Author: Thurlow, Edward Hovell
Biography:
THURLOW, Edward, later Hovell-Thurlow (1781-1829: ODNB)
Elder son of Thomas Thurlow (1737-91), Bishop of Durham, and his wife Anne Bere (1735-91), he was born on 10 June 1781 in the Temple, London, and educated at Charterhouse and Magdalen College, Oxford (matric. 1798, MA 1801). His uncle was Edward Thurlow (1731-1806), Lord Chancellor and the first Baron Thurlow of Thurlow, Suffolk. As a child and young man Edward Thurlow acquired several sinecures that he held all his life: patentee of the Bankrupts’ Office, clerk of the presentation in the Petty Bag Office, clerk of the Hanaper, clerk of the custodies of lunatics and idiots, and registrar of the diocese of Lincoln. In 1806 he succeeded his uncle as the second Baron Thurlow; he took his seat in the house of Lords in 1810. In 1814 by royal licence he took the additional name Hovell (sometimes spelled Hovel), the name of his paternal grandmother. On 13 Nov. 1813 he married Mary Catherine (or Katharine) Bolton, a Covent Garden actor, the daughter of a London attorney; they had three sons, the eldest of whom succeeded to the title after Thurlow died at their home in Regency Square, Brighton, on 4 June 1829. He was buried on 15 June at Ashfield Magna, Suffolk. Thurlow was a devotee of early English literature: his first book was an edition of Sidney’s prose Defense of Poesy (1811) with some of his own sonnets included (reprinted with his Poems on Several Occasions), and one of his last was a modernized version of two poems by Chaucer. Between two periods of poetic activity 1811-14 and 1819-23, he was a frequent contributor to GM. (ODNB 31 Aug. 2024; findmypast.com 31 Aug. 2024; Alumni Oxonienses; GM Aug. 1829, 174-5;Annual Register 1829-1830 [1830], 236)
Other Names:
- Edward Thurlow
- Edward, Lord Thurlow
- Edward Hovel Thurlow