John Nichols Tom or Thom, 1799 – 1838. Cornish merchant and maltster who re-invented himself as Sir William Courtenay. He stood for parliament in Canterbury, was convicted of perjury in a smuggling case, spent four years in the Kent County Lunatic Asylum, later, with a small band of followers he paraded in the Kent countryside. Along with several of his followers, he was killed in a confrontation with government soldiers in Bossenden Wood, in what has sometimes been called the last battle to be fought on English soil. From Cassell's Illustrated History of England.

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