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Henry Stanyford Blanckley | |
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![]() Henry Stanyford Blanckley's place of birth: Ordnance House or "Bomb House", now home to the Gibraltar National Museum. | |
Born | 29 September 1752 Gibraltar |
Died | 12 May 1828 Versailles |
Occupation | Officer of the 31st Regiment of Foot, captain 97th Regiment of Foot (1780), gamekeeper in Little Hallingbury, Essex, and British Consul to Menorca and Algiers. |
Nationality | British |
Period | 18th century, 19th century |
Henry Stanyford Blanckley (29 September 1752 [1] [2]) also known as HSB, [3] was an officer of the 31st Regiment of Foot, [4] captain of the 97th Regiment of Foot (1780), [5] gamekeeper in Little Hallingbury, Essex, [6] and British Consul for Menorca and Algiers. [7] A variety of family stories attribute him as a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh. [8] [9] [10]
HSB was born in Gibraltar [8] on 29 September 1752 [1] to Elizabeth and Henry Blanckley. His sister Ann Elizabeth Blanckley later married Alexander Shaw (British Army officer). [11] Their father, Henry Blanckley, held the offices of Storekeeper, Clerk of the Cheque and Clerk of the Survey for Gibraltar Dockyard [12] granting the family residence in the Ordnance House or "Bomb House", now home to the Gibraltar National Museum. According to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James in his 1771 The History of the Herculean Straits the Blanckley's Gibraltar home was:
HSB's father, Henry Blanckley, died in 1773. [14]
In 1777, HSB, an ensign of the 31st Regiment of Foot, sought promotion by requesting permission to purchase the lieutenancy of Alexander Hamilton, who had quit the regiment. [4] The 31st Foot were stationed in North America for the American Revolutionary War and had garrisoned Quebec the previous year:
HSB's father, Henry Blanckley's will was proved on 10 March 1777, four years after his death. He bequeathed everything to his wife Elizabeth, [16] who married Charles MacKintosh in St Pancras Old Church, London on 26 September 1778. [17] Saunder's News Letter records HSB's own marriage six-months later, in March 1779, at Coolyduff, Inniscarra, Cork, Ireland. [18]
His bride was Mary Rogers, [8] daughter of Captain Henry Rogers, who had been buried at Magourney, near Coolyduff, in 1773 [19] Different lines of their descendants believed HSB and Mary Rogers to have been cousins. [9] [10]
HSB was a captain of the 97th Regiment of Foot (1780) and made Brigade-major on 6 April 1882 during the Great Siege of Gibraltar. [5]
HSB's first child was baptised Ann Blanckley in St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, London on 5 March 1784. [20] His first son, named Henry Stanyford Blanckley after him, was born on 5 August 1785, and baptised in Hatfield Peverel, Essex on 3 April 1785. [21] His next three children, Maria (born 8 January 1787) and twins Charles and Caroline (born 3 September 1788) were baptised in the village of Little Hallingbury, Essex. [22]
HSB is listed as a gamekeeper residing in Little Hallingbury in February 1786 [23] and October 1787. [6] According to historian George Redmonds, 18th century gamekeepers were often gentlemen:
HSB auctioned the contents of his Little Hallingbury house on 19 and 20 October 1789. The auction notice, entitled "A CATALOGUE Of all the neat and genteel Household Furniture, Fixtures, Brewing and Dairy Utensils, Beer Casks, about fifteen Loads of exceedingly good Meadow and Clover Hay, and other Valuable Effects The Property of CAPTAIN BLANKLEY Of Little Hallingbury, in the County of Essex", stated that he was leaving the country. [25]
There are no subsequent records of the twins, Charles and Caroline. However, an 1889 letter written from HSB's granddaughter Mary Louisa Philippedes Cammenos to her first cousin Henriette Elizabeth Blanckley, says of their grandmother, Mary née Rogers:
The above letter excerpt suggests that HSB and Mary née Rogers had two other children born in England, of whom one was named Eliza (born c. 1780), and that these, along with the twins Charles and Caroline, died in about 1789, prompting HSB to relocate his family to Menorca, where two more children were born, including HSB's only other son to survive into adulthood, Edward Blanckley.
Henry Stanyford Blanckley, was formally appointed British consul to Majorca, Menorca and Ibiza by George III in 1790. [26] Conditions were hard for the native population of Menorca during his consulship in the 1790s. Britain's ceding of the island to Spanish rule in 1782 had resulted in strict sanctions being imposed on the Menorcans. These included heavy taxation, harsh trade restrictions, the banning of their Catalan language, and the imprisonment their men. Swarming rats and poor harvests added widespread famine to the islanders' plight [27] Spain's switch of allegiance from Britain to France in 1796 [28] closed Menorca to the British fleet, and faced the Blanckleys with an actively hostile government. [29] In the summer of 1797, a plague spread rapidly across the Mediterranean from Constantinople, Corsica and the Barbary Coast, causing Britain to impose a strict quarantine in which all vessels were banned from visiting Menorca. [30] HSB's wife Mary fell gravely ill and went first to the spas of Bath then "in her last recourse". [31] to Bristol Hotwells, where she died on 10 March 1798. [32]
HSB married his second wife, Mary Richards, in Sulham, Berkshire, England on 13 March 1800, [33] resulting in two daughters, Elizabeth (who in 1839 authored Six Years Residence in Algiers, a biographical account of HSB's time as British Consul to Algiers, [7]) and Henrietta. [34]
As the Napoleonic Wars progressed, Spain had grown increasing hostility towards Britain, and Menorca's Spanish governor, Ramirez, imposed increasingly strict sanctions on the Blanckleys. He issued a public order forbidding Menorcan people to visit or communicate with them, and placed HSB under house arrest. His butler was stabbed in the arm with a bayonet when the guards posted at his front door mistook him for HSB. [29] His youngest son, Edward Blanckley joined the Royal Navy as midshipman on 17 January 1805. [35] HSB sought British aid to evacuate the rest of his family from Menorca, and was informed that the 38-gun frigate Seahorse would collect them. However, according to his daughter Elizabeth Broughton's later account, Governor Ramirez compelled the Blanckleys to:
HSB stuffed the "wretched boat" with furniture and animals (including a pair of matched coach horses to prevent the Spanish having them) and hung its mast with international flags to make it look diplomatic and non-combative as they limped through the stormy Mediterranean warzone. Elizabeth Broughton claims they stumbled across the British fleet, and Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, upon spying them, declared:
Elizabeth Broughton continues:
Horatio Nelson wrote to HSB on 28 March 1805:
HSB was British Consul to Algiers from 1806 until 1812. [7] When HSB first met the Dey of Algiers, on 30 September 1806, he refused to salute the Dey's hand, explaining that he reserved that homage for his own sovereign, George III. The Dey, responded by good-humouredly holding out his hand, and shaking HSB's "very heartily." His daughter, Elizabeth, states:
Elizabeth Broughton, however, elaborates that HSB was rarely received his salary from the British government:
HSB appointed his son-in-law Lewis Hippolytus Joseph Tonna (the husband of his daughter Maria) as his secretary in Algiers on 9 October 1806. [40] [31] He employed another son-in-law, Edward Dalzel, the husband of his eldest daughter, Ann, as a clerk. The Dalzels lived in a house adjoining the Blanckley's family villa. [7] The Blanckleys lived in a lavish Moroccan-style clifftop house called Villa Brossette. [41] Author Katie Hickman [42] extrapolated a description of the Blanckley's family home in Algiers from Elizabeth Broughton's 1839 memoirs; [7]
Hickman elaborates that HSB's main role in Algiers was to rescue British subjects from enslavement:
HSB's wife, Mary née Richards, cared for the former slaves he succeeded in liberating:
Hickam provides an example of the Blanckleys' work freeing and caring for formerly enslaved British sailors:
HSB ceased his diplomatic role in 1812 and returned to England with his wife and their two young daughters, Elizabeth and Henrietta. They resided at 8 The Paragon, Bath, Somerset in the home of his widowed maternal aunt Ann Harrison. [43] HSB's mother, Mrs Elizabeth MacKintosh, had died in Bath in 1797. Her widower, Charles MacKintosh, had remained living in the city. In his will, proved 21 July 1804, he bequeathed the bulk of his annuities to his sister-in-law, Mrs Ann Harrison "whose attention to me and my interests has always been such as I never can sufficiently acknowledge" decreeing that she caould continue living in his leased house in The Paragon for 3 months after his death.
When Ann Harrison died on 2 January 1814, HSB wrote to his daughter, Maria in Liverpool:
In November 1815, The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette listed H.S. Blanckley Esq as a committee member appointed for the coming season for the Harmonic Society, whose patron was the Prince Regent [44]
He wrote to Maria again the following year, on 23 April 1816, announcing his plan to emigrate to Europe on account of the previous three cold English winters in Bath having affected his health:
HSB travelled to Europe with second his wife, their young daughters, and his son from his first marriage, Edward Blanckley, in about 1816. [45] The Blanckleys rented a house in Paris where they aided their friends the Matchams to find a rental property in Boulogne-Billancourt. [45] The Matcham family were headed by George Matcham and his wife, Catherine, the sister of Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson. The Matchams, at this time, had Horatio Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton's orphaned fifteen-year-old daughter Horatia Nelson as their ward. The Blanckleys and Matchams toured Europe together, and Edward Blanckley married Harriet Matcham in Naples in April 1819. [45]
HSB died in Versailles on 12 May 1828. [46] [2] [47] His Versailles memorial inscription read:
Several lines of HSB's descendants, as well as those of his sister Ann Elizabeth Shaw née Blanckley, believed HSB to have been descended from Sir Walter Raleigh. These accounts are:
1) Edward Blanckley's daughter Tori, ( Catherine Nelson Parker Toriana Blanckley)'s 1827 obituary reads:
2) Tori's daughter Ethel Mary Ward wrote to her niece in 1937:
3) HSB's granddaughter Mary Louisa Philippedes Cammenos wrote to her first cousin Henriette Elizabeth Blanckley in 1875:
...Lizzie told me that after the death of our aunt Henrietta, all the private papers left by our grandfather came into her possession. and that she had torn and burnt them all, including letters from our grandmother to our grandfather, as well as those from her own grandmother... ...I don't know Tory..." [31]
Tory was her first cousin Catherine Nelson Parker Toriana Blanckley.
4) Alexander MacKintosh Shaw's 1877 "A Genealogical Account of the Shaws" states that Alexander Shaw (1740-1811) secondly married Anne Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Blanckley, noting:
Ann Elizabeth was HSB's sister. She married Colonel Alexander Shaw on 11 February 1772 at St Pancras Chapel in London, after his return from the American Revolutionary War. This account pushes the Blanckley-Raleigh lineage tradition back as far as Ann Elizabeth and HSB's parents’ generation. The author's belief that the male Blanckley line had died out by the time of authorship in 1877 suggests that the Shaw's family story of descent from Raleigh was independent from stories held by Edward Blanckley's line, as his son, Horatio Charles Nelson Blanckley lived until 1899. [50]
5) Lewis H. J. Tonna, the son of HSB's daughter Maria, wrote in 1854:
HSB's step-father, Charles MacKintosh noted in his will, proved on 21 July 1804, that he had previously given his stepson Henry Blankley [sic] Henry Blankley "the use of a tea kettle" from his late wife's estate:
Memorial of Ensign Henry Stanyford Blanckley, 31st Regiment, requesting permission to purchase the Lieutenancy of Alexander Hamilton, of that regiment, who has 'quit the regiment'
John Clevland. Henry Blanckley has been appointed Storekeeper and Clerk of the Cheque at Gibraltar, to replace John Russel who has been appointed Clerk of the Survey at Chatham.
Henry Jenkins, Clerk, Gibraltar Yard. Has informed the Board of the death of Mr. Blanckley Naval Officer here
Part of Counterpart lease of the rectory of Chigwell Textual record item-id -D/DU 1487, box B-000820
![]() | This article has an unclear
citation style. (February 2021) |
Henry Stanyford Blanckley | |
---|---|
![]() Henry Stanyford Blanckley's place of birth: Ordnance House or "Bomb House", now home to the Gibraltar National Museum. | |
Born | 29 September 1752 Gibraltar |
Died | 12 May 1828 Versailles |
Occupation | Officer of the 31st Regiment of Foot, captain 97th Regiment of Foot (1780), gamekeeper in Little Hallingbury, Essex, and British Consul to Menorca and Algiers. |
Nationality | British |
Period | 18th century, 19th century |
Henry Stanyford Blanckley (29 September 1752 [1] [2]) also known as HSB, [3] was an officer of the 31st Regiment of Foot, [4] captain of the 97th Regiment of Foot (1780), [5] gamekeeper in Little Hallingbury, Essex, [6] and British Consul for Menorca and Algiers. [7] A variety of family stories attribute him as a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh. [8] [9] [10]
HSB was born in Gibraltar [8] on 29 September 1752 [1] to Elizabeth and Henry Blanckley. His sister Ann Elizabeth Blanckley later married Alexander Shaw (British Army officer). [11] Their father, Henry Blanckley, held the offices of Storekeeper, Clerk of the Cheque and Clerk of the Survey for Gibraltar Dockyard [12] granting the family residence in the Ordnance House or "Bomb House", now home to the Gibraltar National Museum. According to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James in his 1771 The History of the Herculean Straits the Blanckley's Gibraltar home was:
HSB's father, Henry Blanckley, died in 1773. [14]
In 1777, HSB, an ensign of the 31st Regiment of Foot, sought promotion by requesting permission to purchase the lieutenancy of Alexander Hamilton, who had quit the regiment. [4] The 31st Foot were stationed in North America for the American Revolutionary War and had garrisoned Quebec the previous year:
HSB's father, Henry Blanckley's will was proved on 10 March 1777, four years after his death. He bequeathed everything to his wife Elizabeth, [16] who married Charles MacKintosh in St Pancras Old Church, London on 26 September 1778. [17] Saunder's News Letter records HSB's own marriage six-months later, in March 1779, at Coolyduff, Inniscarra, Cork, Ireland. [18]
His bride was Mary Rogers, [8] daughter of Captain Henry Rogers, who had been buried at Magourney, near Coolyduff, in 1773 [19] Different lines of their descendants believed HSB and Mary Rogers to have been cousins. [9] [10]
HSB was a captain of the 97th Regiment of Foot (1780) and made Brigade-major on 6 April 1882 during the Great Siege of Gibraltar. [5]
HSB's first child was baptised Ann Blanckley in St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, London on 5 March 1784. [20] His first son, named Henry Stanyford Blanckley after him, was born on 5 August 1785, and baptised in Hatfield Peverel, Essex on 3 April 1785. [21] His next three children, Maria (born 8 January 1787) and twins Charles and Caroline (born 3 September 1788) were baptised in the village of Little Hallingbury, Essex. [22]
HSB is listed as a gamekeeper residing in Little Hallingbury in February 1786 [23] and October 1787. [6] According to historian George Redmonds, 18th century gamekeepers were often gentlemen:
HSB auctioned the contents of his Little Hallingbury house on 19 and 20 October 1789. The auction notice, entitled "A CATALOGUE Of all the neat and genteel Household Furniture, Fixtures, Brewing and Dairy Utensils, Beer Casks, about fifteen Loads of exceedingly good Meadow and Clover Hay, and other Valuable Effects The Property of CAPTAIN BLANKLEY Of Little Hallingbury, in the County of Essex", stated that he was leaving the country. [25]
There are no subsequent records of the twins, Charles and Caroline. However, an 1889 letter written from HSB's granddaughter Mary Louisa Philippedes Cammenos to her first cousin Henriette Elizabeth Blanckley, says of their grandmother, Mary née Rogers:
The above letter excerpt suggests that HSB and Mary née Rogers had two other children born in England, of whom one was named Eliza (born c. 1780), and that these, along with the twins Charles and Caroline, died in about 1789, prompting HSB to relocate his family to Menorca, where two more children were born, including HSB's only other son to survive into adulthood, Edward Blanckley.
Henry Stanyford Blanckley, was formally appointed British consul to Majorca, Menorca and Ibiza by George III in 1790. [26] Conditions were hard for the native population of Menorca during his consulship in the 1790s. Britain's ceding of the island to Spanish rule in 1782 had resulted in strict sanctions being imposed on the Menorcans. These included heavy taxation, harsh trade restrictions, the banning of their Catalan language, and the imprisonment their men. Swarming rats and poor harvests added widespread famine to the islanders' plight [27] Spain's switch of allegiance from Britain to France in 1796 [28] closed Menorca to the British fleet, and faced the Blanckleys with an actively hostile government. [29] In the summer of 1797, a plague spread rapidly across the Mediterranean from Constantinople, Corsica and the Barbary Coast, causing Britain to impose a strict quarantine in which all vessels were banned from visiting Menorca. [30] HSB's wife Mary fell gravely ill and went first to the spas of Bath then "in her last recourse". [31] to Bristol Hotwells, where she died on 10 March 1798. [32]
HSB married his second wife, Mary Richards, in Sulham, Berkshire, England on 13 March 1800, [33] resulting in two daughters, Elizabeth (who in 1839 authored Six Years Residence in Algiers, a biographical account of HSB's time as British Consul to Algiers, [7]) and Henrietta. [34]
As the Napoleonic Wars progressed, Spain had grown increasing hostility towards Britain, and Menorca's Spanish governor, Ramirez, imposed increasingly strict sanctions on the Blanckleys. He issued a public order forbidding Menorcan people to visit or communicate with them, and placed HSB under house arrest. His butler was stabbed in the arm with a bayonet when the guards posted at his front door mistook him for HSB. [29] His youngest son, Edward Blanckley joined the Royal Navy as midshipman on 17 January 1805. [35] HSB sought British aid to evacuate the rest of his family from Menorca, and was informed that the 38-gun frigate Seahorse would collect them. However, according to his daughter Elizabeth Broughton's later account, Governor Ramirez compelled the Blanckleys to:
HSB stuffed the "wretched boat" with furniture and animals (including a pair of matched coach horses to prevent the Spanish having them) and hung its mast with international flags to make it look diplomatic and non-combative as they limped through the stormy Mediterranean warzone. Elizabeth Broughton claims they stumbled across the British fleet, and Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, upon spying them, declared:
Elizabeth Broughton continues:
Horatio Nelson wrote to HSB on 28 March 1805:
HSB was British Consul to Algiers from 1806 until 1812. [7] When HSB first met the Dey of Algiers, on 30 September 1806, he refused to salute the Dey's hand, explaining that he reserved that homage for his own sovereign, George III. The Dey, responded by good-humouredly holding out his hand, and shaking HSB's "very heartily." His daughter, Elizabeth, states:
Elizabeth Broughton, however, elaborates that HSB was rarely received his salary from the British government:
HSB appointed his son-in-law Lewis Hippolytus Joseph Tonna (the husband of his daughter Maria) as his secretary in Algiers on 9 October 1806. [40] [31] He employed another son-in-law, Edward Dalzel, the husband of his eldest daughter, Ann, as a clerk. The Dalzels lived in a house adjoining the Blanckley's family villa. [7] The Blanckleys lived in a lavish Moroccan-style clifftop house called Villa Brossette. [41] Author Katie Hickman [42] extrapolated a description of the Blanckley's family home in Algiers from Elizabeth Broughton's 1839 memoirs; [7]
Hickman elaborates that HSB's main role in Algiers was to rescue British subjects from enslavement:
HSB's wife, Mary née Richards, cared for the former slaves he succeeded in liberating:
Hickam provides an example of the Blanckleys' work freeing and caring for formerly enslaved British sailors:
HSB ceased his diplomatic role in 1812 and returned to England with his wife and their two young daughters, Elizabeth and Henrietta. They resided at 8 The Paragon, Bath, Somerset in the home of his widowed maternal aunt Ann Harrison. [43] HSB's mother, Mrs Elizabeth MacKintosh, had died in Bath in 1797. Her widower, Charles MacKintosh, had remained living in the city. In his will, proved 21 July 1804, he bequeathed the bulk of his annuities to his sister-in-law, Mrs Ann Harrison "whose attention to me and my interests has always been such as I never can sufficiently acknowledge" decreeing that she caould continue living in his leased house in The Paragon for 3 months after his death.
When Ann Harrison died on 2 January 1814, HSB wrote to his daughter, Maria in Liverpool:
In November 1815, The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette listed H.S. Blanckley Esq as a committee member appointed for the coming season for the Harmonic Society, whose patron was the Prince Regent [44]
He wrote to Maria again the following year, on 23 April 1816, announcing his plan to emigrate to Europe on account of the previous three cold English winters in Bath having affected his health:
HSB travelled to Europe with second his wife, their young daughters, and his son from his first marriage, Edward Blanckley, in about 1816. [45] The Blanckleys rented a house in Paris where they aided their friends the Matchams to find a rental property in Boulogne-Billancourt. [45] The Matcham family were headed by George Matcham and his wife, Catherine, the sister of Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson. The Matchams, at this time, had Horatio Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton's orphaned fifteen-year-old daughter Horatia Nelson as their ward. The Blanckleys and Matchams toured Europe together, and Edward Blanckley married Harriet Matcham in Naples in April 1819. [45]
HSB died in Versailles on 12 May 1828. [46] [2] [47] His Versailles memorial inscription read:
Several lines of HSB's descendants, as well as those of his sister Ann Elizabeth Shaw née Blanckley, believed HSB to have been descended from Sir Walter Raleigh. These accounts are:
1) Edward Blanckley's daughter Tori, ( Catherine Nelson Parker Toriana Blanckley)'s 1827 obituary reads:
2) Tori's daughter Ethel Mary Ward wrote to her niece in 1937:
3) HSB's granddaughter Mary Louisa Philippedes Cammenos wrote to her first cousin Henriette Elizabeth Blanckley in 1875:
...Lizzie told me that after the death of our aunt Henrietta, all the private papers left by our grandfather came into her possession. and that she had torn and burnt them all, including letters from our grandmother to our grandfather, as well as those from her own grandmother... ...I don't know Tory..." [31]
Tory was her first cousin Catherine Nelson Parker Toriana Blanckley.
4) Alexander MacKintosh Shaw's 1877 "A Genealogical Account of the Shaws" states that Alexander Shaw (1740-1811) secondly married Anne Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Blanckley, noting:
Ann Elizabeth was HSB's sister. She married Colonel Alexander Shaw on 11 February 1772 at St Pancras Chapel in London, after his return from the American Revolutionary War. This account pushes the Blanckley-Raleigh lineage tradition back as far as Ann Elizabeth and HSB's parents’ generation. The author's belief that the male Blanckley line had died out by the time of authorship in 1877 suggests that the Shaw's family story of descent from Raleigh was independent from stories held by Edward Blanckley's line, as his son, Horatio Charles Nelson Blanckley lived until 1899. [50]
5) Lewis H. J. Tonna, the son of HSB's daughter Maria, wrote in 1854:
HSB's step-father, Charles MacKintosh noted in his will, proved on 21 July 1804, that he had previously given his stepson Henry Blankley [sic] Henry Blankley "the use of a tea kettle" from his late wife's estate:
Memorial of Ensign Henry Stanyford Blanckley, 31st Regiment, requesting permission to purchase the Lieutenancy of Alexander Hamilton, of that regiment, who has 'quit the regiment'
John Clevland. Henry Blanckley has been appointed Storekeeper and Clerk of the Cheque at Gibraltar, to replace John Russel who has been appointed Clerk of the Survey at Chatham.
Henry Jenkins, Clerk, Gibraltar Yard. Has informed the Board of the death of Mr. Blanckley Naval Officer here
Part of Counterpart lease of the rectory of Chigwell Textual record item-id -D/DU 1487, box B-000820