Irish aristocrat and cleric Percy Jocelyn was BOTD in 1764. Born in Dublin into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, he was raised at his family’s country estate in County Down and studied at Trinity College in Dublin. Ordained a priest in the Church of Ireland, he rose swiftly in the church, due mainly to his father’s connections, and by 1809 was appointed bishop of Ferns and Leighlin. In 1811, his brother’s coachman James Byrne accused Jocelyn of “taking indecent familiarities” and having “indecent or obscene conversations”. Jocelyn sued Byrne of malicious libel, claiming that homosexuality had not yet reached Ireland from the corrupt Continent. Byrne was found guilty, stripped, tied to a cart, dragged throughout Dublin, flogged, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. In 1820, Jocelyn was appointed bishop of Clogher. Two years later, he was discovered in a back room of a public house in London with his trousers down, in the company of a 22-year-old soldier named John Moverley. The pair were dragged through the streets, severely beaten and arrested for the crime of buggery. Due to the lack of evidence of any sexual acts taking place, he was charged with a misdemeanour and released on bail of £1,000. Press reports suppressed Jocelyn’s name, but the scandal became the talk of London, and a target for satire, including the rhyme: “The Devil to prove the Church was a farce/ Went out to fish for a Bugger. / He baited his hook with a Soldier’s arse / And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher.” Terrified at the prospect of facing trial for sodomy, he fled the country and went into exile in France. Both men were found guilty in absentia and Jocelyn was stripped of his bishopric, while a public subscription was raised for Byrne, whose conviction was viewed as a miscarriage of justice. Jocelyn’s case became a national scandal, discussed extensively in the press and within government. George Dawson, private secretary to Home Secretary Robert Peel, described Percy’s arrest as an event that “will sap the very foundation of society [and] raise the lower orders against the higher”, while the Archbishop of Canterbury observed that it was not safe for a bishop to show himself in the streets of London. After a number of years in exile under assumed names, he returned to Britain, settling in Edinburgh with his sister. His final years were spent working as a butler, under the name Thomas Wilson. He died in 1843, aged 78, and buried in an unnamed grave with the inscription “Here lies the remains of a great sinner, saved by grace, whose hopes rest in the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ”.