John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton

The Regency era produced some spectacular eccentrics who managed to gamble and drink their way through vast fortunes. However, none were as potty or as tragic as John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton.

Mytton was born in 1796 at Halston Hall in Shropshire to an ancient squirearchal family. His father died when he was two years old, leaving him heir to 132,000 acres in Shropshire and north Wales. Thoroughly spoiled by his widowed mother (he had his own pack of harriers at the age of 10), young Mytton grew up doing exactly as he pleased and indulging in elaborate practical jokes. Expelled from Westminster and Harrow, he was sent to Berkshire where he punched his private tutor. Thereafter, a succession of new tutors were engaged at Halston but none lasted. Indeed, one left the day after he arrived when he woke up to find a horse in his bedroom.

Mytton stalking duck in his nightshirt

Port consumption

In 1816 Mytton briefly attended the University of Cambridge, sending three pipes of port (2,160 bottles) ahead to his lodgings. He soon became bored, however, and left to embark on the Grand Tour. On his return he joined the 7th Hussars, then with the army of occupation in France. After three years spent gambling and drinking – his regular daily consumption was six bottles of port – he resigned his commission before taking up his duties as squire in 1817.

His close friend the sporting journalist Charles Apperley, who wrote under the pseudonym Nimrod, describes Mytton as about 5ft 9in and immensely strong, with an iron constitution. He was impervious to cold and thought nothing of stalking duck by moonlight on the frozen lake at Halston in only his nightshirt or, occasionally, completely naked. Apperley became Mytton’s biographer and chronicled a good number of his more outrageous episodes. These included putting two bulldogs and his pet bear into bed with a guest who had passed out drunk; riding his horse for a bet up the grand staircase to the balcony of the Bedford Hotel in Leamington, jumping over the diners below and through the window into the street; and disguising himself as a highwayman to surprise two elderly dinner guests who were riding sedately home and chasing them back to Oswestry.

What! Never upset in a gig?

A maniac on wheels

He had complete disregard for his own health and positively courted disaster: bored on a day’s hunting, he once galloped his horse over a rabbit warren to see if it would fall. It did, rolling on him and breaking three ribs, yet he was back in the field the next day. Despite a broken arm in a sling, he joined a Meet of Sir Bellingham Graham’s hounds at Attingham Park by jumping his horse over the high metal railings. Once, when hounds were hunting near Bridgenorth and the field crossed the flooded Severn by ferry, Mytton nearly drowned trying to swim his horse across. On wheels he was a maniac. Finding his path blocked by a toll gate, he drove his tandem at it flat out in the hope the horses would jump it – with the inevitable consequences. On another occasion he deliberately overturned a gig for the benefit of a passenger unwise enough to mention he had never had an accident in one.

Mytton inherited an annual income of more than a million pounds and was equally reckless with money. In 1819 he spent easily that amount bribing voters to elect him Tory MP for Shrewsbury. He attended the House of Commons only once, leaving after half an hour and resigning his post. He kept a huge kennel of hounds, pointers, terriers and lurchers at Halston, and hunted what became the Albrighton country five days a week from 1817-21 at his own expense. Mytton was a keen shot and maintained a large racing stable but his winnings barely touched the colossal expenditure.

Damn this hiccup!

Avoiding bailiffs

By 1830 Mytton had exchanged port for brandy and was deeply in debt; he had sold his unentailed estates in Shropshire and north Wales, the contents of Halston were auctioned and his second wife had left him (the first died in 1820). He fled to Calais to evade bailiffs. One night, after an evening’s drinking, he was plagued with hiccups and set light to his nightshirt, believing the effect would frighten them away. Were it not for Apperley nursing him back to health, Mytton would have died. Once he was back on his feet, the demon drink took hold again and he returned to England, made his way to the empty shell of Halston and was promptly arrested. Mytton, who had once been High Sheriff of Shropshire, was held in Shrewsbury jail and transported to the grim King’s Bench debtors’ prison in London.

Eventually, his principal creditors were paid off and he was released but soon had to flee to France again, this time with a young woman he had picked up on Westminster Bridge who stayed with him to the end. This was not long in coming; deranged with brandy, he was in and out of French prisons for debt and fighting. His mother was persuaded to take him back to England but the bailiffs were waiting and Mytton died, ‘worn out by too much foolishness, too much wretchedness and too much brandy’, in King’s Bench on 29 March 1834. For all his follies, he was immensely popular and 3,000 attended the funeral procession to the chapel at Halston on 9 April. A mourning peal rang at All Saints, Oswestry, and bells in Shrewsbury, Ellesmere, Whittington and Halston tolled during the day.

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