Anthony Aufrère (30 November 1757 at Hoveton, Norfolk – 29 November 1833 in Pisa, Italy) was an English antiquary, barrister and translator.
Early life
Aufrère was the eldest son of Anthony Aufrère (1730–1814), of Hoveton Hall, Norfolk, a landowner and magistrate,The miniature here is of his father. A portrait of the son (watercolours on ivory) by the Italian painter Gustavo Lazzarini, was acquired in 1972 by the Preservation Society of Newport County in the United States of America (Ref. RI010048) from a very large family of fifteen children- seven sons and eight daughters.Agnew's Protestant Exiles from France, Chiefly in the Reign of Louis XIV: Or, The Huguenot Refugees and Their Descendants in Great Britain and Ireland(Turnbull & Spears, 1886), vol. 2, p.392. His mother was Anna Norris (1728–1816), only daughter of John Norris, of Witton, in the same county, and sister to John Norris, founder of the Norrisian professorship at Cambridge. The Aufrère family were of noble French lineage, and proud Protestant Huguenots who had left France on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. As the eldest child, his parents had in mind a legal career for their son, and he was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1773 as a fifteen-year-old."Jan 28. Anthony Aufrere, son of Anthony.A., of Hovetone St. Peter, Norfolk, Esq."The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn, 1521–1889 (London, 1889), p.387. Not much is known about his early life but he appears to have got into serious financial difficulties and his friend, the Reverend William Gunn (1750–1841), rector of Sloley, Norfolk, helped him out in 1781 with his debts. Aufrère was called to the Bar in February 1782."Last week the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn, called Jeremiah Church, John Matthews Grimwood, and Anthony Aufrere, Esquires, to the Degree of Barristers at Law." St. James's Chronicle or the British Evening Post (London, England), 14 February 1782 – 16 February 1782; Issue 3268. Details pertaining to Inn practice and if Aufrère was allowed chambers remains unclear. Three years later a friend of Gunn's wrote to him in 1785 "Anthony has given up the law and is now at Boulogne".Norfolk Register Office: WGN 1/1/78 Jacob Preston to William Gunn, 26 Apr 1785 In what appears to have been an attempt to flee his creditors, he went abroad. He met up with his friend Gunn in Pisa, Italy, who was on a Grand Tour, and they both continued to Florence. According to Riviere, Gunn's biographer, Aufrère later settled in Florence in 1785. The American royalist Thomas Hall (1750–1824), chaplain to the British factory at Leghorn (Livorno), also an antiquary, wrote to Gunn in October 1785 about "news of Aufrère who lives at Pisa".NRO WGN 1/1/82 10 Oct 1785 T. Hall, Leghorn, to William Gunn, Neatishead Riviere writes of "Aufrere's old lodgings by the centre bridge" presumably he lived in the Via Borgo Stretto by the Ponte di mezzo over the Arno river. This proximity would explain part of Aufrère's "Queries sent me by Mr. Gunn; with my answers (1786)", first published by Riviere in 1965, consisting of some 25 questions and answers on different Italian topics, ranging from the origin of the sham battle the Gioco del Ponte in Pisa to the Linnean name of the fish (Argentina Sphyrana) used in making false pearls at Rome., & ; Riviere is extremely prejudiced towards Aufrère in his account here. In January 1786 Aufrère travelled to Naples, and he said himself that he visited Rome for the first time in the winter of 1786, as he recalled seeing Charlotte Stuart, Duchess of Albany there.Viator A to Mr. Urban, 23 Aug., Gentleman's Magazine, Bd. 67, 1797, Pt. 2, p.1000 In 1787 it was reported that he was back in Florence, and in the same year he was also in Geneva, where he studied with the celebrated language teacher Monsieur de Rodon.We presume that he may have studied German in Geneva. Aufrère also speaks highly of his cousin, Philip DuVal Aufrère (died London 14 March 1808), who died at the age of 76, as "my kind friend and benefactor"(Genealogical Notes, op cit. p.,56); the son of his father's sister Marieanne Aufrère. "He was educated at Westminster, Cambridge and Göttingen, took orders, was Subpreceptor to some of the Royal family of England and at the time of his death was Dr of Divinity, Canon of Windsor, and Vicar of Twickenham." His father was Dr Philip DuVal Aufrère, a French refugee physician, who had studied under Herman Boerhaave, and was first Physician to the Dowager Princess of Wales, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1719–1772) mother of King George the Third.
Aufrere in Germany Soon after he visited Germany, he settled down in Stuttgart and befriended Karl Friedrich Emich Freiherr von UxküllUexküll, is the old Livonian place-name Üxküll on the Duina; according to the ADB he wrote his name Ixküll; Aufrère writes Baron d'Uxküll.=Gyllenband (1755–1832), gentleman of the chamber to the Duke of Wirtemberg. He was a renowned art connoisseur and a generous patron. We know that it was the Baron who originally showed Aufrère, Johann Gottfried Herder's essay on the great German humanist, knight, poet and pamphleteer, Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523) that had been published in 1776 in Christoph Martin Wieland's journal Der Teutsche Merkur and that he suggested to him that he should translate it, as this is all mentioned in the translator's preface which is dated (Stuttgardt 10 June 1788).
We presume that it was also the Baron that had assured him that this anonymously printed essay was from the pen of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This false attribution was widely shared in Germany, and the error (that even Herder himself complained about as late as 1793), was still being made by German professors of literature in the 1840s.See Wilhelm Kreutz, Die Deutschen und Ulrich von Hutten: Rezeption von Autor und Werk seit dem 16. Jahrhundert (1984), p.67. Aufrère is thus one of the earliest English translators of one of Herder's Sturm und Drang writings, albeit as a supposititious work.Wilhem Kreuz, "Ulrich von Hutten in der Französischen und Angloamerikanischen Literatur. Ein Beitrag zur Rezeptionsgeschichte des deutschen Humanismus und der lutherischen Reformation", in: Francia. Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, Bd. 11 1983–1984(Sigmaringen 1983.-1984) S.633. It is clear, however, from his preface, that he was proud to have translated this work:
"I trust that I am not deceived in my hopes and wishes, that this publication may prove grateful to the public, and may induce some to make farther enquiries into the particulars of the life of Hutten, and of his contemporaries, with which is interwoven a very interesting event in the history of mankind; nor can I help thinking that I am doing a pleasure to such as take delight in elegant and classic literature. Should I fail in my wishes in these respects, I still hope that my endeavours to make known in England the merits of a great and a virtuous man, will shelter me from censure, and that the defects in the execution will be pardoned in favour of the intention." [A Tribute to the Memory of Hutten (1789), Preface of the Translator, p.xi]
Marriage in London, 1791 Aufrère returned to England early 1791 and set about preparations for his marriage. At St George's, Hanover Square, in the fashionable London district of Mayfair, on 19 February he married Countess of the Empire, Marianne Matilda Lockhart (10 October 1774 – 14 September 1850), the only surviving daughter of General James Lockhart, of Lee and Carnwath in Lanarkshire, Scotland, who had been a general in the service of Empress Maria Theresa. The Empress had raised him to the dignity of a Baron of the Holy Roman Empire and had decorated him with military orders. In his later years he had been attached to the household of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Lockhart had died in Pisa on 6 February 1790.His actual tomb is at Dryden, Scotland, and has the following inscription: 'James Lockhart Wishart, of Lee and Carnwath, Lord of the Bedchamber to his Imperial Majesty Joseph the Second, Emperor of Germany, Knight of the Order of Maria Teresa, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and General of the Imperial, Royal, and Apostolical Armies, died at Pisa, in Italy, VIth February, MDCCXC, in the LXIVth year of his age.' Marianne is also buried there. Aufrère and Marianne had almost certainly met in Pisa in 1785 as his friend William Gunn had already been introduced to father and daughter and, as he wrote somewhat begrudgingly, it was expected of him to spend the evenings at the houses of the three English families there.Riviere (1965), op.cit. After the marriage the Aufrère family chose to live abroad in Heidelberg, Germany, possibly for financial reasons, and in the following year their daughter Louisa Anna Matilda (17 November 1792 – 1868) was also born there. There is a letter of Aufrère's to Gunn from Heidelberg dated 1 May 1793 but it is claimed that they had later moved to Mannheim, as his friend William Gunn and his family – returning from his second Grand Tour – met up with him there on 26 September, where they hired a barge and went sailing down the Rhine. In 1794 a son George Anthony (18 June 1794 – 6 May 1881) was born.The daughter Louisa Anna Matilda later married in 1818 George Barclay (1790–1869), Esq., a merchant of New York, by whom she had a daughter Matilda Antonia Barclay (born in New York 7 December 1824 – 1888) she married Francis Robert Rives (1822–1891) their son George Lockhart Rives later published the Genealogical Notes; and George Anthony married at Hamburg in 1828 Caroline Wehrtmann (died 1885), the second daughter of a Hamburg merchant, John Michael Wehrtmann, of Hamburg and of Osterrade in the Duchy of Holstein. There followed the publication of his Travels (1795) that has the translator's preface signed "Newton, near Chester, February, 1795." It was pitched in the newspaper classified ads as "a proper Supplement to Mr. Henry Swinburne's Travels in the Two Sicilies" so a work firmly belonging to that genre of the travel book influencing and encouraging the Grand Tour. In 1798 appeared his popular anti-revolutionary pamphlet A Warning to Briton's (1798)This work has recently been described as "One of the most widely circulated pieces of atrocity literature from this period" Catriona Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p.162. Aufrère also had in mind the translation of German work, and had written to his publishers Cadell & Davies in 1799: "As I hate to be idle I have some thoughts of employing my few leisure hours in a free translation & alteration of a German Novel, with additional portraits of some characters within the sphere of my own observations- & if I follow it up, as I now think I shall, I shall have it ready by next spring, & will send it you for perusal, & for publication if you think it will take."Letter from Aufrère, Ipswich 5 August 1799, to Messrs. Cadell & Davies, Strand, London, [NRO: MC 486/1, 747X7 ] It appears that the novel was never published or finished.
Imprisonment in France, 1802–1814