westminster and Harrow for bad behavior. As
an example of that bad behavior, he once wrote to
the chancellor at Westminster to explain that he was about
to be married and he was going to need to
have his annual allowance increase to support his wife. This
(10:43):
was before he was getting that huge sum. I have
seen various amounts reported, but it was something like six
thousand pounds a year, which was a lot. The chancellor
replied to him, quote, sir, if you can't live on
your allowance, you may starve, and if you marry, I'll
commit you to prison. If that sounds like an extreme response,
is because Minton was enjoying far more money than anyone
(11:06):
else in his class. And also he was thirteen at
this time, so marriage was preposterous. And while this was
kind of a pretty benign prank to basically make the
case to the Chancellor Westminster that he needed more money,
and I guess he wanted him to intercede with his family.
This was apparently the kind of thing he did constantly,
which led to a lot of ongoing friction with the Chancellor.
(11:28):
There is even a story that this kind of culminated
in him putting a horse in the Chancellor's bed and
that that was the final straw. I don't know if
that's a true story or not. He did move on
to higher education though, and enrolled at Cambridge, but that
didn't hold his attention and he decided to try a
military career. He joined a local volunteer regiment in Oswistree
(11:49):
when he was sixteen, then moved to the Shropshire Yeomanry
Cavalry after a reorganization that folded in his prior unit.
To be clear, this was a part time commitment and
it did not stop Mitton from taking a grand tour
of Europe, which was a custom for wealthy young men
at the time. Yeah, he definitely had an attention issue
(12:11):
and it was like I'm going to do this. Wait now,
I want to go on a ground tour and then
when he was nineteen, Mitton went to France to join
the seventh Husser Cavalry in the Napoleonic Wars. The fighting
was pretty much over by the time he got there,
although he was reportedly, according to some accounts, writing with
them when that regiment joined the Army of Occupation. And
(12:33):
although this was a brief foray into a military career,
Mitton apparently talked about it for the rest of his life.
According to an account written by a friend other than Nimrod, quote,
he used to talk of those days with rapture. I
remember while at breakfast in his drawing room he took
from a wardrobe a uniform jacket of the seventh and
holding it before me, he exclaimed, Ah, if this old
(12:57):
skin could speak, as the Swan of Avon say, it
could a tail unfold. We mentioned that John Mitton was
in France after most of the actual action of the
war was done, so he found other ways to amuse himself,
which were mostly exactly the sorts of things that a
spoiled rich kid would be expected to do. To give
(13:19):
a sense of the reckless lifestyle that Mitton engaged in
from a young age during his time in France, he
lost a billiard's bet so extravagant that it was talked
about in sporting circles for years. In one match of billiards,
he lost ten thousand pounds. That is a lot. Today
we always talk about how converting currency over such a
(13:44):
stretch of time is really guesswork at bests, but the
UK National Archives converter puts that at close to six
hundred thousand pounds in modern value, So no wonder this
became legendary. Yeah, on one billiard's match. He also got
into a lot of fights, seemingly for fun. Mitton was,
(14:06):
by all accounts naturally very strong and courageous to an
almost stupid degree. He was not a skilled fighter, but
he was powerful enough that he often won fights despite
his own clumsiness, and was robust enough that he was
able to easily shake off the ones he lost. His
friend Nimrod wrote of his incredibly hearty nature quote, never
(14:27):
was constitution so murdered as mister Mitten's was. For what
but one of adamant could have withstood the shocks independent
of wine, to which it was almost daily exposed. His
dress alone would have caused the death of nine hundred
of one thousand men who passed one part of the
day and night in a state of luxury and warmth.
(14:48):
He never wore any but the thinnest and finest silk stockings,
with very thin boots or shoes, so that in winter
he rarely had dry feet. To flannel, he was a
stranger since he left off his petticoats. Even his hunting
breeches were without lining. He wore one small waistcoat, all
was open in the front from about the second of
(15:09):
the lower buttons, and about home he was as often
without his hat as with one. His winter shooting gear
was a light jacket, white linen trousers without lining, our
drawers of which he knew not the use, and in
frost and snow he waded through all water that came
in his way. Minton may not seem like the type
(15:29):
to start a family based on these descriptions, but he did,
and we will talk about that right after we pause
or a sponsor break. After leaving the army and returning
home to England, Minton got married to a young woman
(15:51):
named Harriet Emma Jones on May twenty first, eighteen eighteen,
at Saint George's Hanover Square. Harriet was, like John, from
a family of means. Her father was Baronet Sir Thomas
Cherwitt Jones. The couple had a daughter a year into
the marriage, but Harriet died after an illness in eighteen twenty.
(16:12):
During his marriage, Mitton ran for MP as a Tory
and was elected to Parliament to represent Shrewsbury. He was
twenty three at the time. This role got even less
attention and discipline than his other endeavors. He reportedly spent
exactly thirty minutes in the House of Commons before he
got bored and left and never came back. Yeah, and
(16:32):
he may have purchased those votes, like he may have
promised everyone who voted for him ten pounds. That's one
version of how he got elected. The year after Harriet's death,
Mitton became interested in Caroline Mallett Gifford, the seventeen year
old sister of one of his friends, and he suggested
a marriage to Caroline's mother, Lady Charlotte Gifford. This was
(16:55):
something that was actually pretty difficult to decide for the
Gifford family. John was good friends with the family and
they adored him. A lot of people seem to really
love him, but there had also been a lot of
unsavory rumors about him mistreating Harriet during their short marriage,
and he already had a reputation as a rake who
had little regard for money. When his friend Charles Apperly
(17:19):
was asked by Caroline's mother if he would marry off
his own daughter to Mitton, his reply was quote, in
my opinion, Lady Charlotte, mister Minton has no business with
a wife at all. But should he marry your daughter, Caroline,
there is a greater prospect of his making a good
husband to her than any other woman in the whole world.
(17:39):
The wedding went ahead and the couple were married in
October of eighteen twenty one. In the beginning of the marriage,
they do seem to have been doing all right. Caroline
is described by Mitton's friends as being an incredibly good
wife who did seem to love her husband. That eventually changed, though.
The couple had five children together from eighteen twenty two
(18:01):
to eighteen twenty seven. These were Barbara John, Charles Euphrates,
and William John. Was Sheriff of Mariannath in Wales starting
in eighteen twenty one. You will also see him reported
as high sheriff for shrupture, and he was, but that
was after he served his first high sheriff role for
two years. And to be clear, he was not really
(18:22):
a lawman. This is a little bit, you know, one
of those things where the words mean different things, because
by this point that title was largely ceremonial, but it
did lend an air of respectability to Mitton, at least
for a time. After that, he seems to have thrown
himself headlong into amusements. One of his very favorites was
(18:43):
fox hunting. In that earlier quote we read about his clothes,
it mentioned how he would completely disregard any kind of
normal human needs for being out in the brush chasing
down foxes or other prey. It seems as though hunting,
like box was something that he did with more enthusiasm
than skill. He had done it since he was a boy.
(19:05):
But he seemed to actually love when things went wrong
as much or even more maybe than when things went right.
He got injured pretty frequently and did not seem to mind.
Just about every account written by people who knew him
notes that he never even complained when he had injuries,
like broken ribs after being thrown from a horse. Yeah,
(19:27):
there are. I don't even dozens, at least his stories
about him like going out hunting and his clothes get
torn in the brush, so he just keeps hunting naked,
and he doesn't even care that it's cold or you know,
getting swacked by something while he's out, and he just
keeps going. He definitely had a high tolerance for discomfort.
(19:48):
He also loved, loved, loved a bet. Horse racing was
an especially engaging sport for him. It was one in
which he loved to wager. We mentioned earlier than he
had a son named Euphrates. That child was not named
for the river. He was named after a race horse
that Minton owned that won a lot of races and
(20:08):
continued to compete until that horse was thirteen. Just as
with his other enthusiasms, though Minton didn't really know a
lot about horses, he was an excellent rider and he
knew them really well in that way, and he would
spend a lot of money to purchase a horse if
someone he trusted recommended it. But he didn't know anything
about breeding. So while he had a stable that was
(20:32):
incredibly large and could have potentially produced a lineage of champions,
he never managed it like he never got that part
of it together, which a normal person would do if
you were making those investments. He also apparently had a
similar problem with the hounds that he used for fox hunting.
At one point had said he had two thousand dogs,
but he never put a breeding program together. That's so
(20:54):
many dogs. It's so many dogs. He had so many
of everything. As a young man, Mitton is said to
have drunk six bottles of port every day. As he aged,
he switched from drinking port to drinking brandy, but the
volume that he consumed remained the same. And there are
innumerable tales of Mitten's intense and careless behavior, some of
(21:18):
which was surely the result of drinking all that alcohol.
His friend Nimrod wrote to this behavior, quote that John
Mitton saw his thirty eighth year must either be attributed
to the good genius that accompanied him or to the
signal interposition of providence. For scarcely a day passed over
his head in which he did not put his life
(21:39):
to the hazard. Some of his escapes indeed border closely
on the miraculous, but it would fill a volume were
I to enumerate them. How often has he been run
away with by horses in gigs, how often struggling in
deep water without being able to swim. How was it
that he did not get torn into peace? Is in
(22:01):
the countless street broils in which he was engaged. And lastly,
how did he avoid being shot in a duel? The
latter question is soon answered he never fought one. Nimrod
goes on to say that while Mitton loved a brawl,
he had a rather gentle spirit and never could have
fired on a man if he was called to in
(22:23):
one of these wild stories. This is like one of
the most famous. He was riding with a friend in
a gig, and he asked that friend if he had
ever been hurt by a gig flipping over, And when
the friend said he had not he had never been
in such an accident, Minton suggested that he had not
really lived unless he had had that experience, And then
he purposely and violently wrecked the gig that they were
(22:45):
in by running one of the wheels up a steep embankment,
so it flipped. Luckily, both of the men walked away
from that incident. On another occasion, Mitton was testing a
horse he was considering buying by running him in tandem
in front of an another horse that was attached to
a gig. But as they were traveling, he started wondering
(23:05):
if this new horse could jump, and gave him a
whip on the flank as they approached a gate. This
horse cleared the jump, but the second horse, Mitten, and
the horse dealer were all left behind with the gig
in the process. He also liked to do a trick
with one of his horses that was basically the gig
equivalent of popping a wheelie. So on command, the horse
(23:25):
would rear up while attached to this gig. The cart
would then tip back until the back touched the ground.
When it came to money, he was not only cavalier
about spending it, but also about handling it at all.
This sounds completely bananas, so brace he has said to
have put high denomination pound notes on sandwiches and eat them.
(23:51):
Given how dirty money is, we always see these discussions
about if you test a bill of money, that makes
me completely nauseous. It's disgusting. Also left money lying everywhere everywhere.
Apparently he didn't like paper currency. People who visited Halston
Hall would often find it just on the ground or
in bushes. It's unclear nobody knows to this day whether
(24:13):
he was dropping money accidentally because he was just so
completely casual about handling things, or if he purposely was
throwing it on the ground because of his disdain for it.
And then there's the bear. Mitten had a pet bear,
as much as one can have a pet bear. He
purchased this bear, along with a monkey, for thirty five
(24:34):
pounds when both of them were quite young, and raised
them in the house. He also had a horse that
routinely slept in the house, as well as innumerable dogs.
We just mentioned the extraordinary number of dogs. He's said
to have ridden this bear, using spurs to drive it
into the middle of one of his parties while yelling
(24:55):
tally hoe. His guests were panicked, and rightly so. This
bear is described in this incident as pretty calm until
Mitton got her with a spur, at which point the
bear whipped around and bit Mitton right through his calf.
Minton thought this was hilarious, even though he was seriously wounded.
(25:18):
At one point, he also got a horse dealer drunk,
and when the man passed out, Mitton put him to
bed with the bear and two bulldogs, and he liked
to have dogfights in the dining room to entertain guests
while they ate. Yeah, he he had boundary issues. When
(25:41):
a horse dealer named George Underhill visited Mitton in search
of money that he was owed, Mitton gave him a
sealed letter with instructions to take it to an address
in Shrewsbury to see a banker who would give him
the money. This is basically an order of payment, but
that banker was also a governor in the Lunatic Assylum,
as it was called, and the note was not in
(26:02):
order for payment, but a letter which read quote admit
the bearer, George Underhill, into the Lunatic Asylum, your obedient servant,
John Minton. It appears that the banker knew this was
a joke and George Underhill was not in any real danger.
But oh Man and Minton also could be kind in
his own way. He was lenient with the tenants on
(26:24):
his land when they struggled financially. He gave away grain
so people could eat. He would borrow money only to
give it or lend it to someone else, and he
often got in hot water because the recipient would vanish
with no intention of repayment. Coming up, we're going to
talk about how Minton's life shifted considerably to one far
(26:44):
less grand. But first we will pause for a sponsor break.
Minton's cavalier attitude about my me, both in spending it
for his own amusements and in giving it to others,
led to his great fortune dwindling away. And as this
(27:09):
happened and his drinking became more and more problematic, his
behavior with his wife Caroline became unkind. In the stilted
writing of the day, it is never spelled out exactly
what happened between them. The Nimrod biography we've been talking
about includes the information that Caroline confided in the writer
about it once quote recounting some of his acts which
(27:31):
only a madman would have committed, But it doesn't state
what any of those acts were, only that from the
biographer and friend's point of view, quote, were my life
to endure a thousand years? I could never lose my
recollection unless I lost my reason. Of that distressing scene,
Caroline left Mitton in eighteen thirty. She's often described as
(27:52):
running away, and the two of them never reconciled. By
this point, Mitton had accrued a massive debt, and he
had started selling off property to meet his obligations. But
in the wake of Caroline's exit, he decided he might
once again like to attempt to run for parliament, this
time representing Shropshire. His first address to the voters was
(28:15):
as follows, quote, Gentlemen, domestic affliction of no slight or
common nature has latterly limited my intercourse with you. My
wishes for the prosperity of my native country have ever
in absence held their usual sway, Having once had the
honor of representing your county town in Parliament. Feeling that
(28:35):
various avocations precluded the conscientious performance of my duty to
my constituents, I declined the representation that the dissolution of
that parliament. I have now no wife, no family, no hounds,
no horses. Some will say no steadiness of purpose. But
feeling that I can devote myself to your service, should
you honor me with your support and confidence, I venture
(28:59):
to offer myself to your notice as a candidate for
the county, totally unshackled by prejudice or otherwise, and a
strenuous advocate for reform, Relying upon the strength of the cause.
I shall advocate, I throw myself upon your favor, and
shall assuredly take the sense of the county. I shall
(29:19):
look to the vote of every independent freeholder, without making
further professions. Uh. He did not win the seat. It
was not long after that Mitton fled his creditors, landing
eventually in France and Calais, specifically where he had spent
most of his brief military career. When his friend Apperly
(29:41):
saw him there, he found Mitten to be a much
changed man. He described him as quote a round shouldered, decrepit, tottering,
old young man, if I may be allowed such a term.
There was a mind as well as a body in ruins.
The one had partaken of the injury done to the other,
and it was and at once apparent that all was
(30:01):
a wreck. In fact, he was a melancholy spectacle of
fallen man, of one over whom all the storms of
life seemed to be engendered in one dark cloud. But
Minton didn't seem dejected or sad, and he seemed to
think his finances were on the brink of turning around.
But Apperley saw through all of this, and he noted
(30:22):
to Mitton's valet and their mutual friends that he feared
that John may quote either go mad or die, and
very shortly too. Mitton's behavior was as erratic as ever
in France, and sometimes even more so. In an infamous story,
he set fire to his night shirt in an effort
to scare his hiccups away. When Apperly asked him why
(30:45):
he did such a thing, he said quote that he
wished to show me how he could bear pain. According
to Apperley's account, he drank even more heavily to medicate
as he was badly burned. In this episode. His doctor
thought he could die at any moment, but he somehow recovered,
at least physically. But in the Nimrod biography, Applely described
(31:09):
spending days with Mitten as he behaved in ways that
were just inscrutable and sometimes terrifying. This included an incident
where he took six knives into bed, believed to be
with the intent of self harm. His mother and his
friends went to great lengths to nurse him back to health.
They eventually moved him to a chateau in the country,
(31:30):
where he very much improved, both physically and mentally, until
he escaped from his friends and managed to get his
hands on a bottle of brandy. Eventually he was able
to connect with some of the less noble characters he
had been associating with in his Calaet circle, who thought
they should take him back to England so they could
sign over his remaining property to them. Yeah, he had
(31:52):
clearly fallen in with people that wanted to take advantage
of his not robust and healthy state of mind. Of course,
once he was back in England, Mitton was arrested and
he was taken first to Shrewsbury Jail and then to
the King's Bench Prison, which was a debtor's prison in London.
He was released after serving his sentence, and right after
(32:13):
that he met up on Westminster Bridge with a young
woman that he had never seen before named Susan, and
right there, at the moment they met, he told her
he would give her five hundred pounds a year if
she stayed with him, and she did. This is a
weird thing. Sometimes it's described as he fell in love
with her at first sight, but it honestly reads as
just something of like a lonely desperate person. But she
(32:36):
is described by his friends as being incredibly kind to Mitton.
She even kind of won the favor of his mother,
who thanked her later on for having been so invested
in caring for him. The two of them left for France.
He was then arrested in France for his debts. Once
(32:56):
he was released from his prison time there, he went
back to England and then he was back in King's
Bench prison almost immediately. John Mitton died in prison on
March twenty ninth, eighteen thirty four, at the age of
thirty seven. A coroner's inquest was called to determine his
cause of death. According to the notice in the Gloucester Chronicle, quote,
(33:18):
two medical attendants stated that the immediate cause of death
was disease of the brain delirium tremens caused by the
excessive use of spiritust liquors, verdict natural death. Mitton's mother
was with him when he died and arranged for his
remains to be buried at the Halston property. Three thousand
people attended his burial at the family crypt, and the
(33:40):
shops in Shrewsbury were closed that day in his honor.
As a coda to John Mitton's story, in The Standard
Newspaper of London in nineteen hundred, a reader wrote in
regarding an encounter they had had with his son some
years earlier. This letter to the editor included the setup
that he'd the writer and a friend had dined one
(34:02):
evening at the Bedford Hotel, but at the end of
the meal they found that they were short on the bill,
and the manager was kind enough to overlook the small gap.
It wasn't a big a big short on the bill,
but they did have to move out of the fancy
or private dining room and into the coffee room, which
was a little less fancy, and there they met John
Minton junior. He, according to this account, bought them each
(34:24):
oranges from the waiter, and then gave each of them
half a sovereign for pocket money. And then he left.
And the writer of this tale, identified as SFH, said
they heard that he had just ridden a horse up
a flight of hotel stairs on a wager, without injury
to himself or the horse. This account summarizes this entire
incident by saying, quote, though he had a kind heart,
(34:47):
he was not free from his father's faults and follies,
nor I fear did he escape from the ruinous results
which were the natural consequence that story, incidentally about riding
a horse up the hotel stairs is something that his
father definitely did. It is a little unclear whether his
son repeated that same act or if this was a
(35:07):
confusion of local lore on the writer's part since they
were both named John Mitton. But this does kind of
explain why he has this strange hero status because everyone
recognizes that he was completely out of control, that he
also had this desire and proclivity to be kind to
people when he could, and apparently his son was also
(35:28):
similarly living his life. I have so many thoughts about
him that we could talk about on the behind the scenes. Okay,
I have a listener mail from our listener, Shanila. I
hope that's how she pronounces it. I live next to
someone with this name growing up who pronounced it that way,
so if I got it wrong, I apologize. Schwritz Hi
(35:51):
Alian Tracy. I discovered your podcast several years ago and
have been intermittently listening to episodes in any quiet moment
when my kids weren't around. Now that the youngest in
full time non virtual school, I am starting at the
beginning and working my way through all your old episodes.
I recently listened to the one about how a war
between Canada and the US was almost started over a pig,
(36:11):
and was delighted to hear Holly mentioned she had lived
in the pew wall Up, Tacoma area as a child.
Qe all Up is my hometown, and it brings me
so much joy to hear of someone else from here,
especially someone I listened to and admire. Several years ago,
I moved to my husband's hometown of Boise, Idaho, and
I deeply missed the Pacific Northwest. Thank you for the
unexpected smile you gave me. My husband and I are
(36:32):
regular watchers of Jeopardy, and I feel compelled to suggest
that you both should apply to be on the show.
Hardly an episode goes by that I don't say, oh,
I know that I just listened to this history podcast
about it, regarding at least one clue if I am
ever on Jeopardy and when it will be because of
your podcast. She mentions another interesting story we might talk about,
and then some sum mates by saying, thank you always
(36:54):
for being so delightful. We don't have any pets because
keeping four children alive is all I can handle. They
are pretty cute, even if they're not free, so I
attached a picture of them. Cheers. I'm so so delighted
that you have this beautiful family. I kind of wanted
to say this to say I could never be on Jeopardy.
I choke in the moment of being questioned. I have
(37:15):
taken the Jeopardy test a couple times and didn't pass it. Yeah.
I would be like, I don't know about that, but
do you want to hear about this other weird thing
I know? And then they'd be like, no, man, please
go away. But you know, always good to hear someone
from pewall Up. People in pewall Up don't tam they rest.
That's one of the many slogans you can usually find
(37:37):
on a T shirt there. I too miss the Pacific Northwest.
It's so beautiful and I love it so I hope
you get to visit often and take your kids. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
also find us on social media as Missed in History,
and if you have not yet subscribed, that is easy
as pie to do. Just do it on the iHeartRadio
(37:58):
app or anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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