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John Mytton — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Life as a squire

Mytton later returned to his country seat and took up the duties of a squire in preparation for coming into his full inheritance when he became 21.

In 1819 he entertained ambitions of standing for Parliament, as a Tory, following family tradition. He secured his seat by offering voters £10 notes, spending a total of £10,000 (equivalent to £757,894 in 2025). He thus became MP for Shrewsbury. He spent just 30 minutes in the House of Commons in June 1819, but found the debates boring and difficult to follow because of his incipient deafness. When Parliament was dissolved in 1820 he declined to stand at the next election.

However, he attempted to re-enter Parliament in 1831, this time for one of the two Shropshire seats and as a Whig candidate. He withdrew on the fifth day of the poll and came bottom with 376 votes. He then issued an address stating that he would contest the next parliamentary election, but by the time of that election, in 1832, he had gone into exile to escape his creditors.

He instead served as High Sheriff of Merionethshire for 1821–22, High Sheriff of Shropshire for 1823–24; Mayor of Oswestry for 1824–25 and as treasurer of the Salop Infirmary at Shrewsbury in 1822.

Meanwhile, he indulged his enjoyment of horseracing and gambling, and enjoyed some success at both. He bought a horse named Euphrates, which was already a consistent winner, and entered it in the Gold Cup at Lichfield in 1825, and it duly won. Its portrait, commissioned by Mytton from the painter William Webb, was exhibited at the Royal Academy the same year. Mytton also became a well-known character at Oswestry Race Course, an increasingly disreputable local racetrack.

It is said that in 1826, in order to win a bet, he rode a horse into the Bedford Hotel opposite the Town Hall in Leamington Spa, up the grand staircase and onto the balcony, from which he jumped, still seated on his horse, over the diners in the restaurant below, and out through the window onto the Parade.

He also held contests for local children at Dinas Mawddwy, giving sums ranging from half a crown to half a guinea to those who rolled all the way down the hill Moel Dinas.

Decline and death

Mytton was an extravagant spendthrift. Visitors to his estates sometimes found banknotes secreted around the grounds, whether left on purpose or simply lost. Over the course of fifteen years he managed to spend his inheritance and then fell into deep debt. His agent had calculated that if he could but reduce his expenditure to £6,000 a year for six years his estate would not have to be sold, but Mytton declared that "I wouldn't give a damn to live on £6,000 a year!" In 1831 he sold his estate at Dinas Mawddwy to John Bird, and fled to Calais to avoid his creditors. He had met an attractive 20-year-old woman named Susan on Westminster Bridge and offered her £500 a year to be his companion. She accompanied him to France and stayed with him until his death.

During his stay in Calais he tried to cure his hiccups by setting his shirt on fire. Charles James Apperley, who wrote under the pseudonym of "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."

In 1833, Mytton returned to England, where, still unable to pay his debts, he was confined at Shrewsbury Prison, then transferred to the King's Bench Prison in Southwark. 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". The cause of death was delirium tremens. He was buried in the vault of the private chapel at Halston on 9 April. In 2023, a Time Team investigation sent a camera down into the vault, which discovered his intact coffin had what appeared to be the skin of his beloved pet bear draped over it.

A print of a portrait of John Mytton by Rudolph Ackermann was published in 1847, 13 years after their deaths. These were marked "JOHN MYTTON ESQ. HALSTON SALOP ~ from an original picture in the possession of John Bishton Minor Esq. Astley House Pradoe, guardian of J. F. G. Mytton, this engraving of his ward's late father" When the print was published John jnr would have been 24 years old and would have inherited what was left of the estate. There is also a portrait of Mytton on horseback, by William Webb, and numerous illustrations, by Henry Thomas Alken and T. J. Rawlins, appear in Nimrod's Life of John Mytton.