FolklorePeter Marshall's story - one of his stories - begins in 1634, with the death and burial in the coastal town of Minehead, Somerset, of an old woman named Susan Leakey. Nothing that had happened to Mother Leakey during her lifetime had the impact of her posthumous activities.
By 1637, reported sightings of the dead widow had the town in a state of pleasurable agitation, and a royal commission, consisting of "three powerful and important men", had been sent from London to look into the matter.
They dismissed the whole thing, naturally enough, as ballyhoo. But the actual presence of these grandees in distant Somerset suggests an unacknowledged agenda. Clearly, there was more to Mother Leakey than a dead old beldam who wouldn't lie still.
The person most plagued by the apparition was Susan Leakey's daughter-in-law, Elizabeth. Elizabeth was charged with carrying over to Ireland a message solely for the ears of the Bishop of Waterford, John Atherton, the husband of Mother Leakey's daughter, Joan - and now the plot thickens, not only Peter Marshall's plot but a host of other putative plots. Now the bishop jumps centre-stage. John Atherton was hanged in 1640 for an unspecified crime, too shocking to be disclosed to the public, but of an egregiously sexual nature. The records show that Atherton, a father of five, was tried and convicted of sodomy, on the evidence of his servant and fellow debauchee.
Atherton, a native of Somerset, had been a protege of Thomas Wentworth, lord deputy of Ireland, whose policy of appointing Laudian Englishmen to Irish bishoprics had got up the noses of "New" English and "Old" Anglo-Norman settlers alike. Wentworth's appointee, the Bishop of Waterford, was especially assiduous in retrieving church property from the hands of lay lessees, such as the powerful Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork. (Never mind that the lands in question had once belonged to old Irish families; conquest and political manoeuvring had reassigned them.) Atherton's fate had considerable implications for the future, as well as acting as something of a conduit into the intricacies of 17th-century goings-on.
He's not the first figure in the history of Ireland, indeed, to have contradictory varieties of symbolical significance imposed on him. But the ingredients of his story - ghosts, sex, scandals, conspiracies, rumours of even darker deeds and an exorbitant end - proved irresistible to moralists as well as sensation-mongers, and others with axes to grind. Mother Leakey and the Bishop is essentially a tripartite narrative. On top of the stories of its eponymous principals, Peter Marshall documents the course of his own researches into the Atherton affair, beginning with a visit to the Somerset Records Office and ending with a cafe-cum-curiosity shop in Minehead called Mother Leakey's Parlour (alas, no longer a going concern). He makes an extraordinarily intriguing account of it, with his intrepid investigative tactics and his wry approach.
MOTHER LEAKEY ACTS as a kind of running motif, mostly in the background, as her wraith goes through a number of incarnations - or disincarnations - from a witch associated with the whistling-up of a wind to cause shipwreck and loss of life, to a doughty old disembodied chastiser of bad manners. Sir Walter Scott alludes to her on a number of occasions. Never exactly a frightening phantom, indeed with a strong comic element to some of her doings, Mother Leakey has ended as a figment of local lore. But the strand that connects her back to her bad son-in-law also puts her on the periphery, at least, of important historical events (including the execution of the Earl of Strafford).
Like hers, Atherton's story underwent a number of transformations - was he a penitent sinner, a more or less innocent, well-intentioned cleric, a victim of political upheaval, or a diabolical sensualist and worse, much worse? Commentators on his crimes were sometimes careful to insist that one rotten bishop needn't be equated with the contamination of the entire church - though their argument wasn't helped by the arrival of the Bishop of Clogher, the Hon Percy Jocelyn, on the sodomite scene. Atherton's prodigious priapic feats, though, put him in a category of his own, if they're to be taken seriously. Every sexual transgression in the book was thrown at him, down to the accusation of "Uncleanness with a Cow"°, which surfaced in a pamphlet of 1710. And, though a final conclusion eludes him, Peter Marshall may be said to have the last word on the topic, as he conducts us, with verve, through the byways and ramifications of the Leakey-Atherton association, enabling us to savour to the full the details of what adds up to a scholarly romp.
Patricia Craig is a critic, editor and biographer. Her Ulster Anthology was published by Blackstaff last autumn
Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story By Peter Marshall Oxford University Press, 323pp. £12.99