Stanley Muttlebury - Parentage and Family Background

Parentage and Family Background

Muttlebury was born 29 April 1866 in London, England, the only child of James William Muttlebury, and his wife, Catherine Elizabeth Stanley Duff (born in Madras, British India; died in 1915, aged 80), daughter of Major Duff, 37th Regiment, Madras Native Infantry (The Grenadiers). He was baptised according the rites of the Church of England on 4 September 1866 in Holy Trinity, Paddington, London, England. His father, who was by profession a barrister, was trained in Toronto and called to the Bar of Upper Canada as a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada. He practised in Toronto, Canada West (now Ontario), but by 1851 returned to his birthplace Walcot, Bath, Somerset, and by 1856 migrated to the antipodes where he was a solicitor in St Kilda's, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. There he made his fortune, becoming a director of the National Bank of Australasia. He returned to England by 1862, for he was married in Kew that year, and the subject was born in London four years later. Financially able to retire, he lived the life of an annuitant gentleman, dying in Geneva, Switzerland in 1886, when Muttlebury was a freshman Cambridge undergraduate.

Muttlebury's paternal grandfather was Dr James Muttlebury (1773–1832), M.D., F.R.S.E.(1818), a medical graduate of St Andrews and Inspector-General of Hospitals (18 September 1795 to 25 June 1818), in the British Army, whose own mother resided at Close Hall, Wells in Somerset in 1798, and at Taunton, Somersetshire, at the time of her death in 1825. After retiring as an Army doctor, in 1820, he settled nearby at Bath, Somerset, where he joined the hospital board.

In the spring of 1832, he emigrated from England to Upper Canada, in British North America, arriving on 7 May after a 67-day journey which had involved sailing from Portsmouth, England to New York City, and then travelling overland for a month. He bought land in Upper Canada, in York township along Yonge street, near the capital, York, now Toronto, where, accompanied by two of his eight sons, the eldest, Rutherford, 18, and Augustus, 12, he met the leading citizens, including the governor, Sir John Colborne. The latter made him a member of the provincial, that is, colonial, medical board, and he received a 640-acre (2.6 km2) land grant at Blandford township in the Brock district commensurate with his former military rank. Unfortunately, on 14 August 1832, he died at his new farm during a cholera epidemic after visiting local hospitals filled with the infected. His widow, Elizabeth Margaret "Eliza", eldest daughter of John Rutherford, of Sue River plantation, Jamaica, accompanied by the rest of their sons, and their three daughters (Eliza, Fanny Maria, and new-born Jane Isabella Charlotte), arrived in the colony after landing at New York on 19 November 1832. There she managed to send six of her fatherless sons to Upper Canada College (enrolled 1832: Frederick, Augustus, James; 1833: John; 1837: Francis, 1838: Francis (again) and Henry), eventually launching them on careers in the Law, Army, and Medicine.

According to the 1854 obituary (in The Gentleman's Magazine) of the rower's great uncle, this nineteenth-century Muttlebury family was descended from an old, armigerous, English landed family settled at Jordans (or Jordaynes) near Ilminster, Somerset, whose pedigree was recorded in the heraldic Visitation of Somerset in 1623, and again, in 1672 as of Jordans in Ashill in Com Somersett. The blazon for the coat-of-arms borne by them is found in Burke's General Armory (p. 719, col. 2), under the rubric Muttlebury (Jourdaine, Co. Somerset) Ermine on a bend gules, three round buckles or, a border of the second. Crest—A hare courant argent.

Catholic Record Society publications reveal the family's long adherence to Roman Catholic recusancy. It is likely that this loyalty contributed to the family's eventual ruin as heavy payments levied on them for their religious nonconformity to the Church of England took their financial toll. Suspicion of the Catholic church has become a legacy for many members of the Muttlebury family who remained loyally Church of England.

The history of the English Benedictine Congregation includes three known members of the family: Dom Placid, O.S.B. who was professed a monk at St Laurence, Dieulwart, Lorraine, France in circa 1610-11. He is described as the former Muttlebury, George (Placid), O.S.B., born in Somersetshire: whilst a priest on the mission came to Dieulwart to petition for the habit of a monk; here, says F. Weldon, his pleasing qualities rendered him highly grateful to all his brethren of that house, amongst whom he happily ended his life in a good old age, 6 July 1632 (see Collections, Illustrating the History of the Catholic Religion George Oliver, 1857, p. 632); Dom Francis Muttlebury, of Somersetshire, professed 13 November 1658, later Vicar to the Abbess of Cambray in James II's reign; and a lay member, Sister Dorothy Muttlebury, of St John-Baptist, who died 2 October 1704.

Some sources claim that the family were forced to sell their estates in the reign of Charles I, possibly for their habitual Catholicism. Opposing this is the fact that, in 1685, one John Muttlebury was sentenced in the Bloody Assizes at Wells to be transported to the Caribbean for his part in the Monmouth rebellion, an uprising for the Protestant bastard son of Charles II of Great Britain, James, Duke of Monmouth, against the Catholic Duke of York, later James II. The obituary states that it was through this latter event that Jordans was forfeited to the crown in consequence of the adherence of the Colonel's ancestor to the unfortunate Monmouth. It may be that their own membership in the Established Church by nineteenth century members of the family favoured this particular interpretation of events.

Whether in the reign of Charles I, or that of his son, James II, it is, nonetheless, clear that in the seventeenth century, the old West Country Muttlebury family went into a decline in social status and wealth which apparently lasted until the second half of the eighteenth century.

It was then that opportunity arose through the rewards bestowed upon the subject's great-grandmother, Frances, wife of James Muttlebury, gent., of Creech St Michael, Somerset, and later of Brighthelmstone, Sussex, who served as wetnurse to Princess Charlotte, The Princess Royal, eldest daughter of King George III, and later to his son, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, Queen Victoria's father. This post was considered a plum appointment only suitable for a vigorous gentlewoman, and proven mother of healthy offspring. It gave the recipient an unusually intimate relationship within the royal circle, and at her 1798 marriage, Mrs Muttlebury's own daughter, the royal namesake, Charlotte Muttlebury, was referred to as the fostersister of her mother's former royal charge who had herself by now become the Duchess (later Queen) of Württemberg. This close Court connexion doubtless had led to her daughter's having been baptised with the name Charlotte (in 1771, St Nicholas', Brighton, Sussex; and, from 1798, the wife of Francis Richardson, to whom she was married at Fivehead, near Langport, Somerset). It also helped launch two of her younger sons (James, baptised 1773, and, George, baptised 1776, who were both also christened in Brighton, then fast becoming a royal haunt) on respectable careers in one of the classic professions for gentlemen, the British Army.

According to Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses, Mrs Muttlebury's older son, the Rev. John Muttlebury, was educated at the expense of the Queen (Charlotte, wife of George III), first at Manchester Grammar School, and later at Cambridge University's St John's College, before being ordained a clergyman of the Church of England, as the following extract reveals:

Admitted pensioner at ST JOHN'S, July 3, 1783. Of Somerset. School, Manchester (supported there by the Queen). Matric. Michs. 1783; Scholar, 1783; B.A. 1787; M.A. 1790. Minor Canon of Bristol Cathedral, 1792-5. Rector of Cowley, Gloucs., 1795. He can have held the living for but a short time, since George Martin was instituted rector, June 6, 1796. His education at the expense of the Queen is explained by this notice: ‘died lately at Wilton, near Taunton in her 90th year, Mrs Muttlebury, foster-mother to the Princess-Royal of England, the present Queen of Wurtemberg.’ (Manchester Gr. Sch. Reg.; St John's Coll. Adm. IV. 393.) (In fact, he married Grace Hancock on 24 April 1796, at All Hallows, London Wall, in London, and their daughter, Frances Elizabeth Muttlebury, was baptised at Broadwinsor, Dorset, on 15 July 1798. See also his estate papers: Abstract of Administration of John Muttlebury, Clerk of Saint James, Gloucestershire. Proved in the Court of Bristol. Date May 13, 1808 TNA Catalogue reference IR 26/295)

The rise of the family star continued through the career successes that both younger sons, the subject's grandfather and great-uncle, achieved after benefiting from this same royal patronage. They appear to have needed what help they could get as their own father died in India when they were both children (see Will of James Muttlebury, Gentleman and now Cadet in the Honourable East India Company's Service at Pondicherry on the Coast Coromandel in India of Brighton, Sussex proved 3 July 1782, TNA Catalogue reference PROB 11/1093).

With his large family, it seems likely, however, that through emigration to Upper Canada, and in taking up the large land grants, and additional career opportunites, on offer to veteran British officers, Dr Muttlebury probably sought not only to increase his income, but to economise the better to rear his eleven offspring on his small Army pension. After his untimely death, however, it was left to his sons, notably the subject's father, to advance the family's fortunes.