John Nichols Thom, or Mad Tom, (1799 - 31 May 1838) was a Cornishman, a self-declared messiah who, in the 19th century led the last battle to be fought on English soil.
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John Nichols Thom was born a son of a publican, in 1799 at St Columb Major in Cornwall. When he was a child, his mother died in an insane asylum. He worked for five years with two wine merchants in Truro until the business collapsed. Thom proceeded to become a wine merchant himself. In 1828, he was a maltster, when fire destroyed his malthouse and he collected £1000 for insurance to begin anew.
At the Quarter Sessions held at Bodmin on 15 July 1828, Thom applied successfully for the return of £304 paid in excise duty on malt destroyed in the fire at his malthouse on 17 June 1828.[1]
After some years, he disappeared. Having departed Truro in 1832, he became infatuated with Lady Hester Stanhope. Thom claimed to have followed her to Beirut only to be utterly rejected. The claims that he travelled to the Near East are probably false as he was known to have been in Liverpool and also London at the time.
In September 1832, Thom arrived in Canterbury, announcing himself as Count Moses R. Rothschild, of the illustrious Jewish banking family. He dressed as a Turk, or in other fantastic costumes, and spent money liberally, quickly becoming well known in the city. After a few weeks he metamorphosed into Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay, Knight of Malta.[2][3]
Although seen by many as a charlatan, Thom stood for Canterbury at the parliamentary election of 1832, using the name Sir William Courtenay of Powderham and claiming to be the heir to the Earl of Devon. Thom's populist politics saw him poll a creditable 375 votes, which was almost half the 834 and 802 polled by the other two candidates, Richard Watson and Viscount Fordwich.[4]
Thom's popularity was largely confined to the city of Canterbury. He was then living at the Rose Hotel, and campaigned in a crimson velvet suit with gold lacings and carried a sword. He later began to call himself the King of Jerusalem and Knight of Malta. He began to tour Kent and spoke against various tax laws.
In 1833 Thom begun to publish a theological journal The Lion in which he stated that all the churches just wanted to hoard gold. In July 1833 he also claimed to have seen that a group of alcohol smugglers had not thrown their cargo overboard, which they certainly had done. On 24 July he was sentenced to penal transportation for perjury and was locked up in the Barming Heath asylum in Kent.
His father petitioned for his release and, with help of Sir Hussey Vivian, wrote letters to Lord John Russell (the then Home secretary). The petition was successful and a pardon was granted.
Upon release, Thom again assumed the identity of Sir William Courtenay, declared himself "saviour of the world" and became a wandering preacher. He again wore his colourful costumes, including an embroidered Maltese Cross and a sword which he claimed to be Excalibur. Later witnesses also stated that he had nail marks in his hands. He supported the cause of farm workers who resisted the effects of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which ordered all able-bodied men to workhouses if they could not find work.[5]
Thom gathered a following of more than one hundred people and convinced them that their faith would make them invulnerable to steel and bullets. He also claimed that he could slay 10,000 men by hitting his left hand with his right and that if he were shot dead, he would come back to life three days later.
When Thom and his followers paraded in and around the countryside near Boughton, a farmer named Curling asked magistrates in Canterbury to arrest his truant workers who had left with Thom. On 31 May 1838, magistrates sent three constables to arrest Thom at the house of a farmer named Culver. Thom shot constable Nicholas Mears dead, mutilated the body with his blade and threw it into a ditch. Mears was later believed to have been a follower of Thom's and to have been shot for his betrayal. Thom then pacified his followers with a sacrament of eucharist, promised them the estates of the landed gentry, and led a group of thirty or forty men to Bossenden Wood.
The authorities had had enough. The same day they sent 100 soldiers of the 45th Foot regiment to the village of Dunkirk to arrest Thom and his followers. Troops surrounded the woods and the commanding officer, Armstrong, demanded they surrender. Thom would have none of it and shot and killed Lieutenant Henry Boswell Bennett, who was leading his troops. Soldiers of the 45th opened fire and killed Thom and nine of his followers. After a brief struggle, Thom's remaining followers dispersed, but the soldiers captured twenty-five of them. Local constable George Catt, who had accompanied the troops, also died in the clash.
Thom's body was taken to Hernhill. Before the inquest, Thom's remaining disciples tore his bloody shirt on his body and divided it for relics. The coroner, having heard the rumour that Thom would rise on the third day, ordered his heart removed and pickled in a jar. The pickled heart survived until the 1950s. On 5 June, when Thom and his dead followers were buried in an unmarked grave in Hernhill churchyard, watchmen guarded the grave for some time in case of fervent grave robbers.
Trial against nineteen of the surviving followers began 9 August 1838 in Maidstone and ended on 17 August. Some of them were sentenced to death but all the sentences were commuted to penal transportation or hard labour.
As a result of the battle at Bossenden, the Government realised there was a serious problem in Dunkirk. They dealt leniently with the survivors of Courtenay’s army. Most were given parole. Only two were sentenced to transportation, and one of them went on to make a fortune in the Australian goldfields.
Frightened of further unrest in the area, the Government decided a Christian mission might help, made Dunkirk a proper parish (at last), and built both a church and a school. The church, at the top of Boughton Hill, was declared redundant some years ago and is likely to be converted into a house. The school has now also closed.
Although technically a rebel and fanatic, Thom's 19th Century reputation was darker. In a celebrated cartoon by Richard Doyle (the uncle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) of Madame Tussaud's museum, which named the room of criminal items "the chamber of horrors", in the forefront were a set of statues of various murderers or attempted murderers, including James Greenacre, Daniel Good, James Blomfield Rush, and Edward Oxford. Among these is also John Nichols Thom.
In 2003 the story of John Nichols Thom was made into a stage musical.[6]