Author: Prowett, James
Biography:
PROWETT, John (1774-1851: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 4 Mar. 1774 at Adderbury, Oxfordshire, the eldest son of William Prowett and Elizabeth Bathurst, who had married at St. James’s, Westminster, London on 29 Mar. 1773. His father was originally a grocer in Holborn, London, but acquired land at Little Bourton, Oxfordshire in 1763 on the death of his brother John. It is not known where John Prowett went to school but he proceeded to New College Oxford (matric. 1792, BA 1796, MA and Fellow 1801). He was ordained deacon (1797) and priest (1798). He was rector of Belaugh, Norfolk (1807-10), Edburton, Sussex (1810-33), Heigham, Norfolk (1820-33), and All Saints, Catfield, Norfolk (1833-51), and sinecure rector of Great Tey, Essex (1845-51). He married Martha Maria Hodgson (1774-1850) on 25 June 1799 at St. Augustine the Less, Bristol. She was the daughter of Colonel Robert Hodgson, who had died in Guatemala City in 1791, having acquired land and a pension of 30,000 dollars per annum from the King of Spain. (The pension and property were never handed over and John Prowett seems to have obsessed over them with no success.) They had at least two daughters and five sons. He died on 20 Mar. 1851, aged 78, and was buried at Catfield on 28 Mar. (All Ancestry trees give a date of death of 1824 but this is disproved by his will, written in1849 and proved in 1851.) His wife, Martha Maria, had died the previous year. There are only two known copies of The Voluspa (1816)—in the Kunliga Biblioteket, Stockholm, Sweden, and the Hesburgh library, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US--but it was reprinted with other verse in Poems by a Father and a Daughter (1845). The latter volume also included the posthumous verse of his eldest daughter, Henrietta Elizabeth Bathurst Prowett (1801-36), under the signature “H.” (ancestry.co.uk 27 Oct. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 27 Oct. 2023; familysearch.org; N&Q 9 July 1864, 28; Gloucester Journal 1 July 1799; Bury and Norwich Post 27 Jan. 1836, 26 Mar. 1851; Norfolk Chronicle 18 May 1850; “Atlantic Bristol,” specialcollections.blogs.bristol.ac.uk) AA
Other Names:
- J. Prowett