Puffendor – The Man Dubs Loved To Hate
Patrick Ryan takes a look back at the life of one of the most despised men in Irish history.
Ireland has no shortage of heroes to herald or Bogeymen to blame and boo.
Usually our pantomime villains are from overseas; those who persecuted the Irish, robbed us of freedom. Scoundrels, who denied us our place in the sun.
You know yourself. Oliver Cromwell, Captain Boycott… that FIFA fellah in the yellow hat who wouldn’t let John Aldridge come as a sub in USA ’94.
However one of Ireland’s most hated men wasn’t some Johnny Foreigner, he was John Toler from Tipperary, a self-declared son of Erin who would become infamous as the “Hanging Judge” who mocked and jeered hundreds of prisoners in the dock, including Robert Emmet at Kilmainham Gaol, before sending them to gallows, Though he might sound like a lovable character from Harry Potter, the peer the public knew as “Puffendor”, this Baron (and later Earl) of Norbury who rose to become Chief Justice of the Common Pleas was, well, a total bastard.
And that’s the sort of thing his friends and supporters said about him.
To his bitter enemy Daniel O’Connell the peer was a “a judicial bully, butcher and buffoon”. And O’Connell wasn’t exaggerating. Toler was however, as Irish as a Tayto sandwich.
The man hated Catholics, whom he tried to ban from becoming MPs, understood little about the laws he was sworn to uphold, and turned his court into a farce to the disgust of those of all political persuasions who knew him.
At the suggestion his fellow TCD alumnus should be appointed to such a senior position the Chancellor John FitzGibbon, Earl of Clare and former Attorney-General, who despised Catholic emancipation, and as an MP supported the use of torture on prisoners, was in no doubt.
“For God’s sake make him a bishop or even an archbishop, but not a Chief Justice.”
John Toler was born in Beechwood, near Nenagh in County Tipperary at some point in the early-to-mid 1740s, to a wealthy family descended from a planter originally from Norfolk who had served under Oliver Cromwell, and his father Daniel Toler, the local High Sheriff, was infamous for his antipathy towards his Catholic neighbours.
Educated at Kilkenny College, the alma mater of Johnathan Swift before entering TCD, the future Chief Justice was admitted to the Irish bar in 1770 where after graduation he rose to become first Solicitor-Ceneral and by 1798, Attorney-General. He was also an MP is several constituencies, and while Solicitor-General opposed a motion by Henry Grattan’s condemning the sale of positions and peerages, as well as describing Henry Flood’s 1783 parliamentary reform bill as akin to an abortion in a maternity hospital.
“Toler enjoys a conspicuous place in revolutionary demonology,” says Ireland’s greatest legal historian UCD Law Professor Nial Osborough, in his entry for the judge in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, which pulls no punches.
“Toler’s scanty knowledge of the law, his gross partiality, his callousness, and his buffoonery, it was asserted, completely disqualified him for the position,” it reads.
Toler wasn’t a toiler and didn’t get where he was by hard work, or application. He was a placeman, a yesman, a crony rewarded for political support. Corrupt and biased he ignored proper legal procedure and was a terrible administrator who would quote Shakespeare and Milton and perform stand-up comedy routines in court, mocking unfortunates facing the death penalty.
The Reverend John Scott in his Review of the Irish house of commons in 1789 had his number, noting that “as a placeman and a lawyer seeking to be a judge, [Toler’s] political conduct is readily known; it is invariably guided by the Pole Star of the Castle.”
Even hardliners who shared the judge’s politics disliked him with Nial Osborough noting that his indifference to human suffering disgusted even those who called for firm action by to government. In 1799 Toler was happy to bring forward a law that allowed the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to suspend habus corpus (which protects citizens from false arrest by requiring the police to bring detainees promptly before a court to establish whether their arrest was justified) and allowing him to introduce martial law.
Scholar Moira Lysaght agrees, and in a paper delivered to the Old Dublin Society in 1977 describes her subject as “a cold-blooded tyrant, contemptuous of the little law which he knew…and his style of its administration was ludicrous.”
She quotes John Philpot Curran, a liberal Protestant barrister who defended United Irishmen like Wolfe Tone, Napper Tandy, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald knew Toler well, and described his contemporary as “short and pursy with a jovial visage and little grey, twinkling eyes. He had a singular habit of inflating his cheeks at the end of every sentence,” he said, earning him the title of Puffendor.
Toler’s court was a popular form of riotous entertainment for Dubliners in the 18th century and packed with the public and the press.
Those accused were less amused.
One one occasion a desperate man pleaded from the dock for life imprisonment instead of the hangman’s noose.
“My Lord, give me the long day instead,” he begged.
“I will give you until tomorrow, the longest day in the year,” retorted Toler in his loud and deep tones, passing sentence of death 24 hours before the June 21st summer solstice – the longest day of the year.
The Chief Justice was also known to bizarrely throw open his robes, toss away his wig or turn it round and regale those assembled with rambling anecdotes about his youth, and jokes -either original or borrowed from the gag books of the day – while making time to deliver sarcastic remarks about the defence counsel.
On one occasion he sentenced 198 men and women to death, and on another circuit 97 were hanged after he put the kibosh on them, the term coming from when judges donned “an caip bháis” to pronounce a death sentence.
Homicides often went unpunished. In spite of a verdict by the coroner’s jury of wilful murder by a Captain Frazer, who while drunk had slashed an old peasant to death for being outside during curfew (in an area where no curfew was in place) Toler acquitted the soldier, describing him as “a gallant officer who had only made a mistake” adding that if the victim was a good man as had been stated he was as well out of this wicked world, and if he was as guilty as his neighbours? Well then Ireland was better off without him!
Another time the Hanging Judge astounded the court by directing the jury to acquit a murderer in spite of overwhelming evidence of his guilt, explaining that he had sentenced half-a-dozen innocent men to death earlier.
“I’ll let off this poor devil now to square matters,” he puffed.
By now Toler had made powerful enemies. Included among them was his polar opposite and the most popular man in Ireland, Daniel O’Connell, barrister and MP, hailed as “The Liberator”. The driving force behind Catholic Emancipation, O’Connell was instrumental in the bringing before parliament a private letter from 1822 from then Attorney-General William Saurin to Toler to ask him to use his influence on the circuit to halt Catholic agitation for rights and justice, causing uproar in Dublin and London.
In 1825 O’Connell tried in vain again with a petition seeking the removal of his enemy – by then a peer – from office on the grounds of incapacity and infirmity, claiming Baron Norbury had fallen asleep during a trial and was unable to produce casenotes when requested by the Lord Lieutenant, Marquees (Richard) Wellesley.
The judge, a crack shot who had been in many duels at a time when gentlemen could kill each other over matters of honour and not suffer any consequences, responded by saying of the Marquess:
“I’ll have his life or mine. The hair triggers are ready as in the days of Tandy and Fitzgerald.”
Removing Toler was a tall order.
He survived because he was without conscience and delivered for the authorities in Dublin Castle; indeed his appointment as Chief Justice was a payoff for ensuring the Act of Union was passed into law and his loyalties, and love for Loyalism, were never in doubt. For example Toler asked Emmet at the end of his trial in 1803 if he had anything to say before sentencing him for treason, and as the rebel delivered his famous Speech from the Dock the judge interrupted him repeatedly, criticising his prisoner for his eloquence in defending “his perverted talents”.
The Reverend John Scott in his Review of the Irish House of Commons in 1789 had Toler’s number, pointing out that “as a placeman and a lawyer seeking to be a judge, [Toler’s] political conduct is readily known; it is invariably guided by the Pole Star of the Castle.”
However by 1827 the writing was on the wall as under a new PM the government sought to appease Catholics, and a deal was finally done in the smoke-filled back rooms. Toler would resign, but he would become Viscount Glandine and Earl of Norbury, which unlike the “Barony of Norbury”, would pass to his son.
His eldest, Daniel was considered mentally unsound, so the title went to his second boy Hector John, who as the 2nd Earl of Norbury decades later met the sort of grisly end many had dreamed of delivering upon his late father. Aged 57 he was shot six times by his butler, probably in consort with “Ribbonmen”, a popular movement of poor, rural Catholics which predated the Young Irelanders and the Fenians, bitterly opposed to landlordism and the Orange Order, which took its name from the green ribbon badge worn by members in their button-holes.
The original Earl Norbury’s death on July 27th, 1831 had been far more more mundane, and he was buried in the churchyard attached to St Mary’s, a famous place of worship on what’s now Jervis St, adjacent to Wolfe Tone Square which has close associations with far more celebrated Irishmen; Arthur Guinness was married there while Theobald Wolfe Tone, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Seán O’Casey were baptized in that same church.
Today the site is home to a pub and restaurant, and in spite of decades on the bench as the anniversary of Toler’s death this month it’s fair to say nobody will be raising a glass to his memory, never mind calling parks after him.
The story goes that as his coffin was being lowered the tethers lowering it to the grave proved too short, causing a pause. Given his love of quoting The Bard Toler might have expected the mourners to mummur something Shakespearean – dramatic lines from Richard II, perhaps?
“Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay;
The worst is death, and death will have his day.”
The Puffendor’s shuffle from this mortal coil was less noteworty, though an observer watching his stalled burial was heard to shout:
“Give him rope galore boys, he was never sparing of it to others.”
