Author: Champion, Anthony
Biography:
CHAMPION, Anthony (1725-1801: ODNB)
He was born on 5 Feb. 1725 at Croydon, London, the son of Peter Champion, merchant, originally from St. Columb, Cornwall, and Catherine Wright, who had married at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, in 1716. He was educated at Cheam School where he was instructed in Latin and Greek. He proceeded to Eton (1739-42) and St. Mary Hall, Oxford (Matric. 1743), and entered the Middle Temple in 1744 (Bar, 1749, Bencher 1779, Reader 1785). At Eton and Oxford he became a lifelong friend of William Henry, Lord Lyttleton (q.v.), who later edited the posthumous collection listed here and supplied a brief memoir. At Oxford his tutor was Walter Harte, poet and friend of Alexander Pope and Edward Young (qq.v.). He was MP for the Cornish boroughs of St. Germans (1754-61) and Liskeard (1761-8). He died at Garden Court, Middle Temple, on 22 Feb. 1801 and was buried on 3 Mar. at Temple Church, “a Master of the Bench.” He never married and left an estate of over £30,000 with generous bequests to his friends Robert Partridge, KC, and Lord Lyttleton (to whom he left his library and papers). He left the Middle Temple £1000 and made provisions for his servants. Miscellanies (1801) contains much ordinary occasional verse but also contains a long philosophical poem, “The Empire of Love,” some topographical verse (Greenwich, Dovedale, Buxton), and an elegy on the now largely forgotten Shaftesburian philosopher Francis Coventry. (ODNB 7 July 2023; DNB; historyofparliamentonline.org; William Henry, Lord Lyttleton, [“Memoir”], Miscellanies, in Verse and Prose [1801], iii-iv; ancestry.co.uk 7 July 2023; findmypast.co.uk 7 July 2023; Eton College Register 1698-1752 [1927], 65; Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple [1849], 1: 325; Portrait, NPG) AA