The Remarkable Lushington Family. David Taylor
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last words called down blessing upon him.11
In 1798, Stephen, then at the height of his career, purchased Wimbledon House, Surrey, an impressive eighteenth-century mansion with land and a pew in Wimbledon Church. At this time, London was becoming increasingly unpleasant in the summer and Wimbledon was within an easy drive of the City.
Stephen and Hester had three sons. Henry, the eldest, was born in 1775 and inherited his father’s title. He married Fanny Maria Lewis, the daughter of Matthew Gregory Lewis, a coheir of Matthew Lewis, MP, the dramatist and novelist, best known for his popular The Monk: A Romance, a Gothic novel published in 1796. In 1815, Henry was appointed British Consul General in Naples. The youngest son, Charles, born in 1785, became Member of Parliament for Ashburton in South Devon and, later, Westminster. Like his father, Charles held various offices in the East India Company between 1800 and 1827.
Stephen Lushington died in 1807, leaving an estate worth about £15 million pounds in today’s money. Following his death, his widow moved to York Pace, Bedford Square, London, where she died in 1825. At her request, she was buried in her father’s vault in Aspenden Church “without show or ostentation.”12 It was the second of Stephen and Hester’s sons who became Lady Byron’s lawyer; the subject of the portrait that fascinated Thomas Hardy; and first of the three generations of the remarkable Lushington family whose story follows.
NOTES
1. Vernon Lushington to Susan Lushington, 25 July , 1905. SHC7854/4/2/319.
2. Edward Lear, Diary, Saturday 14 July, 1860. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng. 797.3.
3. Notes and Queries, 15 July, 1911, p. 53.
4. Thomas Lushington (1590–1661), ONB.
5. For more on Thomas Lushington, see H.J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 1951).
6. Letters of Jane Austen ed. Lord Brabourne (Ricard Bentley and Son, 1884), Vol. 2, p. 186.
7. For more on the Lushingtons and Tennysons see John O. Waller, A Circle of Friends: The Tennysons and the Lushingtons of Park House (Ohio State University Press, 1986).
8. India Office Records. IR1/22/76. BL.
9. For more on Sir Stephen Lushington, see Sir John Lushington Bt., From Men of Kent to Men of the World (printed privately, 2018).
10. From Recollections of Sir Stephen Lushington, 1st baronet, and Dr Stephen Lushington, author and date unknown. SHC7854/10/5.
11. Ibid.
12. TNA PROB 11/1521/482.
Stephen Lushington was born on 14 January, 1782, and baptized at the parish church of St. Mary, Marylebone, on 6 March the same year. Two portraits survive from his childhood. A charming oval watercolor by John Downman shows him seated on his mother’s lap and, a few years later, Richard Cosway painted him dressed in a blue coat with large silver buttons, cream waistcoat, and shirt with wide falling collar. His hair is curled and worn long (figures 1 and 2). Lushington retained his girlish looks into his adolescence and, aged eighteen, attending a fancy-dress ball dressed as a lady, he received no less than three offers of marriage.1
What little is known of Lushington’s formative years comes from some notes compiled by one of his grandchildren.2 He went to Eton at the tender age of six accompanied by his nurse but was removed from the school at the age of eleven for fighting.3 After this he was tutored privately to prepare him for university and then, aged fifteen, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford.
Like many other young undergraduates, before and since, Lushington enjoyed an active social and recreational life at the university. He became vice president of the exclusive Bullington Club, a sporting club dedicated to cricket and horse-racing, whose rowdy dinners gradually became its principal activity and were notorious for its members’ riotous behavior. He was also a keen sportsman and excelled at cricket making several appearances in major matches in 1799, usually playing for Surrey.4 At university, Lushington took degrees in civil law. He graduated with a BA in 1802, followed by an MA in 1806, BCL in 1807, and a DCL in 1808.
One of Stephen’s contemporaries, both at Eton and Christ Church, was Edward Harbord, son of Lord Suffield. The two became close friends, and Suffield later opened the way for Lushington’s parliamentary career. In 1801, Lushington was elected as a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a position he held until 1821 when he resigned on marriage as was then required. He presented the college with two silver dishes with an amusing inscription of how he had fallen, “alas, into matrimony: farewell and be warned.”
The future of Lushington’s older brother Henry, who was heir to the title and fortune, was guided entirely by his father, whereas Stephen’s education and career were left largely to his mother. After her son left university, Lady Lushington wrote to Lord Melville hoping to get her son a government appointment. She explained how “for many years back his head has run upon nothing but politics.”5 Despite meeting with Melville, Lady Lushington was unsuccessful in furthering her son’s prospects. Stephen Lushington’s son, Vernon, writing in 1855, stated that his father had been offered an undersecretaryship of state, “but some noble lord in the Cabinet objected to it, & my father was not appointed; & I often heard him congratulate himself on his rejection, for ‘Perhaps I should have ended my days long ago in some miserable colony or other, & then where wd. you have been, my children.’”6
In 1806, Lushington was called to the bar of the Inner Temple and, later that year, he entered Parliament as Member for Great Yarmouth. An American visitor to England at this time described him as:
of the middling size, rather slender in person, with a pensive and almost melancholy expression of countenance. The tones of his voice, too, are solemn, melodious and pathetic . . . The powers of Dr L. as an orator are certainly of no common stamp.7
Lushington’s parliamentary and legal careers will be considered later. For the time being, we turn to a major turning point in his domestic life, his marriage in 1821 to Sarah Grace Carr, a daughter of the Newcastle lawyer Thomas William Carr.
The Carrs of Hampstead
The Carrs were an old Northumberland family who, like the Lushingtons, could trace their ancestry back to the early fifteenth century.8 Thomas William Carr was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1770 where his father, also named Thomas, had settled earlier in the century to take up the lucrative post of customs collector. He was the son of William Carr who lived at of Eshott Hall, Northumberland, a fine Palladian style house which stands close to the beautiful Northumberland coast.
Thomas senior married four times and on his father’s death, he inherited Eshott and returned there from America with Thomas William in 1772. Thomas was reckless with the family finances and nearly obliterated their wealth and landholdings after borrowing heavily. In 1786, he left Eshott Hall, and it was sold out of the family.9 Thomas William was named as his father’s heir and sent to study law at Edinburgh University. The Carr family eventually moved to Newcastle where they became close friends of the Hollands, who were ancestors of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.10
In 1794, Thomas William married Frances Morton, who was also from an old Northumberland family (figure 3). In 1801, he was called to the bar. Four years later, Thomas Carr was appointed Solicitor to the Excise, the government department dealing revenue chargeable on the manufacture or sale of liquor and tobacco. His distance from London and his reluctance to spend too much time away from home, led him to move his family south in 1807. They chose the country rather than the city and settled in Hampstead, then a rural village on the outskirts of London, surrounded by fields.11
By the early eighteenth century, Hampstead had become a fashionable spa with wells and an assembly room.