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THE

ANNUAL

BIOGRAPHY AND OBITUARY,

OF

1834.

PART I.

MEMOIRS OF CELEBRATED PERSONS, WHO HAVE DIED WITHIN THE YEARS 1833-1834.

No. I.

REV. JOSEPH DRURY, D.D.

LATE HEAD MASTER OF HARROW.

a

So many of the nobility and gentry of our land, so large proportion of those who are now distinguished in the senate, the pulpit, and the bar, are indebted for their early intellectual training to the lately deceased Joseph Drury, D.D., and he was so well known, during a large portion of his life, to persons eminent for taste and literature, that we should be justly chargeable with culpable negligence, were no biographical sketch of him to appear in these pages.

The subject of this memoir, although descended from one of the most ancient houses of our English gentry, was the exclusive architect of his own moderate fortunes; and had far more satisfaction in so considering himself, than in any pride of pedigree. It may be allowable, nevertheless, for a biographer to notice that about which he himself was somewhat indifferent.

The founder of the family in England was a Norman gentleman, who came over with the Conqueror, and whose

name is to be found in both the copies of the Battel Abbey Roll, between those of Durand and Dabittot. His settlement was fixed in the parish of Thurston, near Bury St. Edmunds. There his family continued, under the appellation derived from their locality, as John or Henry, &c. of Thurston, until the time when the Norman surnames had by degrees made their way into general use. In the beginning of the fifteenth century, Sir Roger Drury, the property of his house having very considerably advanced, by marriage and other causes, in its later generations, removed his family to Rougham, also near Bury; and there his descendants kept residence for more than two hundred years. As has often been the case with families of landed estate, the junior branches established houses of more fame than that which remained in possession of the patrimonial inheritance. Of these were the Drurys of Ickworth, in Suffolk, from whom the estate of Ickworth passed, by marriage, about the end of the sixteenth century, to the ancestor of the Marquis of Bristol, its present proprietor; and the Drurys of Hawsted, in the same county, whose settlement at Hawsted was of longer continuance, and who were, for several generations, connected with the court, and long represented the county of Suffolk in parliament. Of this stock was Sir William Drury, governor of Ireland, who suppressed the rebellion of the Desmonds, in the south, in the time of Elizabeth; and his cousin, Sir Drue Drury, who married a cousin of Queen Anne Boleyn, and who, being of the privy chamber of Elizabeth, was, conjointly with Sir Amias Paulet, intrusted with the custody of Mary Queen of Scots. He lived to the age of ninety-nine years.

The Hawsted branch (who were, moreover, proprietors of Drury House, from which our present Drury Lane took its appellation,) ended in a female, who died unmarried, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and whose well-known epitaph, by Donne, has conferred on her name a poetical immortality.

"Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought."

The Hawsted estate passed through a female to Sir Christopher Wray, who sold it in 1656. *

To return to the elder branch: Sir Robert Drury, of Rougham, who died at the age of eighty-two, in the year 1622, had ten sons, besides daughters; some of the former died young and unmarried. He outlived his eldest son; and was succeeded in his estates by his grandson, who was born in 1599, and who appears to have been the last possessor but one of this ancient patrimony. A younger son of Sir Robert became settled at Lesgyat Holt, in Norfolk; and it is from him that the subject of these pages traced his descent,

* In Sir John Cullum's "History of Hawsted" will be found a remarkable pedigree of the Drury family, from the Conquest to the first herald's visitation in the reign of James I.; the different houses, all portrayed there, having, by marriages and inheritances, become possessors of several mansions and manors, mostly in Suffolk. Some of these estates, they retained nearly six hundred years, as dated from the first settler at the Conquest. This pedigree was originally drawn up by Mr. Thomas Drury, of the Inner Temple, in the reign of James I. He was a younger son of the then representative of the house of Rougham, He compiled it for a descendant either of Sir William or Sir Drue Drury, probably the latter, as it came by inheritance into the hands of Sir W. Wake of Northamptonshire, one of whose ancestors married the last female descendant of Sir Drue. Sir W. Wake allowed the use of it to Sir J. Cullum for his "History of Hawsted." The writer of the pedigree, who, in a preface, speaks of his family as one "replenyshed with knights and esquires, and greatlie honoured with souldiers of notable fame and memory," takes evidently a great pride in a female descent from Catherine Swinford, daughter, by her first husband, of Catherine Lady Swinford, who became the second wife of John of Gaunt, "time-honoured Lancaster." Lady Swinford bore children to the Duke before her marriage, who were legitimatised by Richard II. in 1397, as also by the Pope. From the eldest of these children (John Beaufort, Marquis of Somerset,) Henry VII. was lineally descended, and claimed the crown in right of such descent. The compiler of the pedigree evidently esteemed Sir W. Drury, who succeeded Sir H. Sydney as governor of Ireland in 1580, as the hero of the family, and has given, in a note, an abstract of his public services. It is remark. able that the original of this pedigree should not only now be in excellent preservation, as Sir J. Cullum states it to be, but that the first rough draft of it should also be in existence. Such, however, is the case, and it is now in possession of the Rev. H. Drury of Harrow, bound up with some other genealogies. It corresponds entirely in matter with that printed by the historian of Hawsted, but is in parts rather difficult to be deciphered, from original alterations and erasures. Of the family of Rougham, at which place, it is believed, he was buried, was likewise William Drury, (styled, in Latin, Druræus,) a learned and accomplished professor in the Jesuits' College at Douay, mentioned with great praise by Dodd, in his Church History, as the author of some well known dramatic works in the Latin language. He lived about the beginning of the seventeenth century.

of which his father retained a good deal of traditional knowledge. Here, at this last-named residence, an estate and mansion of some degree of local importance continued in the family until the beginning of the last century, when it was finally alienated, and left the immediate line, of which we are treating, with no other patrimonial possession but the vain and empty honour of a long-drawn ancestry. The extravagances and imprudence of the last owner of Holt were the immediate causes of this decay. Dr. Gibson, afterwards the excellent and pastoral Bishop of London, was was a faithful and tried friend of the family, and offered, for their sake, to arrest the sale, by taking on himself the redemption of certain encumbrances. It is not known for what reasons such a prop was never applied; but the probability is, that in this, as in so many similar cases, the edifice, when thoroughly inspected for the calculation of repairs, was found in a much more decayed and rotten state than the owner had represented it; in other words, that the aid which friendship nobly offered was inadequate for the purposes required, when all the real facts of the case were laid open. The elder son of the last landed proprietor of this line became a lawyer at Colchester, where he is buried. He is mentioned in the "Biographia Dramatica," as the author of some few unimportant pieces for the stage, long since, and, it should seem, not undeservedly, consigned to oblivion. He was a man by no means of a disposition or habits likely to redeem the broken fortunes of his family.

Mr. Thomas Drury, father of the subject of this memoir, was the younger brother of the dramatist. He led a life of comparative obscurity, and owed most of the comforts of his old age to the affection of his son, who had the opportunity of administering those comforts during many years, as his father lived to the year 1805, when he died at the advanced age of eighty-seven. He was a man of amiable.

Born in 1669; of Queen's College, Oxford; Bishop of Lincoln, 1715; of London, 1720; deceased, 1748. In biographical notices of this excellent and learned man there are many traits of a noble and generous spirit.

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