QUEEN’S HEAD.
Along that road lies the road to Halston, where, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, lived the Mad Squire, Jack Mytton, of whose exploits we have already heard something at Shrewsbury. He came of the ancient family of Mytton, and traced a distinguished ancestry from 1373, when Reginald de Mutton, as the name was then spelled, was a Member of Parliament for the county town. Between that time and his own there were Myttons who left names honoured in the law and in the service of King and Country, and had always held a tight hand upon Halston; handing from father to son, a fine estate and a handsome rent roll.
John Mytton was born in 1791, and his father died two years later. His admiring friend and biographer, “Nimrod,” gives us the picture of an unlicked cub, spoiled by the indulgence of his mother. Expelled from Westminster and Harrow schools and rusticated from Oxford, he was gazetted to a cornetcy in the 7th Hussars after Waterloo, too late to be taught anything on the battlefield, and just at the time when he came of age, and the estate, carefully managed during a long minority of nineteen years, fell to his own disposal. A rent roll of £10,000 a year and an accumulated sum of £60,000 only existed for him to dissipate as soon as possible; and he was not long about it. In four years he had left the army, and come home to marry and be the Squire and a Member of Parliament, and to enter upon the wildest part of a career that squandered upwards of half a million sterling and brought him to an early grave in 1834.
The “hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-fighting and hard-hitting Jack Mytton” has left an immortal memory in North Shropshire. They tell still of his exploits; of how he only engaged a certain gamekeeper for the Halston coverts on condition that he should thrash a sweep supposed to lurk there. The gamekeeper accordingly went forth to battle and fought for his promised place, giving the sweep a thorough hiding. Hard-hitter though he was, the Squire met his match that day, for he was the Sweep! Another encounter, from whose gory twenty rounds he came victorious, was his set-to with a miner who had annoyed him when out with the harriers. The miner boasted himself a “tough ’un,” but was knocked out of time. Mytton gave him half a sovereign and a hare, and told him to take it to Halston “and get another bellyful.”
To his maniacal pranks there was no end. He once went duck-shooting on the ice in the depth of winter, naked, and a favourite amusement was to ride into the drawing-room in full hunting costume on the back of a tame she-bear. To put a guest to bed (dead drunk of course, for hospitality in those days could do no less, and both inclination and etiquette on the guest’s side did their part) in company with the bear and two bull-dogs was a prime joke.
One of his exploits is connected with the toll-gate that once stretched across the road just beyond the “Queen’s Head.” It lay, of course, on his way home from Shrewsbury, whither he had gone one day. Returning at some time between eleven o’clock and midnight, the turnpike man, roused out of his bed, and thinking the hour past twelve o’clock and another day come, insisted upon charging him another toll. It was a bitterly cold night, and the pikeman was glad enough to hurry back to bed.
Waiting until he had got between the bedclothes, Mytton rode back and had him out again to open for him, and returned a little later to rouse the worried wretch once more from his slumbers with the cry of “Gate!” The man then returned the money and Mytton went home.
Among his eccentricities was an inordinate love of filberts. He and a friend ate eighteen pounds on one occasion, on the way down from London in his carriage, and when they reached Halston they were “up to their knees in nutshells,” as he declared. A sporting hairdresser of Shrewsbury, who generally supplied him with filberts, once said that he had sent two cartloads to Halston in one season. Perhaps he ate them to provoke a thirst, and certainly his exploits with the port equalled his consumption of nuts, four to six bottles a day being his usual performance.
But he would drink anything. On one occasion, going into the establishment of the sporting hairdresser, he called imperiously for something, and taking down a bottle of lavender-water, knocked the head off and drank the contents. He said it would be “a good preservative against the night air.”