Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/138

 on 18 Dec. 1790, and was buried on the north side of Warmington churchyard, in accordance with somewhat singular directions which he had given (ib. p. 412). A marble bust of him by John Hickey, with an inscription, the joint work of Sir Philip Francis and Edmund Burke, was placed in St. Paul's school by his pupils in 1792. The inscription is no longer extant (Notes and Queries, 8th ser. ix. 148).

[Kirby's Winchester Scholars, 1888, p. 233; Gardiner's Admission Registers of St. Paul's School, p. 84; Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, i. 426 n., ix. 251–6; Gent. Mag. 1790 ii. 1153, 1791 i. 30; Athenæum, 29 Sept. 1888; Pauline (St. Paul's School Magazine), xiv. 18–21; Memoirs and Anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse, 1788, i. 7, 8; Parkes and Merivale's Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, 1867, i. 5.] 

THICKNESSE, PHILIP (1719–1792), lieutenant-governor of Landguard Fort, seventh son of John Thicknesse, rector of Farthinghoe, Northamptonshire, who was a younger son of Ralph Thicknesse of Balterley Hall, Staffordshire, was born at his father's rectory on 10 Aug. 1719. His mother, Joyce Blencowe, was niece of Sir John Blencowe [q. v.] George Thicknesse [q. v.] was his elder brother. Another brother, Ralph (d. 1742), was an assistant master at Eton College, and published an edition of ‘Phædrus, with English Notes’ (1741). He died suddenly at Bath on 11 Oct. 1742, while performing a musical piece of his own composition (cf. his epitaph in Gent. Mag. 1790, i. 521).

Another Ralph Thicknesse (1719–1790), cousin to Philip, born at Barthomley, Cheshire, was M.A. of King's College, Cambridge, and M.D., and practised as a medical man at Wigan, where he died on 12 Feb. 1790, aged 71. He wrote a ‘Treatise on Foreign Vegetables’ (1749), chiefly taken from Geoffroy's ‘Materia Medica’ (ib. 1790, i. 185, 272, 399; Journal of Botany, 1890, p. 375).

Philip, after going to Aynhoe school, was admitted a ‘gratis’ scholar at Westminster school. He left that school in a short time to be placed with an apothecary named Marmaduke Tisdall; but he soon tired of that calling, and in 1735, when he was only sixteen, went out to Georgia with General Oglethorpe. Returning to England in 1737, he was employed by the trustees of the colony until he lost Oglethorpe's favour by speaking too plainly of the management of affairs in Georgia. He afterwards obtained a lieutenancy in an independent company at Jamaica, where for some time he was engaged in desultory warfare with the runaway negroes in the mountains. He returned home at the end of 1740 after a disagreement with his brother officers, and in the following January became captain-lieutenant in Brigadier Jeffries's regiment of marines. Early in 1744–5 he was sent to the Mediterranean under Admiral Medley, and passed through a terrible gale near Land's End on 27 Feb. In February 1753 he procured by purchase the lieutenant-governorship of Landguard Fort, Suffolk, an appointment which he held till 1766. He had a dispute in 1762 with Francis Vernon (afterwards Lord Orwell and Earl of Shipbrooke), then colonel of the Suffolk militia; and, having sent the colonel the ludicrous present of a wooden gun, was involved in an action for libel, with the result that he was confined for three months in the king's bench prison and fined 300l. In 1754 he met with Thomas Gainsborough near Landguard Point, and for the next twenty years constituted himself the patron of the artist, of whose genius he considered himself the discoverer. He induced Gainsborough to move to Bath from Ipswich; but in 1774 their friendship was broken by a wretched squabble. About 1766 he settled at Welwyn, Hertfordshire, removing thence to Monmouthshire, and in 1768 to Bath, where he purchased a house in the Crescent, and built another house which he called St. Catherine's Hermitage. His long-cherished hopes of succeeding to 12,000l. from the family of his first wife were destroyed by a decree against him in chancery and by an unsuccessful appeal to the House of Lords. Three letters, in which this decision of the House of Lords was vehemently denounced, appeared in an opposition newspaper, ‘The Crisis,’ on 18 Feb., 25 March, and 12 Aug. 1775 respectively. The first two were signed ‘Junius,’ and appeared while Thicknesse was still in England. The last letter, which had been promised in the second, and was issued after Thicknesse had quitted the country, bore his own name. All were doubtless by Thicknesse, and the use of Junius's name was in all probability an intentional mystification. Thicknesse many years later (1789) issued a pamphlet, ‘Junius Discovered,’ in which he professed to discover Junius in Horne Tooke; but the identification cannot be seriously entertained (information kindly supplied by A. Hall, esq.).

After the House of Lords finally pronounced against Thicknesse in 1775, he, regarding himself as ‘driven out of his own country,’ fixed upon Spain as a place of residence. He returned, however, to Bath at the end of 1776. In 1784 he erected in his