Henry Stanyford Blanckley (29 September 1752) also known as HSB, was an officer of the 31st Regiment of Foot, captain of the 97th Regiment of Foot (1780), gamekeeper in Little Hallingbury, Essex, and British Consul for Menorca and Algiers. A variety of family stories attribute him as a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh.
Early life
HSB was born in Gibraltar on 29 September 1752 to Elizabeth and Henry Blanckley. His sister Ann Elizabeth Blanckley later married Alexander Shaw (British Army officer). Their father, Henry Blanckley, held the offices of Storekeeper, Clerk of the Cheque and Clerk of the Survey for Gibraltar Dockyard granting the family residence in the Ordnance House or "Bomb House", now home to the Gibraltar National Museum. According to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James in his 1771 The History of the Herculean Straits the Blanckley's Gibraltar home was:
"The Bomb-House - The storekeeper and ordnance clerks dwellings, commonly called the bomb-house, was once a fine Moorish building : I take it to have been the residence of their governors, because I have seen the same kind of structures in Spain, and never but one in that style in each town: and that which is peculiar, is the top of the house, which is a flat oblong terrace; round it is a wall of three feet high, and on the wall are stone pillars that support a roof: there houses are much higher than any other building in the town, and command the whole: this upper apartment is at prevent a dwelling room, the spaces between the pillars being filled, and now has windows, and a door place. The cellars remain in their old state, one of which I take to have been the family mosque; the inside is an oblong square, and round the centre are pillars that support a handsome cupola.
Round the architrave is an inscription, but so defaced that I could not make anything of it. This house, when we took the place, was quite entire, and very large; and the complete remains of the Moors, as a dwelling, in the town; but the changes it has since undergone, have almost diverted it of its ancient beauties; ancient I call it, because it might have been built soon after the coming of those people in seven hundred and eleven . . . ."
HSB's father, Henry Blanckley, died in 1773.
31st Regiment of Foot
In 1777, HSB, an ensign of the 31st Regiment of Foot, sought promotion by requesting permission to purchase the lieutenancy of Alexander Hamilton, who had quit the regiment. The 31st Foot were stationed in North America for the American Revolutionary War and had garrisoned Quebec the previous year:
"The 31st sailed west again in 1776 to garrison Quebec during the War of American Independence. The flank companies served under General Burgoyne and were forced to surrender at Saratoga. They served in Canada for eleven years before returning home.",
Marriage to Mary Rogers HSB's father, Henry Blanckley's will was proved on 10 March 1777, four years after his death. He bequeathed everything to his wife Elizabeth, who married Charles MacKintosh in St Pancras Old Church, London on 26 September 1778. Saunder's News Letter records HSB's own marriage six-months later, in March 1779, at Coolyduff, Inniscarra, Cork, Ireland.
"At Coolyduff, Henry Stanyford Blanckley, Esq; lieutenant in the 31st regiment of foot, to Miss Rogers, daughter of the late Capt. Rogers."
His bride was Mary Rogers, daughter of Captain Henry Rogers, who had been buried at Magourney, near Coolyduff, in 1773 Different lines of their descendants believed HSB and Mary Rogers to have been cousins.
97th Regiment of Foot HSB was a captain of the 97th Regiment of Foot (1780) and made Brigade-major on 6 April 1882 during the Great Siege of Gibraltar.
First children and gamekeeping in Little Hallingbury
HSB's first child was baptised Ann Blanckley in St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, London on 5 March 1784. His first son, named Henry Stanyford Blanckley after him, was born on 5 August 1785, and baptised in Hatfield Peverel, Essex on 3 April 1785. His next three children, Maria (born 8 January 1787) and twins Charles and Caroline (born 3 September 1788) were baptised in the village of Little Hallingbury, Essex.
HSB is listed as a gamekeeper residing in Little Hallingbury in February 1786 and October 1787. According to historian George Redmonds, 18th century gamekeepers were often gentlemen:
"From 1671 lords of manors were authorised to employ one or more gamekeepers, and these men had the right to take and seize the guns, nets and other hunting * engines of unqualified persons, however wealthy they might be. In real terms sporting privilege had been transferred from the king to the landed gentry, and so had the preservation of the game. Not surprisingly, in such a tight-knit social group, there was a tendency to appoint gamekeepers from within their own ranks. In 1733, for example, Dame Anne Kaye of Woodsome Hall 'appointed Sir John Lister Kaye of Denby Grange her gamekeeper';6 in 1738 the Rev. Mr Philip Kitchon was 'appointed gamekeeper to Thomas Bright and Mrs Mary Lowther, for the Mannors of Marton, Tolthorpe and Nunthorp'.7 These were hardly gamekeepers as we now understand the word, but persons of considerable social status and this gave them the authority to confiscate weapons and enforce the property qualifications of the Game Acts."
HSB auctioned the contents of his Little Hallingbury house on 19 and 20 October 1789. The auction notice, entitled "A CATALOGUE Of all the neat and genteel Household Furniture, Fixtures, Brewing and Dairy Utensils, Beer Casks, about fifteen Loads of exceedingly good Meadow and Clover Hay, and other Valuable Effects The Property of CAPTAIN BLANKLEY Of Little Hallingbury, in the County of Essex", stated that he was leaving the country.
There are no subsequent records of the twins, Charles and Caroline. However, an 1889 letter written from HSB's granddaughter Mary Louisa Philippedes Cammenos to her first cousin Henriette Elizabeth Blanckley, says of their grandmother, Mary née Rogers:
"I have a letter, written to her by a friend, which carries the date 4 February 1790. In this letter are some expressions of tender sympathy with regard to the pain that was being suffered by our grandmother as a result of the illness of her daughter Eliza. I know that this young girl was very nearly ten years old when she died, and that it was of this illness to which the letter refers, whooping cough, from which several of our relatives died... it was following the death of Eliza and of three other children in the space of one month that the health of our grandmother was so altered that our grandfather left the military life and was nominated Consul to the Balearic Isles, and the two other children were born, the latter of which, if I am not mistaken, was the brother of Horace."
The above letter excerpt suggests that HSB and Mary née Rogers had two other children born in England, of whom one was named Eliza (born c. 1780), and that these, along with the twins Charles and Caroline, died in about 1789, prompting HSB to relocate his family to Menorca, where two more children were born, including HSB's only other son to survive into adulthood, Edward Blanckley.
British Consulship in Menorca
Henry Stanyford Blanckley, was formally appointed British consul to Majorca, Menorca and Ibiza by George III in 1790. Conditions were hard for the native population of Menorca during his consulship in the 1790s. Britain's ceding of the island to Spanish rule in 1782 had resulted in strict sanctions being imposed on the Menorcans. These included heavy taxation, harsh trade restrictions, the banning of their Catalan language, and the imprisonment their men. Swarming rats and poor harvests added widespread famine to the islanders' plightSloss J., (2002) Exit Britannia, Britain's Last Conquest of Menorca, Bonaventura Press, pp. 15-16 Spain's switch of allegiance from Britain to France in 1796 closed Menorca to the British fleet, and faced the Blanckleys with an actively hostile government. In the summer of 1797, a plague spread rapidly across the Mediterranean from Constantinople, Corsica and the Barbary Coast, causing Britain to impose a strict quarantine in which all vessels were banned from visiting Menorca. HSB's wife Mary fell gravely ill and went first to the spas of Bath then "in her last recourse".Blanckley Family Papers, Box B-000820; Folder 8, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library to Bristol Hotwells, where she died on 10 March 1798.
Second marriage HSB married his second wife, Mary Richards, in Sulham, Berkshire, England on 13 March 1800, resulting in two daughters, Elizabeth (who in 1839 authored Six Years Residence in Algiers, a biographical account of HSB's time as British Consul to Algiers,) and Henrietta.St Martin-In-The-Fields, Westminster, England baptism record
Meeting with Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson
As the Napoleonic Wars progressed, Spain had grown increasing hostility towards Britain, and Menorca's Spanish governor, Ramirez, imposed increasingly strict sanctions on the Blanckleys. He issued a public order forbidding Menorcan people to visit or communicate with them, and placed HSB under house arrest. His butler was stabbed in the arm with a bayonet when the guards posted at his front door mistook him for HSB. His youngest son, Edward Blanckley joined the Royal Navy as midshipman on 17 January 1805. HSB sought British aid to evacuate the rest of his family from Menorca, and was informed that the 38-gun frigate Seahorse would collect them. However, according to his daughter Elizabeth Broughton's later account, Governor Ramirez compelled the Blanckleys to:
"embark on a wretched boat, at the risk of our lives, for he would not permit us to await the frigate, which we were hourly expecting".
HSB stuffed the "wretched boat" with furniture and animals (including a pair of matched coach horses to prevent the Spanish having them) and hung its mast with international flags to make it look diplomatic and non-combative as they limped through the stormy Mediterranean warzone. Elizabeth Broughton claims they stumbled across the British fleet, and Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, upon spying them, declared:
"Good God, it must be Mr. Blanckley, and the Sea Horse [sic] has missed him. Send a boat on board, and with my compliments, beg him to come to me immediately."
Elizabeth Broughton continues:
"As soon as my father entered his cabin, he met him with extended hand. "How, my dear Sir, could you in such weather trust yourself in such a nutshell ? Where is your family ?" When my father replied that we were all on board, he lifted up his hand and eyes in astonishment, and added, " I give you my word, I sent you the very first frigate I had under my command. The Sea-horse had only returned to the fleet, the very day I dispatched her to you. I am sadly crippled for want of small craft;"—and then beating up, with his one noble hand, the cushions of the sofa, he made my father sit beside him, adding, " But I will not say one word more, until you tell me what I shall send Mrs Blanckley for her supper." My father assured him that she was amply provided; and enumerated all the live stock we had on board, and among other things, a pair of English coach-horses, which, to our no trifling inconvenience, he had embarked, and stowed on board; —" for if I could not have managed to bring them, I would rather have cut their throats, than that a Spanish dragoon should mount them," was my father's concluding sentence. Lord Nelson laughed heartily at the enumeration of all my father's retinue, exclaiming, " A perfect Noah's ark, my dear Sir —A perfect Noah's ark !"