PERCY (afterwards GREATHEED BERTIE PERCY), Hon. Charles (1794-1870), of Guys Cliffe, nr. Warwick.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832, ed. D.R. Fisher, 2009
Available from Cambridge University Press

Constituency

Dates

8 Feb. 1826 - Mar. 1829

Family and Education

b. 4 Mar. 1794, 8th but 6th surv. s. of Algernon Percy†, 1st earl of Beverley (d. 1830), and Isabella Susanna, da. of Peter Burrell† of Langley Park, Beckenham, Kent; bro. of George Percy, Lord Lovaine*, Hon. Henry Percy*, Hon. Josceline Percy† and Hon. William Henry Percy*. educ. Eton 1805; Christ Church, Oxf. 1812. m. 20 Mar. 1822, Ann Caroline, illegit. da. of Bertie Greatheed (d. 1804), grandda. and h. of Bertie Bertie Greatheed of Guys Cliffe, 1da. Took names of Greatheed Bertie before Percy by royal lic. 10 Apr. 1826. d. 11 Oct. 1870.

Offices Held

Treas. Ionian Islands 1818-21; priv. sec. to sec. of state for war and colonies June 1821-Jan. 1826; comptroller of household to ld. lt. [I] Mar. 1829-Dec. 1830.

Sheriff, Warws. 1835-6.

Biography

Percy, the youngest son of the Pittite 1st earl of Beverley (the second son of the 1st duke of Northumberland), spent his childhood at Orwell Park, near Ipswich. Of his elder brothers, one entered the diplomatic service, one the church, two the navy and one the army. After his conventional education, during which he became a close friend of Ralph Sneyd, George Agar Ellis* and the 2nd earl of Clare, he evidently held a place in Princess Charlotte’s household. In 1815 he visited the battlefield of Waterloo and spent some time in Paris. He led a largely aimless life, joining White’s and indulging his literary and aesthetic tastes, until 1818, when, after making an unsuccessful application for the vacant secretaryship of the Cape, he secured the post of treasurer of the Ionian Islands, or, as he facetiously termed it, ‘the Vansittartship of Corfu’; it was worth £800 a year.

For Percy, who felt that his cousin, the 3rd duke of Northumberland, might have exerted himself to ‘obtain for me any reasonable thing, such as a commissionership of stamps, which would be a life provision’, it was a question of faute de mieux. He sailed early in March 1819 and, after a brief stay at Gibraltar, which he liked, he arrived in Corfu on 25 Apr., dreading ‘the prospect of my life there, beyond belief, and far beyond what common sense will justify’. His initial off-hand reception by the autocratic lord high commissioner Sir Thomas Maitland,† who set him to work to learn accounting, filled him with despair. Yet he was captivated by the beauty and tranquillity of Corfu. Preferring the company of such ‘sensible reading men’ as he could find to that of the ‘drinking, smoking, whoring garrison sparks’, he was horrified by the contempt shown by the British for the natives; he made an attempt to master modern Greek. He soon realized that his office, which afforded him no scope for initiative, ‘cannot possibly give me an honour or reputation, nor indeed even habits of business’, as Maitland interfered in everything. Although he was not particularly disappointed when the commissioner reduced his salary by £100, having budgeted before setting out for its not exceeding £700, he was at a low ebb by July:

The pleasantest moments I have passed since I left England were on board ship ... but here, fixed, without occupation to employ, much less interest me, without a friend or even acquaintance for whom I feel other than perfect indifference, feeling the total neglect I experience, yet not wishing it otherwise, and added to all a trying, debilitating, unpleasant and unhealthy climate, certainly does not mark out Corfu as a chosen residence. The beauties of the country are cut off from me also, by the malaria reigning there. Add to all these, that the necessaries of life are all dear, and that the same manoeuvring and reckoning and economy is necessary, which has always hitherto annoyed me. Could I come as lord high commissioner at some future time I should like it, from the conviction I feel that in that situation so much good might be done that is now neglected; but with my situation, I have no power, however limited, neither have I means had I the power, and my example here is nothing.

Maitland’s temporary absence and a three-week tour of the other islands in the company of Sir Frederick Adam, the military commander at Malta, who befriended him, not only removed Percy from the worst of the summer heat, but raised his spirits and ‘entirely reconciled’ him to residence at Corfu: ‘under the influence of climate, blue devils, outraged self-sufficiency and neglected vanity, I have abused this place ... far beyond its deserts’. He tried to learn Turkish as well as Greek, and began to get on better with Maitland, who had ‘spoken kindly of me in England’, though he was for a while tormented by fear that his earlier disparaging remarks in letters home might come to the attention of the authorities. On British domestic politics, he feared that the ‘hurry and precipitation’ of the Liverpool ministry’s handling of the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre had ‘produced a feeling hostile to them and their cause amongst a considerable portion of otherwise well disposed persons’, and he had little confidence that ‘the powers that be were strong enough to support our constitution as it is’. At the same time, he could not ‘bear those who truckle to the mob’ and deemed himself ‘a poor creature in politics, as I find myself always on the neutral ground, and unwilling to go heartily the length of either party’. He professed to favour a purge of the patronage system and the adoption by government of the ‘new and more enlightened system’ of ‘commerce and political economy’. He anticipated nothing but trouble and embarrassment from the prosecution of Queen Caroline, which he considered an act of ‘insanity’: ‘the cause of public morality will not gain, even state convenience is not consulted by it, but the bad effects are clear and palpable’, he wrote on 18 Oct. 1820. He did not think that ministers could creditably remain in office, wondered whether a conservative Whig administration headed by Lord Lansdowne might be formed and told Sneyd:

It is only to your private ear that I twaddle in this way in politics, and I am glad I am not in Parliament, for I fear I should give mortal offence if I were to the high Tories of my own family, for I find the blue part wearing away. I believe it may be attributed (if not to right reason) a little to the inherent contradictiousness of man, for I am sickened by the super ultra Toryism of the court here.

In June 1820 Percy had confided to Sneyd his matrimonial interest in Ann Caroline Greatheed, a ‘little, fat, good humoured’ young woman, whom he had first met at Grimsthorpe, Lincolnshire, the home of his uncle, the 1st Lord Gwydir and his wife Baroness Willoughby d’Eresby. Miss Greatheed was a connection of the latter, whose aunt Lady Mary Bertie, sister of her father, the 3rd duke of Ancaster, had married in 1747 Samuel Greatheed (d. 1765), the owner of a plantation in St. Kitts and of a house and estate at Guys Cliffe, near Warwick, which borough he had represented, 1747-61. Samuel Greatheed’s only surviving son and heir Bertie Greatheed, born in 1759, was a member of the British literary coterie which was active at Florence in the mid-1780s. His blank verse tragedy, The Regent, was supported by his friends John Kemble and Sarah Siddons, but it flopped when put on at Drury Lane in 1788. In an interlude from his foreign travels, he unsuccessfully contested Leicester as ‘Citizen’ Greatheed in 1796. His only son and namesake, born in 1781, was a talented artist, who exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802. In December that year his eccentric parents, who had withdrawn him from Eton after two years to educate him themselves, took him to Paris, so that he might study the masterpieces in the Louvre. They were detained on the resumption of hostilities in 1803, but allowed to go on parole to Germany, whence they moved to Italy. Bertie Greatheed junior died at Vicenza, 8 Oct. 1804, leaving an illegitimate daughter, Ann Caroline. She was brought up by her grandparents, who made her their sole heir.1

Therein lay not the least of her attractions for Percy, whose suit had been encouraged by the old Greatheeds. He renewed it, propitiously, by letter from Corfu in 1820, though he typically fell prey to guilt over the ‘tone of mercenary levity’ in which he had introduced the subject to Sneyd. He became increasingly anxious to return to England to bring matters to a conclusion, but was initially frustrated when Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary, to whom he owed his job, got wind of his wishes and intervened to forbid Maitland to give him leave of absence. Towards the end of 1820 Percy appealed directly to Bathurst, citing ‘particular private reasons’ for wanting to go home. The intercession of his eldest brother Lord Lovaine, a lord of the bedchamber (like Northumberland), emboldened him to persuade Maitland to write to Bathurst in his favour. He was optimistic at the close of the year, though reconciled to a delay while he acted as one of the commissioners appointed to try some state prisoners. Bathurst agreed to his leaving Corfu and offered him the position of his private secretary. Percy stalled, asking for the interval of his journey home to consider the offer; but he was inwardly resigned to accepting it, even though the salary was only £300 and Bathurst had ruled out any prospect of future permanent employment. As he told Sneyd, ‘it would be folly to throw away a trump, which appears to offer itself’; and it was ‘showing some decision of character to give up £500 at least, in the hand, for a hen in the bush’. Percy arrived in England at the end of May 1821 and a fortnight later began his work in Downing Street.2 He was immediately ‘bored and uncomfortable’, perceiving that ‘it is not to be in the slightest degree a situation of confidence, or that if it was, I have not the power of availing myself of it’. He rapidly became nostalgic for the ‘peace and tranquillity’ of Corfu, ‘which I rashly left for smoke and gloom, cool acquaintances, and friends on the point of departure’: ‘I have been a prey to blue devils. I want the peace within, without [sic] which external accidents cannot have any permanent effects’. However, he needed the money, and he stayed in the job, nominally at least, for almost five years.

Shortly before Percy married Miss Greatheed in March 1822 Maria Edgeworth, who described her as ‘a great and fat heiress’ with an appropriately ‘very large’ head, reported that as ‘the substance is all on her side, the family on his’, they ‘have been called Quantity and Quality, or better still, Flesh and Blood’. Sir James Mackintosh* described her as ‘the giantess of seventeen’ and Percy as ‘a puny insect shivering in the breeze’.3 Bertie Greatheed settled on the bride, subject to his wife’s life interest, Guys Cliffe, property in Leamington, some Ancaster estates in Lincolnshire and the St. Kitts plantation.4 Yet Percy remained short of ready cash and was alarmed at the old Greatheeds’ extravagance, which seemed to threaten to impair the inheritance. In January 1823 he whined to Sneyd, who was in Rome, from Guys Cliffe:

I foresee ruin, without comfort. Oh! that I could have retained for a couple of years my situation at Corfu ... My longing to get abroad is greater from the numerous obstacles, and from the pressure of such slight vexations, which like the ropes of the Lilliputians are scarce perceptible, and yet bind me hand and foot.

He and his pregnant wife (they had one child, Ann Barbara Isabella) were at Keele and Teddesley in November 1823. Observing that Mrs. Percy ‘sings like a nightingale’, Lady Granville reflected on ‘how blessings are thrown away in this odd world’.5 In August 1824 Bathurst gave Percy permission to make a foreign tour, provided he did not stay away too long and so invite censure. The following month he and his wife set off for Italy, hoping to rendezvous with Sneyd in Rome. In this Percy was frustrated, and he briefly considered returning home in October, especially as the prospect of a change at the colonial office suggested that it might be in his best interests to be on the spot. Caroline persuaded him to stay on and they reached Rome in November 1824, when Percy sent Sneyd a letter for Bathurst, which evidently staked his claim to the under-secretaryship currently held by Robert Wilmot*: if he got it, he surmized, ‘I might hereafter really arrive at the great object of my ambition, the commissionership of the Ionian Islands’. As he anticipated, nothing came of it. At the turn of the year he wrote to Sneyd, who had advised him to go home without much further delay:

Since I quitted Corfu I have not passed two months so happily, but my unfortunate disposition to brood over the discomforts of my situation, the dread of returning to England and the weekly accounts of great folly and extravagance in Warwickshire have conspired occasionally to poison my enjoyment ... I do not see the necessity of my punctual return ... My situation is too private, and much too insignificant, to be alluded to in Parliament; and it has been one of little pleasure, or respectability, and it is one of so little promise, that I am ready to retire from it at any moment. Indeed, with my present income, and my future prospects (owing to the selfish silliness of those who have the power and inclination to sport with our happiness) I cannot see any other prudent step, as I am convinced entire retirement is the only possible chance, I will not say of happiness, but of ease and economy. Even in my child I do not anticipate any happiness! If I insist, as in duty I ought to do, on my right as a parent, mine and all its future prospects must be the sacrifice.

Henry Fox*, one of the British residents with whom the Percys mixed, took a jaundiced view of him:

Percy is a coxcomb, made more so by frequenting, admiring and imitating Agar Ellis and Sneyd and the set of pedantic fribbles. Whenever anything really his own does break out, it is more sensible and agreeable and even sometimes clever than one could at all attend from his finicky, affected manner and laboured, far-fetched language, which fatigues me horribly.

When he caught up with Percy in Naples in January 1825 Fox decided that he was ‘devoid of any real character’, beyond ‘a little narrow-minded selfishness’. His wife’s flirtatiousness evidently aroused jealousy in Percy, and Fox delighted in ‘making him suspicious and on the watch’, hoping thereby to help realize his prediction that ‘that menage will some of these days go wrong’. Yet when reproved by Eleanor Fazakerley for his mischief-making, Fox disclaimed any intention of

throwing a touch of discord between the happy couple ... I only regret and lament for her sake, poor little woman. Of him I have not half such a good opinion as I once had and he therefore bores me with his refined, exquisite aristocracy, which is in fact nothing but low, parvenu Smithson vulgarity that apes gentility.6

The Percys made their way to Paris (it was reported that he ‘did not admire anything’ on the Riviera), with the intention of proceeding immediately to London so that he could resume his official duties. Informed, however, by Wilmot that he had ‘survived the estimates’ and was not urgently required, he stayed in Paris to act as personal secretary to Northumberland during his lavish special mission to attend the coronation of Charles X. He was grateful to be housed and fed at the duke’s expense, especially as he had recently ‘lost £300 by my banker’s neglect’. His wife, who became ‘the duchess’s woman’, was said to be ‘in great force, with all these lordships to flirt with’.7 Shortly before Northumberland’s arrival Percy learned of the death of his brother Henry, one of the Members for their father’s pocket borough of Bere Alston. Reflecting that there was now a vacancy for himself or his brother Algernon, he told Sneyd that the previous year Beverley had offered to bring him in ‘on condition that I supported ministers, voted against Catholics, and against reform, and in all doubtful questions referred myself to Lovaine’. He had pleaded the excuse that Bathurst did not then wish him to retire from the secretaryship and asked for the offer to be repeated on the dissolution. If it was made now, he thought

on the above conditions I could not accept it. But I am ready not to vote on the Catholic question. On doubtful questions of course I must reserve myself to use my own discretion instead of Lovaine’s, holding myself ready to lay down my seat whenever, or if ever, I felt obliged to dissent from his views, except in insulated questions of no moment ... You know my present poverty, the uncertainty of my prospects, the unbounded extravagance and the caprice of those on whom I depend. You also know the little prospect there is of my connection with Lord Bathurst ever being of the slightest advantage ... I am not insanely vain enough to have any ambitious views. I know my incapacity sufficiently. Indeed, if ever I had any energy, I have lost it. I am fretted into being a disappointed, unhappy man, bankrupt in my spirits, as well as a pauper in means.

Whatever advice Sneyd gave was academic, for, as Percy told him in July 1825, he received not a word about the vacancy, and it was through a stranger that he discovered that it had been filled by his cousin Percy Ashburnham: ‘I wrote to Lovaine in consequence, but without any anger, and he has not been graciously pleased to answer my letter’. Eleanor Fazakerley heard that on his reappearance in London Percy was

amazingly out of humour with England and everything English ... and that with the help of his Parisian tailor, he looked so French in Kensington Gardens, that it was quite ridiculous. His little pinchy figure would easily look like a Frenchman’s.

He and his wife spent a peaceful late summer at Guys Cliffe (the old Greatheeds were in Scotland), their relationship now ‘become quite smooth’ after the strains evident earlier in the year.8 On 22 Sept. 1825, when a dissolution was expected, Percy told Sneyd that he meant to decline his father’s intended offer of a seat ‘as there is not time for explanations which would be unavoidably necessary, and if I am to be brought in by favour, I had rather take the chance of the duke, than my father’s borough, with its probably rapid reversion to Lovaine’. He had also, he said, ‘very reluctantly’ declined an invitation to stand for Warwick, where he was encouraged to expect success ‘without opposition or any considerable expense’, giving him ‘a seat for life and entirely independent’. He did so partly because ‘any expense to me is considerable’, partly because he did not know whether the absent Greatheed would approve. Percy formally resigned his secretaryship on 5 Jan. 1826. Ten days later Greatheed died, but Percy was ‘not richer’, in terms of access to ready money, as a result. Greatheed’s personalty was sworn under £80,000, 1 Mar., but Percy calculated that the likely annual income from the inheritance after the death of Mrs. Greatheed, who immediately made a will leaving everything to Caroline Percy, would be the ‘much reduced sum’ of £5,000. On 10 Apr. 1826 Percy obtained royal licence to take the names of Greatheed Bertie before Percy, supposedly in accordance with a stipulation of Bertie Greatheed’s will, though in fact this had directed that he should adopt only the additional name of Bertie: in practice, Percy styled himself Charles Bertie Percy.9

He was by then a Member of Parliament, having been returned in February by Northumberland on a vacancy for Newport. He observed that ‘I come into Parliament at a strange moment, when all the cheers that animate Robinson and Canning are from the opposition benches, and those behind the treasury silent as the grave’; but he showed no initial disposition to make anything of his membership, as he told Sneyd, 2 Mar. 1826:

When it was more inconvenient than I can possibly say, I was obliged to hurry down into Cornwall to dine and be elected. Private business forced me up to town, so I took my seat; but this session I do not mean to attend, as my private business is far more pressing in importance than my public duties.

He was returned again at the general election, a fortnight after the death of old Mrs. Greatheed, which involved him in an unequal struggle with ‘the harpies of the legacy office’. A deficit of £14,000 on the estate had to be paid by the legatees, of whom Percy and his wife were the principals: ‘I have been worried into a bilious attack’, he informed Sneyd, 5 Aug., ‘and evacuate without intermission from all possible orifices’. Mrs. Fazakerley later found him ‘very conversible and cheerful’, though still complaining of ‘poverty’; she supposed that ‘if they are now poor it will only be for a time, as I believe the fortune is very good’.10 At the close of 1826 Percy, still embroiled with the taxmen, ruled out of the question taking a London house next year, ‘perhaps ever’; but he made an unconvincing attempt to stop grumbling and count his blessings:

I own my fault (I ought to say my guilt) in letting the rubs and irksomenesses of the present moment so often plunge me into despondency and repining, when I have every reason to be grateful. When I reflect what I am, and what I deserve, how ought I to overflow with thankfulness.

Dividing his time between his father’s house at 8 Portman Square and Roehampton, where he deposited his wife and child, Percy showed his face in the House at the start of the 1827 session. On 13 Feb. he was named to the Leominster election committee, which, to his delight, lasted only three days. He correctly predicted that the ministerial crisis precipitated by Lord Liverpool’s stroke would end in a coalition between Canning, as premier, and the Lansdowne Whigs. He did not wish to believe the assertions of ‘those who are fatuous for Canning’ that Peel was under his thumb:

I shudder at the notion of Canning uncontrolled, notwithstanding his ultra prudence and discretion so bevaunted by [Edward] Littleton* ... The fulsomeness of his supporters so outrages common sense and decency as to drive moderate people beside themselves, and I find myself rapidly assuming a deeper blue, which had faded to a very light cerulean a short time ago.

He said that Plunket’s violent pro-Catholic speech of 2 Mar. ‘almost converted me into a Protestant’; but he did not vote in the division on relief, 6 Mar. A week later his wife told Sneyd that Percy ‘would take a great interest’ in Parliament, ‘had he not hitherto attended it so uncomfortably’.11 Percy voted for the duke of Clarence’s annuity bill, 16 Mar. He was given a month’s leave to attend to ‘urgent business’, 3 May 1827. After Canning’s death he hoped that ‘all political bitterness is for the moment buried’ with him and that the Goderich ministry

will fulfil the hopes that seem generally to attend its infancy. Most heartily do I wish that the bugbear of [Catholic] emancipation, which cannot be obtained and had better not be agitated during the reign, was not to deprive us of Peel’s practical ability. With that addition I should augur well for the country, as far as one can augur well of so worn out and crackledown a concern.

By now he appears to have sorted out his finances, in that he had £42,000 invested, with a further £5,000 lying idle; but he still saw ‘no practicability of taking a house in London’ in 1828.

He was ‘charmed’ with the return to power of Wellington and Peel in January 1828, and fully approved the ‘general complexion of the government’, with the exception of Lord Ellenborough. He trusted that Huskisson’s participation would guarantee ‘the most rigid scrutiny’ of the national finances, believing that ‘the philosophy of political economy must be applied to taxation’. He told Sneyd that he would ‘as usual, pass an uncomfortable "before Easter"’ at Roehampton and in an hotel, and return to Guys Cliffe ‘just at the time that public business in the House would occupy and amuse me’. He was a spectator in the Lords for the ‘grand field day’ of ministerial statements and recrimination, 11 Feb. 1828. He thought that Huskisson had a good deal of awkward explaining to do about his recent conduct, but saw no reason why, once this difficulty and the embarrassment of Navarino had been got over, ‘the ministry should not stand’, though he did ‘not feel quite comfortable’ with Huskisson’s attitude. The explanations of Huskisson and Herries in the Commons, 18 Feb., satisfied him that neither had been guilty of any ‘unfair dealing’ in the break-up of the Goderich administration. Percy, who is not known to have uttered a word in debate, voted against repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb., but was an absentee from the division on Catholic relief, 12 May 1828.

In September he went with his family to tour the Rhine, and by the turn of the year they were at Le Mans. They had intended to stay there until March, but Percy accepted Northumberland’s offer of the place of comptroller of his viceregal household in Dublin. He did not, of course, do so without misgivings:

I did not like to say nay ... and have been perfectly miserable ever since. All my independence at an end; hustled and bored to death; no saunterings in summer at Guys Cliffe, but instead, parading a sham gold stick at a Brummagem court ... I suppose secretary is the post I ought to have ambitioned, but it would be a certain confinement. I am glad it has not been offered ... A very vulgar Irishman, like the rest of his nation, tells me I have a four-windowed house in the Castle yard and £1,200 a year at least. I do not believe a word of it. Besides, if I have, the d d journeys across the Channel will eat up my salary.

Planta, the patronage secretary, listed him as a possible but unlikely mover or seconder of the address,12 and numbered him among those who would vote ‘with government’ for Catholic emancipation. He was in Dublin when named as a defaulter, 5 and 10 Mar. 1829. His necessary re-election for Newport did not take place, for at Wellington’s request to Northumberland, he made way for the president of the board of trade, Vesey Fitzgerald, who was without a seat after his defeat in Clare.13

Knowing Percy’s self-confessed ability to ‘extract the poison of life from any position in which I am placed’, it can have come as no surprise to Sneyd that within a month of his arrival in Dublin he was complaining that ‘I never was so miserable in all my life’. His post was ‘something between an aide-de-camp and a house steward, without the intimacy of the former, or the confidence reposed in the latter’; and he was ‘entirely disgusted with the place, the court, and more especially with myself’. His attitude mellowed as he discovered the ‘picturesque beauty’ of Ireland beyond Dublin later in the year. There was talk in May of his resuming his seat as soon as Vesey Fitzgerald was accommodated elsewhere;14 and in December 1829 he supposed that he was to be

returned again for Newport soon after the meeting, but I would readily delay the event till Easter, indeed if I did not think it dangerous, I should not mind to be out of Parliament a little longer, and to go abroad comfortably ... next autumn, for a year and a half; but I am not sure it would be prudent under my present circumstances with respect to this seat in Parliament and its patron.

Nothing came of this, and Percy was never again in the House, where he had so signally failed to make any mark.

He left Dublin with Northumberland on the fall of the Wellington ministry. By his father’s will, proved in February 1831, he received £5,000, having been advanced the same amount against his portion some years earlier.15 He was appalled by the Grey ministry’s reform bills and the unrest which accompanied their progress through Parliament. He and his wife were in Italy and Switzerland for two years from late 1832 and they spent much time abroad during the following 20 years. Mrs. Fazakerley encountered them and their ‘remarkably pleasant and popular’ daughter in Lucerne in September 1845, when they were ‘very prosperous’ but pining, as she thought, for Italy.16 Percy, the last survivor of the eight brothers, died at Alnwick, the residence of his nephew, the 6th duke of Northumberland in October 1870. By his brief will, dated 25 June 1865 and proved under £160,000 at Birmingham, 7 Dec. 1870 (so much for poverty), he left all his property to his wife, who survived him by 12 years.

Ref Volumes: 1820-1832

Author: David R. Fisher

Notes

Based, unless otherwise stated, on Percy’s letters to Ralph Sneyd, 1809-70 (Keele Univ. Lib. Sneyd mss SC11/205-83; 12/1-213).

  • 1. 2 Oxford DNB (Greatheed Bertie); Caribbeana, v. 49-50; Englishman in Paris ed. J.P.T. Bury and J.C. Barry; Farington Diary, vi. 2111; Berry Jnls. i. 245, 435; ii. 240, 431-2, 435; Gent. Mag. (1804), ii. 1073, 1236.
  • 2. Northants. RO, Agar Ellis diary, 1 June, 6 July 1821.
  • 3. Edgeworth Letters, 369; Add. 52445, f. 69.
  • 4. PROB 11/1710/151.
  • 5. Dyott’s Diary, i. 352; Countess Granville Letters, i. 235.
  • 6. Fox Jnl. 197-8, 202; Add. 61937, ff. 1, 3.
  • 7. Add. 52017, Townshend to Fox, 25 Apr., 11, 18 May 1825.
  • 8. Add. 52011, Mrs. Fazakerley to Fox, 29 Aug., 31 Oct. 1825, 14 Jan. 1826; 52017, Townshend to same, 30 Oct. 1825.
  • 9. Add. 52012, H. Greville to Fox, 9 Feb. 1826; PROB 11/1710/151; 11/1713/326; IR26/1082/93.
  • 10. Add. 52011, Mrs. Fazakerley to Fox, 24 Nov. 1826.
  • 11. Sneyd mss SC12/80.
  • 12. Add. 40398, f. 85.
  • 13. Wellington mss WP1/1002/18, 20; 1007/11, 17.
  • 14. Ibid. 1018/22; 1022/10.
  • 15. PROB 11/1781/67.
  • 16. Add. 52011, Mrs. Fazakerley to Fox, 11 Sept. 1845.