Author: Comber, Thomas
Biography:
COMBER, Thomas (1765-1835: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 6 Mar. 1765 at Stonegrave, Yorkshire, the son of Rev. Thomas Comber, rector of East Newton, Yorkshire, and Mary Brooke, the daughter of William Brooke, surgeon, who had married at All Saints, Wakefield, on 20 Apr. 1763. They had at least four sons and a daughter. For reasons unknown the name of the mother of several of them, including Thomas, was given as “Ann.” He was educated at Wakefield school and Jesus College Cambridge (matric. 1784, BA 1787), entered the church, and was ordained deacon in 1788. He was curate of Dundry, Somerset, from 1788 and curate, then vicar of Creech St. Michael, Somerset (1793-1812), and rector of Oswald Kirk, Yorkshire (1813-35). He married Elizabeth Coote (1764-1852), daughter of John Coote, bookseller and author, of Paternoster Row, City of London, on 30 May 1792 at St. George’s, Hanover Square, London. They had two daughters and a son who all survived into adulthood. His Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Comber, D.D. (1799) provided the basis for the nineteenth-century attribution of Waltheof (1832) since both were written by a lineal descendant of the seventeenth-century divine. The attribution of the anonymous Miltonics (1826) is less secure but it is certainly not by Charles William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, Viscount Milton (1786-1857), as listed in library catalogues. It is an attack on Fitzwilliam, John Marshall, and others as “Rabble-leaders” leading a “wild uproar,” and its highly conservative stance is consistent with Comber’s prose works The History of the Paris Massacre (1810) and Retrospectiana: A Comparison of the French Revolution of 1793 with the English Revolution of 1688 (1825). A further reactionary work, not attributed in library catalogues (except Durham University), was also printed by Henry Wellerby at York and advertised as his at the end of Miltonics. It dealt with radical reformers, the Catholic Question and agricultural distress: A Letter to the King on the Critical Circumstances of the Present Times (1823). Comber died on 7 Aug. 1835 at Oswald Kirk and was buried there with a memorial tablet. (ancestry.co.uk 15 Jan. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 15 Jan. 2024; N&Q 10 Aug. 1850, 12 May 1860; Leeds Intelligencer 3 May 1763; Yorkshire Gazette 8 Aug 1835; GM Sept. 1835, 330) AA