The Bonhams are the family of E. M. Delafield’s mother Betty. A series of merchants, traders, politicians, soldiers and sailors, they exemplify the growth and influence of the middle classes from the seventeenth century in England. The family line can be traced definitively back to Captain Samuel Bonham (1677-1745). Before that the family’s origins are uncertain. This post is indebted to the family history of the Bonhams that Andrew George has made available on Ancestry (you’ll need an Ancestry account to view it).
Samuel Bonham I (there are more Samuels, as we will see) was born in Stepney in east London, and worked as a sailor before commanding his own ships. Given the era in which he lived, it is unsurprising that he worked in the slave trade and commanded slaving vessels: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database includes details of nine slaving voyages between London, West Africa and Jamaica between 1705 and 1713: 3,269 African people were trafficked in these voyages and 438 of them died during their journeys. In later life he also worked in marine insurance as an underwriter. Samuel’s civic and business reputation - he gave evidence to a government commission on the Royal African Company - shows the utter normalcy with which the slave trade was viewed at the time.
Described as a ‘merchant’ - someone whose income came from overseas rather than domestic trade - he acquired substantial wealth and invested it in property in East London and Essex. Near Thurrock in Essex he built Orsett House, a grand red-brick Georgian house, and lived there for the last five years of his life. There is a photo of the house, which still stands, in this article from the Thurrock Nub News website. His first wife Sarah Dewey died when they had been married for only a year, and their son Samuel II died in his early twenties. He married his second wife Jane Pinson, in 1713 after his career at sea was probably over. Jane had eleven children, six of whom survived to adulthood and five who outlived their father, who died in 1745 and was buried in a rather elaborate tomb at St Giles and All Saints, Orsett.
Samuel I’s will shows his efforts to keep his newly created wealth within the family, with complicated trusts, distributions of property and entails. His wife Jane’s will shows the luxury goods the family had been able to acquire, including gold watches, silver goods, Chinese ceramics and expensive furniture. His business interests were left to his youngest son to manage.
Samuel Bonham III (1728-1821) was indeed involved in business, although the detail of this is obscure until 1794 when records show he was involved in shipping and the trade of the East India Company. He married Sarah Richardson in 1759, although they had been living together as man and wife for a while before this, and already had two children; they would go on to have ten children together, with eight surviving their childhoods. They lived at first in Hatton Garden in London and Samuel III described himself as a ‘Gentleman’, showing an upward class mobility; he was involved in various civic duties such as being a Commissioner of Sewers and serving on a jury. He too invested in a country property, Warley Place at Great Warley in Essex (now demolished, and later the home of the plantswoman Ellen Willmott), and also inherited substantially from his siblings, as Samuel Bonham I’s will and entails worked their way through the family. Like his father, Samuel III was able to leave substantial bequests to his adult children and grandchildren.
Of the next generation of Bonhams, two became sailors (Samuel IV and the unfortunate George, who died in a shipwreck in 1809); Pinson Bonham joined the Army and became a general and colonial governor; while the three surviving daughters made advantageous marriages. Henry Bonham (1765-1830), Betty’s great-grandfather, as well as inheriting substantially from his father, was left Bear Hill in Wargrave in Berkshire by an aunt, and Orsett House by his uncle. He too was involved in colonial trade as an East India Company stockholder and shipowner; he had enough liquid cash to invest £20,000 in an insurance loan in 1797 and £12,000 in the construction of a new East India Company dock in 1806. Through his involvement with the East India Company agency Fairlie & Co, as a concealed partner, he was covertly involved with the opium trade. He was also a volunteer in the London and Westminster Light Horse, a sort of amateur army regiment cum military guild with lavishly trimmed uniforms that functioned primarily as a social club. Henry was a Member of Parliament, firstly for Leominster from 1806-10, for Sandwich from 1824-26, and for Rye from 1826-28, but, as Andrew George says, his political career was “unexceptional, perhaps verging on quiescent”.
Henry married Charlotte Morrice (1780-1877) in 1802. Charlotte was the granddaughter of Adrien Coltée Ducarel (1718-45), a French Huguenot who migrated to England and was a Director of the South Sea Company. As well as being Betty’s great-great-great grandfather, Adrien Coltée Ducarel is also Henry de la Pasture’s great-great grandfather; his granddaughter Elizabeth Ducarel (1772-1798) married Henry’s grandfather Pierre Marie de la Pasture (1770-1800), so EMD’s parents were very distant cousins. Charlotte gave birth to nine children, eight of whom lived into adulthood, and most of whom married, some more than once, producing a large number of grandchildren for Henry and Charlotte.
The family moved around a lot, living for a while at the very grand Titness Park in Berkshire, and ending up in Essex like his father and grandfather at the end of their lives, at Rochetts near South Weald. Henry died in 1830 and was buried in the family tomb at Orsett; most of his estate, including all the property, apart from a £30,000 settlement for Charlotte, went to his eldest son Henry Frederick (1808-56). Edward Walter Bonham (1809-86), Betty’s grandfather, inherited a £22,000 interest in Charlotte’s trust, but no actual cash or property. He would have to get a job, as we will see.
Charlotte lived on until 1877, living for a while in Brighton and then in Chailey near Lewes in Sussex (where she is buried), so it is quite possible that Betty would have known her as a child. Betty’s stepmother Henrietta Currie (1834-1910) was from Staplefield, about ten miles away from Chailey, and Charlotte’s daughter Marianne lived nearby at Slaugham. There is a photograph of Charlotte in old age in the Library of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Betty’s novels often feature grand elderly ladies who tell stories about family history and illustrious ancestors; I wonder if Charlotte was an inspiration for them. The large families of the Bonhams, rich in second marriages and complicated cousin relationships, must also have helped Betty along with the plots of her family dramas. Betty’s novels often feature social advancement so she might have enjoyed the fact that one of the many, many descendants of Samuel Bonham I is Camilla, the Queen Consort.
Betty’s grandfather Edward Walter Bonham and her father Edward William Bonham will be discussed in future, separate posts.