Before long, he joined a troupe of unsuccessful actors who encouraged him to steal to support them. This was a time when, rather than waiting tables, out-of-work actors engaged in crime to make ends meet. This was how he discovered his innate talent for pick-pocketing.
From the actors he learned how to disguise himself. His favorite camouflage was to pose as a clergyman. In 1775 in London, he was caught stealing a jeweled snuffbox from a Russian count. He talked his way out of that jam using his native Irish charm. But in 1777 he was sentenced to three years’ hard labour in a hulk.49 He was freed after a year but was soon back inside where he attempted suicide, being too much the gentleman for a hulk.
At last a mysterious posh visitor to the hulk who took pity on him had him liberated. He returned to Dublin and then moved on to Edinburgh, and back again to London to keep ahead of his reputation for crime. But, alas, he had lost his edge. As his best days were behind him, he was soon back in the courts.
In 1790 he made what his contemporaries regarded as a brilliant speech from the dock in the Old Bailey in London. Practically singlehandedly inventing the discipline of psychology for the occasion, he argued that his crimes occurred despite his own best efforts. But notwithstanding his eloquence, he was transported to New South Wales, Australia. However, while he was on board the transport ship there was a mutiny amongst the prisoners. Luckily, Barrington sided with the captain, who won in the struggle. As a reward he was pardoned in 1792.
He reinvented himself as a “respectable gentleman” and became superintendant of convicts in Parramatta50 in 1796, and later high constable. He retired in 1800. But in a shocking development, for me anyway, he was declared insane by a commission. He died in 1804. Many disreputable authors cashed in on his fame and numerous dodgy histories were written about him.
Banking
Not all historical sinning involved sex or death. It could involve money. If for some unfathomable reason you couldn’t be a prostitute, “grave robber”, anatomist or “surgeon”, highwayman or gentleman pickpocket, you could try banking, also known by the historical term “swindling”. Even back in the nineteenth century, banking was amongst the top career choices of the degenerate.
This is the vocation John Sadlier (1813–1856) chose. Sadlier came from a wealthy Catholic family in Tipperary. He was suited for commerce because one of his ancestors was King Henry VIII’s chief butler’s accountant. He joined the family law firm in Dublin in 1837. Just two years later he was involved with his uncle in establishing the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank. They soon opened nine branches in Tipperary, Carlow and Kildare.51 I have no expertise in this area as I am not a banker, but I believe that rapid expansion may be an indication of either unprecedented success or unprecedented failure.
Sadlier rapidly gained full control of the bank’s funds. In 1847 he ran for election to Parliament. Through the judicious application of the Tipperary bank’s funds to the electorate, he won a seat in Carlow. By 1852 the bank’s funds had helped his brother James and his three first cousins to join him in Parliament, becoming what was called the “Papal Brigade”. He became a minister in 1853 but was forced to resign when he was found guilty of masterminding a plot to imprison a Tipperary bank customer who had refused to vote for him in the election. “Sadlierian” became a by-word for political corruption. However, political corruption was only a prelude to his banking style.
In 1852 the Tipperary bank became insolvent after Sadlier withdrew £288,000. He had drained the bank with his brother’s help to fund a series of disastrous speculations in hemp, sugar and iron, while issuing annual accounts showing that the bank was thriving.
Amongst his many roles, he was chairman of the London and County Joint Stock Bank, where he already had a massive overdraft. He now turned to this bank for more funds. He purchased the Newcastle upon Tyne bank, using the Tipperary bank drafts. He then used the Newcastle bank funds to bolster the Tipperary bank.
He sold 20,000 forged shares in the Royal Swedish Railway Company, of which he was chairman, to his cousin, who barely financially survived the resulting prompt collapse of the railway company. Sadlier also sold forged land deeds, spent rents from properties that he held in receivership and confiscated marriage settlements held by his solicitor’s office. From all these financial gymnastics, I mean instruments,52 he raised a total investment fund of £1.5 million, and promptly lost it all in one big disastrous speculation.
He committed suicide by drinking prussic acid.53 Dear, oh dear. I am not a psychologist, but it seems to me that he was either on a deliberate path to self-destruction or didn’t actually understand the complexities of the financial instruments and was embarrassed to admit it to his colleagues. Charles Dickens based his character Merdle in Little Dorrit on John Sadlier.
Sadlier’s family were financially wiped out because they were liable for the bank losses. They were even politically ruined, it was that bad. And, of course, they all fell out with each other in a downward spiral of blame. Sadlier’s brother James was declared an outlaw and fled to Switzerland, the home of the banking business, where he was murdered by an unknown thief who tried to steal his gold watch in 1881.
A Professional Heir
For those who couldn’t sin by becoming a banker, highwayman, anatomist or prostitute, there was the ever-popular path of becoming an heir, either by marrying a rich woman or by being a sycophant to a rich relation. Finding a rich wife was often precarious because the object of one’s plans, or her rich relations, might violently resist the proposed nuptials, especially if they hoped to inherit her money themselves. Naturally, becoming a professional heir often necessitated murder. Planning a relative’s premature death was difficult because there was no formal training available. Because anything could go wrong with one’s plans to inherit a fortune, it amounted to a form of gambling. This combination of vices made becoming a professional heir one of the most challenging paths to moral ruin.
Being a gambler alone was a popular form of sinning, with records showing that betting on turkey versus goose road races could be lucrative. John MacNaghten (1722–1761) may have been a gambler and a would-be heir, but he was also, probably, the unluckiest man in Ireland, ever. With such bad luck you might have thought that he would have given up gambling, but apparently that is not the way betting works: there is always the chance your luck will change on the very next bet.
He dropped out of Trinners in 1740 after just one year, setting a pattern for later generations of students. Following a series of failed or short-term positions, including running a poor house and founding one of the first farming societies in Ireland, he decided he had better marry money. He was charming and popular so he had little difficulty in persuading Mary Daniels to marry him in 1752. He even promised her that, once married, he would change his ways and quit gambling. One evening, when returning home to their house in Dublin, some local leg-breakers accosted the devoted couple at their front door. MacNaghten had lost big and the enforcers’ employers wanted their money back. Mary, who was heavily pregnant, dropped dead with shock.
Mary’s brother, with the same naïveté as his sister, got MacNaghten a job as a revenue collector in Coleraine, Co. Down. This was a great job for someone with a gambling addiction. When he rapidly embezzled £800, his brother-in-law was forced to repay £2,00054 to forfeit a bond of good conduct on MacNaghten’s behaviour.
Short of funds, he decided to marry money again, and succeeded in seducing fifteen-year-old Mary Knox. Going against her parents’ explicit wishes, she partially married him. She only read part of the marriage service. This small oversight allowed her family to have the marriage annulled, and to kick MacNaghten out.
He then paid a visit to his childless eighty-two-year-old Uncle Edmund, who was on his deathbed, to see if he could be named his heir. Edmund was so appalled at the prospect that he got up and went in pursuit of a new wife. He married a young woman, fathered two sons, got back into bed twenty year
s later and died at the grand old age of 102.
After many more scrapes, MacNaghten returned in despair to the pursuit of Mary Knox. He did the only thing he could. With three accomplices he ambushed her coach in an attempt to abduct her in November 1761. Five bullets – not four, three, two or even one, but five bullets – from MacNaghten’s gun hit Mary, fatally wounding her where she sat in the coach. He didn’t mean to shoot her, at least not before marrying her. He was also wounded.
MacNaghten would have been firing flintlock pistols or muskets. These were highly inaccurate weapons, which would have needed to be individually loaded with powder, shot and wadding, probably by his accomplices, and discharged singly into the coach. A well-trained soldier could average four shots per minute. If we assume there was a five-minute gun battle between MacNaghten and Mary’s servants, with his accomplices loading at half-professional speeds, with one accomplice put out of action after two minutes and a second after four, and only MacNaghten firing, this would produce a total of twenty-two shots fired. This would give MacNaghten a hit rate on Mary of one in four. Lucky shooting!
He was arrested and promptly put on trial. He defended himself because, I imagine, he couldn’t afford an attorney. He wasn’t accomplished at it because he didn’t plead insanity. Instead, he made an impassioned speech that included an appeal for pardon for his accomplices. He failed on all arguments, and was found guilty.
However, he was so popular that none of the locals wanted to build the gallows. But Mary Knox’s uncle agreed to build it himself. When he finally climbed onto the homemade gallows, MacNaghten jumped with such enthusiasm that the rope around his neck broke, and he landed on the ground alive and well. He could have run away or pleaded for clemency on the grounds that at last his luck had changed. But, no, he said he didn’t want to be known to history as “half-hanged MacNaghten”, so he climbed back up on the gallows with a new rope and jumped again. This time the rope worked.
Perhaps Mary Knox’s relatives first got the moniker into circulation, but we now know him as “half-hanged MacNaghten”.
Landlording
A traditional way to be a rotter in Irish history was to be an evicting landlord who threw his poor tenants onto the roadside. Better still, if you were a nineteenth-century landlord you could have made yourself a justice of the peace and impose the law yourself. Ah, what a life! However, Colonel Saunderson, an Irish landlord, describing the disadvantages of that profession, said, “If we reside on our properties, we are shot, and if we go out of range we are called absentees.”
Adolphus Cooke (1792–1876) was the illegitimate son of a landlord, Robert Cooke, and an unknown servant. Becoming an eccentric landlord was a traditional career move in these circumstances. As a landlord he proved to be mad maybe because he couldn’t distinguish himself as being notoriously bad. First, he joined the army because that was an established training ground for a considerable number of eccentrics. In 1835, when Robert Cooke died, his two legitimate sons having predeceased him, Adolphus Cooke inherited the estate in Cookesborough, Co. Westmeath. At last, he could give full reign to his idiosyncrasies as a landlord.
The army had taught him the virtue of discipline, so he drilled his tenants like soldiers in the mornings. He threw them off the land if they lost any of the tools that he gave them. He passionately hated children. He once gave a beggar £555 because he was childless, and complained bitterly that a father of twelve children was extremely “naughty”.
But, as a landlord, he wasn’t all bad. He loved animals, if not children and people. He believed that the animals on his estate were the reincarnations of his own relatives. When a bullock was drowning in the river, he herded the other bullocks onto the riverbank to make them observe a lesson in water safety. He fought a bull that attacked him, waving a red coat as a cape and brandishing a sword like a Spanish bullfighter. When the bull was just about to gore him to death, a maid rescued him. Naturally, being eccentric, he fired her as a reward for her bravery. She should have known better.
Cooke came to believe that the turkey cock on his estate was his reincarnated father, Robert. Therefore, this turkey had to be treated with enormous respect. He became frustrated by the disobedience of his dog Gusty, and became so exasperated that he eventually put the dog on trial in front of a jury of sycophantic tenants. Reluctantly, they found the dog guilty, and Gusty was condemned to be hanged by Cooke in the guise of a judge. But no one amongst the tenants would volunteer to carry out the sentence. A local sage called “The Bug Mee” eventually agreed to do it. He dragged poor Gusty away to the dog gallows. Minutes later he came back with Gusty still alive and wagging his tail, claiming that the turkey intervened on the dog’s behalf, begging for clemency. The Bug Mee got the cushy job of looking after the turkey and Gusty for the rest of their lives.
When Cooke died, the local attorneys were delighted to discover that he had made three different wills. One will bequeathed everything to Dr Wellington Purdon, who had been subsequently disinherited for fox-hunting on the land, killing several of Cooke’s own relatives in the process. Purdon sued Edward Pakenham, another claimant to Cooke’s estate, arguing that Cooke was mad. However, the court found that Cooke was “not insane”. They didn’t find him sane; just not insane – an entirely different conclusion. Normal insanity, as then understood, usually involved killing someone. Cooke hadn’t achieved that distinction.
John Rutter Carden (1811–1866) was a landlord who was generous to those tenants who blindly obeyed his will but merciless to those who didn’t. In other words, he was a control freak. He was called “The Woodcock” because he was shot at so often by the local peasantry but was never hit.
On one occasion, he was waylaid by two of his tenants near Nenagh. These two were absolutely determined to actually shoot him dead at close range. He knocked one of them unconscious with his riding whip, and chased and captured the other. He hauled them both off to Nenagh Gaol, where they were hanged. The locals, who had had enough, descended on his castle with pitchforks and burning brands, establishing the standard template for future mob-inflicted house sieges in Hammer House of Horror films. When the rabble surrounded his castle he got on the roof with a grapeshot-filled swivel gun. Unsurprisingly, the peasants instantly panicked and fled.
In 1854 he became the High Sheriff, making himself both the law and the outlaw. He then began his career as an obsessive lover, setting exceptionally high standards for posterity in the art of stalking. Like many stalkers, he did not present an outward demeanour that suggested a struggle to conceal an immense capacity for love.
Carden fell insanely in love with Eleanor Arbuthnot, who was a posh English woman living near Clonmel, Co. Tipperary. He followed her everywhere and asked her relatives for her hand in marriage. When they rejected him, he decided that he and Eleanor should elope together. He wrote to Eleanor, laying out his plans. She refused to run away with him. In the most appropriate lady-like terms, she informed him that, while she was flattered by his attentions etcetera, he should leave her alone and cease and desist bothering her.
Naturally, because not every single word in the correspondence was actually negative or threatening, and she had, after all, used definite and indefinite articles, he decided that she really loved him but just didn’t realise it. To help her to full consciousness of her repressed feelings, he decided to kidnap her while she was travelling home from church in her carriage. He knew that as soon as she was in his kidnapping arms she would realise how much she really loved him.
He convinced six servants to help him by persuading them that she did actually love him. It is more likely they were obeying him out of their long-established terror of him, which he interpreted as affection. With his servants in tow, he attacked her carriage with pistols, lengths of rope for tying her up and two bottles of chloroform just in case she temporarily forgot her real affection for him. He was meticulous in his planning. He had laid on a relay of horses to carry the happy
united lovers from Tipperary to Galway, where he had a steamer waiting to take them to London. He invested over £7,00056 in the enterprise.
Eleanor, along with her sister and their own lackeys in the carriage, fought Carden and his six servants to a standstill. Carden was arrested and found guilty of attempted abduction. He was sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Clonmel Gaol. However, his mates, the magistrates, begged him to stop stalking Eleanor. They promised to let him out of gaol early, say after an hour, if he agreed to desist in his attentions. However he refused, so he served the full two years.
When he got out he went to India for a break but returned early to recommence the stalking. He followed Eleanor to Dublin and London before being arrested again in Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire, for plotting another kidnap. This time he had to put up securities to stay out of gaol.
Given the times he lived in, he had to write a pamphlet publically explaining his behaviour – that is, that Eleanor didn’t realise that she really loved him, and if it wasn’t for her interfering relatives the two of them could be blissfully happy together for ever and ever.
Neither he nor Eleanor ever married, proving to him that he was right all along – that she did in fact love him and no one else would do.
Sinning in Name
Surnames only came into general use in Ireland in the eleventh century. Before then we had forenames followed by the name of a better-known family member or a place associated with a particular person. Thus, we have Gormlaith, daughter of Flann Sinna, or Finbarr of Cork, who was a saint. Having a long name will help you be remembered in history, either as a saint or a sinner. Being called Sir William Pierce Ashe A’Court, Baron Heytesbury is better than Ed Ball, milkman. However, being called Ed Ball, milkman, international explorer, pianist, trapeze artist, Trapist monk and leader of men is a step in the right historical direction. Reginald Thomas Amesley Ball-Acton is noteworthy because he was killed at Ypres in 1916. It was rare for long-named people to be killed in the First World War because they usually remained behind the lines sipping cognac, which was one of the few roles in that war demanding extensive military experience. He must have wandered into a trench by accident while looking for his drinks cabinet.
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