Author: Montagu, Montagu
Biography:
MONTAGU, Montagu (1786-1863: ancestry.com)
A career naval officer with a literary bent, he was born in London on 28 Nov. 1786, the second son of Montagu Montagu of Little Bookham, Surrey, and his wife Anne Catherine Hobart (d 1800), who had in all five sons and one daughter. The early records of the family are confusing or absent. It seems likely that the father was born Montagu Wilkinson in Little Bookham but changed his name after his marriage to the grand-daughter of an earl (and daughter of the MP Henry Hobart); he held a sinecure at the Signet Office and began also to trade (possibly in statuary) on the Continent, settled in Livorno, and died overseas in 1797. Our author, educated presumably in Italy, entered the Royal Navy in Apr. 1799, rose to the rank of Commander in 1815, and retired with the rank of Captain in 1853. The GM obituary gives details of his distinguished service record. He was also active as an author and translator from French, Italian, and German: besides the works listed here he published, often with Hatchard, A Sketch from Public Life (1816), a poem of 8 pages; Schiller’s Song of the Bell (1839, rev. 1854); Gresset’s Vert-Vert (1840); California Broadsides (1850); The Psalms in a New Version (1851); and Fifty Sonnets (1860). Harvard University Library holds a collection of his privately printed leaflet and broadside poems. Montagu never married. In the 1841 and 1851 Census he appears at his London address, Golden Square. He retired to Bath and died at home at 12, The Circus, on 31 July 1863 and was buried in the churchyard of St. Thomas à Becket, leaving an estate of under £16,000 mainly to his nephew Horace Montagu, Captain of Hussars, and an important collection of manuscripts and autographs to the Bodleian Library. (ancestry.com 2 July 2023; findmypast.com 2 July 2023; GM Sept. 1863, 383; Dublin Evening Mail 7 Aug. 1863; Brighton Gazette 6 Aug. 1863; Oxford, Bodleian Libraries MSS Montagu; Edward Walford, The County Families of the United Kingdom [1860]) HJ
Other Names:
- M. Montagu