As it’s 19 July, it is — well, obviously — the 201st anniversary of 58-year-old Bishop of Clogher Percy Jocelyn being arrested with his trousers down with a 22-year-old soldier in the back room of a London pub.
He would have gotten away with it, too — or at least, might have been able to talk his way out of it — if it hadn’t been for a previous trial 11 years earlier where he’d been acquitted for the exact same thing. And maybe if he’d been a better bishop.
Percy had come from money, being the third son of the 1st Earl of Roden, and — like a lot of younger sons who weren’t going to inherit — went into the church, where he became well known for being “idle to the point of negligence, seldom taking services and never preaching”.
In 1811, when he was Bishop of Ferns, his brother’s coachman, James Byrne, accused Percy of propositioning him for sexual favours. Jocelyn denied this, as you might expect, and Byrne was charged with criminal libel.
Jocelyn’s defence — conducted by Ireland’s Solicitor-General, the Rt Hon C Kendal Bushe — was remarkable. Basically: it can’t have happened, because there is no homosexuality in Ireland
The word of a bishop being valued more highly than that of someone from The Lower Orders, Jocelyn was acquitted, and the coachman sentenced to two years in prison and three public beatings, the first of which he barely survived.
According to Matthew Parris’ The Great Unfrocked, “a six-foot drummer from the barracks … flogged Byrne with a cat-o’-nine-tails which broke under the force”. Thankfully, Jocelyn arranged for him not to suffer the other lashings when he withdrew the charge.
11 years later, Jocelyn popped into the White Lion, off Haymarket, after a hard day in the Lords. The landlord’s son-in-law suspected that his meeting with 22-year-old soldier John Moverley was not an accident, and peered in at the back parlour window.
George Dawson (who hadn’t witnessed it first hand, but was private secretary to Home Secretary Robert Peel, and therefore clearly an expert) later wrote to the Archbishop of Armagh to describe the scene, prefacing his words with “Excuse me, my dear Archbishop for offending your eye with the following detail, I blush while I write it…”
The unfortunate Bishop and the Soldier at last became so indecent, so horribly profligate in their proceedings, by taking every liberty with each other’s person, by using every unnatural provocative, and by having recourse to licentiousness only human by the descriptions in the most abandoned writers of the French school, that the party assembled could no longer curb their indignation, but broke into the room at the very moment that the soldier was about to consummate the crime upon the prostituted and exposed person of the Bishop.
They didn’t know he was a bishop at first, but in an effort to conceal his identity, Jocelyn tore up a letter and threw it in the fireplace. It being July, no fire had been lit. The watchman put the letter back together and saw it was addressed to the Bishop of Clogher.
Soon the story was out, in the form of newspaper coverage and… ‘poetry’ in penny pamphlets:
There was also a Cruickshank caricature, which demonstrates how progressive attitudes were at the time. The subtitle, “Do as I say, not as I do”, seems fair enough, but the title… well: lacks subtlety, let’s say.
They’d been arrested, as the Dictionary of Irish Biography delicately explains, “before any sexual act had been committed”, so it was a misdemeanour, and bail of £1,000, rather than the capital charge of ‘sodomy’.
Jocelyn paid up, and — as innocent men always do — ran away (in this case to France). Which left the unfortunate soldier, John Moverley, who did not have £1,000 to his name, languishing in jail. Intriguingly, it was George Dawson at the Home Office who came to the rescue.
He wrote to the Archbishop of Armagh to hint that he should write to Lord Roden (Jocelyn’s uncle) to get him to bail out Moverley, which (remarkably) duly happened. But why would a senior civil servant be spending time on such a case, even if it did involve a bishop…?
Well, because the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, was being blackmailed at the time for picking up a soldier, who he -ahem- had apparently thought was a woman. (Rather tragically, Castlereagh went home and cut his own throat.)
Jocelyn remained out of the country for some years, eventually returning to live with his sister in Scotland, where he pretended to be the butler, dying in 1843 under the name Thomas Wilson.
There was a happier ending for the coachman James Byrne, who now found himself “vindicated and a public subscription to help him raised £300”
