Author: ASHE, Thomas
Biography:
ASHE, Thomas (1770-1835: ODNB)
Thomas Ashe, army captain, editor, and adventurer, appears to have only passed through the Isle of Man for a short time in the 1790s and again in the early 1820s, but he left his mark. He was born on 15 July 1770 at Glasnevin, near Dublin, Ireland, into a propertied Irish Protestant family, the third son of Margaret (Hickman) Ashe and her husband, a half-pay officer whose first name is not known. He attended a public (i.e. fee-paying) school and secured a commission in the 83rd Regiment of Foot which, however, was disbanded before he could join it. Later adventures, of which Ashe himself gave a self-serving and sensational account in his Private Memoirs and Confessions (1815), took him far afield to France, America, and Canada, and provided him with useful skills in languages, accounting, editing, and journalism, but he lived a fast life and in his quest for financial and social advantages he could be unscrupulous. Sometimes his creditors caught up with him. During his first period of residence in the Isle of Man he published a novel of which only one copy is known to be extant, The Manks Monastery (1792). Four other novels followed in 1811-19, the most successful of which was The Spirit of “The Book” (1811), a thinly disguised defence of Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales. Ashe successfully used the threat of another fiction, an exposé of the cloistered lives of the royal princesses at Frogmore House (renamed Toadmore) entitled “The Claustral Palace,” to extort money from the Treasury; the ms, which still exists among official papers at the National Archives, is at the core of a recent book about Ashe by James Travers. After his first application to the RLF in 1807 was rejected, Ashe started applying under false names, sometimes from real prisons. A final application from “Mrs. Ashe” (no marriage record has been discovered) in 1820 was also denied. On his second visit to Man, Ashe busied himself with a newspaper, a museum, and an illustrated tourist guide, besides the edited collection of local poetry here, before being imprisoned for debt and being obliged to move on. He died in poverty at Bath on 17 Dec. 1835. (ODNB 28 Mar. 2023; James Travers, A Blackmailer at Frogmore [2022]; RLF # 206; Cubbon)
Other Names:
- T. Ashe