Family and Education

b. ?1796, o.s. of Lt.-Col. George Kien Hayward Coussmaker of Spring Gardens, Mdx. and Hon. Catherine Southwell, da. of Edward Southwell†, 20th Bar. de Clifford. educ. Westminster 1808-14; Christ Church, Oxf. 23 May 1814, aged 17. unm. suc. fa. 1801; grandmother Mary (wid. of both Evert George Coussmaker (d. 1763) of Dane Court, Kent and Sir Thomas Pym Hales†, 4th bt. (d. 1773), of Bekesbourne, Kent) to property in Sandwich, Kent 1803.1 d. 23 May 1821.

Offices Held

Biography

Coussmaker, whose ancestors had migrated from Flanders to southern England in the seventeenth century, continued to sit unopposed for Kinsale as the nominee of his maternal uncle and former guardian Edward, 21st Baron de Clifford.2 Like de Clifford and his uncle by marriage John Calcraft*, who together had sponsored his admission to Brooks’s, 25 Jan. 1819, Coussmaker was deemed by the Liverpool ministry to be ‘in opposition’, but he was an infrequent attender and is not known to have spoken in debate. He voted against them on the civil list, 5, 8 May, and was probably in the opposition minority against Wilberforce’s attempt to compromise Queen Caroline’s claims, 22 June.3 When de Clifford spoke and voted in the Lords against the bill of pains and penalties, 6 Nov. 1820, the Whig Thomas Creevey* reckoned it ‘an agreeable surprise’, for he was ‘such a cursed queen-hater that we always calculated upon his being for the bill’.4 Coussmaker divided against the omission of her name from the liturgy, 23, 26 Jan., but was absent from the division on the opposition censure motion, 6 Feb. 1821. On 28 Feb. he probably voted against Catholic relief, to which de Clifford, an absentee Irish landlord, was also hostile.5 He took three weeks’ leave on account of ill health, 13 Mar., and died intestate in May 1821. His effects were sworn under £25,000. His only surviving sister and heiress Sophia (1791-1874), who in 1822 married ‘little, stubborn’ Jack Russell* (1796-1835), nephew of the 6th duke of Bedford, was declared Baroness de Clifford, 4 Mar. 1833, after her uncle’s death without issue the previous year.6

Ref Volumes: 1820-1832

Authors: Philip Salmon / David R. Fisher

Notes

• 1. PROB 11/1363/647; 1396/634; Gent. Mag. (1803), i. 485.
• 2. Genealogie de la Famille de Coussemaker, 24-30.
• 3. He was so listed in Parl. Deb. n.s. i. 1314, but not in The Times, 26 June 1820.
• 4. Creevey Pprs. i. 336.
• 5. He was so listed in The Times, 5 Mar. 1821, but not in Parl. Deb. n.s. iv. 1033.
• 6. PROB 6/197/186; Fox Jnl. 135-6; Raikes Jnl. ii. 92.