Author: Willmett, John Alexander
Biography:
WILLMETT, John Alexander (c. 1783-1857: ancestry.com)
André-Simone Willmett, a musician, French by birth, married a Kentish woman, Elizabeth Chapron, at his parish of St. Saviour, Southwark, London, on 19 June 1787. She is described in the licence as a widow and he as a bachelor but they already had five children born between 1773 and 1786, the fourth of whom was their son John Alexander Willmett, born in Southwark about 1783. The family settled at Tonbridge, Kent, where John Alexander set up his first practice as an attorney-at-law. On 9 Jul. 1810 he married Mary Ann Alfrey (d 1823) at her parish of All Saints, Maidstone. He later transferred his business to Rochester, where he published his only known poem in 1830 and where he was still in practice in 1835. They had four children. The elder son, John Alexander Jun. (1815-46), embroiled his father in a national scandal in 1838 when he was tried for bigamy, calling himself “Captain Willmett.” After he was discharged—apparently on the grounds that his first marriage was invalid because his wife was already married—a mob of women in Rochester beat and robbed both him and his father. He subsequently went bankrupt, was imprisoned, and probably died in Queensland, Australia, in 1846. His father having been held responsible for some of his debts was imprisoned for three months and then released as an insolvent debtor in London, where he defrauded and abused his landlady and abandoned her and their infant child. (He had persuaded her to make a mock marriage to avoid her also becoming liable for his son’s debts.) He was fined £2 each on two counts and imprisoned again in 1841. He was almost certainly the "John Alexr. Willmott" who died insane at the St. Pancras workhouse on 22 May 1857, allegedly aged 81, and was buried at the St. Pancras parish chapel on 26 May. The death certificate however gives the date of death as May 21, cause of death as "natural decay," occupation as "late Captain in Militia," and age as 62. (ancestry.com 21 June 2024; findmypast.com 21 June 2024; Kentish Gazette 13 Jul. 1810; Evening Chronicle 8 Aug. 1835; Huntingdon, Bedford, and Peterborough Gazette 8 Sept. 1838; Perry’s Bankrupt Gazette 19 Jan. 1839; Morning Advertiser 23 Apr. 1839; Weekly True Sun 19 Sept. 1841; GRO death cert.; information from AA) HJ
Other Names:
- J. A. Willmett