In later life, along with his employer, George Robert FitzGerald, he was executed for conspiracy to murder, in Castlebar, County Mayo in 1786, although he vigorously denied the charge.
To this end, he had presented a fraudulent reprint of lunation times in Ryder’s Almanack that fooled the court by invalidating the identification of the robber by moonlight.
[5] Having published books of poetry and satire,[6] his political pamphlet, Droit le Roy (a Digest of the Rights and Prerogatives of the Imperial Crown of Great Britain), brought him to national attention.
Despite mild dissent from the Jacobite peer Hugh Hume-Campbell, 3rd Earl of Marchmont, Droit le Roy was ordered to be burned outside the gates of Westminster in 1764.
He was described as a colourful radical and alchemist “reputed to drink a bowl of his own blood every Good Friday.”[10] With advancing years, he was saved from penury by the equally eccentric landowner and duellist George Robert Fitzgerald of Turlough, County Mayo, Ireland who appointed him as his law agent.