Author: Stewart, Thomas
Biography:
STEWART, Thomas (1802-46: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 21 Dec. 1802 at Murthly, Perthshire, Scotland, and baptised on 11 Jan. 1803 at Little Dunkeld, the sixth child of Sir George Stewart (1750-1827) and Catherine Drummond (1762-1823), who had married in Edinburgh in 1792. His elder brother, William Drummond Stewart (1795-1871), is well known for his adventures in the Rocky Mountains in America and two semi-autobiographical novels, Altowan (1846) and Edward Warren (1854). Both brothers probably developed same-sex passions. Thomas Stewart was educated at Christ Church College, Oxford (matric. 1820, BA 1827), but he spent the spring of 1826 in the circle of Lady Blessington at Naples where his uncle, Sir William Gell (1777-1836), archaeologist, topographer, and poet, also lived. After Oxford he left England for good and spent the rest of his life in Italy, converted to Catholicism, and was known as the Abbé Stewart and Knight of St. John of Jerusalem. In Naples he wrote An Epistle from Abelard to Eloise (1828) and Retirement (1829), the latter dedicated to his aunt, Lady Harriet Drummond. A short poem, An Elegy on the Convent of the Grotto at Amalfi(Palermo 1830), was privately printed. By 1834 he was in Pisa where he wrote Napoleon’s Dying Soliloquy. He wrote the Preface to The Constantiniad (1845) at Perugia on 29 June 1844. All his longer poems were published in London by James Ridgway. He was murdered on the beach at Case Bruciate near Ancona on 18 July 1846 and his valet, Luigi Buranelli, was later suspected but never prosecuted. Buranelli was executed at Newgate in London in 1855 for another murder. (ancestry.co.uk 13 Sept. 2024; Scotland’s People; Edinburgh Evening Post 5 Aug. 1846; GM Nov. 1846, 553; R. R. Madden, The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington [1855], 1: 306-7, 2: 103-6; Boase 1: 475; William Benemann, Men in Eden. William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountains [2012], 290-2) AA