Regency Personalities Series-Sir Charles Bunbury 6th Baronet

Regency Personalities Series

In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Sir Charles Bunbury 6th Baronet
May 1740 – 31 March 1821

Charles Bunbury

Sir Charles Bunbury 6th Baronet was a British politician and the first husband of Lady Sarah Lennox.

Bunbury was the eldest son of Reverend Sir William Bunbury, 5th Baronet, Vicar of Mildenhall, Suffolk, and his wife Eleanor, daughter of Vere Graham. The caricaturist Henry Bunbury was his younger brother. He was educated at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Bunbury was returned to Parliament as one of two representatives for Suffolk in 1761, a seat he held until 1784 and again from 1790 to 1812. He was also High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1788.

Bunbury married firstly Lady Sarah, daughter of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond (a grandson of Charles II), and one of the famous Lennox sisters, in 1762. Their notorious marriage, which produced no children (although Sarah gave birth to a daughter by her lover Lord William Gordon in 1769), was dissolved by Act of Parliament in 1776 (on the grounds of Sarah’s adultery). He married secondly a woman by the name of Margaret sometime after 1776. There were no children from this marriage either. Bunbury died in March 1821, aged 80, and was succeeded by his nephew, Henry. Margaret, Lady Bunbury, died in February 1822.

Bunbury was an important figure in the field of horse-racing. He was a steward of the Jockey Club and his horses included the Epsom Derby winners Diomed, Eleanor and Smolensko.

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Regency Personalities Series-General Henry Edward Fox

Regency Personalities Series

In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

General Henry Edward Fox
4 March 1755 – 18 July 1811

Henry Edward Fox

General Henry Edward Fox a son of Henry Fox, first Baron Holland and his second wife, (Georgiana) Caroline Fox, née Lennox, he was a younger brother of the politician Charles James Fox.

He attended Westminster School before being commissioned as a cornet in the 1st dragoon guards in 1770. Soon after that he spent 1 year’s leave at the military academy at Strasbourg. After his return he rose to lieutenant (1773) then captain (1774).

In 1773 he moved to the 38th Regiment of Foot, stationed at Boston, and fought in the American War of Independence (spending 1778-79 on leave in England). By the end of the war he had risen to colonel and king’s aide-de-camp, and he then moved to command the forces in Nova Scotia (1783–89), where he was influential in the creation of the new colony of New Brunswick, and then the Chatham barracks (1789–93).

Next he was quartermaster-general on the Duke of York’s staff in Flanders to replace the recently killed James Moncrieff (1793–95) and fought in the Netherlands theatre of the French Revolutionary Wars. He then served as inspector-general of the recruiting service (1795–99), lieutenant-governor of Minorca (1799–1801) following its capture from the French, commander in chief of all British Mediterranean forces outside Gibraltar (1801–03, replacing General Sir Ralph Abercromby fatally wounded at the battle of Alexandria) and finally Commander-in-Chief, Ireland (1803). In Ireland he was caught off-guard by Robert Emmet’s Dublin uprising (23 July 1803) and was quickly replaced by Lieutenant-General Cathcart, whose appointment was gazetted on 20 October.

Fox moved to be commander of the London district (1803), Lieutenant-Governor of Gibraltar (1804–06), Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean (1806–07) and minister to Sicily. With his health weakening, Fox passed active command of the force to his deputy, Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore. The smallness of his force (made yet smaller when Major-General Mackenzie Fraser was sent to occupy Alexandria) meant he refused the repeated requests from the Sicilian court and William Drummond, British minister at the Sicilian court, for land operations on the Italian mainland. Fox and Moore also opposed the naval commander William Sidney Smith’s political machinations at the Sicilian court, contrary as they were to the army’s tactics for the Italian theatre, until Fox’s ill health finally led to his being recalled by the British government and replaced by Moore. Fox was promoted full general on 25 April 1808, appointed governor of Portsmouth in 1810 and died the following year.

On 14 November 1786 he married Marianne Clayton, daughter of William Clayton, 4th Baronet and sister of Catherine, Lady Howard de Walden, and they had 3 children

• Louisa Amelia Fox (d. 1828), later wife of Major-General Sir Henry Bunbury
• Henry Stephen Fox, (1791–1846), later the UK’s envoy-extraordinary and minister-plenipotentiary to the United States of America
• Caroline Fox, who married Major-General William Napier

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Regency Personalities Series-Sir Henry Bunbury 7Th Baronet

Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Sir Henry Bunbury 7Th Baronet
4 March 1778 – 13 April 1860

Sir Henry, son of the famous caricaturist, Henry William Bunbury and Catherine Horneck, was educated at Westminster, and served on active service in the army from 1795–1809, notably in the Helder Campaign 1799, the Egyptian Campaign 1801, and the campaigns in the Mediterranean, where Bunbury served as Quartermaster-General. He particularly distinguished himself at the Battle of Maida in 1806. He served as Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies from 1809-16. He was promoted to the rank of Major-General and awarded the KCB in 1815, and in the same year was responsible for informing Napoleon of his sentence of deportation to St Helena. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant-General.

Bunbury succeeded to the baronetcy in 1821 on the death of his uncle, Thomas Charles Bunbury. He was High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1825 and an active Member of Parliament for Suffolk from 1830 to 1832.

Bunbury was the author of several historical works of value, the most notable being his military memoirs Narratives of Some Passages in the Great War with France, first published in 1854.

“Henry Bunbury’s Great War with France is perhaps the most valuable record… which any soldier has bequeathed to us of the long struggle that began in 1793 and ended in 1815. and it derives its value from the fact that the author was not only a good soldier, well skilled in his profession, but that he was, as a staff officer, thrown with the best British commanders… of his day; that he had opportunities of discussing with them every point of military policy and the details of many important campaigns; and that further he was a highly educated gentleman, with a seeing eye, a kindly nature, a keen sense of the ridiculous, and a very real literary gift.”

Bunbury married twice; firstly in Sicily in 1807 to Louisa Amelia Fox, daughter of General Henry Edward Fox and secondly in Pau, France in 1830 to Emily Louisa Napier, daughter of Colonel George Napier and Lady Sarah Lennox, who had formerly been married to his uncle. With his first wife he had four sons. His first wife was the granddaughter of Lady Caroline Fox, who was the elder sister to his second wife’s mother, Lady Sarah Lennox.

The eldest son, Sir Charles James Fox Bunbury inherited his title and was a well known naturalist. His second son, Sir Edward Herbert Bunbury, also a member of Parliament, was well known as a geographer and archaeologist, and author of a History of Ancient Geography. Another son Henry William St Pierre Bunbury was an explorer in Western Australia.

He died at Barton Hall, Bury, Suffolk.

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