The Man Who Set Himself on Fire to Cure Hiccups

John Mytton inherited a fortune worth tens of millions, an estate of 132,000 acres, and a 500-year-old family name. He was two years old. By the time he came of age, he had been expelled from Westminster, expelled from Harrow, and arrived at Cambridge with 2,000 bottles of port. He did not graduate.

He then spent £10,000 buying a seat in Parliament, attended the House of Commons for thirty minutes, found it boring, and never went back.

This was the restrained phase.

He kept 2,000 dogs, some fed on steak and champagne. He owned 700 pairs of handmade hunting boots. He drank between four and eight bottles of port a day, and when brandy ran out, he drank eau de cologne. He once asked a passenger in his carriage whether the man had ever been in an accident, and when the man said no, Mytton cried "What a damn slow fellow you must have been all your life!" and drove them off a bank. He rode his pet bear, Nell, into his drawing room in full hunting costume. She bit through his calf. He kept her.

In Calais, broke and in exile, he cured a bout of hiccups by setting his own nightshirt on fire. He sustained serious burns across his chest and shoulders, reeled naked into bed, and quoted Sophocles in Greek.

He died at thirty-seven in a debtors' prison, a man his biographer described as "a round-shouldered, tottering, old-young man." Three thousand people came to his funeral.

In 2023, a camera was lowered into his sealed vault at Halston Hall. Draped over his coffin was what appeared to be the skin of his bear.