BROWNES IN ENGLAND
The Manor in Monkton Farleigh, Wiltshire. The town is on a hill overlooking the Wiltshire Downs all the way to Bath. It consists of a church, a pub, the Manor House and other dwellings. Wade Browne, younger, lived there from about 1831 to his death in 1851. "Browne's Folly" is an observation tower overlooking the Downs. Wade Browne built it during the 1840s to give work to the poor. I took these photographs in 1978.
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Manor House Front
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Front Door Manor House
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Rear of Manor House
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Garden View
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Terrace
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Memorial Sundial
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Manor House Front
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Manor House Gate
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Garden
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St. Peter's Church
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Memorial to Anne P.W Browne
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Memorial Eardly Smith Wade Browne
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Village Pub
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View Toward Browne's Folly
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Browne's Folly
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In the second generation from George Browne (1633--?), two brothers appear. Martin, b1713, had a son, Martin (b 1749) who came to America. the other brother, John, married an heiress, Lydia Wade, and had a son, Wade, who married Rhoda Smith, an heiress. The name "Wade" becomes a part of the surname thereafter. I have never found it actually hyphenated.
The two marriages to heiresses lifted the Brownes from the merchant class into the gentry. Wade Browne, the younger, went to Cambridge and passed the Bar from the Middle Temple. He hired the manor at Monkton Farleigh, Wilts., became a JP, and married first, Anne Pennefather, daughter of a prominent Anglo-Irish family, and second, Selina Caroline Eardley Wilmot, daughter of a titled English family.
Edward, child of wife #1, purchased a commission in the 71st Foot (later 1st Bn. HLI) and served in the Crimean War, transferred into the Scots Fusilier Guards and retired in 1867 to live the life of a gentleman until his death in 1904.
Cornwallis, child of wife #1, bought into the 48th Foot (First Bn. Northampton Regiment) and served in India until he retired in 1866. Reconstructing from data, he probably became a tea planter in Ceylon, as he married there. He emigrated to Australia, was an overland drover (he wrote a book, "Overlanding in Australia" of which I am trying to get a copy).. He retired to Medlow Bath, in the Blue Hills outside Sydney, and was a man of some stature and influence there.
By wife #2 he had a son, Trevor, who went to Eton and became a Resident Magistrate in Sligo (Ireland).
Cornwallis Wade Browne
(courtesy National Library of Queensland)
Wade Browne the younger had five daughjters, not one of whom married. Edward had two daughters, also spinsters. Edward's son, Thomas, became a tea planter in Ceylon, had a breakdown, came to Venice down and out, went to Paris and committed suicide in 1914. Cornwallis had only one child, John, who died in Sydney, a bachelor.
My theory is that the family fortune was large enough to support a gentry life-style, but not enough to provide sufficient dowry for seven daughters in two generations to attract husbands from their own class, but class rules prevented them from marriing poor men for love.
Of the four sons in the last two generations who did not marry, Eardley died age ten. Trevor was blind in one eye (accidental?) and lived, isolated, in Ireland. Thomas, as described in a book about "Baron Corvo" by Edward Weekes, surely was suffering from a deep clinical depression. John, a bank clerk in Sydney, died in Sydney intestate.
