Author: Williams, Philip
Biography:
WILLIAMS, Philip (1780-1843: ancestry.com)
The son of the Rev. Philip Williams and his wife Sarah Collins, he was born at the end of 1780 and baptised at St. Michael, Winchester, Hampshire, on 9 Jan 1781. His father was a prebendary of Winchester Cathedral by the time he matriculated at New College, Oxford (his father’s college also), in 1798. At New College he took the degree of BCL in 1805 and DCL in 1825; in the meantime he studied law and was called to the bar from Lincoln’s Inn in 1806 (KC and bencher 1831), was made a Fellow of New College, and in 1824 was elected Vinerian Professor of Civil Law, a position he held until his death. On 13 Dec. 1817 at Rowner, Hampshire, he married Jane Blachford (b 1791), with whom he had one daughter, Sarah Jane, born at Winchester in 1819. He thereupon gave up his college fellowship. His continuation of Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther, which he refers to as a jeu d’esprit in the Preface of 1835, was at first printed for private circulation and then released to a wider audience. In the context of Catholic Emancipation and the 1832 Reform Bill, it speaks urbanely in favour of “mutual concession” and aims to show “How truth and justice have at length combined/ To soothe the sorrows of the patient Hind.” Williams also produced a translation of Vida’s Poem on the Game of Chess (Winchester 1843) and a few professional papers. In the census of 1841 the family is recorded at their London address on Upper Bedford Place, Bloomsbury, but their permanent residence was near Winchester, where Williams served as Recorder until his death on 9 Oct. 1843 at Woolley Green, Hampshire. He was buried at Winchester Cathedral. Jane Williams died less than a year later and was buried at St. Michael’s, Winchester, on 21 Aug. 1844. (ancestry.com 15 June 2024; findmypast.com 15 June 2024; Alumni Oxonienses; MH 13 Oct. 1843) HJ