John Mytton - Decline

Decline

Mytton was spendthrift and cared little about warnings that his money was running out. He would drop bank notes in his estate and gave his servants lots of spending money. Visitors to his estate would find banknotes secreted around the grounds, whether left on purpose or simply lost by the drunken or distracted squire was uncertain. Once he lost his racetrack winnings - several thousand pounds - at Doncaster races when the wind blew them away. His workmen and tenants regarded him as a generous man. Over fifteen years he managed to spend his inheritance and then fell into deep debt. He totally ignored the advice of close friends and of official advisers such as his agent. His agent had calculated that if he could but reduce his expenditure to £6,000 pa for the next six years his estate would not have to be sold. Jack considered this option for a mere minute before replying "You tell Longueville (the agent) I wouldn't give a damn to live on £6,000 a year!" His fate was sealed at that point. At first creditors were hard pressed to find the services of a bailiff who was prepared to take the risk of arresting Mad Jack but in 1831 he fled to France to avoid his creditors, prison and court.

He had married, taking his first wife, a Baronet's daughter, in 1818 but she died in 1820. His second wife Caroline Giffard ran away in 1830. His wives bore him children who he would affectionately toss into the air as babies and pelt with oranges.

In Calais he fell in with a company of shady English adventurers whose occupations kept them by necessity away from English justice. He had met an attractive 20 year old woman on Westminster Bridge and immediately offered her £500 per annum to be his companion and flee with him to France. She took up his offer, which says a lot for his charisma, influence and personality. This woman, Susan, stayed with him for the two years until his death.

During his stay in France he tried to cure his hiccups by setting his shirt on fire. It did work but only the intervention of his friends spared him more serious injuries from burns. Nimrod was present at this event:

‘"Damn this hiccup!!" said Mytton as he stood undressed on the floor, apparently in the act of getting into bed “but I’ll frighten it away”; so seizing a lighted candle applied it to the tail of his shirt – it being a cotton one – he was instantly enveloped in flames. A fellow guest and Mytton’s servant beat out the flames: "The hiccup is gone, by God!", said he and reeled, naked, into bed'. From bed he quoted Sophocles in Greek the beautiful passage "wherein Oedipus recommends his children to the care of Creon" according to Apperley / Nimrod.

Apperley visited Mytton in his room the next morning, to find him ‘not only shirtless, but sheetless, with the skin of his breast, shoulders and knees of the same colour as a newly singed bacon hog’.

After a couple of years he decided to return to England and ended up in the King's Bench debtor's prison in Southwark, London. He died there in 1834 a 'round shouldered, tottering old-young man bloated by drink. Worn out by too much foolishness, too much wretchedness and too much brandy' in one account.

The Literary Gazette's review of Nimrod's biography contrasted the youthful Mytton:

Nimrod, Charles James Apperley, a neighbour, fellow hunting devotee, close friend and peer felt compelled to record the life of Mad Jack in 'The Memoirs of the Life of the Late John Mytton, Esquire, of Halston, Shropshire, formerly MP for Shrewsbury, High Sheriff for the Counties of Salop & Merioneth (1821), Major of the North Shropshire Yeomanry Cavalry ; with Notices of his Hunting, Shooting & Driving'.

Published in 1837 this often reprinted series of articles written by Nimrod in The New Sporting Magazine sell for thousands of pounds when originals or early reprints come up at auction.

Maybe the last word on the life of Mad Jack Mytton should be left to Nimrod, a man who knew him well and had a full and lengthy insight into the enigma that was John Mytton : 'It was his largeness of heart that ruined Mr Mytton, added to the lofty pride which disdained the littleness of Prudence'. But it was also Nimrod who asked: