Author: Roche, John Hamilton
Biography:
ROCHE, John Hamilton (1784-1834: Copsey)
He was probably born in Dublin in 1784 and joined the British Army at fourteen. He was made Ensign in 1803 and possibly served in North America but his claim to be “late Captain in the Northumberland Fencible Infantry” in 1807 is suspect as is the claim by his widow that he had served eighteen years, was wounded five times and had been at the Battle of Clonard (1798). After leaving the army in 1808, he traded as a wine-merchant in Sudbury but went bankrupt in Nov. 1810. In Apr. 1811 he was charged with accessory to forgery (“uttering a false note for £10”) and briefly imprisoned, but was acquitted. In 1808 and 1812 he spent two short periods in the King’s Bench for debt. In 1815, after the end of the war, he moved to Paris where he applied for a commission in the French army but was refused. He later claimed to have reached the rank of Colonel in the Hohenlohe regiment in Paris. In 1829, he issued florid appeals for assistance to the RLF and was awarded £5. He returned to England after the 1830 Revolution having spent fourteen years in France. He initially went to Dover but again ran into financial trouble and left in Nov. 1832. By Feb. 1834 he was in the King’s Bench Prison, Southwark, for debt and again applied to the RLF. He died there from cholera on 24 Aug. 1834, aged 51. His fourth wife Mary Roberts, now calling herself Mary de la Roche, applied to the RLF and was awarded £10. In his final years in England, he called himself Alfred Hamilton, Comte de la Roche, Colonel of Infantry in the French Service, Knight of the Legion of Honour, and of the Phoenix of Hohenlohe, and Grand Cross of the Lyss. He also claimed to be a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Royal Academy. His early loosely autobiographical novel, A Suffolk Tale (1810), has a young Alfred, born in Ireland and trained at Summer Hill military academy in Dublin, who serves in North America. It also contains memorial poems to "Louisa" and is probably more truthful than his later writings. He married four times and had at least ten children: (1) Louisa Bath, 8 Aug. 1803, at Ixworth, Suffolk, (2) Sarah Strutt, 8 Sept. 1807, at St. Gregory’s, Sudbury, (3) Jane Durdin (from Cork), 7 Oct. 1818, at Paris, (4) Mary Roberts (of Great Wakering, Essex), marriage untraced, possibly Paris or 1830 England. His publications are equally problematic. France (1814) was exposed as having copied long passages from Homer’s Iliad; another poem, "The Wonder," plagiarised a translation of Boccacio by J. C. Hobhouse (q.v.); various works contained preposterous lists of subscribers. (Copsey 1: 411; findmypast.co.uk 26 Nov.; ancestry.co.uk 26 Nov. 2021; RLF, 1/868; True Sun 25 Aug. 1834; Bell’s Weekly Messenger 15 June 1834; Dover Telegraph 14 June, 13 Sept., 1834; EN2, 329; "Detection of an Extraordinary Literary Imposture," New Monthly Magazine 2 [Nov. 1814], 330-33) AA
Other Names:
- J. Hamilton Roche
- H. Roche
- Hamilton Roche