Lady Olivia Sparrow

She was a prominent evangelical, belonging to 29 societies engaged in related causes,[1] and a friend of both Hannah More and William Wilberforce.

[7] During the period 1808 to 1814 of his time in Ireland, Gaspare Gabrielli carried out fresco work at Tandragee Castle which she owned; it later passed to the Montagu family.

[8] In 1814 Lady Olivia went to the Lake District, in a party including John Bowdler the Younger and George Gough-Calthorpe, 3rd Baron Calthorpe, a follower and political supporter of William Wilberforce.

[9] Robert, Lady Olivia's teenage son, was an invalid, and in 1817 she built a villa in Villafranca (now Villefranche-sur-mer, France), at that point in the Kingdom of Sardinia.

[15] According to D. J. O'Donoghue's account of his 1825 Irish tour, Sir Walter Scott was fascinated by the life and career of 17th-century County Armagh outlaw, or Rapparee, Count Redmond O'Hanlon.

Hoping to make him the protagonist of an adventure novel, Scott corresponded with Lady Olivia, as her estate at Tandragee included one of the main regions of O'Hanlon's activities.

Although Scott asked Lady Olivia to obtain as much information as possible about O'Hanlon, he was forced to give up on the project after finding documentation too scanty.

In the account given by John Henry Blunt, Caird was a lawyer's clerk, and was employed by Lady Olivia as a lay missionary.

[24] In 1832 Lady Olivia and Louisa Montagu, Countess of Sandwich both put up £300 to support a Tory candidate who could defeat John Bonfoy Rooper for the Huntingdonshire seat.

[29] At Leigh, Lady Olivia encountered opposition to her schools, in the form of Robert Eden, who was Rector there from 1837 to 1852, a High Churchman with an interest in elementary education.

[30][31] Charles Blomfield, the Bishop of London, gave Eden the role of inspector of schools in Essex, for which he trained by accompanying Edward Feild.

Interested in the "conversion of the heathen", Lady Olivia hosted gatherings to discuss missionary work, before the Bentincks departed.

Edward Bird (died 1858), whose previous tenure at St Thomas's Church, Birmingham had aroused serious opposition because of his sabbatarian views; he was a Cambridge graduate who had been a barrister in Bengal before being ordained in his early 30s.

The traveller Isabella Bird was his daughter by his second wife Dora Lawson, and initially lived with her mother in Edinburgh.

[49] In the period of the mid-1850s, after she had travelled to the United States and before her father's death, Isabella stayed at Wyton rectory, and would often ride over to Brampton Park with a neighbour, Mrs George Brown, to visit Lady Olivia.

[51] At Westminster School in the late 1780s, he had bullied Robert Southey, with whom he had shared a room at Ottley's house for boarders.

Réamonn Ó Muirí comments that "It is not easy to clarify the incident of Sparrow's killing of Captain Lucas."

[59] There is an account of Sparrow interrupting Birch's wake with an armed force, and violently detaining a group of mourners, It is in A View of the Present State of Ireland, a pamphlet of 1797 by "An Observer".

[60] Ó Muirí takes the view that the author was James Coigly; Richard Robert Madden attributed it to an unnamed magistrate in northern Ireland, and Henry Cleary to Arthur O'Connor.

[61] Sparrow was an officer of the 111th Regiment of Foot; and in 1804, ranked Colonel, was appointed brevet Brigadier-General serving under Sir William Myers, 1st Baronet in the West Indies.

[64] There was also a tablet placed in Brampton church, with information (not all consistent with the other monument): that he had died of fever on a ship returning to England from Barbados, and was buried on Tortola.