If you are well versed in the history of kleptomaniacal aristocrats, then you will have heard of Mary Monckton. She may have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth but that did not stop her stealing everyone else’s spoons and assorted cutlery.
I first came across her in the book The Men Who Stare at Hens, Simon Leyland’s very entertaining compendium of Irish eccentrics, and it’s clear that she earned her place in that book. The daughter of the first Viscount Galway and Jane Westenra from Laois, she became the Countess of Cork and Orrery in 1786 when she married Edmund Boyle, the seventh earl of Cork.
She was well-read from an early age and was known for lively wit and great conversational powers. No surprise then that she had a legendary address book and was famous for her soirées. If you were lucky enough to be invited to one of her parties, you could find yourself in the same room as Samuel Johnson, Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron. But if you wanted to pull your chair closer to any of these guests, well, that would be impossible. She lined the armchairs around the walls of her drawingrooms and, depending on what account you read, she either chained the chairs to the walls or bolted them to the floor. She said she did this because she didn’t want guests breaking away into smaller circles. Less charitable people believed she was making it impossible for guests to steal her chairs.
Hauling an armchair from your host’s home might be a difficult heist to pull off but Mary Monckton stole much larger items in her time. The UK’s Dictionary of National Biography recorded that, on one occasion when she was leaving a breakfast party, she took a friend’s carriage without permission. When the carriage was finally returned to the owner, she had the audacity to complain that the steps of the carriage were too high for her short legs.
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But generally she confined her kleptomania to items she could smuggle in her hand muff. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to find an 1887 article from The Atlantic written by someone who knew her: the actor and writer Fanny Kemble. She wrote that “the unfortunate propensity of poor Lady Cork to appropriate all sorts of things belonging to other people, valueless quite as often as valuable, was a matter of public notoriety”.
Back then, instead of going into a shop, the wealthy classes could sit in their carriages while the minions brought out the goods for inspection. However, the London shopkeepers must have lost one too many of their wares when they disappeared into her carriage so they refused to send their goods out to her. Instead, she had to come in to the shop, where the eagle-eyed staff followed her around the shop and watched her like a hawk.
On one occasion she remarked that heaven would be very boring after the interesting life she had led, and one of her acquaintances quipped that she was probably against heaven because “there would be nothing to steal but one another’s wings”.
Possibly because of her laissez-faire attitude to property ownership, she was more often a host than a guest at parties, but when she was invited to dinner, the servants were instructed to remove the finest silver and leave out pewter cutlery.
“Whenever she visited her friends in the country, her maid on her return home used to gather together whatever she did not recognise as belonging to her mistress, and her butler transmitted it back to the house where they had been staying,” Fanny Kemble wrote.
And this brings us to her most unusual episode of thievery. According to Kemble, a pet hedgehog was running around the halls of a place where the countess was staying. As she left the establishment, she instructed her unfortunate servant to pick up the prickly pet and place it in the carriage.
However, she must have been stricken with robbers’ remorse very quickly. She decided to offload it in a bakery at a small town nearby. The article recounts how she exchanged the hedgehog for a sponge cake. It is silent on the type of sponge cake involved in the bartering arrangement but noted that the countess had assured the baker a hedgehog would be “invaluable in his establishment for the destruction of black beetles, with which she knew, from good authority, that the premises of bakers were always infested”.
They don’t make them like Mary Monckton any more, which is just as well for innocent hedgehogs, and the unfortunate victims of her kleptomania.
