Author: Woodley, William
Biography:
WOODLEY, William (c. 1778-1837: ancestry.com)
No birth record has been found but his admission record for Trinity College Dublin gives his age on 4 July 1796 as 18; he registered but did not take a degree. He was born at Youghal, Co. Cork, Ireland, the son of a wealthy lawyer, Francis Woodley (1726-98), and his second wife Elizabeth Norris. On 18 Sept. 1802 he married Isabella de Vere Bowles (1780-1853), with whom he had at least four children. In 1810 he was a lieutenant in the Cork militia; otherwise his occupation is unclear, and he may have had the means to live independent of employment. His only known volume of verse was certainly a labour of love. It was published by the very respectable firm of J. Hatchard & Son in London but was presumably paid for by the author, and contains a curious preface in which Woodley reveals that the title play had been rejected both by theatre managers and by the publisher John Murray, who said it “wouldn’t answer”—but that a dream about Catullus and a statement by Samuel Johnson in the Rambler had led him to publish anyway. Reviews were not encouraging. Woodley was a Protestant Loyalist, one of the founding members of a local Brunswick Club (to protect the British Constitution in church and state) in 1828 and in the same year the author of a prose pamphlet also published by Hatchard, Strictures on the Roman Catholic Claims. In 1829 after an incident in which he confronted two men who had fired at him and assisted in their arrest, it was proposed that he should be given the freedom of the city of Cork. He died at North Esk, Co. Cork, probably on 15 Jan. 1837, and was buried at Cork Cathedral on 18 Jan. (ancestry.com 14 July 2024; findmypast.com 14 July 2024; Alumni Dublinensis [1924]; Literary Chronicle 24 Dec. 1825, 820; Dublin Evening Post 11 Nov. 1828; Cork Constitution and Public Advertiser 18 Aug. 1829) HJ