Author: Villiers, John Charles
Biography:
VILLIERS, John Charles (1789-1838: ODNB)
He was born at Hindon, Wiltshire, on 14 Nov. 1757 and baptised in Westminster, London, on 7 Dec., the second son of Thomas Villiers (1709-86), 1st earl of Clarendon (of the second creation), and his wife Charlotte Capel (1721-90), daughter of the earl of Essex. He was educated at Eton and St. John’s College, Cambridge (admitted 1774, matric. 1776, MA 1776, hon. LLD 1833). At the same time he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1774 to study law, and was called to the bar in 1779. He entered parliament as MP for Old Sarum (1784-90) and later for other constituencies (1802-5, 1807-12, 1820-24). Several government posts and sinecures followed: the ones highlighted in obituaries were Chief Justice in Eyre, North of the Trent, and Prothonotary of the County Palatine of Lancashire. He was also Baron Hyde of Hindon and a Count in the kingdom of Prussia, and briefly (Nov. 1808- Feb. 1810) British Envoy to the court of Portugal. On 5 Jan. 1791 he married his first cousin, Maria Eleanor Frances Forbes (1761-1844), at her father’s house in Savile Row, London. They had an only daughter, Maria Harriot (1796-1835), who predeceased her parents. In 1824, following the death of his elder brother, Villiers succeeded to the earldom. He died suddenly at home in Deal, Kent, on 22 Dec. 1838, having been well enough to attend to letters on the morning of his death, and was buried on 29 Dec. in Watford, Hertfordshire. Few accounts of his life mention his authorship of the closet drama Chaubert; or, The Misanthrope (1789), which was based on a fictional character from an essay in Cumberland’s Observer. ACAD, which does notice it, attributes to him also A Tour through Part of France--another anonymous work of the same year, from the same London publisher—but that is now believed to have been the work of George Monckton. (ODNB 10 Apr. 2024; findmypast.com 10 Apr. 2024; ancestry.com 10 Apr. 2024; ACAD; Dublin Evening Packet 29 Dec. 1838) HJ
Other Names:
- J. C. Villiers