THE MAN WHO MARRIED TWO OF AUSTEN’S NIECES
PRIOR, Matthew.
The Poetical Works … now first collected, with explanatory Notes, and memoirs of the Author, in two Volumes … London, W. Strahan, T. Payne, J.
Rivington and Sons, J. Dodsley [and five others], 1779.
Two vols, 8vo, pp. I: xvi, 420; II: [4], xvi, 287, [1]; with half-titles; engraved portrait of Prior on a4 in vol. I; with a 24-page Catalogue of Books, Pamphlets, Oratorios, and Plays (W. Lowndes, c. 1784–91), bound in at the end of vol. II; a few spots and stains, but a fine copy, in early nineteenth-century polished calf, covers gilt with a double-fillet and roll-tool border, spines gilt in six compartments, black morocco labels, blue endpapers, marbled edges, silk placemarkers.
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The Poetical Works … now first collected, with explanatory Notes, and memoirs of the Author, in two Volumes … London, W. Strahan, T. Payne, J.
A handsome copy of this collected edition of Prior, edited by Thomas Evans, inscribed on a front endpaper: ‘George Augusta Hill given him by Ladies Anne and Gertrude Fitz-Patrick, out of the Library of the late Earl of Upper Ossory Ampthill Park who died Feb 1st 1818’.
The said Earl was John FitzPatrick (1745–1818), MP, a friend of Horace Walpole, who introduced him to the unhappy Duchess of Grafton in 1765. Their resulting affair led to the birth of a daughter, Anne (1768–1841), and then to the Duchess’s divorce for adultery (her husband’s own affairs were numerous), after which she remarried Ossory in 1769, legitimising Anne. Her second surviving daughter Gertrude was born in 1774. Despite significant wealth the Fitzpatricks never attempted to re-enter public life and lived in near retirement at Amphtill, Bedfordshire; her daughters never married.
George Augusta Hill (1801–1879) was the son of Arthur Hill and Mary Marchioness of Downshire. He is probably now best known for his successive marriage to two of Jane Austen’s nieces. In 1827 he had met and proposed to Cassandra Knight, and although she accepted, the match was forbidden by his mother (‘No money: all charms!’). Eight years later, the Marchioness relented and they wed, having four children. After her death, her younger sister Lousia Knight, Austen’s god-daughter, moved to Ulster to look after the children, and his marriage to her in 1847, in Denmark, prompted a parliamentary investigation into the legality of a widower marrying his sister-in-law.
We have been unable to trace direct links between the Ladies Fitzpatrick and Lord George Hill, but the Downshires had estates in Bedfordshire not far from Ampthill, and both families had large tracts of land in Ireland. Was this a present on a visit to Ampthill?
ESTC T42745.
