The Mad Mystic and the Last Battle on English Soil - with Ian Breckon

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Pushkin. Pushkin. As the sun sinks,

the trees cast long shadows across the countryside of Kent at the southeast tip of England.

Blackbirds, robins, song-crashing wood pigeons join the dusk chorus. But they're not the only ones gathering on the evening of Sunday the 27th of May, 1838. Over 100 people, all from nearby hamlets,

are standing in the lane on the edge of a little village named Don Kirk. Some climb onto fences and carts to get a bit of view. The air is electric with anticipation. Earlier today, most of them stood at the rear of the church for the Sunday service. Two poor and lowly to have a seat.

For two hours they stood,

“men in clean-mite smokes or Sunday jackets,”

women wearing their best shawls and bonnets,

how their backs and feet ached as the reverend-handly, vicar of her and hill gave his uninspiring sermon. And yet, here they are, waiting to hear from another man of God. Health to the poor,

toasts Sir William Courtney, as the crowd raises glasses of beer and return. Dressed in somber black, Sir William removes his wide rimmed hat, ready to preach.

His clutching a pocket bible in his hand, not that he needs it to quote the epistle of some James. "Go to now, you rich men, weep, and how for your miseries that you'll come upon you." Courtney's followers hang on every word.

As he goes on to recite Job chapter 20 from memory, because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor, because he hath violently taken away and house which he build it not. God shall cast a fury of his wrath upon him. The heavens shall reveal his iniquity,

and the earth shall rise up against him. The audience of poor laborers like the sound of that, they scrape a living from the earth, while the gentry owned it. In the fading light of that cool Sabbath evening,

Sir William Courtney tells the crowd to carry on as normal tomorrow. But to join him again on Tuesday, to prepare for what lay ahead. Sir William's most devoted disciples believe him to be the Messiah,

and will willingly follow him into the last battle, fought on English soil. I'm Tim Hartford, and you're listening to caution retails. Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtney was the ninth Earl of Devon. He caused a scandal in his teens for a homosexual affair with a gothic novelist,

and left England in 1811 to escape creditors. But William Courtney was not the man who had addressed the crowd of peasants

The man claiming to be William Courtney the rightful Earl of Devon and heir to powder him castle was in fact a former wine merchant, who had spent time in prison and an asylum, and stood for Parliament along the way. Here to tell us all about him is Ian Brecken,

author of Mad Tom's Rising,

the revolutionary mystic Sir William Courtney

and the last battle fought on English soil. Ian, welcome to Course Me Zales. Hello. Before we get too far into this incredible story, I just wanted you to paint as a picture of England at the time,

the late 1830s. It was a time of social ferment, really.

“It certainly was, yeah, I think we'd need to go back”

a little bit earlier than that, but right back to the beginning of that decade, the beginning of the 1830s, because this was a tremendously turbulent time in the history of England. It was the time of the great reform act.

It was the time of the new poor law. It was the time of rioting and uproar across the country. There were huge uprisings in Bristol and Derby, many other towns and cities.

Mainly connected to the demands for political reform initially

and a widening of the electorate. But as the decade went on, that initial uproar continued into other fields. There were the swing riots, which began in Kent, and were focused on opposition to the mechanization in the countryside.

They were very violent, swept across the country. There was arson. People being threatened in their homes, machines being broken. But that violence continued then throughout the decade, particularly in the rural areas,

which were very depressed. They were very run down. Parish relief in particular, which many families relied on for a living during the winter months. In the previous few years,

the law of the government came in after the great reform act. And that led to further rioting, particularly again in Kent, these same districts. This was in 1835. So really these areas, these rural areas,

were primed for uproar. They were primed for revolt. And even though each successive revolt had been beaten down by a mixture of legal temporising and military action,

there was still a lot of resentment, and a lot of fear about the way things were changing. The way that this traditional rural way of life was coming to an end. And into this powder keg was the spark. Calling himself Sir William Courtney,

in your book, you call this gentleman the imposter. You need to give him that nickname, because he keeps changing his name.

“What was his aim, Alias, when he first arrived in Canterbury?”

Well, when he first appeared in Canterbury,

in around September 1832, he claimed that his name was Count Moses Rossopchine Rothschild. Well, this was the name that he spread around Canterbury in any case. And he appeared to be probably a foreigner,

perhaps Jewish, maybe from some Eastern land. He had a very exotic appearance in any case. He wore extraordinary clothes of red velvet and gold and a big hat. He had this big beard and long hair.

He seemed to have what onlookers described as a dusky complexion and an exotic foreign accent. So, he definitely seemed to be a strange character from far away and was also rumoured to be very rich. Yes, of course.

He claimed to be very rich. Yes. But then he hears that Sir John Courtney Honeywood, the fifth baronette of even turn and the former sheriff of Kent, had died.

And that gives him a kind of opening. Well, it does, yeah.

“I think what had happened was that this local novel man died,”

somewhere close to Canterbury, and his valetamann called Collard, somehow came into possession of his wardrobe or certain items of his wardrobe and travelled to Canterbury and put them up for sale.

So he then buys these trinkets, these clothes and a sword and so on. Yeah, he bought a pair of caught epilets, a sword, various metals and bits and pieces, but he also bought a new identity

because after this having assembled this new wardrobe and also briefly taken on the services of the valetamann Collard, he revealed himself to be, in fact, Sir William Percy Honeywood, Courtney, Earl of Devon, Knight of Malta, King of Jerusalem,

King of the Gypsies. Oh, okay, that escalated quickly. So, and well, how did he account for the fact that he had previously called himself Count Moses a rust-op-chine rust-child?

He seems to have made out that this was just an alias that he'd had to adopt, because he came with an extraordinary backstory, which he slowly revealed to his fascinated audience that he'd had to conceal his identity,

because various members of his family,

were plotting against him,

“they were plotting to defraught him in some way,”

and he had been forced to return to England, undercover from exotic distant lands to reclaim his birth, right? And it was a bit of a kind of romantic story that appealed to a lot of people,

because people in those days were just as excited as they are now, by stories of conspiracy and the upper echelons of society. Yeah, I mean, people seem to love the story, they seem to like him, he got invited to all the parties, everyone enjoyed his company.

When you're that popular, then, of course, the next thing you might want to do is stand in an election. So, he stands in the election of 1832, as Sir William, what was he promising?

He was promising the earth, basically.

In those days, electoral culture was still very bombastic, very brambunctious, everyone was a populist, essentially. There wasn't a sort of professional politician. You did have parties that you had the wigs and the tourists. Yeah, so which one was he standing for?

Well, he wasn't standing for either. The two sitting candidates in Canterbury, because there were two candidates for each seat, were both wigs. This was the liberal reformist party who had pushed through the great format. And so popular had they become that they'd won the previous election

uncontested. Yeah, and the Tories weren't really up to putting up a candidate against them. So, when this mysterious Maverick stranger popped up, saying that he wanted to stand for parliament as well, the local Tory party were very pleased.

They got behind him quite a lot.

“And actually, I think a lot of the votes that he attracted”

had to have been Tory voters who didn't have anyone else to vote for. Well, he promised I read a return to the good old days of roast beef and mutton and plenty of prime nut brown ale, which I think is calculated to appeal to any Tory voters. I mean, indeed many voters.

Yeah. So, what was his campaigning strategy? What did he look like on the stump? Well, I mean, he looked extraordinary on the stump,

because he was still wearing this amazing costume that he'd put together.

This velvet and gold costume with big chunky epilets and a simmer tar that he carried around with him and his big beard and his long hair. And he took to standing on the balcony of his hotel, shouting speeches to the crowd below and throwing coins down to them. And basically, his platform was what might seem to us a strange combination

of intense utopian socialism, really. Collectivising everything, taking all the tax from the poor and putting it on the shoulders of the rich. He would often talk about the patrimony of the poor and say, it's an abomination, the eyes of God that the poor had denied their rights.

But then he would combine that with this intense kind of ultrapatriotism, this kind of flag waving and the British lion must arise and all this sort of thing, which sounds to us quite right-wing.

“So, it's a strange combination, but I think in the political culture of the times,”

it would have seemed quite recognizable. So, how did he do in the election? Well, initially, he seemed to be doing quite well, because he was able to attract a very large crowd who followed him around the streets of Canterbury hanging on his every word. Unfortunately, most of this crowd were relatively poor people who didn't have the vote,

as you can know the great reform act to gone through. The vote was still restricted to about 10% of the population, just under 20% of the male population. So, his vote share was actually comparatively small. He got between 300 and 400 votes compared to the 800 or so gain by each of the two weak candidates.

So, respectable, they're not really close to winning. Yeah, and his followers treated him as if he had won. They pulled him about the streets of Canterbury in his carriage, singing "Rull Britannia" and fading him to the skies. And he then follows this up by setting up his own newspaper, The Lion.

Tell us about that. It kind of pamphlet really, a compilation of his political and social and religious ideas. These copies of The Lion, they're very densely printed, quite hard to read at times, but they do sound fairly sensible. They don't necessarily sound like the ravings of a madman.

Yeah, it's a combination of what at the time was fairly standard political radicalism about taking away tides, reforming parliament, that kind of thing. Combined with a growing religiosity, it was rather a sporadic publication, because in the middle of his print run, he was suddenly arrested and thrown in jail.

Ah, okay, how did that happen? Well, initially he was for swindling. One of the waiters in the-- Yeah, there's enough swindling. No, no, it was actually charged with swindling.

I realise I have no idea what swindling actually is. It's just a generic term for some kind of mischief. What is swindling? He had been staying in a hotel called The Rose in Canterbury, when he was going around saying that he was count wrothed child and so forth.

He made out that he was very rich, or would shortly be very rich, as soon as he got hold of his inheritance. And in the process, borrowed an awful lot of money of various people. After he moved out of the Rose and lost the election, of course, one of these people decided to come forward and say, "Hang on a minute, where's my money?"

including fondly enough, collard, the former valid who'd sold him the various costume items.

“So, swindling is borrowing money under false pretentious and not paying it back.”

Pretty much, okay, good to know. And on top of the swindling charge, he gets involved in another court case, involving smuggling, but he wasn't smuggling. No, he'd given evidence and the trial of some smugglers in Rochester. This was around the time that he was trying to broaden his base really to include

anyone who might be considered oppressed. And he was very impressed himself with smugglers, who he regarded as heroes, because they were opponents of taxation. No but conscientious of Jack Jackson, he loved it. So he'd rushed over to Rochester to give slightly farsical evidence in this trial

of these smugglers claiming that he had been at sea himself at the time, and had seen them not doing any smuggling. But this was thrown out by the court.

“And some time later, he was revealed to have purged himself in court,”

a local clergyman revealed that he had been in church at the time he claimed to have been at sea. Is perjury worse than swindling? It is, yes, giving false evidence in court was considered a very serious crime indeed. Right, and so what was the sentence? Well, after he was found guilty of perjury he was sentenced to three months in

Maidston jail followed by seven years' transportation to Australia. Just after the perjury trial, the editor of a local newspaper, published a hand-printed bill which declared, "So William Courtney's real character discovered. His lady and brother-in-law have positively identified him.

And after the break, Ian is going to tell me who Sir William really was." Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, I Heart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only I Heart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think I Heart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting, call 844-844-I Heart to get started. That's 844-844-I Heart. On big lives, we take a single cultural icon.

People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives. Discovering, forgotten interviews that change exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes.

I'm a mental geochee and chai-right and this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. I'm Tim Hartford and I'm speaking to Ian Brecken, the author of Mad Tom's Rising. So Ian, we have charted the checkered career of the imposter. He adopted one identity, then he adopted another, the identity of Sir William Courtney.

And now this pamphlet is circulating saying that his true identity has been revealed.

“So what was his identity and how did it come to be discovered?”

Oh, his true identity was John Nichols Tom. A man from Cornwall who lived most of his life in Truro as a wine merchant and maulster. And for those who were not familiar with the geography of England,

it basically called the opposite end from Kent.

It's the far southwest of the southeast. Yeah, so he'd grown up down there. He had a family there. He had a wife down there. And around the age of 30 or 31, he had had a mental health episode, which remains a little bit cloudy in our sources. It's described as either monomaniar or congestion of the brain of these extraordinary Victorian terms.

Yeah, well, pre-victorian slightly. He was treated by a couple of local doctors who weren't able to do very much other than shave his head. Oh, that'd be it. Yeah, it was a sort of common treatment at the time. And his family believed he'd actually got better after that.

But what actually happened to him is one of the great mysteries of this story. It actually goes up to Liverpool with a cargo of maul. This is in, I think, about March 1832. Turns up again several months later in Canterbury, September 1832, and he's turned into somebody completely different.

He's not only adopted this other persona, but he seems to have become a different person.

He's become this incredible, bombastic, charismatic, orator.

And after this trial in Maidstone, after he had been imprisoned and sentenced to transportation, his family actually caught up with him.

There's this guy who has been sentenced to transportation to Australia

who calls himself Sir William Courtney. This woman, Catherine Tom of Truro, shows up and says, "Actually, this is my husband. What do the authorities make of all that?" Well, initially, they seem to be rather unwilling to let this Mrs. Catherine Tom see

this prisoner who they believe is called Sir William Courtney,

“but eventually she and her brother and her, I believe, are allowed to visit him.”

And they confront him, essentially, and say, "Look, you are John Nichols Tom. You are my husband. You're not this Sir William Courtney character. Why don't you confess who you really are? He refuses to concede that he is, in fact, John Nichols Tom. He insists on his identity.

So he says he's Sir William Courtney. Absolutely, he's just into the story. Absolutely. So then what do they send me for Australia or not? No, what their family do is manage to persuade the prison doctors that he is actually insane.

Because there was a law of the time that if anyone should be found to be insane, they can be transferred from a prison to a mental asylum. Right. And he's transferred to Kent County, Leunit Excilament Barming Heath.

The good news for Sir William, aka John Nichols Tom, is that he doesn't languish there forever. He is pardoned by Queen Victoria herself. And released. So was he cured at that point?

Well, I'm not really know. He had been in this lunatic design for three years, really.

“And over the course of these three years, he had been pretty much unchanged.”

Still maintained his identity as Sir William Courtney. Still a knight of Malta, exactly. Exactly. Still the heir to powder him, Castle. Absolutely, yes.

Yes. But he was released on the request of his family, actually. Queen Victoria just come to the throne. And they wrote to the Hemsak tree and said, "Can you let my husband, my son-in-law,

there is family members wrote? Out of this asylum because he's better now, a will look after him, and everything will be great." And they decided to go for this, which seems strange to us because the asylum superintendent

actually still believed that he was insane. Yes. Well, whether or not he's insane. He's released.

And then a friend of his basically says, "I'll take care of him."

This was a man called George Francis, who was a local young and farmer, who were John Thomas already greatly impressed during the period between his election campaigns and his imprisonment.

He'd been touring around the countryside of Northeast Kent. Speaking to an awful lot of people, and impressing them with his religiosity, his great learning, his extraordinary exotic foreign travels.

And this man, George Francis, was one of them. He owned a farm called Fairbrook, close to her and hell. And this man, George Francis, was the one who took him in when he was released from the asylum. He shouldn't have been actually.

He was supposed to have been delivered into the care of his family, but because he refused to accept that he was John Nichols' tom, and insisted that he was, instead, so will him, Courtney. Still still working on getting his land and money back. Absolutely, absolutely.

And this was one of the reasons why George Francis was eager to take him in, because he was promising him extraordinary rewards once he got his riches back. And I understand he also promised that he was going to keep out of politics.

Yeah, well George Francis subsequently said that he had made Sir William as he's still called him. Promise that he would not involve himself with politics and would not address mobs. How did that go?

I didn't go very well at all. Very rapidly, this new house guest of his was touring this rounding area, talking to local laboring people in their cottages, and indeed addressing mobs.

Right, so who's in these mobs? Who is finding him interesting? He's roaming around, he's given these barnstorming sermons or speeches. Who's in the audience?

They all came from a very small area of North Kent. These two parishes, Hornhill and Boughton, and this neighbouring extra-procule district as it was called of Dunkirk. Most of them were related to each other.

These were mainly laboring families. Some of his supporters were actually slightly more prosperous. They were landowners, small farmers. But all of them were from what were called at the time the laboring classes. We heard him at the beginning of our conversation,

quoting biblical passages that had a kind of a political and economic resonance. But I'm curious, the people who are listening to him, are they thinking, this guy's a political leader I can follow,

“or are they thinking, this is a religious, great man?”

I think it's a mixture of both.

What we'd probably need to think about first of all

is how deeply saturated everything was by religion, by Christianity, at this point. So even families who were illiterate, they still had prayer books, books of Psalms, they had quite cheaply copied pictures of biblical scenes,

stuck to the walls of their cottages. They went to church every Sunday, and religion was the highest authority for them. So when this man appeared amongst them, this extraordinary charismatic stranger,

who was able to recite great tracks from the Bible, from memory apparently,

things that involved their lives and their livelihoods,

“but framing it in this religious biblical language,”

they instantly recognized us having authority. Of course, they were going to be impressed by him. He had a small body of what we might call disciples, his closest followers, and it was them who were kind of disseminating this idea

of his divine status amongst all of their neighbors. Tell me about the millenarians, the post-millenarians, the pre-millenarians. What is the religious backdrop? Again, as we were saying,

the 1830s were a very politically fee-brile era. They were also quite religiously turbulent as well, and there were many people, even quite mainstream people, who held ideas which we might consider to be pretty fringe, which at the time were not considered that way at all,

and one of them was the idea of the approaching millennium, which was a biblical term, meaning essentially the end of the world. It was the beginning of the reign of Christ and His saints, which would last for a thousand years. It was heralded by the millennium itself,

also known as the day of judgment, and would end with the apocalypse.

“And many people, including members of parliament,”

ministers of state, members of the aristocracy, believed firmly that this was about to happen any moment now within their lifetime. Yeah. It's extraordinary because some of this sounds almost medieval,

but at this very moment, there are steam trains running between Manchester and Liverpool. The industrial revolution has been in full swing for half a century or more. Modernity is coming, and yet you've got this guy wandering around the Kent Country side,

and some of his followers genuinely think this is the second coming.

Yeah, they think that he can work miracles, and they're prepared to believe it. He says that he can shoot the stars down from the sky that he can be in several different places at once, that he can hear conversations over a mile away,

that he can change shape, that he can kill a thousand people, simply by striking one hand against the bicep of his other arm. This kind of thing. He also says he came from the sky on a cloud.

The other thing he tells them on this Sunday evening in 1838 is I'll see you Tuesday, prepare for what lies ahead. So this Tuesday, 29th of May, 1838,

“they have been told together because something important is going to happen.”

What does happen? Well, essentially, he leads them on a kind of recruitment march, leading them around the edges of these various parishes, trying to drum up support. There's a fairly sizable band of people that follow him,

traipsing around the countryside here and there, but he doesn't cause this widespread uprising which he might have hoped for. Roughly how many people are there? When he did his big sermon on the Sunday night, there was a local constable there who said that there were between 100 and 200 people there.

His recruitment march around the countryside varies between about 1360. It's not exactly an army. Is it? And are they armed? Is he armed?

Well, he has a pair of pistols and a sword, at least one sword. He also seems to have some kind of little dagger thing as well. They're only carrying clubs. Or at least at this point, they're open-handed. There seems to be a certain amount of uncertainty amongst them about what he's going to call on them to do.

But he says that if anybody takes them on, I shall cut them down like grass. So that sounds fairly warlike. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty bellico, some of the things he comes out with.

So these marches have been wandering around for a couple of days.

And the second day they cover 30 miles,

but their numbers have stopped growing. Some people are ready to go home. So, do they forsake their Messiah? We will find out after the break. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?

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So Ian, so William Courtney, let's call him so William Courtney, we might as well.

“He is struggling to entice more people to join his crusade.”

He is worried about others drifting home. So how is he entice people to stay with him? He essentially ups his messianic appeal.

This is an extraordinary scene that happens at the end of his second day of leading his supporters

around the countryside of Ken. And they must all be exhausted. Absolutely. They'd been on this extraordinary long march, and they find themselves in this wood, Bozendon wood, which by that point had become the headquarters of Sir William and his band. And there's the scene which is described by a woodcutter who happened upon it,

where Sir William lying on the ground surrounded by all of his followers. And he sits up and suddenly starts declaring various extraordinary facts about himself. A game reiterating that he's come from the sky upon a cloud, and he can kill all of these people simply by speaking a single word. But then declaring he is, in fact, Jesus Christ himself.

That he is the resurrected body of Christ, and he shows them the marks on his hands of the crucifixion.

Wow. He's saying, "I am Jesus. I was crucified here at the old scars.

You can see them right here." And these people who are surrounding him, at least the hardcore of his supporters, his disciples, are absolutely ecstatic at this. And we have descriptions of them falling on the ground and worshiping him, women kissing his feet, kissing his hands, praising him to the skies as the Messiah.

So some of his followers are very impressed by this declaration. And some of them scared of him?

“Yeah, certainly, I think he was also capable of inspiring considerable amounts of dread,”

partly because of the things he claimed would happen if people didn't follow him. He said that fire and brimstone would rain down from the sky, they would burn people in their beds, that people would be dragged down to hell if they refused to follow him. And in fact, he would chase them down into hell. So he has now this hardcore of incredibly loyal followers who are in raptures.

Jesus himself is leading them. What does he do next? Well, by this point, word of his activities has got through to the local authorities. Law enforcement in the countryside of England at this time was in a fairly sort of ad hoc state. Really, you had these magistrates who were local landowners usually or clergymen.

And they had various parish customers who were working for them. But these are all part-time roles. Yeah, and if he's got 50 or 100 people with cudgils with him, that's not a straightforward thing to deal with. Exactly, yeah. So what do they do?

So on the morning of the 31st of May, parish constable, John Mears is sent off with his brother and a friend of his who he's empowered as special constables to serve this arrest warrant on Sir William Courtney. Here at this point is living at Bosendon Farm in the center of this woodland. Right, so there's just three of them. Yeah, the dozens and dozens may be 100 followers of Courtney.

So what happened? As soon as they approached the farmhouse, John Nichols' tombs of William Courtney appeared with a pistol in one hand, sawed in the other, killed the constables brother, Nicholas Mears, shot him through the body with a pistol, stabbed him several times, and then declared that he was the savior of the world. Right.

So that escalated very quickly, very quickly.

“So what did John Mears do and his friend, the other two?”

They took to their heels as quickly as they could. They got away. Yes, being pursued by John Nichols' tom with his other pistol, which had gone back into the house to get. It must have been terrifying. The news of the murder then reaches the magistrates. So presumably at that point, they need to escalate.

But Sir William is now goes on the march again. How do they try and track him down and stop him? Well, yeah, he goes on the march around this local area with his gang of hardcore disciples. Let's seem to be about 30 of them or so.

He first of all heads over to Fairbrook Farm, where George Francis lives, his former friend, who is now turned against.

And friends to kill them. Although he's met at the fence by Francis himself and his various women focus, instead ply them with beer and gin. That's smart. If you got 30 people with coutures and someone's got a gun. Exactly nice.

At this point, luckily a group of magistrates and special constables turn up on horseback. And Tom and his followers retreat to a small below plantation where they plan on making a stand. Right, a stand against who? Well, this was a stand against the group of magistrates who are led by a young man called Norton Natchball, who was the son of the local MP, Sir Edward Natchball.

He had about a dozen local, gentry and yeoman farmers and so forth on horseback. A few special constables that he'd enrolled in Favisham, but they were pretty much outnumbered. In order to summon soldiers in support of the civil power as they put it,

And to do that, he needed a witness.

“So what do you have at this moment are these people rushing back and forward across the countryside?”

Trying to find witnesses, trying to bring the witnesses to the magistrates, get the magistrates to write an order for troops. I mean, the nearest military garrison was in Canterbury, which was an hour or so's ride. But in order to get them, they actually need to ride back and forth several times, trying to get the right kind of authorization.

But they do in the end succeed. Major Armstrong shows up with about 100 men from the 45th foot, notting a macho regiment. So what happens then? They fall up in the road near these woods, bosendon woods,

where by this point, John Tom and his band have kind of gone to ground.

And the military detachment under Major Armstrong,

divided into two parts, and essentially do a kind of pince movement to try and trap these people in the clearing. I can't imagine he's going to go that well for Sir William and his followers. Yeah, I mean, this is a military detachment of round 100 men, fully armed with muskets and bayonets, against between 30 and 40 men owned with cudgels.

And only John Tom has a pistol.

“These forces meet, and are we talking about a peaceful surrender or something else?”

No, certainly not. As soon as John Tom sights the approaching soldiers, he stands up, calls upon his men to follow him. He has a flag by this point with a rampant lion on it, and they charge at one of these military detachment, which is led by a young officer called Henry Bennett.

Bennett apparently shouts that Tom should surrender, but the two of them russia each other, and Tom shoots him dead with a pistol. Wow, yeah, and at this, the sound of this shot suddenly pandemonium breaks out. The other military detachment, who by this point have been lined up into a kind of firing line on the other side of the clearing, panic and let loose a volley of muskets into the clearing,

shooting down quite a few of Tom's followers dead on the spot. Did Tom, Sir William, was he hitting that early volley or did he survive? We don't know exactly when he died because the following confrontation lasted for about three minutes, a very fierce and very confused fighting. Three minutes, yeah.

Tom was probably shot dead in the first volley.

He was hit sort of just below the collarbone by a single musket ball, went right through his body, fell to the ground, and allegedly died with this head against white thorn tree, saying, "I have Jesus in my heart." But he told his followers that he was bulletproof.

Yeah, and that all of his followers were also bulletproof, which must have been a great shock to them when they suddenly realised that they weren't. Eight of them were shot dead, or killed with bandits. In this very frenzy, three minute battle, which followed. Yeah.

At the end of that, we have various people lying on the ground, various dead bodies, injured people. One of the military officers dead, one of the constables dead, another military officer, beaten unconscious. Blood all over the place. This clearing was an absolute scene of slaughter. After all this, he still has his loyal followers.

And they still believe that he is Jesus, and Jesus came back from the dead. Yeah. And he gave instructions as to how to resurrect him. Yeah. Well, amongst his followers, there was an extraordinary woman called Sarah Culver.

And he told her apparently that if he was dead or appeared to have been killed, she was to wet his mouth with water. And that either at that point, or three days later, he would rise from the dead. And she was actually captured at the scene of the battle, running towards him with a bucket of water, which he brought from the well, in order to follow his instructions and wet his lips.

Well, one thing we do know is that he did not come back to life three days later, but his body was put on display.

“It was, yeah, I think partly because of this claim that he was going to rise from the dead,”

the authorities decided that the bodies of John Nichols Tom and several of his dead followers would be displayed in a stable beside a pub called the Red Lion. And they became objects of extraordinary, grisly curiosity for thousands of people. Because by this point, the news of these events had spread across the country. Everybody had heard about it, Queen Victoria had heard about it.

Thousands of people came down from London on stage coaches. They came on steamers down the tens, just to throng into this stable to look at these dead bodies, which were slowly mouldering in the rather damp, hot weather. What happened to his survival followers? A few of them escaped, but most of them were arrested.

They were held captive. They were put on trial due to a strange legal technicality of the time. Even if you were a bystander when an officer of the law was killed, you could still be charged with murder. A large group of his followers were tried for murder. Around 10 of them were actually found guilty in the end, although most of those were given sentences of a year or so in prison with hard labor.

They included John Tom's most committed disciples, and they never returned.

“But 32 people were initially arrested. What happened to the rest?”

Most of them were actually led off by the time the trials actually happened. The mood in the country had changed considerably. As more and more people found out about what had happened and read, all of these very detailed accounts of the events that led up to this great tragedy, there was a feeling in the country that the people that had been arrested were more victims than perpetrators. They had been deluded as people put it at the time by this charismatic madman who had gone around promising extraordinary things.

They were not necessarily held to be guilty of the crimes of which they had been accused. No matter how mad he may have seemed himself, the people who followed him were not mad. They were following him because they had real grievances, because he was speaking to them about their real lives and about the hardships that they were suffering. They were following him because he was offering them something that no one else was offering them.

He was offering them some sense of hope and change, which they didn't see around them otherwise. So your book is called Mad Tom's Rising.

“Was John Nichols Tom mad when he declared himself to be Sir William Courtney and then declared himself to be Jesus?”

So was he motivated by something else? What was going on inside his head? The name Mad Tom was given to him after his death in various news reports. I think it's incontestible that he was mentally ill. He was mad as people would have put it at the time. It's impossible to diagnose what that madness might have been because we don't have him available for study.

All we have is the accounts of the period which are kind of shot through with the prejudices of the day. The way that I tend to think of it is that he became possessed by a fictional character that he had invented. He achieved extraordinary things. I mean, it all ended in tears, of course, but he totally re-emented himself. He convinced a lot of people. He stood for Parliament, made a good account for himself.

It was a compelling creature, led this popular uprising. It's an extraordinary transformation for a wine merchant who is struck down by some episode of "Evil Health." Yeah, I mean, the transformation is, it almost defies belief. How did this man transform himself in this way? How did he become this fictional character?

And then, having been accused of various crimes put on trial, sent to prison, why did he continue to play this role when he could at any point of just step back from it? He could have disappeared again. He could have changed his identity again, but he refused to do so.

“And I think it's because this character, so William Courtney, that he'd invented and that he'd become,”

was so much more powerful than he was himself. It was so much more powerful than the real John Nicholstom, wine merchant of Druro. But there was no way he was going to go back to his real self. Yeah, he'd become so almost intoxicated by being this person, that he refused to give it up.

And on Cochritte Tales, we are always trying to learn lessons from history.

You end your book with the line, "Mad Tom's Ghost" is rising again. What do you mean? This character, John Nicholstom, is not greatly known in history. He was very quickly forgotten, turned into a character of folklore or mythology almost. He didn't fit with his times in any way that's useful to the usual narrative of history.

But looking back on it today, because of that, he seems almost beyond history. He seems to have exceeded his historical context. And there's something about that role that he played, the mutation of his identity, his weird charisma that he was able to exert. This magnetic effect that he had on those around him, that seems oddly contemporary.

It seems to echo so many other charismatic populists of our own time, with their appeals to alternative sources of news. There appeals to conspiracy theories or magical thinking. And there claims that reality is what they say it is, rather than what people might perceive it as being. Ian, thank you so much for talking to us.

Thank you.

Ian's book is "Mad Tom's Rising", the revolutionary mystic, Sir William Courtney,

and the last battle fought on English soil. It is, of course, available wherever you get your books. Corsionary tales is written by me, Tim Halford. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey, and Owen Miller.

Corsionary tales is a production of pushkin industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.

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