Author: Ashburnham, William
Biography:
ASHBURNHAM, William (1769-1843: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised at St. Martin in the Fields, London, on 21 Jun. 1769, the eldest son of Sir William Ashburnham (1739-1823), 5th Bt., MP for Hastings 1761-74, and his wife Alice Woodgate (1741-1777), who had married in 1766. His poem The Restoration of the Jews (1793) was intended as a Seatonian Prize entry at Cambridge but he did not meet the MA requirements. It is unclear whether he went to Cambridge but if he did, it would almost certainly have been to Corpus Christi, which his father and grandfather attended. He may have left without taking a degree. In 1794 he discussed the possibility of ordination with his grandfather, the Bishop of Chichester, and expressed his belief that war and the swearing of oaths were contrary to Christianity. He wrote a couple of plays which were rejected by theatres and continued to write sonnets but seems to have abandoned attempts to publish further (KLHC ). On his father’s death in 1823, he inherited the Broomham estate at Guestling, Sussex. He married Juliana Humphrey (c. 1791-1865) on 7 Jul. 1825 at Seal, Kent, where her father was Rector. There was no issue. On his death the title and estate passed to his brother, the Rev. John Ashburnham, chancellor and prebendary of Chichester. He died on 23 Mar. 1843. His wife survived him and edited The Restoration of the Jews, and Other Poems (1849), which contained almost a hundred additional sonnets together with other miscellaneous poems. She died in 1865 and left an estate of under £18,000. (ancestry.co.uk 16 Jun. 2021; Morning Post 12 Jul. 1825; LES 4 Apr. 1843; GM Jul. 1843, 108; Kent Library History Centre [KLHC], U150, Correspondence and Literary Papers) AA