Author: Cooksey, Richard
Biography:
COOKSEY, Richard (1760-98: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born at Braces Leigh, Worcestershire, on 2 May 1760 and baptised on 12 May at Leigh with Bransford, one of at least five children of Holland Cooksey and his wife Elizabeth Storrs, who had married at St. George’s Chapel, Mayfair, London, in 1751. His sister Harriet married Sir John Scott Byerley (q.v.) in 1805. He was educated at Eton and Worcester College, Oxford (matric. 1778) but there is no record of him taking a degree. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1784 and is recorded as practising on the Chester circuit in 1787. He travelled in Switzerland and France 1789-90. He published proposals for a county history of Worcestershire in 1788 but only a small portion was printed, as an essay on the life of John Lord Somers, in 1791. In 1792, he was brought before the bar of the House of Lords and fined £500 for breach of privilege in writing an angry letter to the Earl of Coventry who had refused his father’s request for a commission for him in the Worcestershire militia. He was committed to the King’s Bench Prison for debt on 4 Jan. 1796. He probably died there but it is possible that he was living locally under the “rules.” His burial, on 5 Mar. 1798, at St. George the Martyr, Southwark, records him as “late a prisoner from King’s Bench.” Miscellaneous Poems prints his travel and topographical poems of 1789-90 and makes a minor contribution to contemporary aesthetic debates with “To Richard Payne Knight (q.v.) and “Ut Pictura Poesis” where he proposed (ironically) a new term, “Picturesquizzity.” (ancestry.co.uk 15 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 15 Nov. 2022; edpopehistory.co.uk; London Gazette 19 Sept. 1797) AA