Author: Tindal, William
Biography:
TINDAL, William (1756-1804: ODNB)
He was born at Chelmsford, Essex, on 14 May 1756, the son of James Tindal, captain in the 4th Regiment of Dragoons, and his wife Lucy Shenton, who had married at Greenwich in 1741. After his father’s death in 1760, his mother went to live with her brother, a minor canon at Chichester. She married John Smith, a physician at Cheltenham and Oxford, at Greenwich in 1769. William Tindal was educated at Trinity College, Oxford (matric. and Scholar 1772, BA 1776, MA 1778, Fellow 1778). He entered the established church and then held an array of curacies and rectorships at Fladbury, Worcestershire, Billingford and Wallingford (both Norfolk), before becoming Chaplain of the Tower of London in 1799. He also became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His antiquarian work, The History and Antiquities of the Abbey and Borough of Evesham (1794) was highly regarded. An anonymous critical work, Remarks on Dr. Johnson’s Life, and Critical Observations on the Works of Mr. Gray (1782) has been attributed to him but was not mentioned in his GM obituary; another candidate is the classical scholar, Rev. William Windsor Fitzthomas (1742-1806). Juvenile Excursions in Literature and Criticism (1791) is certainly his. His pamphlet, Plain Truth, in a Plain Dress (1794) was well known in its day and the GM mentions but does not give titles for a further six pamphlets which remain untraced. His only known published poem, listed here, is rare, with only two copies located at Yale and Stanford. He married Dorothy White on 24 Mar. 1801 at St. Alphege, Greenwich. There was no issue. He committed suicide by shooting himself with a short-barrelled musket at his residence in the Tower on 16 Sept. 1804 while suffering from depression. The coroner returned the usual verdict of lunacy. His obituary in the GM noted that his conduct “was ever marked by much eccentricity and abstraction of mind, tinctured with a considerable portion of melancholy” (GM, 889). Criticism of the conduct of his wife, who was away in Exeter at the time, was rebutted by the Colonel of the Tower, a servant, and the GM obituarist. After his death she probably returned to Devon. She died at Alphington, near Exeter, on 19 Feb. 1853, aged 87. (ODNB 2 Dec. 2022; ancestry.co.uk 2 Dec. 2022; CCEd 2 Dec. 2022; GM Sept. 1804, 889-90; Atlas 26 Feb. 1853) AA