Dudley Bradstreet 1711-1763
DUDLEY BRADSTREET, fortune hunter and spy, was born in Co Tipperary, a son of landowner John Bradstreet, whose family had received Cromwellian land grants. Raised by a foster family because of his father’s high living, Dudley later attributed his own reckless conduct to being abandoned as a child. Educated in Tipperary and at a boarding school near Templemore, he developed a lifelong interest in card playing. In 1723 he rejoined his family in Dublin, and completed his education at a Latin school in Granard, Co Longford.
He left for London with his mistress in 1728, but returned to Ireland to join the army. A trooper in a regiment of horse, he married a distant relation who had beauty but no fortune. Discharged from the army, he was penniless after his parents’ deaths, but was awarded a freehold worth £36 a year by his brother. His wife died in c1733, by which time Dudley had moved on to other pursuits, dividing his time between gaming table and bedroom. He had children but was reticent about their number.
In 1735 or 1736 he captained Westmeath to victory in a football match against Longford, one of the first recorded intercounty games. Moving to Dublin, he became an attorney’s apprentice, but he was arrested in 1737 for debt. To prevent further embarrassment he married a wealthy widow while on bail. He left Dublin in 1739 and joined the army in England.
After saving a doctor from blackmail he was encouraged to become a British spy in 1744. Infiltrating Irish groups to assess disaffection, he invented tales of Jacobite plots. In 1745 he was given a commission as captain and asked to delay Prince Charles’s rebel army at Derby. According to Bradstreet, he inveigled his way into the Jacobite leaders’ confidence, using an alias, and convinced them that any attack was doomed to failure. When the rebels returned to Scotland Bradstreet claimed credit.
In 1748 he toured the countryside, claiming to be able to restore youth and talk to the dead. Having saved £1,500, he lost most of it after a relation cheated him. He returned to Dublin and then, after further business failures, moved to Multyfarnham, Co Westmeath, where he built a house and a brewery and published a memoir, The Life and Uncommon Adventures of Captain Dudley Bradstreet(1755). Its success inspired him to write Bradstreet's Lives(1757), commended by modern scholars for its sympathetic treatment of female characters. He died in September 1763 in Multyfarnham.
Adapted from the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography. See dib.ie
