“Sir,
“I have perused with mingled feelings of mirth and
compassion, the delectable epistle of Mr. John
Debrett, Editor of the Peerage, Baronetage, and Imperial
Calendar. Being a plain matter-of-fact man, I cannot hope to
compete with that droll personage, in either wit or erudition, and must
resign the field to him in those respects, without attempting to crack
jokes or quote scraps of latin. Nor shall I take any notice of the
personalities which that facetious chronicler has thought it necessary to
have recourse to. Patient, however, of injuries as I am, I cannot consent
to give up my personal identity. You, Mr. Editor, can assure Mr.
Debrett that I, who glory in the signature of the triple P,
am quite a different person from him of the bi-literal appellation of
J. M. We are, I suspect, from different sides of
the channel. Mr. Debrett has thus been affected in
| MAGINN: THE PEERAGE. | 331 |
“Passing by all this buffoonery, let me call to Mr. Debrett’s recollection the true state of the case. I pointed out in his account of the noble families of Howth and Clarina, errors of the most palpable and ridiculous description; and I added that it was scandalously negligent to continue them in edition after edition, said to be carefully revised and corrected. In answer, he tells me, that it is very easy to rectify these errors (the existence of which he cannot deny), which, if true, renders his negligence in suffering them to remain unamended for so many years, still more inexcusable; and that I am a scandalously mean fellow, which, whether true or not, does not establish the correctness of his peerage.
“I confess, however, such is my obtuseness, that I cannot see wherein I am so scandalous. I gave for Mr. Debrett’s book four and twenty shillings under the impression that it was accurate. If not accurate, it is not worth as many pence: and every approach to inaccuracy, is a sensible, a calculable diminution of its value. And I re-assert that it contains as many errors as articles; but I must also repeat, that to prove the assertion at length, would occupy all your columns. If Mr. Debrett have the honesty to return me my twenty-four shillings, which I can assure him I regret parting with for his Peerage, I engage to forward him, by return of post four and twenty blunders as ridiculous as any already mentioned; but as he seems to wish for a farther exposé in public, I shall, with your permission, oblige him with a dozen specimens of his correctness, which I have collected in less than half-an-hour.
“1st. p. 54. We are told that the late
Duke of Dorset was killed at Killarney in Ireland. Now his Grace met with the sad accident,
that put an end to his life, above a hundred miles from Killarney, in a
different province altogether. He might as well say that a gentleman killed
in Norfolk, was killed in Cornwall. I confess I do not lay much stress on
such blunders as these, because they are not very material. If I did I
could glean a hundred of them by barely casting my eyes over his pages; but
as we do not consult peerages for historical facts or
| 332 | APPENDIX. |
“2nd. p. 73. George Paulett of Amport, twelfth Marquis of Winchester, married in 1812 Martha Ingoldsby, who died in 1796. In spite of this droll taste of marrying a woman sixteen years after her death, he had three children; and it is not the least wonderful circumstance, that he himself died in 1800, twelve years before his marriage. I have a dim recollection of reading in Mr. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, an account of a ghost-wedding; but I did not know till now that he had such authentic warrant for the circumstance. I must farther remark, that it is rather scandalous in Mr. Debrett to assert that the noble lady of Sir Joseph Yorke was married twenty-seven years before her mother was united in the holy bonds of matrimony to her father; and that the late Marchioness of Winchester had a grandchild before she had a husband. I omit mentioning that he makes her son to be married a year after his mother. This is almost scandalum magnatum.
“3rd. p.231. Here is more scandal. Bennet, third Earl of Harborough, married, according to this authentic register, in 1748, having had children by his lady in 1739, 1741, 1743, and 1744. What follows is almost as bad. This Earl had a daughter Frances, married to Colonel Morgan in 1776, six years after her father’s death, which occurred in 1770; and yet we are told he left no surviving issue. What is the meaning of this? Does Mr. Debrett mean to insinuate that Lady Frances, though the Earl’s daughter, was not his child?
“4th. p. 986. Here we have scandal against a living lady. The Earl of Mexborough, he says, was married to his Countess, September 25th, 1782, and their daughter Eliza came into the world on the 20th of June preceding. Upon my word Mr. Debrett, this is taking a shocking liberty with Lady Mexborough’s character!
“5th. p. 1248. Again to it! William Townshend, eldest son of Lord Ventry, marries Miss Jones in 1797; but her son by him was born in 1793. On the part of the Hon. Mrs. Mullens, I must take upon me to contradict this calumny, and to expostulate warmly with Mr. Debrett for treating her in this manner, in his scandalous chronicle.
| MAGINN: THE PEERAGE. | 333 |
“6th. p. 375. Catherine, wife of Edward Devereux, eleventh Viscount Hereford, dies February 2nd, 1741, yet has a son on the 19th of the same month, and a daughter in 1743!
“7th. p. 1045. This fashion of Lady Hereford’s appears to have been adopted about the same time in Ireland; for we find that the mother of the first Viscount O’Neil died in 1742, and had her eldest son, the viscount, in 1748, six years after. It appears to me, however, that he is rather unfairly counted her eldest son, as her second son is born in 1746, which, I submit, is an earlier date. But that is a bagatelle here.
“8th. p. 980. We have another post-obit birth—a circumstance, I suspect, rather more frequent in this Peerage than in the Lying-in Hospital—in the case of Catherine, wife of the second Earl of Arran, who dies in 1770, and, according to custom, has a son in 1774, and daughters in 1775 and 1776. This would have been a valuable woman in a new colony.
“9th. p. 584. William Brabazon, Baron Ponsonby of Imokilly, was born in 1744, and married in 1726, only eighteen years before his birth. He had three children nevertheless, one of whom Mr. Debrett makes Knight of the Shire for Cork in 1817, though the gentleman at that time was not in parliament at all; and I perceive that the error is repeated in the revised and corrected edition for 1820. If an edition be published in 1850, I suppose he will still figure as M.P.
“10th. p. 899. Robert Fitzgerald, nineteenth Earl of Kildare, marries in March, 1708, Lady Mary O’Brien, who died in the February preceding. As usual, this hopeful marriage produces eleven children!
“11th. p. 966. Rev. Pierce Butler, third son of the second Earl of Carrick, dies in 1803, and as usual here, marries in 1806. His lady, I see, took a second husband. I hope her second match was more auspicious than her first. It must have been rather unpleasant to be married to a man who had been three years dead.
“12th. p. 1271-2. In the former of these pages,
we are told that Richard Handcock was member for
Athlone in 1800, and in the latter, that William Handcock, first
Lord Castlemaine, represented that town from 1783 to 1801.
Now William represented it until 1804, and I believe
Richard never at all.
| 334 | APPENDIX. |
“There is my dozen for you. It will be in vain for Mr. Debrett to shift these errors on his pressmen. They arise from scandalous negligence somewhere; and it is little matter to the people who like me are out of pocket for Mr. Debrett’s bundle of inaccuracies, whether it is master or man that is to blame for them. I could not help laughing at the suggestion of the worthy editor, that I ought rather to have sent my corrections to him in a private letter, when I recollected how carefully he adds in his advertisement, prefixed to his worthy work, that all correspondence to him on the subject of the Peerage, should be post paid. This is, I suppose what he calls soliciting corrections; but the plain English of it is this—you have lost one pound four shillings by me, and now to enable me to make another edition more correct, you ought to throw away a few additional shillings in postage.
“I believe I take leave of Mr. Debrett here. He refers me to his Baronetage: I have seen that book. Does he wish to have my opinion on it? If so, let him say the word, and I am ready for it, in public or in private.
“I remain, Sir,
“Your humble Servant,
“P.S. The pages refer to the edition of 1817; but the errors exist as well in the edition of 1820 as in the former one, not a single inaccuracy being corrected.”
