Author: Gregg, John
Biography:
GREGG, John Anthony (1760-1811: ancestry.com)
The son of John Gregg and his wife, Mary Thomas, Gregg was born in London on 1 Jan. 1760. His Catholicism and his residence among French exiles suggest that his family name was an Anglicization of Grégoire and that his ancestors, Huguenots, had fled persecution. Commencing in 1779, he was educated at the English College, Douai, France. In 1795, now a priest in the Catholic Diocese of London, he resided at 24 Golden Square, Soho, with another priest, the Rev. James Archer (1751-1834). His 48-page poem, The Solitary Frenchman, is an original work in the guise of a translation; in it, the speaker laments the Revolution: “Ah! Paris plung’d in crimes, / Open your eyes, and rue the horrid times!” His praise of the English is boundless: “Admire their scales of Justice, Liberty, / Their well-pois’d state, their love of George their King!” The poem was widely reviewed, but despite its anti-Jacobin theme the inferior prosody and clunky phrasing condemned it. The AR’s reviewer thought it should be “consigned to oblivion under the concise character of contemptible doggerel.” Sometime between 1796 and 1800 Gregg married, abandoned the priesthood, and converted to Protestantism. He defended his actions in Hierogamy, which he addressed to “the Rev. J. A.” (James Archer). The full title is Hierogamy; Apology for the Marriage of a Roman Catholic Priest without a Dispensation (London: Hatchard, 1801). At his death, in June 1811, he was resident in Compton Street, an area of London that was at the time a commercial district and the haunt of French exiles. He was buried at St Anne, Soho, Westminster, on June 28. (ancestry.com 29 May 2023; Allibone; First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay [1878], 79; GM [Dec. 1802], 1136) JC