Author: Wainhouse, William
Biography:
WAINHOUSE, William (1738-1796: ancestry.com)
The only son of the Rev. Richard Wainhouse (1700-1761) vicar of Nether Wallop, Hampshire, and later of Keevil, Wiltshire, and his wife Mary Wansborough (1696-1767), Wainhouse matriculated at Queen’s College, Cambridge, on 13 May 1755 (BA 1759, MA 1762). Ordained deacon in 1761 and priest in 1763, he was in the latter year appointed curate of St Leonard’s, Keevil. From 1764, he was curate at St Mary’s, Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire. In 1789, he was appointed domestic chaplain to Lionel Tollemache, Earl of Dysart, and, in the same year, to a plurality of livings, rector of Badgwoth, near Axbridge, Somerset, of Ufton Nervet, Berkshire, and of Butterleigh, Devon. He married his first wife, Anne Beach (1749-1771), at Keevil on 22 Nov. 1770. A poorly documented story relates that Anne’s family forcibly kept her from eloping with Wainhouse. They married when she reached the age of majority, but she died three months later. Poignantly, “Remember Ann Beach” is scratched—by Anne herself, apparently—into a window-pane in the Beach family’s manor house. By his second wife, Sarah Madocks (1741-1819), whom he married 29 Sep 1772 at Llandyrnog, Wales, he was the father of five children. Having inherited Pye Nest estate, Halifax, he sold it in 1779 to a great uncle of the diarist Anne Lister. The subscribers to his collection of poems are a politically homogeneous group of aristocrats, wealthy parishioners, and fellow clergymen. A reviewer in MR (1796, 225) judged “that the sparks of genius in these poems have not been sufficiently bright to attract our dull optics … we find a prosaic flatness.” Wainhouse was a subscriber to the poems of Myles Cooper (q.v.), a contemporary of his at Queen’s College. He was buried at Badgworth on 14 Aug. 1796. (ancestry.com 24 Apr. 2023; Alumni Oxonienses; Somerset Heritage Centre DD/DP/21/1, DD/DP/81/5; D. Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters [2011], 495; A. Thomsett, ed., A Book of Keevil [1998], 2:7-12) JC