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Scandal & Society · Lowther (near Penrith), Cumbria (Westmorland)

Wicked Jimmy — the Bad Earl of Lonsdale

The tyrant nicknamed 'Jemmy Grasp-all' who, when his tenant-farmer mistress died, could not bear to bury her — and kept the corpse until it could no longer be endured.

StatusDocumented history
Date1736–1802
The peopleSir James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale (1736–1802), John Wordsworth (the poet's father, his law-agent)
The siteLowther Castle and Gardens, Lowther, near Penrith (seat of Sir James Lowther)
Coordinates54.60100, -2.72200 (confidence 4/5)

Evidence note. The dead-mistress story is widely repeated from 19th-century sources; presented as documented reputation, attributed to those sources.

The story

Sir James Lowther, first Earl of Lonsdale — "Wicked Jimmy," "Jemmy Grasp-all" — was the richest and most hated man in the north, controlling a bloc of MPs known as his "Ninepins." The DNB records Alexander Carlyle's verdict: "truly a madman, though too rich to be confined." He employed the poet Wordsworth's father as law-agent and refused to pay a debt of some £4,000, shaping William's orphaned childhood; the heir paid it only after Lowther died in 1802.

The notorious tale that he kept a dead mistress's embalmed body under glass traces to De Quincey, who reported it as Cumberland hearsay, not fact — and in a far milder form than modern retellings. The present Lowther Castle is the 1806–14 Smirke rebuild, now a ruined shell with restored gardens, open to visitors.

More stories at this spot

Hanged for the paperwork, not the person

John Hatfield's trial at Carlisle turned on forged bills and the fraudulent franking of letters with an MP's name — crimes against property and the post. The bigamy and the broken-hearted bride, which gripped the public and filled the London theatres, were legally beside the point. He is a neat, grim illustration of what the Georgian state actually punished, and what it merely found entertaining.

A castle with no ceilings

Lowther Castle, the great Gothic pile Robert Smirke built for Wicked Jimmy's heir between 1806 and 1814, was stripped and unroofed in 1957 when the family could no longer maintain it. Rather than vanish, it survives as a deliberate ruin: visitors walk through grand rooms open to the sky, the restored gardens spread below, a monument to money that outlasted the family that made it.

Sources

Nearby on the map

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Documented historyHot spot

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