Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/208

 which he had caused Vavasour to copy; this copy, now preserved in the Bodleian Library, was published by David Jardine [q. v.] in 1851. Garnett himself was examined on the point, but ‘was reluctant to judge in the case of Francis Tresham's equivocation, as he did it to save a friend’ (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1603–10, p. 306).

Tresham died on 22 Dec.; although he had not even been indicted, he was treated as a traitor, his corpse was decapitated, and his head set up over the gate at Northampton. He was attainted with the other conspirators by act of parliament passed during that session (Statutes of the Realm, iv. 1068–1069), and his lands were forfeited. By his wife Anne, eldest daughter of Sir John Tufton of Hothfield, Kent, Tresham had issue two daughters—Lucy, and Elizabeth who married Sir George Heneage. In spite of the attainder, Rushton and other lands of Tresham passed eventually to his brother Lewis (1578?–1639) of the Inner Temple, who was a baronet of the original creation, 29 June 1611, was knighted on 9 April 1612, and died in 1639. He was succeeded by his son William, on whose death in 1650–1 the baronetcy became extinct. Wood credits Tresham with the authorship of the above-mentioned ‘Treatise of Equivocation,’ and of ‘De Officio Principis Christiani,’ in which he is said to have maintained the lawfulness of deposing heretic kings. Nothing, however, is known of the manuscript, which was never printed.

[Cal. Rushton Papers, Northampton, 1871; Cal. State Papers, Dom. passim; Stow's Annales; Hist. MSS. Comm. 12th Rep. App. pt. iv.; Goodman's Court and Times of James I; Wood's Athenæ, i. 754; Abbot's Antilogia; Dodd's Church Hist. ed. Tierney; Jardine's Gunpowder Plot, 1857; Gerard's What was the Gunpowder Plot? 1896; S. R. Gardiner's History, vol. i., and What Gunpowder Plot was, 1897; Gerard's Gunpowder Plot and Plotters, 1897; Falkener's Tresham Pedigree, 1886; Bridges's Northamptonshire; Burke's Extinct Baronetcies; Brown's Genesis U.S.A.]  TRESHAM, HENRY (1749?–1814), historical painter, was born in Ireland. The date of his birth has been variously stated from 1749 to 1756. He received his first instruction in art from W. Ennis (d. 1770), the pupil and successor of Robert West (d. 1770) at the Dublin art school. For three years Tresham exhibited his works at Dublin—chalk drawings in 1771, allegorical designs for a ceiling in 1772, and ‘Andromache mourning for Hector’ in 1773. He came to England in 1775, and supported himself by drawing small portraits, till he obtained the patronage of John Campbell of Cawdor, afterwards (1796) first Baron Cawdor (d. 1821), who invited Tresham to accompany him on his travels through Italy. Tresham remained on the continent for fourteen years, staying chiefly at Rome, where he studied from the antique and from the paintings of the old masters, modelling his style especially on the works of the Roman school. He became an accomplished draughtsman of a frigid academical type, but had little sense of colour. He was a member of the academies of Rome and Bologna, and a keen student and a good critic of all kinds of works of art according to the standard of eighteenth-century connoisseurship. During his residence at Rome he published in 1784 ‘Le Avventure di Saffo,’ a series of eighteen subjects designed and engraved in aquatint by himself, which do not give a favourable impression of his draughtsmanship or taste at that period of his career. On his return to England in 1789 he resided at 9 George Street, Hanover Square, for some years, and afterwards at 20 Brook Street. He sent no fewer than twelve works, most of which were drawings, of very various subjects, to the Royal Academy in 1789. From that year to 1806 he exhibited thirty-three works in all, the majority of which were subjects from scriptural, Roman, or English history, accompanied sometimes by rather pedantic quotations in the catalogues from Cicero or Athenæus. Many of his pictures were painted for Robert Bowyer's ‘Historic Gallery,’ and engraved in the large illustrated edition of Hume's ‘History of England.’ His sepia drawings for the twofold dedication of this work, to George III and to the ‘Legislature of Great Britain,’ which were engraved by Bartolozzi and Fittler respectively, are in the print-room of the British Museum. Two illustrations of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ by him appeared in Boydell's ‘Shakespeare,’ and a third subject from the same play in Boydell's large ‘Shakespeare Gallery.’ He also designed frontispieces for Sharpe's ‘British Classics’ and several other publications. Several of his large scriptural and classical pictures—e.g. ‘Maid Arise’ and ‘The Death of Virginia’—were engraved by the two Schiavonetti, and his ‘Ophelia’ was etched by Bartolozzi.

Tresham was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1791, and an academician in 1799. In 1807 he succeeded John Opie [q. v.] as professor of painting, but resigned that office in 1809 on account of bad health. He was a collector of pictures and decorative objects, and it is related that he