party led by Charles James Fox. Reformers and sympathetic to the needs the people, they were considered to be the leaders of the popular party. The historian Henry Hallam said, “the Whigs had a natural tendency to improvement, the Tories an aversion to it.” The Whig political program later encompassed not only the supremacy of Parliament over the monarch but also support for free trade, Catholic emancipation, the abolition of slavery, and the expansion of the franchise, or right to vote. Stephen found a natural alliance with the Whigs and was befriended by Fox. His attendance record at Parliament was poor, largely due to his ill health.
Stephen served for a period as one of the Members of Parliament for Hebdon. Later, after losing that seat, he was returned as the Member of Parliament for Helston, Cornwall. This led to an interest in tin mining, an important industry in the county at that time and one mine, close to Wadebridge in the south of the county was known as Wheal Lushington.9
After Stephen joined his father-in-law’s bank, it was renamed Boldero and Lushington which, by this time, had become one of the biggest and best-known banks in London. However, its early success only led to its failure when it overstretched its resources. In 1811, the bank ran short of funds and unsuccessfully applied to the Bank of England for assistance. It was a huge shock to both to investors and customers when, in January 1812, the bank stopped all payments and later applied for bankruptcy. There being no assets, Boldero’s London house and its contents, together with his family’s plantations in the West Indies, were sold to pay off debtors.
According to some biographical notes compiled by a member of his family, Stephen Lushington was once ordered to go to Oporto for the benefit of his health. He returned on a ship carrying a cargo of port wine that was pursued by French privateers. After ordering the crew to their posts, the captain invited Stephen to come up on deck and encourage them by his presence. Suffering from gout, he was carried up and took a seat on the deck with a drawn sword in his hand. The French ship was eventually chased off by an English Man of War.10
Following their marriage, Stephen and his family settled at South Hill Park, a fine Georgian mansion near Bracknell, Berkshire. When traveling between Bracknell and his London home in Harley Street, Stephen found that the roads were often so bad that the family coach, despite being drawn by four horses and attended by two footmen, could not do more than reach Slough by the evening. As a consequence, he developed the habit of walking the distance, about twenty miles, arriving just in time for supper. There is a story of how, on one occasion, he was waiting in his carriage at Slough:
While his servant went into the tap to get a drink, a highwayman put his head in the window and demanded his purse in which [he] had 100 guineas. He gave him 10 guineas and told him to be off, declining to give up any of his possessions. The highway man then rode off saying “God bless you” and at the same moment the servant came out and asked permission to follow up the highwayman, whereupon [he] declined saying he would be no party to hanging a man whose 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
