Author: Le Mesurier, Thomas
Biography:
LE MESURIER, Thomas (1756-1822: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 28 Aug. 1756 at Alderney, Channel Islands, the fifth of six children of John Le Mesurier (1717-93), the governor of the island, and his wife Martha Dobrée (1727-66), who had married at St. Peter Port in 1747. He was educated at Winchester and New College Oxford (matric. 1774, BA and Fellow 1778, MA 1782, BD 1813) and entered the established church. He married Margaret Bandinel (1777-1823), the daughter of the Rev. James Bandinel (1733-1804), sometime Fellow of Jesus College Oxford, on 28 Aug. 1800 at Netherbury, Dorset. They went on to have thirteen children. Le Mesurier gave up his Fellowship on taking up the living of Newton Longueville, Buckinghamshire, in 1799 before securing the Rectorship of Haughton, Darlington, Durham, in 1812 which he held until his death. His Translations Chiefly from the Italian of Petrarch and Metastasio (1795) and Poems, Chiefly Sonnets (1799) are his only works of poetry and he was mostly known as a staunchly orthodox Church of England opponent of Catholicism. He wrote an array of sermons, tracts and pamphlets attacking and appealing to Catholics: A Serious Examination of the Catholic Claims (1805), The Nature and Guilt of Schism (1808), The Doctrine of the Eucharist (1810), On the Authority of the Church (1810), A Plain Statement of the. Roman Catholic Question (1812), and many others. He died at Seaton Carew, Durham, on 14 July 1822, aged 65. His wife gave birth two months later and died in May of the following year. (ancestry.co.uk 8 Apr. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 8 Apr. 2022; CCEd 8 Apr. 2022; GM Sept. 1800, 900, and July 1822, 89-90; OUCH 20 July 1822; OJ 21 Sept. 1822; Morning Post 20 May 1823) AA