On November 21, an article in The Times mentioned the first announcements of births, marriages and deaths to appear in the paper when it began publication in 1785.
The very first marriage announcement, published on January 5, 1785, ran as follows: “Monday a special licence passed the seal, for John Ellis, Esq, of St Mary-le-Bone, to be married to Miss Antonetta Parker, of same place, a minor, by consent of her father, Sir Peter Parker, Bart.”
“I wonder”, wrote Rose Wild, author of the article, “if this hints at a reason why Miss Parker, despite being a minor, might have needed to get hitched in a hurry.” A fair enough suspicion, but it would seem to be unfounded, unless she had a miscarriage. Her first recorded child was born in 1788.
Antonetta— given incorrectly as Antionette in most reference books—was the elder daughter of a tough, determined, eminently dislikeable naval officer, who ended up as an admiral of the fleet and had the coveted distinction of being the chief mourner at Nelson’s state funeral in January 1806.
Sir Peter Parker (1722-1811), said to have been descended from Queen Elizabeth’s Archbishop (“Nosey”) Parker and created a baronet in 1782, fought against the French most profitably in the West Indies, buying an estate in Essex with his prize money. Serving briefly as a Tory MP, he extolled the slave trade as the foundation of Britain’s commercial success. He even claimed that its abolition “would cause general despondency among the negroes.”
“Known for being cantankerous” by his contemporaries, he was the kind of despotic father a spirited daughter would want to escape. She was 18 in 1785. Her suitor would have received every blessing from her father. John Ellis (1757-1832) belonged to one of Jamaica’s oldest and wealthiest families. Some 1,200 slaves toiled on their vast sugar plantations. His brother, Charles, later the Ist Lord Seaford, was a Tory leader of the West Indian interest in the Commons, fiercely opposing every move to abolish slavery. Her younger sister Anne married another Ellis, George, a cousin of her husband. (Her brother, Christopher, married Lord Byron’s cousin, Augusta.)
Antonetta and John Ellis had a mansion built for them at Hurlingham, which now houses the Hurlingham Club. Whether they were happy is unclear. It does not seem very likely. They managed to get through his fortune, and were heavily in debt by the time she died in 1829.
But however it ended, the first marriage announced in The Times had some interesting features, not all of which their descendants might choose to recall.
Extracts from this article were published in The Times on December 5.
