Author: Archer, Henry Playsted
Biography:
ARCHER, Henry Playsted (1811-31: ancestry.co.uk)
He was privately baptised in Northampton and then publicly at Avon Dassett, Stratford on Avon, the following year, the son of John Archer (1771-1851), a lieutenant in 40th and 18th Regiment of Infantry, and his wife Thomasin(e) Playsted (1784-1864) who had married in Shoreditch in 1806. Various other children, mostly daughters, were baptised in Salisbury, Canterbury, and London. One daughter appears to have been born in Portugal during the Peninsular War. He died on 1 June 1831 from consumption at Harbledon, Kent, where the family had settled after the war. A family death notice proclaimed his literary abilities and his contributions to the Kentish Weekly Post under the signature of "Don Sagittarius," and announced the intention to publish his poems. Emmet, The Irish Patriot (1832) was an enterprising and original poem although by 1832 in the atmosphere of political reform it was not as radical as it would have been had it been written twenty or thirty years earlier. The graves of his parents are at St. Michael and All Saints, Harbledon, and they were probably buried with him with the stone added later. (ancestry.co.uk 19 Oct. 2020; findmypast.co.uk 19 Oct. 2020: Kentish Weekly Post 7 June 1831; findagrave.com 19 Oct. 2020) AA