Author: Eustace, John Chetwood
Biography:
EUSTACE, John Chetwood (1761-1815: ODNB)
The title page of his Elegy to the Memory of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke has his middle name as Chetwood; elsewhere it is shown as Chetwode. The ODNB confidently gives his birth year as 1761 but elsewhere it appears as 1762? and no birth or baptism records have been located. He was born in Kildare, Ireland, to Maurice Eustace and his wife Katherine Keegan. Maurice Eustace was of Anglo-Norman descent and his family was connected to the Chetwodes of Cheshire who had settled in Queen’s County (now County Laois), Ireland. The family was Roman Catholic and John was educated at Sedgeley Park in Staffordshire and at the English Benedictine monastery of St. Gregory in Douai, France. He was ordained in the diocese of Kildare and Leighlin when he returned to Ireland. In 1795 he was appointed to the chair of rhetoric in the newly-founded Maynooth College but he remained there for only a few years before moving to England in 1798 where he served as chaplain to Sir William Jerningham in Norfolk. In 1802 he accompanied three young men on a tour through Italy, serving as their tutor and companion. He became a tutor to George Petre at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1805 and later travelled with Petre in Dalmatia, Greece, Sicily, and Malta. The journal of his first Italian tour was published in 1813 as Tour through Italy; it was reissued as Classical Tour through Italy in 1815 and went to numerous editions. Eustace also found success with his Letter from Paris to George Petre, Esq. (1814). He was in Naples preparing a supplement to Classical Tour when he contracted malaria and died in 1815; he was buried in the Chiesa delle Crocelle. A memoir in GM says of his Tour that few works “ever experienced so rapid a diffusion.” The book was not, however, uncontroversial: John Cam Hobhouse (q.v.) complained of its inaccuracies and decried Eustace as an “unsatisfactory” writer. He was also criticised by his fellow Catholics for his latitudinarian spirit and cordial relations with Anglican clergymen. His other publications include A Political Catechism (1810) and The Proofs of Christianity (1814). (ODNB 27 May 2024; GM 85 [1815], 372; J. Clayton, Sketches of Biography [1825])
Other Names:
- John Chetwode Eustace