Henry Pellew, 6th Viscount Exmouth

Henry Edward Pellew, 6th Viscount Exmouth (26 April 1828 – 4 February 1923) was a British peer and a naturalised United States citizen who inherited the title of Viscount Exmouth at the age of 94 from a cousin, and held the title for less than a year before his own death. Although born and educated in England, he moved to America in 1873 shortly after his second marriage and lived there for the rest of his life, carrying out charitable works.

Life

Henry Pellew was born on 26 April 1828. His father, George Pellew, who was Dean of Norwich, was the third son of Edward Pellew, 1st Viscount Exmouth, a British admiral who saw action in the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars.^[1][2] Henry was his only son. Pellew was educated at Eton College, before studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1850. Whilst at Cambridge University, he won his "Blue" by rowing for the university boat club against Oxford in the Boat Race in 1849.^[3] He was one of the founders of Keble College, Oxford and served on the Council of the college from its foundation in 1870 until 1873. He was also a magistrate for the county of Middlesex, serving on the boards of various charities, hospitals and schools in and around London. He married in 1858 Eliza Jay, the daughter of a judge from New York and a descendant of John Jay, the Van Cortlandt family, the Livingston family, and the Schuyler family. They had three children, of whom only Charles, his eventual heir, survived. She died in 1869. In 1873, he married her youngest sister, Augusta, a marriage that was not recognised as valid at that time in English law. In the same year (possibly because of this, suggested his obituary in The Times)^[1] he moved to New York City, and later to Washington, D.C. He became a naturalised citizen of the United States.^[1]

Pellew carried on working for various good causes in America, as he had in England, even after his ninetieth birthday. He helped to organise the Bureau of Charities in New York, working with the future President Theodore Roosevelt.^[1][3] He helped to set up coffee houses for poor people, a free lending library, and night shelters, as well as helping improve housing conditions. He was President of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor and of the St George Society, an Anglo-American group in New York; he also belonged to the Society for Sanitary Reform and the School Commission. He helped with the plans for Washington National Cathedral.^[1]

In August 1922, Edward Pellew, 5th Viscount Exmouth, a distant cousin, died without descendants and his titles (Viscount Exmouth and two other titles earlier created for the 1st Viscount, namely Baron Exmouth and a baronetcy) passed to Pellew as the closest male relative. He attempted to renounce the peerage (the U.S. Constitution prohibits any "person holding any office of profit or trust under them" from "without the consent of the Congress, accept[ing] any . . . title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state."^[4]) in favour of Charles, but was told by the British Embassy in Washington that this was not possible. In any event, he preferred to remain known as "Mr Henry Edward Pellew" rather than use the title of Viscount. He died in Washington on 4 February 1923, and was succeeded in his titles by his son, Charles Pellew, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University.^[1][3]

References

Notes