William Madocks - Biography

Biography

William Madocks was born in London on 17 June 1773 to middle-aged parents. He had two older brothers, John Edward, and Joseph, but his parents had suffered the death of two further infants after Joseph's birth, who was ten by the time William was born. His father was John Madocks, a barrister at Lincoln's Inn, who would go on to become an eminent King's Counsel, and his mother was Frances. When he was christened at St Andrew's Church, Holborn, he was given the name William after his grandfather, and Alexander after Alexander the Great, rather than because it was a family name. Frances was the daughter of a London merchant called Joseph Whitchurch, who came from Loughborough in County Down, Ireland, although her mother was English and they lived at Twickenham.

The Madocks family had long associations with Wales, traceable back to the time of King Henry II, and William's father inherited property at Llangwyfan and near Wrexham. As he rose to prominence in the legal profession, the family moved to a substantial Jacobean house with its own private theatre in North Cray, Kent, as the Welsh properties were too far away. At the age of eleven, he went to Charterhouse boarding school, and spent five and a half years there, but left in December 1789, when it appears that the Founder's Day celebrations got out of hand, and William refused to submit to a flogging of the whole class. His father backed his stance, and he worked briefly in a country solicitor's office before going to university at Oxford. His father hoped that he might also pursue a career in the legal service.

While there was support for parliamentary reform, particularly among students, at the start of Madocks' university career, the events of the French Revolution resulted in Radicals being viewed with suspicion, and there was little support for reform. The Napoleonic Wars resulted in few of the gentry making grand tours of Europe, and travel to the remote parts of Britain, including the Lake District and Wales became popular. Madocks visited North Wales often, staying at the houses of the gentry. There was a tradition of house-parties and theatre, with Sir Watkin of Wynnstay holding a six-week season of plays each winter, at which Madocks and his brothers excelled. Joseph and William were noted for their duets, but the parties also offered lively discussion of land reclamation, landscaping and agricultural practices. Madocks' ideas on communities with a sense of purpose were shaped at this time by his brother's building of a house at Erith, where he also saw the benefits of reclaimed land, in this case former marshes by the River Thames.