Day Twenty Seven

Brooke House Asylum, London where  Abraham Creighton,  the second Earl of Erne was incarcerated for forty years.

The committal for insanity of Abraham Creighton by his father John, the First Earl of Erne, and his subsequent lifelong incarceration in Brooke House, London,  had ramifications for the title and the Crom Estates, including Crom Castle.  Abraham assumed the title in 1828 upon the death of his father, but the terms of his committal specified that neither the title nor the Crom estate would pass to his offspring. Both were passed to his nephew,John Creighton in 1842.  Abraham officially died without offspring.

In 1799 when the Stuart-Wortley family enquired as to the causes of Abraham Creighton's insanity, concerned that their son, James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, 1st Baron Wharncliffe, was to marry Caroline Creighton, daughter of John Creighton first Earl of Erne and Mary Hervey, daughter of the Frederick Augustus Hervey, Earl of Bristol , they were told by the Creighton family that Abraham's  insanity was not of the hereditary kind but had been caused "by immersion in a bath of mercury".

The Public Records Office of Ireland in The Erne Papers notes that  "Since the insanity was apparently not of an hereditary kind, it had the advantage to the Creighton family that, during the period 1828-1842 when the 2nd Earl held the title, his financial requirements were extremely modest (a maintenance allowance of c. £780 per annum in the 1830s), as indeed the 1st Earl's must also have been in the period 1785-1828. Because of the 2nd Earl's incapacity, a whole generation of marriage settlement charges was skipped. The money saved was used for purchases of land which were made from 1810 onwards and, eventually, for the building of the new Crom Castle. Somewhat surprisingly, the 2nd Earl died worth over £52,500 and was allowed to dispose of this large sum of money by will, which he did by leaving almost all of it to junior branches of his family. Earlier, his heir, the future 3rd Earl, had tried unsuccessfully to apply it to Crom Castle."

http://www.proni.gov.uk/introduction_erne_d1939.pdf  refer page 19