Author: Townsend, Horatio
Biography:
TOWNSEND, Horatio (1750-1837: DIB)
His first name is sometimes given as Horace and his surname as Townshend. His great-grandfather, Richard, came to Ireland as an officer in the parliamentarian army during the Civil War; he was given land (now Castletownsend, County Cork) which he was later allowed to keep. Horatio was the third surviving son of Captain Philip Townsend and his wife Elizabeth Hungerford. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin (BA 1770, MA 1776) and his degree was incorporated at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 15 Apr. 1776. In Sept. 1770 he was ordained deacon and priest by the Bishop of Cork, and he became curate at Abbeystewry in County Cork. In 1803 he was made rector of Clonakilty and Carrigaline and was given the living at Rosscarberry, Cork, which he retained for the rest of his life. He purchased his brother Richard’s interest in Derry, Rosscarberry, and built a new family home there. In 1785 he married Helena Meade of Ballintober; she died in May 1786 after the birth of their daughter. In Oct. 1787 he married Katherine Corker, daughter of Archdeacon Corker of Glanmire, Cork; accounts vary but they had numerous sons and daughters with the second son, Horace, succeeding his father in the rectory. Like William Tighe (q.v.) he participated in the Royal Dublin Society’s undertaking to survey the whole of Ireland, contributing Statistical Survey of the County of Cork in 1810. When the Rev. Dr. William Coppinger complained that the survey represented the Catholic clergy as bigoted, Townsend responded uncompromisingly with Observations on Dr. Coppinger’s Letter to the Dublin Society (1811). Other publications include The Expediency of an Union Between Great Britain and Ireland (1799), Observations on the Question of Whether Irish Roman Catholics are … Entitled to Unqualified Emancipation (1813), A View of the Agricultural State of Ireland, in 1815 (1816), and A Tour Through Ireland and the Northern Parts of Great Britain (1827). He used the pseudonym “Senex,” for his letters on agriculture to the Munster Farmers’ Journal and for his many contributions on literary and other matters to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. He died at home on 26 Mar. 1837; there is a monument to him in Ross Cathedral Church in Rosscarberry. (DIB 6 Dec. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 6 Dec. 2021; W. Maziere Brady, Clerical and Canonical Records of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross [1863]; Henry F. Berry, The History of the Royal Dublin Society [1915]; Alumni Oxonienses) SR