But for John Atherton, there was a way of escape. There had always been strong links between Somerset coastal towns (and indeed Bristol) and Dublin, with both trade and piracy being common over the centuries. But Atherton was fortunate in having Irish links at a time when the Earl of Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, became Lord Deputy of Ireland, and he had caught the eye of some powerful clerics. Preferment came his way and he was placed in Lismore for the centre of his Bishopric.

Atherton, initially related to Strafford’s star on the rise, would have seen Wentworth, when he was sent to govern Ireland in 1633, become a tyrant, and he must have seen that what was to become known as the ‘Bishops’ Wars’. When he was impeached for alienating the King’s subjects, matters were grim and he had to defend himself with his life at stake. At that point, Atherton was already dead, an early casualty of the ‘wars’.

Strafford was executed on Tower Hill a year after Atherton had been hanged in Dublin. Atherton’s downfall started with an accusation from his steward, John Child. Child claimed that he had indulged in sodomy with him – and that was a felony and a capital offence in 1640. Almost a century before, in 1533, parliament had made the ‘abominable vice of buggery’ into a capital offence. Then, in contrast, in Ireland it had only been a hanging offence for six years at the time of Atherton’s trial. It was also bad luck for Atherton in that just a few years before Child’s accusations, there had been a high profile case of sodomy against a nobleman, the Earl of Castlehaven. The crime was in England, but the Earl, Mervyn Touchet, had his title from Ireland.

It all began when Child, who would be committing a felony himself if the accusation were proved, so the implication had to be that he was telling the truth, unless he was totally out of his senses. Just to make that accusation publicly was a confession about one’s own offence. Child made a petition and that was presented to parliament and the man who was then in place as the new Lord Deputy, Sir Christopher Wandesford, who announced that what he found in the petition would make all men blush when they saw ‘what stuff was in it’.

As for John Atherton, he planned to attend what would be his last service at Christ Church cathedral, and he did not exactly hide away in a corner, because he was noted to be dressed in all his fine ecclesiastic attire. But Wandesford, perhaps fearing open trouble did not allow him to go. Clearly, there was a great deal of embarrassment in the men of the cloth in the midst of all this ‘bad press’ for the church. Other enemies of Atherton came out of the woodwork and joined in the attack. One of these was the steward to the Earl of Cork, John Walley, who delighted in taking the opportunity to gather all kinds of other scraps of evidence against the Bishop. In one of his letters he wrote that the Bishop of Waterford had been found out and ‘his filthy and odious sins of sodomy and adultery laid open to the world’.

Tongues wagged across England as well as Ireland and other men set about laying into Atherton. One of these was a scandal-monger, Edmund Rossingham, who told anyone who came across his pamphlet that Atherton had been accused by a servant of his being buggered by the Bishop. He added that many other charges had accumulated, and these he described as ‘many other foul offences’ which were ‘adulteries and single fornications’.