John Temple Leader

Born at his father's house, Putney Hill Villa, on 7 May 1810, he was the younger son of Mary[1] and William Leader, a London merchant, and Whig Member of Parliament for Camelford and then Winchelsea.

[2] On 12 February 1828 Leader matriculated as a gentleman commoner at Christ Church, Oxford, meeting there James Robert Hope Scott, W. E. Gladstone, and Sir Stephen Glynne with whom he made archæological excursions.

In his Oxford vacations he continued his travels, and was in Paris during the July Revolution of 1830; and there, through his father's friend Henry Brougham, he came to know leading liberal politicians.

In the House he generally acted with George Grote and William Molesworth of the Philosophical Radicals, and supported the People's Charter of 1838.

In February 1837, as a disciple of Brougham and Grote, he was admitted to the first council of the new London University, and in the same month he presided at a dinner for Thomas Wakley, which was attended by Daniel O'Connell, Joseph Hume and other radicals.

Other guests there included Richard Monckton Milnes, Charles Austin, and overseas visitors; he saw much in London of Louis Napoleon, and knew Gabriele Rossetti.

[2] In Florence and its environs Leader purchased old buildings of historic interest, restored them, and filled them with works of art and antiquities.

On 5 March 1855 he purchased the ruined medieval castle of Vincigliata, in 1857 a house in the Piazza dei Pitti in Florence itself, and on 8 April 1862, the Villa Catanzaro, also at Majano.

The restoration at Vincigliata was the work of Giuseppi Fancelli, son of the steward of Leader's Florentine estates, whom he had had trained as an architect.

He made bequests to educational and charitable institutions in Florence, including money for the restoration of the central bronze door of the Duomo.

The rest of his property in England and Italy, including Vincigliata, was bequeathed to his great-nephew Richard Luttrell Pilkington Bethell, 3rd Baron Westbury.