on marriage as was then required. He presented the college with two silver dishes with an amusing inscription of how he had fallen, “alas, into matrimony: farewell and be warned.”
The future of Lushington’s older brother Henry, who was heir to the title and fortune, was guided entirely by his father, whereas Stephen’s education and career were left largely to his mother. After her son left university, Lady Lushington wrote to Lord Melville hoping to get her son a government appointment. She explained how “for many years back his head has run upon nothing but politics.”5 Despite meeting with Melville, Lady Lushington was unsuccessful in furthering her son’s prospects. Stephen Lushington’s son, Vernon, writing in 1855, stated that his father had been offered an undersecretaryship of state, “but some noble lord in the Cabinet objected to it, & my father was not appointed; & I often heard him congratulate himself on his rejection, for ‘Perhaps I should have ended my days long ago in some miserable colony or other, & then where wd. you have been, my children.’”6
In 1806, Lushington was called to the bar of the Inner Temple and, later that year, he entered Parliament as Member for Great Yarmouth. An American visitor to England at this time described him as:
of the middling size, rather slender in person, with a pensive and almost melancholy expression of countenance. The tones of his voice, too, are solemn, melodious and pathetic . . . The powers of Dr L. as an orator are certainly of no common stamp.7
Lushington’s parliamentary and legal careers will be considered later. For the time being, we turn to a major turning point in his domestic life, his marriage in 1821 to Sarah Grace Carr, a daughter of the Newcastle lawyer Thomas William Carr.
The Carrs of Hampstead
The Carrs were an old Northumberland family who, like the Lushingtons, could trace their ancestry back to the early fifteenth century.8 Thomas William Carr was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1770 where his father, also named Thomas, had settled earlier in the century to take up the lucrative post of customs collector. He was the son of William Carr who lived at of Eshott Hall, Northumberland, a fine Palladian style house which stands close to the beautiful Northumberland coast.
Thomas senior married four times and on his father’s death, he inherited Eshott and returned there from America with Thomas William in 1772. Thomas was reckless with the family finances and nearly obliterated their wealth and landholdings after borrowing heavily. In 1786, he left Eshott Hall, and it was sold out of the family.9 Thomas William was named as his father’s heir and sent to study law at Edinburgh University. The Carr family eventually moved to Newcastle where they became close friends of the Hollands, who were ancestors of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.10
In 1794, Thomas William married Frances Morton, who was also from an old Northumberland family (figure 3). In 1801, he was called to the bar. Four years later, Thomas Carr was appointed Solicitor to the Excise, the government department dealing revenue chargeable on the manufacture or sale of liquor and tobacco. His distance from London and his reluctance to spend too much time away from home, led him to move his family south in 1807. They chose the country rather than the city and settled in Hampstead, then a rural village on the outskirts of London, surrounded by fields.11
By the early eighteenth century, Hampstead had become a fashionable spa with wells and an assembly room. When the Carrs settled there, the village was home to many well-to-do merchants and professional men as well as a number of artists and writers. It was ideal for Carr who, although a lawyer by profession, at home was a devotee of music and the arts and on close terms with several leading artists and designers of the day including Arthur Devis, Thomas Hope and Robert Smirke. Carr’s circle of friends also included the wealthy banker and abolitionist Samuel Hoare Jr., and the poets William Wordsworth and Robert Southey.12 A Hampstead neighbor was the Scottish author and poet Joanna Baillie, who extolled the virtues of the place in her verse:
It is a goodly sight through the clear air,
From Hampstead’s heathy height to see at once
England’s vast capital in fair expanse.
It was Hampstead’s “clear air” and “heathy height” that drew Thomas Carr to the place as he explained to Wordsworth, “I have reason to love it [Hampstead] with gratitude for I believe it saved my Life.” Wordsworth later recorded that Carr had confided in him,
that in consequence of severe application to business his health had entirely failed, a complaint having been generated the seat of which he thought was in his heart, and I came here, said he, as I believed to die,—But relaxation from business and pure air, by little and little restored me, and I am now excellently well and my children 8 in number healthy and flourishing. The seat of his disease proved to be the Liver; he is now quite well and blooming, but in the lines of his face are traces rather of sickness than years. When I last saw him about ten years ago he was the most youthful and healthful looking Man of my acquaintance.13
The Carrs lived at “Maryon Hall,” an impressive, late eighteenth-century, house, in an area known as Frognal.14 It was conveniently close to the center of the village and the parish church. Wordsworth described it as follows:
most charmingly situated . . . which though not many yards from the public road sees nothing of it, but looks down the hill sprinkled with trees over a scenicly [sic] rich woody Country, like one of our uncut forests, towards the smoke of London and upon the Kentish and Surrey hills far beyond.15
Sarah Grace was the first of Thomas and Frances’s eight children. She had two sisters both of whom married well. Isabella married Sir Culling Eardley Smith, a wealthy religious campaigner and a founder of the Evangelical Alliance, and Laura married Robert Monsey Rolfe, Baron Cranworth who became Lord Chancellor. The Cranworths lived in Kent where their neighbor was Charles Darwin. The other girls—Frances Rebecca and Anna Margaret—never married. There were three sons, Andrew Morton, Thomas William and William Ogle. Andrew Morton and William both followed their father into the law.16 Morton later moved to Edinburgh where he became Solicitor to the Excise, and William, who entered the diplomatic service, traveled with his sister Anna Margaret to Ceylon where he became King’s Advocate and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.17 Thomas William junior took holy orders and became an Anglican priest.
A Literary Coterie
The Carrs soon established themselves at the center of a lively literary coterie in Hampstead which included Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes. Baillie knew Byron and Keats and her work was greatly admired by Sir Walter Scott. The Baillie sisters were considered “sociable, hospitable, and much admired and visited, being on intimate terms of friendship with many eminent figures in the arts and sciences.”18 Joanna wrote to Walter Scott, “We have a most agreeable neighbour here, a great favourite of my Sisters & mine . . . Mr Carr, a learned Barrister.”19 Together, the Baillies and the Carrs made the middle-class society in Hampstead “very agreeable.”20 Scott himself dined with the Carrs on at least one occasion in May 1815.21
Another literary lion, the poet and essayist Anna Letitia Barbauld, moved to Hampstead with her husband, the Reverend Rochemont Barbauld, in 1785.22 She wrote several powerful, controversial, political tracts praising the French Revolution; criticizing Parliament in its failure to abolish slavery and championing the rights of Dissenters from the Church of England.23 At one time, she had sought to mentor the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but he later turned against her. Barbauld was befriended by Joanna Baillie who almost certainly introduced her to the Carrs, and it was they she probably had in mind when, noticing the surplus of young women in Hampstead, she wrote, “I pity the young ladies of Hampstead . . . there are several very agreeable ones. One gentleman in particular has five tall
