Today in 1789, the 2nd Earl of Massereene, despite being called Clotworthy Skeffington — and having a father, grandfather and great grandfather each also called Clotworthy Skeffington — proved it wasn’t just his name that was noteworthy by being freed from a Paris prison by a mob.
It wasn’t the Bastille, but the Prison de la Force, stormed the day before the Bastille, and he wasn’t the Marquis de Sade (who was freed from the Bastille on 14th), although he was a source of shame to his aristocratic family, with an eye for the ladies.
He became the 2nd Earl and 6th Viscount Massereene as a teenager, inheriting debts from his father, and promptly falling off a horse, which — his family said later, when they contested his will — altered the balance of his mind.
“A hair-brained scheme for supplying salt from the Barbary coast either to France or the Swiss cantons” increased his debts from around £10,000 to £30,000 (according to The extraordinary career of the 2nd Earl of Massereene, by A. P. W. Malcomson).
His taste for clothes didn’t help. Malcomson quotes one person who says, “In his early days he figured very conspicuously in the walks of fashion” and another who calls him: “the most superlative coxcomb that Ireland ever bred”.
Mind you, according to the Antrim Guardian:
Anyway, as he was living (and owed the money) in France, that was where he went to prison. At the time, they had a law that debtors who spent 25 years in prison were set free with their debts cancelled, and as prison didn’t curb his lifestyle, he settled in for the duration.
Indeed, contemporary reports reveal that ‘cheerful society was not denied him’ and he continued to live a life of wine, women and song. He had all his food sent to him and he entertained many young mademoiselles in his cell, often rewarded them by settling their jewellery and dress making bills. Incredibly, he even managed to woo and wed Marie Anne Barcier, the daughter of one of the prison’s principal officials. In his first seven years his debt had risen to 1,000,000 livres, and was growing by the day.
His unhappy creditors decided, apparently, to trick him into trying to escape. A trick, because they had tipped off the guards, thinking that being caught and transferred somewhere stricter would concentrate his mind. He was, indeed, caught, and moved to the Prison de la Force, a gaff that was cut with rodents. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “he complained that he was shut up in solitude ‘save for the vermin and a mouse which I taught to come for food’”.
There, however, he apparently declared that “he was prepared to remain ‘in confinement with the rats’ until he was 90!” and “the debts continued to mount, rising to 3,000,000 livres”.
When 1789 came around, he’d been inside for 19 years, just six away from having his debts written off, but the mob liberated him anyway — and he departed the place with the governor’s daughter, Marie Anne Barcier, whom he’d married (twice) inside.
They made it to London, where they married again, despite the strong objections of his mother. They separated four years later, and he married a former servant, Elizabeth Lane, or Blackburn (unless that was someone else he took up with), and he got into more debt, of course.
Then he died in 1805 and left his three brothers a guinea each, and almost everything else to Elizabeth, the former servant. The brothers were less than perfectly pleased.
They managed to get the will overturned not due to Clotworthy’s insanity, which was the initial plan, but due to Elizabeth’s “undue influence” over her late husband. Then they all died without male heirs, and it looked as though the Viscountcy might expire with them — but it turned out that “the unusual terms” when creating the title meant the 4th Earl’s daughter could become Viscountess Massareene, and the family — and its bizarre taste in names — appears to be going strong.
