Author: CRESPIGNY, Mary Champion de
Biography:
CRESPIGNY, Mary Champion de, formerly CLARK (c. 1747/8-1812: ancestry.co.uk)
She was the only child of Mary (Wilks) and Joseph Clark who, originating from Derbyshire, established himself as a linen draper in the city of London. They had been married at Westminster Abbey on 15 Dec. 1746. Widowed in 1757, in 1760 her mother married Isaac Heaton, a prosperous merchant who in Feb. 1764 witnessed the marriage of his 16-year-old stepdaughter to Claude Champion Crespigny (1734-1818). Descended from a Huguenot family, Crespigny inherited Champion Lodge, the family’s Camberwell estate, in 1765 and was receiver-general of the droits of Admiralty, a director of the South Seas Company, and major-commandant of the Camberwell Volunteers. Nothing is known of Mary’s education. To offer guidance to her only child, William (1765-1829), she wrote Letters of Advice from a Mother to Her Son (1803), the work for which she is principally remembered. Published some years after they were written, the surprisingly frank essays treat matters religious, sexual, and socially practical. For society was important to Crespigny, whom the European Magazine remarked “was courted by the gay and admired by the clever.” The Prince Regent’s visit in 1804 to a Champion Lodge fête resulted in the 1805 award of a baronetcy to Claude Crespigny, his wife thereafter known as Lady Mary Champion de Crespigny. Champion Lodge was the scene of festivities and private theatricals, with Crespigny writing songs for the former and acting in the latter. In 1801 she became patroness of the Toxophilite Society, on occasion composing verses to amuse her fellow archers. A patron of the theatre, supporting both actresses’ benefit performances and plays of favourite authors, such as Mariana Starke (q.v.), Crespigny also subscribed to the works of numerous women writers. The printed dedication to her only novel, The Pavilion (1796), memorializes Sir Henry Martin, commending him for allowing his family to read such works. Martin, whom her surviving diary reveals as a close friend, had been comptroller of the Navy, the service that Crespigny extols in A Monody to the Memory of the Right Honourable the Lord Collingwood, her verses amplified by footnotes detailing victorious naval manoeuvres. Crespigny died at Richmond House, Twickenham, on 20 Jul. 1812 and was buried in Camberwell churchyard. (ancestry.co.uk 25 May 2023; Orlando; 1791 Crespigny Diary [Bodleian MS. Eng. e. 3767]; Morning Post 12 May 1801; EM Dec. 1804; GM July 1812) EC
Other Names:
- Lady Champion de Crespigny