William Chamberlayne

William Chamberlayne
First name:William
Surname:Chamberlayne
Year elected:1824
Last year on list:1829
MembershipMember
Chamberlayne was well provided for by his father, who had successively held the posts of solicitor to the mint and treasury and commissioner of the public accounts. He sold his father’s residence at Coley Park, Berkshire, in 1802 and appears to have done the same with the parts of his landed inheritance which lay in Kent and Hertfordshire. Shortly thereafter he moved to a new house at Weston, on Southampton Water, which was later eulogised for its neat appearance by William Cobbett, once a near neighbour at Botley. Cobbett also commended Chamberlayne’s record as a landlord and employer, in spite of the knowledge ‘that both he and his equally benevolent sister would rather that their goodness remained unproclaimed’, and noticed the recent augmentation of the estate to include ‘the whole of the lands that come down to the water’s edge and that lie between the ferry over the Itchen at Southampton, and the river that goes out from Southampton Water at Hamble’. This had come to Chamberlayne as the reversionary legatee of his father’s friend and client Thomas Dummer on the death of the latter’s widow in June 1825, and along with a smaller plot in Leicestershire was reputed to be worth £18,000 a year. According to his father’s will, there was also ‘a very considerable personal estate’. Although Chamberlayne never lived at Cranbury Park, Dummer’s former residence near Eastleigh, he was responsible for the accumulation of most of the furnishings and pictures which later adorned it. He was a patron of the painter Henry James Richter and, according to an obituarist, possessed ‘a most correct and elegant taste for the arts’.

Yachts Owned

NameRig ClassfromtoMMSI
Fairy Cutter 1824 1829  

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