Ralph Broome (pamphleteer)
Ralph Broome (1742–1835) was an English stockjobber, pamphleteer and satirical poet.
Life and career
The third son of Ralph Broome (1714–1768) of the manor of Bushton, Wiltshire,[1] Broome was sent as a cadet to India, where he acquired Oriental languages, including Persian, and became a judge advocate with the rank of captain in the Bengal Army. While there he fathered a daughter Miriam (c. 1781–1840) by an unknown Indian lady. The girl accompanied him back to England in about 1785 and married in 1803 Broome's lawyer nephew, also Ralph Broome (1781–1838).
In 1790, Broome himself married Lucy Jeffreys, a daughter of Richard Jeffreys of Penkelly, Brecknockshire, Wales, but she died at Bristol Hot Wells in 1796. He then married the widowed Charlotte Ann Francis, née Burney (1761–1838), on 28 February 1798. Their only child was a son, Ralph (1801–1817). The marriage caused consternation in Charlotte's father Charles Burney, her sister Frances Burney and other members of the family, mainly because of doubts about Broome's finances, although they became reconciled to it later.[2]
Works
Broome was a prolific pamphleteer and versifier. Although he had not known Warren Hastings personally in India, he attended the impeachment proceedings and argued in Hastings' defence in several works. Broome's published works include:
- Letters of Simkin the Second to his dear brother in Wales, containing a humble description of the trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. (1788)
- Letters of Simpkin the Second, Poetic Recorder, of all the proceedings upon the Trial of Warren Hastings (1789)
- An Elucidation of the Articles of Impeachment preferred by the last Parliament against Warren Hastings, Esq., later Governor of Bengal (1790)
- Letters from Simkin the Second to his dear brother in Wales, for the year 1790; giving a full and circumstantial account of all the most material points both in the speeches of the Honourable Managers, and in the written and oral evidence brought ... during the trial of Warren Hastings, etc. (1790)
- A Comparative Review of Mr. Hastings and Mr. Dundas, in War and Peace (1791)
- An Examination of the Expediency of continuing the Present Impeachment (1791)
- Observations on Mr. Paine's Pamphlet Entitled the Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance... (1796)
- Strictures on Mr. Burke's Two Letters, Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament (1796)
- Letters from Simpkin the Second, to his brother Simon, in Wales: dedicated without permission, to the ancient and respectable family of the Grunters. [A satire in verse, on Edmund Burke.].[3]
References
- ^ British History online: Retrieved 1 August 2011.
- ^ Joyce Hemlow, ed.: The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney... (London: OUP, 1972 ff.). IV, 33n; I, lxxii–lxxiii; IV, references in several letters pp. 31 ff., notably No. 273, pp. 118–25.
- ^ Joyce Hemlow, ed.: The Journals..., p. 30n; British Library Integrated Catalogue.