Active Life
Martin also had a very eventful life. He was a colonel of the County Galway Volunteers. He survived two shipwrecks. He fought over a hundred duels with sword and pistol and earned the nickname "Hairtrigger Dick". He travelled extensively in Europe and the Americas during the 1770s and was in New England when the American Revolutionary War began. He initiated Galway's first theatre in 1783. He employed as tutor to his younger half-brothers Theobald Wolfe Tone, who had an affair with Martin's wife. Martin was in Paris when the French Revolution began during 1789.
Martin was on a first-name basis with many of the famous names of his age, Henry Flood, Henry Grattan, William Pitt, King George IV (who gave him the nickname "Humanity Dick"), Queen Caroline and Daniel O'Connell.
Read more about this topic: Richard Martin (M.P.)
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