Another quick post this, put up simply as a result of a serendipitous finding on the net. I always knew Thomas Townshend, 1st Lord Sydney’s family was a large one: 6 sons and 6 daughters, according to his History of Parliament page. Until now I’ve not been able to track down more than seven of them.

Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney (Wikimedia Commons)

Andrew Tink’s recent biography of Sydney notes only:

Three years Sydney’s junior, Elizabeth [Powys, Sydney’s wife] bore him six sons and six daughters. But only seven, Georgiana, Mary, John, Frances, Harriet, William and Horatio, are known to have survived infancy in an age when the mortality rate of children under two was especially high. On 9 December 1777, for instance, his brother Charles noted that Sydney’s wife ‘is brought to bed and is very well: the child died three hours after she was born’.[1]

I have finally found a list of Townshend’s twelve children (in fact there are thirteen in the list, but I think the last two should be one person). The list is contained in The present peerages… by Joseph Edmondson (London, 1785), and is surprisingly comprehensive  (p. 173):

From this list, and from some other sources, I gather Sydney’s thirteen children were as follows:

1. Georgiana (1 June 1761 – 12 September 1835)
2. Mary Elizabeth (2 September 1762 – 21 May 1821)
3. John Thomas (21 February 1764 – 20 January 1831)
4. Albinia Ann (9 October 1765 – buried 15 March 1770)[2]
5. Charles Horatio (10 December 1766 – buried 22 December 1773)[2]
6. Henry George (25 October 176? – buried 22 December 1773)[2] (apparently born 25 October 1765, but I can’t see how that’s possible given Albinia Ann was born on 9 October, unless they were twins and one of the dates is wrong)
7. Frederick Roger (20 April 1770 – died while at Eton, in 1782)
8. Frances (20 February 1772 – 13 August 1854)
9. Henrietta [or Harriot] Catherine (27 November 1773 – 24 August 1814)
10. William Augustus (10 March 1776 – 3 July 1816)
11. Sophia Charlotte (died young: probably the baby mentioned as dying three hours after her birth in the extract from Tink, so 8/9 December 1777)
12. [Horatio] George Powis (6 February 1780 – 25 May 1843)

I think “Horatia”, at the bottom of the list, probably did not exist, since I’ve not found her mentioned anywhere else. “George Powis”‘s given name was in fact Horatio, so I think that’s probably where the confusion lies.[3]

Either way, it looks like Lord Sydney buried an awfully large number of his children– two on the same day, so presumably felled by the same illness– and that most of them were not in fact tiny babies. Albinia was four and a half when she died; Charles Horatio was seven, as was William Augustus; Henry George possibly eight, and Frederick Roger was eleven or twelve. Only Sophia Charlotte died at birth.

I have to wonder how all this would have affected the 2nd Lord Chatham’s future wife, Mary. She would have been old enough to remember all the five siblings that died. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mary was extremely close to all her siblings, particularly her brother, Georgiana, and Frances, who later married Lord Dynevor.

References

[1] Andrew Tink, Lord Sydney: the life and times of Tommy Townshend (Melbourne, 2011), p. 149

[2] D. Lysons, The environs of London, volume 4 (London, 1796), from here

[3] Collins’s Peerage of England , volume VI by Sir Egerton Brydges (London, 1812), 321-2