THE ALTOGETHER AMAZING TOM POOLEY

The decision to have recourse to law taken by the Cornish parsons so as to hunt down and deal with the blasphemer in their midst in the expectation that he would pay for his impiety with hard labour in a Victorian gaol would seem unduly rigorous to today’s mild clergymen even if blasphemy were still a criminal offence.   I have found no indication that any of these parsons were in any sense otherwise vicious, but they hardly seem to have shown that love and charity, that moderation the Anglican Church preaches and has long preached.  Hypocrisy is a widespread human practice and not one limited to clergymen.  Most of us perhaps do not altogether practice what we preach although, as it is clergymen who tend to do more preaching than most, they are more likely to be thought to qualify as dyed in the wool hypocrites.  The parsons of the Church of England in Queen Victoria’s day were given to preaching long sermons from the pulpit and it was an ego-booster and a career-mo...

  “Judge Coldridge And His Son with the Clergey magastrates And jurey men of Cornwall Have Learnt A Wise Lesson.  They know what they Houte to Have known Before they Had Eny Thing to Doe with T. Pooley. They know now that Thir is A one Allmighty Being that Brought All Things Into Being And judge Coldridge would Have Saved ‘is Chariter from Shame and Disgrace if He Had Sed:  ‘Pooley, Doe you Believe that thir is a one Allmighty Being that Brought All Things Into Being?’”     T. Pooley. Tom was soon congratulating himself on his escape from the prison and the asylum. Once safe home in his house in Moon’s Court, he gloated like the Toad at Toad Hall.  “ The battle is fought and the victory is won.  The Cornish Infidel is left go free from Christian traps and Christian snares.”   In his fevered imagination the Church in Cornwall was reeling from the blows that he had struck. “ The Christian Clergy have had their misery!  They have caught a strang...

 THOMAS POOLEY IN THE ASYLUM “So if mines His a Delusion, it Carried me into the Christian Heaven that is the Asylum wear they say mad People are Bound.  This I sternley Deni.   They may Be mase or, like the Christain Christ, insane But I will give Honest justice to All men.  Thir is madder and unjuster men and women Left Loose on the face of this Globe that are worthy of a mad House.”   T. Pooley  It was on Thursday the thirteenth of August that Tom was taken out of Bodmin Gaol and transferred to the County of Cornwall Asylum, also in Bodmin.  He had been in the ‘Christian dungeons’ for less than a fortnight but for such a childlike spirit the experience had been harrowing.  He was more than ever excitable and incoherent.  He was unsure whether to triumph or to despair, whether to be happy or sad. From George Holyoake’s brief description of the Cornwall Asylum in ‘ The Case of Thomas Pooley’ one might take the impression that this asylum was...

  “O the Horrid touchers I Have Seen!  So, if mines His a Deluson it Carrid me into a Christain Hell, or the Goal, wear the Christain Governer Played the Part of the Christain Divil Compleat and the turnkeys wear the Divil’s Engles Compleat.”    T.  Pooley So that was that!   The blasphemer had been dealt with and the busy judge and barrister had washed their hands of him and there were other cases to be tried and heard.   John Duke later wrote of the jury and the audience in the Crown Court at Bodmin that he was “well convinced that if the punishment of the prisoner had been left to them , he (Pooley) would have ill exchanged what is called the severity of the judge for the mercy of the people.”  He, publicly at least, always maintained that Pooley had only been dealt with according to the fruits of his doing.    To Sir John Coleridge, bewigged and gowned, the very thought that the pathetic, ragged  blasphemer Thomas Pooley wh...