Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 18 - Section XIII
XIII. Fonblanque.
The surname of this Huguenot family was Grenier, a corruption of Garniero; pointing to Italian ancestry. The senior branch was represented as late as 1829 by the late César de Garnier, Marquis de Juliers. The junior branch were the Greniers of Languedoc, eminent in the Huguenot civil wars; a member of the family was created Comte de Fonblanque by Henri IV., Fonblanque being a fief in the Forêt de la Gresine, near Bruniquet. In 1685 a Grenier de Fonblanque was tried and executed for having harboured a Huguenot pasteur. The family remained in France, suffering all the persecuting penalties and risks of their co-religionists; and in 1740 Abel de Grenier, Comte de Fonblanque, sent his two sons, Antoine and Jean, to England to receive a Protestant education. The first became known as Anthony Fonblanque, Esq. of London; he married and had a family of daughters, of whom the eldest, Harriet, married in 1786 William Hollingworth Philipps, Esq., and was the mother of Rev. Sir James Evans Philipps, M.A., eleventh baronet of Picton Castle, Pembroke, and grandmother of Rev. Sir James Erasmus Philipps, M.A., Prebendary of Salisbury. Jean, the other refugee, was naturalized by Act of Parliament in 1748 as John Fonblanque, born in the province of Guienne, son of Grenier Fonblanque and Anne, his wife. He established a London bank, which did not succeed at firsvt; “but, on his retiring from it, it was successfully carried on by his book-keeper, Peter Thellusson, who became the founder of the Rendlesham family, and of that gigantic fortune which attracted so much public attention.” In 1823 he obtained royal license to reassume as surnames, “de Grenier de Fonblanque;” but, with one exception, his descendants adhered to “Fonblanque” alone. He married Miss Bagshawe. His only surviving son, John Samuel Martin Fonblanque, born in 1759, died in 1838, a great equity lawyer of the Middle Temple, called to the bar in 1783, M.P. for Camelford from 1802 to 1806, brought out the standard edition of “A Treatise on Equity,” and lived to be the senior King’s Counsel and father of the English bar. This eminent lawyer had three sons; his eldest son and namesake was born in 1787, and died in 1865. Having spent his early manhood in military service, he was not called to the bar till 1818; he established a periodical “The Jurist;” he became a Commissioner of the London Court of Bankruptcy in 1825, and was joint-author of Paris and Fonblanque’s Medical Jurisprudence. The youngest son was the justly celebrated Albany William Fonblanque.
Albany Fonblanque was born in 1793; his early predilections, also, were military, and he studied for a short time at Woolwich for the Royal Engineers. These studies ceased through an illness from which he did not recover for nearly two years; then he studied law and abandoned it, having before the age of twenty developed a talent for political writing. His father had been an ardent political reformer, and his brother entered upon an agitation for the Reform of the House of Commons in 1817. Albany was a distinguished writer on the staff of the Times and the Morning Chronicle from 1820 to 1830. In 1830 the Rev. Dr. Fellowes, the proprietor of the Examiner, and known as the heir of Baron Maseres, made him editor of that weekly newspaper and literary journal, and placed its management under his absolute control. Leigh Hunt, who had been its editor at a former period has said:—
“I had an editorial successor some years afterwards, Mr. Fonblanque, who had all the wit for which I toiled, without making any pretension to it. He was indeed the genuine successor, not of me, but of the Swifts and Addisons themselves; profuse of wit, even beyond them, and superior in political knowledge.”
His career in the Examiner extended to seventeen years; and in 1847 Lord John Russell gave him the post of Statistical Secretary to the Board of Trade. Albany Fonblanque called himself “a philosophical radical,” and distinct from those “who are radicals because they are not lords.” His radicalism, however, was only the advocacy of most necessary reforms in the representation of the people in the House of Commons and in Municipal Corporations, and in the Criminal Code, following in the latter department the footsteps of Romilly. The style of his political writing was beautiful as well as terse, and collections of his best articles have, to a large extent, the character of history, both readable and reliable. The work of collection was begun by himself; three volumes appeared in 1837, under the title of “England under Seven Administrations.” In 1874 his nephew, Edward Partington de Fonblanque, published, “The Life and Labours of Albany Fonblanque,” the greater part of the volume consisting of extracts from the Examiner. No satisfaction, however, on questions of social and moral reforms can be obtained from his essays;[1] in his day social reformers, whose names are venerated now, were abhorred and caricatured by both whigs and tories.
Edward Barrington de Fonblanque, whom I have just named, has written some instructive and amusing works, such as “The Administration of the British Army in 1858,” “Niphon and Pecheli,” travels in the service of the British Government in China and Japan, published in 1862, and “The Life and Correspondence of General Right Hon. John Burgoyne,” published in 1876. His father was Captain Thomas De Grenierde Fonblanque, K.H., of the 21st Fusiliers, who married, in 1815, a daughter of Sir Jonas Barrington, and died at Belgrade in 1861, as British Consul-General for Servia.
Although Albany Fonblanque did not assume the old French surnames, he had a just regard for his good ancestry. There hung in his study a framed pedigree surmounted by an elaborately emblazoned coat-of-arms, the margin of the parchment being embellished with quarterings. On its being hinted to him that such a display might seem inconsistent with radicalism, he replied that “he could see no possible connection between a man’s political opinions and the interest which it was natural and right for him to take in his family history and antecedents.”
In 1854 he went to Paris as the English representative of the International Statistical Congress. He continued to write occasional articles in the Examiner till 1860. After this date he courted quietude; he died on 13th October 1872, aged seventy-nine.
- ↑ The Political Economy of a Weekly Sabbath, as corrective of the secular and cold-blooded system of six days’ pay for seven days’ work, was not generally understood in his day, so that he was betrayed into upbraiding my benevolent and patriotic father, the late Sir Andrew Agnew, as a Pharisee. Neither did my father then (nor myself now) feel any resentment against him in consequence, being only disposed to apply to him a parody of the late Lady Dufferin’s celebrated song, and to say
’Tis a pity when charming scribblers
Write of things that they don’t understand.