John Tom
It is notoriously dubious to offer a psychiatrc opinion based on written material without having known the person concerned; even more so if this relates to a time when medical practice and a host of other relevant factors were very different. However, it may be useful to consider some of the information available about the mental condition of John Tom/William Courtenay in a wider context than the question ‘mad or not ? ‘ that has tended to be the focus.
Hospital admission
The clearest information about Tom’s mental state at a particular time is an extract from the case notes of Kent County Asylum (also known as Barming Hospital), where he spent four years. It is dated 26th January, 1834 and appears in The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Rural Lfe and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England by Barry Reay (1990), as follows:
William Courtenay states his belief that the Saviour never slept as the Holy Ghost would not let him Sleep. … He also believes that there are some Jews who never sleep. He condemns the Earth as deceitful because it is an object & mutable. … He acknowledges himself to be a dangerous character, & that if he had been returned for Canterbury he should have been sent to the Tower. He would have followed no party but have cut the speeches of all parties to pieces. He wd first have attacked the Throne, then Lord Chancellor Brougham. A Conspiracy wd have been formed against him which might have cost him his life & which he considers may have been saved by his being sent to the Asylum. He thinks no man can stand against his talents as a speaker, though he considers himself as nothing in himself. My dear child, he says, I am in myself a non-entity…. Every thing depends upon self, & selfish implies Lucifer. A Pig is the most selfish animal in existence & a sheep the least, hence pork is the most indigestible Meat, & Mutton the most digestible. He maintained that Pork required strong faith to digest it, because a Pig was the most selfish animal in existence. … He spoke of himself as possessing more faith than any man in existence. His life was a very mysterious one which time must elucidate as it was incommunicable. … He represents himself as not being under the influence of his senses & says he has no smell, but that he lives entirely by faith. … Predicts that some great calamity is about to befall this Country for its sins. The causes of Materialism are the effects of the Creator…. He considers a Tory an Alkali & a Whig an Acid, He regards Locke & Sir I Newton as two of the greatest fools that ever lived.
(p.114)
Reay considered that this was probably recorded over a period of time, but an additional case note that appears to have been the admission entry has been located in the Kent County Archive. It is brief and difficult to read, but states that he ‘complained of sickness but refused medication’ …. ‘it was thought that for some now he has taken very little nourishment’. Significantly, it is clearly dated the day before the extract above.which suggests that this was based on a single interview. Although not recorded in Tom’s own words, and lacking any indication of his mood or level of activity, the volubility (‘pressure of speech’), apparently unconnected topics (‘flight of ideas’) and grandiose beliefs are strong evidence for the diagnosis of a manic episode according to the diagnostic systems of both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organisation. The suggestion that he was faking illness to avoid transportation (Reay, p 114) is untenable on a number of grounds, including his evident loss of speech control.
It is not clear how long Tom remained in this state after admission to hospital:. P.C. Rogers in his Battle in Bossenden Wood : The Strange Story of Sir William Courtenay (1961) states that he ‘behaved very soberly while he was in Barming Hospital’ and was ‘a model patient’. He may have largely recovered well before the Spring of 1937 when the Superintendent told his wife that he was fit to be released, as she had not visited previously. However, he refused to recognise her or his father; persisting in claims to the Earldom of Devon and other titles (p.74), and the significance of this for his mental state is unclear.
Earlier episodes
Rogers also describes a series of earlier episodes, beginning in 1829, the year after he had suffered both the loss of his business due to a fire and the death of his mother, to whom he had been very close. He was observed ‘often lapsing into fits of melancholy, and at other times acting in an eccentric way’. His condition worsened the following year and ‘for a time he seems to have lost his reason’. This is in contrast to the previously described ‘diligent, prosperous and popular tradesman, better educated than most, yet friendly and unassuming’ who ‘talked very little about his religious and political beliefs’ (pp. 4-8).
Rogers goes on to state that Tom’s business, which had closed during 1830, opened again in 1831 and he was ‘just beginning to make up the leeway he had lost, when in December his mind gave way once again’. He was treated by bloodletting for just over a month, between 24th December 1831 and 27th January 1932, when he had recovered sufficiently for his relatives to consider he no longer needed treatment. This episode is also described by Reay (pp. 107-108), who mentions diagnoses of ‘derangement of the intellect’; apoplexy, and monomania; terms that would have been consistent with varied aspects of a manic episode.
At the beginning of May 1832 Tom sailed from Truro with a cargo of malt for Liverpool, having written a very coherent letter to his wife on May 3rd. However, he then vanished as far as his family was concerned, apparently attempting to live an extravagent lifestyle in London as a Squire Thompson. During that time he also ‘picked up an acquaintance with several rabbis, and interested himself in the cause of distressed Jews’, now calling himself Count Rothschild (pp 8-9). Intriguing echoes of this involvement are evident in the case note extract above.
From his return to Kent in September 1832, through political activities and court appearances as Sir William Courtenay, he was consistently flamboyantly, and sometimes oddly, dressed and for much of the time exuberant and overconfident His speech is described on occasions as rambling or incoherent, but he also appears to have been better able to pursue a train of thought than is evident in the Barming Hospital case note. A few well composed speeches and letters are recorded by Rogers (Chap.2) and he managed to maintain purposeful courses of action and carry others along with him.
Final phase
Descriptions of the period following the Barming Hospital admission, that ended in Tom’s untimely death, suggest that he relapsed back to his 1932/3 state; but with anger and violence more prominent features. Rogers (pp. 112-132) describes his ‘ghastly, murderous actions’ in killing Nicholas Mears, when ‘his face was dark with anger’, after which he shouted to his ‘terrified followers’ : ‘I am the Saviour of the World! You are my true lambs – every one of you!’ ….. ‘Though I have killed the body I have saved the soul!’. He had begun to utter threats to his followers, ‘though hitherto he had hardly ever tyrannized’, and became ‘furiously angry’ and threatened to shoot the wife of one of them, who ‘pitifully, with tears streaming from her eyes…. entreated Sir William to let her husband depart with her’. The taunt by a Major Handley that he did not know how to use his sword ‘roused him to a pitch of demoniacal fury’. ..eyes blazing with anger.’
Anger is frequent in manic episodes (and the less severe hypomanic episodes that are now more common) often unexpectedly interrupting a happy or elated mood, and violence is a recognised though rarer complication, influenced by personal and situational factors including alcohol and drug abuse.
Diagnosis
Reay draws on the histroian Roy Porter’s view that Samuel Johnson ‘walked a narrow path between mental instability and madness’ to characterise Tom, who he considers ‘hovered on the edge of madness: sane to some, insane to others, not always for the same reasons’ (pp.114 -116). However, madness and insanity are not part of psychiatric terminology: insanity is a legal term and madness, mad and ‘the mad’ are ancient concepts which were promoted by modern sociologists and historians such as Porter, partly to critique psychiatry. Whatever the intention, they remain denigrating terms that confuse illness and the persons concerned, who are more than their symptoms.
John Tom’s symptom pattern fits the diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis, which was introduced later in the nineteenth century to define the association between episodes of depression (melancholia) and mania/hypomania that had been noted for centuries, and has been largely replaced by the term bipolar disorder. Although now prone to overuse, this diagnosis usefully brings together research and clinical practice, including psychological and biological treatments, and the many personal accounts now available in books and on the internet – if only Tom had been able to provide his own account !
Bipolar disorder is not necessarily a barrier to achievement, and Kay Redfield Jamison, a distinguished psychologist and professor of psychiatry, has described its impact on herself, from enhanced enthusiasm and activity to destructive loss of control. There has been a great deal of debate about its possible association with artistic creativity and in Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993) she mentions more than 150 poets, writers and musicians believed to have been affected by this or related conditions.
Jamison also mentions sixteen political and military leaders similarly affected, including Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill. Their lives illustrate how difficult it is to delineate the role of mental disorders in political and historical events: one influence, itself complex, interacting with so many others. Nonetheless, it is hoped that this note may help to clarify some of the issues around the extraordinary John Tom.
David Abrahamson
Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists
September 2011
