Lawyer and antiquary, who had been private secretary to William Windham (1750–1819; DNB), 1806–1810. He sent Southey papers relating to the campaign in Spain and Portugal.

Leading Catholic layman, lawyer and writer, especially on legal matters. In 1791 he became the first Catholic called to the Bar since the Revolution of 1688; he was closely involved in attempts to secure Catholic Emancipation from parliament. Southey met him in 1811 and found him ‘thoroughly amiable’. However, he replied to Southey’s Book of the Church (1824) with a defence of Catholicism, The Book of the Catholic Church (1825). This in turn provoked Southey’s Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826).

Member of a family of Sussex landowners. He was a friend of Southey’s from Westminster School. D’Oyley was later a barrister and circuit judge and played a leading role in Sussex society and county administration. He had strong antiquarian interests.

The youngest child of Herbert Hill and his wife Catherine; he was named after his first cousin Robert Southey. In later life he became a doctor and botanist.

Rector of Hargrave, Northamptonshire, 1805–1818, and Curate of Westwood, Wiltshire, 1825–1851. Longmire was a well-connected evangelical clergyman, the nephew of Thomas Martyn (1735–1825; DNB), Professor of Botany at Cambridge University, 1762–1825. In 1812 Longmire wrote to Southey to thank him for the moral lessons and biblical parallels that could be drawn from Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), which had strengthened his faith. Southey was surprised and amused, but replied politely.

Naval officer, eldest son of John Joshua Proby, 1st Earl of Carysfort. He was made a captain in 1798 when only 19, probably because of his political connections.

Surgeon at Taunton with literary inclinations, and a friend of James Montgomery. Standert was known to Southey through the latter’s extensive family connections in Taunton and the two men occasionally corresponded.

Wealthy vintner of Great Queen Street, London, an acquaintance of John Horne Tooke, Joseph Watt, William Godwin, and the Wordsworths. His fame as a conversationalist led to the epithet ‘River’ to describe him. Southey’s correspondence with him does not appear to have survived.

Clergyman and author. Only son of George and Mary Martha Butt and brother of Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851; DNB), author of The Fairchild Family. Educated Westminster (adm. 1788) and Christ Church, Oxford (matric. 1792, BA 1796, MA 1799). Curate of Witley, Worcestershire; Rector of Oddingley, Worcestershire from 1806 and Vicar of East Garston, Berkshire from 1806. Author of The Last Vision of Daniel (1808) and other works. His first wife was Mary Ann Congreve; his second, Jemima Hubbal. Butt was a friend of Southey’s at Westminster School and Oxford.

Eldest daughter of Philip Dauncey K.C. (1759–1819) and his wife Marie (Mary) (1769–1804), daughter of Elizabeth Dolignon, who had acted in loco parentis during Southey’s time at Westminster School. Louisa married Robert Bill, an admirer of Southey’s poetry, in 1820. As Southey had known both her parents, in 1819 he wrote to her, commiserating on the death of her father, which he had read about in the newspapers.

Bishop of Beja, 1770–1802, Archbishop of Evora 1802–1814. Member of the Franciscan Order and Professor of Theology at the University of Coimbra 1751–1755. Cenáculo was closely associated with the reforms of the Marquis of Pombal, Prime Minister of Portugal 1750–1777, and retired to his bishopric when Pombal fell in 1777, devoting his energies to his library and promoting education. When Southey visited Portugal in 1800–1801 he obtained a letter of introduction to the Bishop from his uncle, Herbert Hill, and visited him at Beja in April 1801.

Naval officer, Captain of the Mars, in which Tom Southey served. Killed 21 April 1798 when the Mars captured the French vessel, L’Hercule. Hood and two of his brothers were later the subject of a memorial inscription by Southey.

Clergyman. Possibly the son of John Howe of Honiton, Devon. Educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford. Howe was Rector of Huntspill, Somerset 1804–1823. He was Southey’s tutor at Oxford in 1793–1794.

Politician. The father of Thomas Davis Lamb. He was married to Elizabeth Davis and lived at Mountsfield Lodge, near Rye. By the mid-eighteenth century the Lamb family had become the dominant force on Rye corporation and wielded great political influence in the borough. Lamb was the government agent in Rye and sat as an MP for the town 1812–1816 and 1819, though (like his son) he is not known to have spoken in the House of Commons. He was Mayor of Rye some 18 times between 1775–1817. Southey twice visited the Lambs home in Rye in 1791 and 1792 and was on excellent terms with Thomas Phillipps Lamb, perhaps seeing him as a surrogate father-figure. Their correspondence lapsed during Southey’s time at Oxford and was briefly renewed in 1798.

A fellow of Christ Church, Oxford and from 1790 Lees Reader in Anatomy. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1795 and was knighted in 1799.

Writer. Born in Hampshire, she was the only surviving child of Charles Bowles (1737–1801), a retired Captain in the East India service, and Ann Burrard (1753–1817). The continuing decline in her family’s finances was reflected in their move from Buckland Manor, Bowles’s birthplace, to the more modest Buckland Cottage. In 1818, Bowles, fearing that she would lose her home due to the mismanagement of her guardian, wrote to Southey asking his advice about publishing her poetry with the aim of earning much-needed cash. This initiated a correspondence that developed into close friendship and literary collaboration, and culminated in marriage on 4 June 1839. Although Bowles’s finances were in the event stabilised by an annuity from a Colonel Bruce, the ‘adopted’ son of her father, she did pursue a literary career. She contributed to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and published poetry and prose, including Ellen Fitzarthur (1820), Solitary Hours (1826), Chapters on Churchyards (1829), The Cat’s Tail (1830), Tales of the Factories (1833) and The Birth–Day (1836). She also collaborated with Southey on an unfinished poem on ‘Robin Hood’, which applied the metre of the oriental romance Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) to an English subject. Bowles’s relationship with Southey has been the subject of recent debate, though the destruction of part of their correspondence, especially for the crucial period leading up to their marriage, makes it impossible to determine. Certainly their marriage proved unpalatable to three of Southey’s surviving children (Bertha, Kate and Cuthbert), and to some of his friends, including the Wordsworths. Edith May Southey, her husband John Wood Warter, and other friends, such as Landor, took Bowles’s side. Life at Greta Hall during Southey’s final years was uncomfortable, with the house divided between the warring factions. Southey’s ill health and memory loss meant that he was largely oblivious to what was going on around him. The feud continued after Southey’s death in 1843 and ensured the collapse of plans for Henry Taylor to produce a tombstone life of the Poet Laureate. Bowles returned to Hampshire, where in 1847 she published the fragmentary ‘Robin Hood’. She was awarded a pension from the civil list in 1852. On her death in 1854 she left her papers to Edith May and John Wood Warter.

Master of Balliol College, Oxford 1785–1798.

A friend of Grosvenor Charles Bedford and his family. Daughter of Mr and Mrs Deacon.

Soldier. Educated at Christ’s Hospital, where he was a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Obtained an army commission, fought in the Peninsular War and was killed at the battle of Salamanca. There is some confusion over Favell’s first name — with some sources citing it as Joseph or Samuel — see C. A. Prance, Companion to Charles Lamb. A Guide to People and Places 1760–1847 (1983), pp. 112–113 and Duncan Wu, ‘Unpublished drafts of sonnets by Lamb and Favell’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 75 (1991), 100.

Headmaster of Westminster School 1819–1828. He was a clergyman and later Dean of Wells 1831–1845. Southey wrote to him in his capacity as Headmaster of Westminster School.

Charles Watkin Williams Wynn’s uncle. First Lord of the Admiralty, 1806–1807.

Army officer and author. He was appointed to the post of Consul in Galicia in 1791. He was a friend of William Godwin and Joel Barlow (1754–1812; DNB), and his writings included Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal &c. (1788). He and Southey met during the latter’s 1795–1796 visit to the Iberian peninsula. He figures in both Southey’s correspondence from this period and in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal (1797).

Clergyman and schoolmaster. Educated at Balliol and Corpus Christi Colleges, Oxford (matric. 1792, BA 1796). He became a curate and master of the grammar school in Honiton, Devon. A friend of Southey’s at Oxford, they lost touch in later years.

A former friend of Robert Burns, the widow of Thomas Skepper, a lawyer in York, and daughter of Edward Benson, a York wine merchant. She was Mary Barker’s friend, and married Basil Montagu in 1808.