But though I met my accusers boldly, though I lavished sums of money in the election, though I flung open Hackton Hall and kept champagne and Burgundy running there, and at all my inns in the town, as commonly as water, the election went against me.  The rascally gentry had all turned upon me and joined the Tiptoff faction:  it was even represented that I held my wife by force; and though I sent her into the town alone, wearing my colours, with Bryan in her lap, and made her visit the mayor’s lady and the chief women there, nothing would persuade the people but that she lived in fear and trembling of me; and the brutal mob had the insolence to ask her why she dared to go back, and how she liked horsewhip for supper.

I was thrown out of my election, and all the bills came down upon me together—­all the bills I had been contracting during the years of my marriage, which the creditors, with a rascally unanimity, sent in until they lay upon my table in heaps.  I won’t cite their amount:  it was frightful.  My stewards and lawyers made matters worse.  I was bound up in an inextricable toil of bills and debts, of mortgages and insurances, and all the horrible evils attendant upon them.  Lawyers upon lawyers posted down from London; composition after composition was made, and Lady Lyndon’s income hampered almost irretrievably to satisfy these cormorants.  To do her justice, she behaved with tolerable kindness at this season of trouble; for whenever I wanted money I had to coax her, and whenever I coaxed her I was sure of bringing this weak and light-minded woman to good-humour:  who was of such a weak terrified nature, that to secure an easy week with me she would sign away a thousand a year.  And when my troubles began at Hackton, and I determined on the only chance left, viz. to retire to Ireland and retrench, assigning over the best part of my income to the creditors until their demands were met, my Lady was quite cheerful at the idea of going, and said, if we would be quiet, she had no doubt all would be well; indeed, was glad to undergo the comparative poverty in which we must now live for the sake of the retirement and the chance of domestic quiet which she hoped to enjoy.

We went off to Bristol pretty suddenly, leaving the odious and ungrateful wretches at Hackton to vilify us, no doubt, in our absence.  My stud and hounds were sold off immediately; the harpies would have been glad to pounce upon my person; but that was out of their power.  I had raised, by cleverness and management, to the full as much on my mines and private estates as they were worth; so the scoundrels were disappointed in this instance; and as for the plate and property in the London house, they could not touch that, as it was the property of the heirs of the house of Lyndon.

I passed over to Ireland, then, and took up my abode at Castle Lyndon for a while; all the world imagining that I was an utterly ruined man, and that the famous and dashing Barry Lyndon would never again appear in the circles of which he had been an ornament.  But it was not so.  In the midst of my perplexities, Fortune reserved a great consolation for me still.  Despatches came home from America announcing Lord Cornwallis’s defeat of General Gates in Carolina, and the death of Lord Bullingdon, who was present as a volunteer.