Author: Pybus, Charles Small
Biography:
PYBUS, Charles Small (1766-1810: ancestry.com)
He was born at Fort St. George, Madras, India, on 3 Nov. 1766 and baptised there on 19 Dec., the second son and youngest child of an EIC writer, John Pybus (1727-89), and his wife Martha Jane Small of Lewisham, Kent (1734-1802), who had married at Madras in 1753 and gone on to have numerous children, only four of whom grew to maturity. Pybus made a fortune in India and was able to return permanently to England in 1768. He promptly bought a country estate and commissioned a family portrait from Nathaniel Dance (1735-1811) in which the youngest Pybus is seen as a toddler: the painting is now at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Pybus Senior later founded a Bond St. bank. The boy was educated at Harrow School and at St. John’s College, Cambridge (matric. 1781, BA 1786, MA 1789). He also studied law at Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the bar in 1789, but seldom practised. Elected MP for Dover from 1790 to 1802, he was made a Lord of the Admiralty (1791-6) and of the Treasury (1797-1802) under Pitt. His poem on Peter the Great was much mocked and he did not publish again. (The GM reviewer complained about “so small a number of lines, on fashionable paper, in fashionable type, with his own portrait, not that of his hero.” The Mince Pye of Elizabeth Cobbold, q.v., is a poetic response.) He died at his house on Great George St., Westminster, London, on 5 Sept. 1810 after “a short illness” (Pilot). His elder brother John had sold the family house at Cheam, Surrey, in 1803 but in accordance with the terms of his will, Pybus was buried in the churchyard at St. Dunstan’s, Cheam, on 12 Sept., having made provision for a monument to his mother to be erected close to that of his father already there. There is no record of marriage but he may have had at least one illegitimate child, Martha Pybus, daughter of “Ann Pybus,” who was baptised at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, on 30 Dec. 1812 with a birth date of 16 Mar. 1808. (ancestry.com 26 Nov. 2023; findmypast.com 26 Nov. 2023; ACAD; GM Sept. 1800, 854-5; Pilot [London] 8 Sept. 1810; Emma Lauze, “A Nabob’s Return,” Art Journal 43 [2 June 2014], ngv.vic.gov.aus) HJ