Family
On 26 February 1783, he married firstly Charlotte Collins, daughter of his former tutor Reverend Thomas Collins, and had by her two sons and a daughter. After the birth of three of his children by his wife Charlotte, George embarked on a sexual relationship with his younger half-sister Mary Beauclerk. Mary was a twin from her mothers second marriage to Topham Beauclerk, but born in 1766 before their marriage 1768. The first child was delivered in Paris but passed off at home as a child of George and Charlotte's for a time. Charlotte, Lady Bolingbroke was anxious to save her marriage, and hoped by this ruse, to preserve the family name from infamy and her marriage from utter ruin. However, Mary Beauclerk became pregnant for the second time by George in 1788, and delivered their second child again across the channel.
In 1789 both George and Mary along with their two small children left England to live together on the Continent, George leaving behind a wife and three children. They travelled under the name 'Barton' and left instructions to their families not to try and find them. The story quickly reached their circle of family and influential friends, and was reported in The Times (7 July 1789). Mary went on to bear him another two sons, all of whom lived to adulthood. By May 1794 George had abandoned Mary and the four boys for another woman - Isabella Hompesch. (Mary later married 1797 an Anglo-German Bavarian count Franz Jenison von Walworth, by whom she had legitimate issue and descendants). At least one of her sons Robert St John, called Bob St John, was still alive and much loved by the politician Charles Fox and his mistress, later wife Elizabeth Armistead.
Bolinbroke persuaded Isabella Hompesch, a Belgian noblewoman, to marry him bigamously and then to live with him in obscurity first on the Continent, then in Britain, and finally in the United States. Their eldest children were all illegitimate.
Catherine, Lady Bolingbroke died in 1803, and St John married secondly Isabella Charlotte Antoinette Sophia Hompesch, Baroness von Hompesch on 1 August 1804. By his second wife, he had legitimate issue, two daughters and two sons. St John died, aged 63, at Pisa in Italy on a journey to regain his daughter's health and was succeeded in his titles by his oldest surviving son Henry St John, 4th Viscount Bolingbroke, as the oldest son George had died in 1804 just before his mother.
Read more about this topic: George St John, 3rd Viscount Bolingbroke
Famous quotes containing the word family:
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—Russell Baker (b. 1925)
“Our civility, England determines the style of, inasmuch as England is the strongest of the family of existing nations, and as we are the expansion of that people. It is that of a trading nation; it is a shopkeeping civility. The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and has the prejudices and timidities of that profession.”
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“In former times and in less complex societies, children could find their way into the adult world by watching workers and perhaps giving them a hand; by lingering at the general store long enough to chat with, and overhear conversations of, adults...; by sharing and participating in the tasks of family and community that were necessary to survival. They were in, and of, the adult world while yet sensing themselves apart as children.”
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