Author: Lowndes, Thomas
Biography:
LOWNDES, Thomas (1766-1840: ancestry.com)
A decendant of the ancient Lowndes family of Overton and related on his mother’s side to the dukes of Marlborough, Thomas was baptised at Chesterfield, Derbyshire, on 15 Feb. 1766, the second surviving son of Robert Lowndes (c. 1735-1820) and his wife, Elizabeth Milnes (1734-1769). Lowndes was educated at Pembroke College, Oxford (BA 1791), and at the Middle Temple. Upon the death of his brother, Milnes (d 1800), he inherited Barrington Hall, Essex, and properties in Dover, Kent, and London. Contemporary sources state that he died unmarried, yet he had a single child, Isabella (1820-1877), whose mother may have been his housekeeper, Mary Gurney, to whom, and to whose brothers, he left inexplicably generous legacies. Isabella married the Revd. Hon. James Norton; in his will, Lowndes identifies Norton as Isabella’s spouse. Two of Thomas’s relatives are more notable than he: his great uncle Thomas Lowndes (1692-1748) founded the Lowndean chair of astronomy and geology at Cambridge; his daughter’s niece, Caroline Norton (q.v.), was a novelist and poet. For the sake of “increasing the size of the work,” Lowndes contributed several poems to Select Miscellaneous Productions of Mrs. Day, and Thomas Day, published in Mar. 1805, a book he edited. “Mrs. Day,” his aunt Esther, survived her husband, Thomas Day (qq.v.); she left the poet a substantial part of her estate. For the benefit of Middlesex Hospital, Lowndes published at his own expense his collected Tracts … in Prose and Verse (1827). The political tracts therein, self-important and pretentious, are anti-Jacobin and Ultra-Troy. He accurately described his verses as “[inferior] in almost every particular to other similar Publications.” Edward Bulwer Lytton (q.v.), whose mother first Milnes and then Thomas courted, described him as having “just enough cleverness to be a great fool … [who wrote] the worst verses I ever read.” A portrait of him exists, painted by Sir William Beechey (1753-1829), who was his daughter’s relative by marriage. He died, aged 74, on 8 Nov. 1840, probably at Barrington Hall, and on 19 Nov. was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Hatfield Broad Oak, Essex. (ancestry.com 23 Mar. 2023; familysearch.org 7 July 2024; New Reports Containing Cases Decided [1864], 4:49-50; Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 2 vols [1883], 1:59-79) JC