Author: Butler, Piers Edmund
Biography:
BUTLER, Piers Edmund (c. 1806-1842: ancestry.co.uk)
Likely born in Ireland, he was the son of Edmund Butler of Edmundsbury House, Queen’s County (now Laois) and Frances (Madden) Butler. He graduated BA from Trinity College Dublin in 1822 and served as chaplain at the Molyneux Asylum for Blind Females in Peter Street, Dublin. He was ordained a priest in Dublin on 10 June 1827. Three books of verse--Hymns, and Other Poems (1828), The Martyr of the Wilderness (1830), and Raymond, A Tale of the Nineteenth Century (1830)--were published during his time in Dublin. In 1834 he became a curate at the Golcar chapel of St. Peter’s in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. In 1835 his Rationality of Revealed Religion was published and the title page identifies him as curate at St. Margaret’s in Ipswich, Suffolk. He was twice married: first, on 3 Sept. 1823 to Mary Sheares with whom he had two sons and two daughters and, second, on 25 Sept. 1838 in Sudbury, Suffolk, to Jane Broughton Holman, a widow with whom he had a son. Although in 1836 he was instrumental in convincing the Rev. Joseph Kelty (husband of Mary Ann Plomley, q.v.) to renounce Unitarianism for the established church, in 1838 he became pastor at a Baptist chapel in London. He explained his reasons in An Apology for Religious Freedom (1838) which received a damning review in The Christian Guardian of the same year. In the 1841 Census his age is given as 35 and he was living at Bayham Street, Camden Town in London. He died on 8 Apr. 1842 at Peckham, Surrey (now south London), leaving the Edmundsbury estate in Ireland to his eldest son. His other publications include verse in newspapers and Songs of the Sanctuary; and Other Poems (1837); the latter reprints "The Martyr of the Wilderness." (ancestry.co.uk 16 Apr. 2019; thepeerage.com 16 Apr. 2019; CCEd; Catalogue of Graduates; Southern Reporter 21 June 1827; Essex Standard 14 July 1837; Christian Guardian [1838] 352-53; Essex Herald 2 Oct.1838; Ipswich Journal 14 May 1842; Burke’s Irish Family Records [1976]) SR