Author: Kingdom, John
Biography:
KINGDOM, John (1767-1851: ancestry.com)
The son of Joan (Sprye) and William Kingdom, who had been married at Stoke Damerel, Devon, in 1758, he was baptised at St. Andrew's, Plymouth, on 8 May 1767. On 16 June 1794 he married Mary Sparshott at St. Thomas's. Winchester, Hampshire. He joined the navy, rising to the rank of lieutenant in 1813, and was still in active service in 1821 but may have retired on half-pay shortly after. In 1806 he was initiated into a masonic lodge in Plymouth Dock. The Kingdoms, who appear to have had several children, lived mainly in the west country at addresses in Devon or Somerset. He is referred to in newspapers as "John Kingdom, Esq., of Batheaston." At the time of the 1841 census they were in Chilcompton, Somerset; by 1851, when he gave his employment as "superannuated deputy lieutenant of the Navy Board," they had moved to the spa town of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, where he died on 24 Dec. 1851 and was buried on 1 Jan. 1852. He left his estate to his wife, who died in 1860 leaving about £600. Most of the poems in Kingdom's Scraps are social and occasional. Besides the three titles listed here, he published The Crusaders, or, The Siege of Acre (n.d.), a theatrical spectacle in prose, identifying himself on the title-page as the author of "Madeline," "Griselda," and three other poems which had probably been published separately (and anonymously) in periodicals. A year after his death, the Cheltenmah Journal published original verses about December from Kingdom's "Naturalist's Calendar," which he had been keeping since he lived near Bath about thirty years earlier. The present whereabouts of the ms is unknown. (ancestry.com 6 June 2021, 4 Dec. 2025; findmypast.com 6 June 2021; Navy List July 1821GM 191 [1852] 212; Bath Chronicle 1 Jan. 1852; Cheltenham Journal 11 Dec. 1852; information from AA) HJ
Other Names:
- I. K.--I. Kingdom
- J. K.