Author: Trevanion, Henry
Biography:
TREVANION, Henry (1805-55: ancestry.com)
He was the third of four sons of Charlotte (Hosea) Trevanion (1783-1810) and John Trevanion Purnell Bettesworth Trevanion (1780-1840), who had married in 1801 at the groom’s London parish of St. James’s, Piccadilly, with the consent of her guardian, she being an orphan and a minor. The family seat was Carhayes or Caerhays Castle, Cornwall. John Bettesworth Trevanion appears to have been over-ambitious in his efforts to replace the old manor house with a new castle and eventually abandoned it and fled to the Continent to escape his creditors: he died in Brussels in 1840. It is not clear where Henry was educated. His younger brother Frederick was sent to Eton but Henry’s name is not on the College lists. On 4 Feb. 1826 he married a minor, Georgiana Augusta Leigh (1808-66), daughter of Byron’s (q.v.) half-sister Augusta Leigh (1783-1851), at St. James’s, Piccadilly, with the grudging consent of her father Col. George Leigh. They went on to have three daughters and their names appeared in reports of fashionable society. (The youngest daughter, Ada [1829-82], became a writer herself.) It is possible that Trevanion had studied law, since in the 1851 census Georgiana declared herself the wife of a barrister. Trevanion’s only volume of verse, The Influence of Apathy (1827), is a poor imitation of Byron through and through. The Trevanions separated after Henry seduced Georgiana’s younger sister Elizabeth Medora Leigh (1814-49, believed to have been the daughter of Byron and his half-sister Augusta Leigh) and eloped to France with her in 1829. Their first child was stillborn but they stayed in France, passing as brother and sister under the name Aubin. Medora converted to Catholicism. They had a daughter, born on 19 May 1834 and baptised Marie Violette Trevanion on 21 May; she eventually entered a convent, where she died in 1873. Henry and Medora parted ways in 1838. She married a soldier, Jean-Louis Taillefer, with whom she had a son before she died of smallpox on 30 Aug. 1849 in Aveyron. Trevanion, whose finances had improved after the death of his father, died in Brittany on 25 Dec. 1854. (ancestry.com 8 Sept. 2024; findmypast.com 8 Sept. 2024; Catherine Turney, Byron’s Daughter; a Biography of Elizabeth Medora Leigh [1972]) HJ