Robert Plumer Ward

[2] He was born in Mount Street, Mayfair, London, on 19 March 1765, the son of John Ward by his wife Rebecca Raphael.

[2] Ward then passed some years abroad, and travelled in France during the early part of the revolutionary period.

[2] In London in 1794, a chance conversation in Bell Yard near Fleet Street put him in possession of information about subversion, and Ward took it to Richard Ford, who was a police magistrate.

Ford took Ward directly to William Pitt the Prime Minister, and the law officers Archibald Macdonald and John Scott.

He was returned on 8 July 1802, but did not speak in the house till 13 December, when, somewhat to the annoyance of his friends, he supported Henry Addington.

[6] Turning down an offer of a Treasury lordship, Ward remained at the Admiralty till June 1811, when he was appointed Clerk of the Ordnance.

In 1811, he anticipated the dismissal of the government in the wake of the passing of the Regency Act, and looked forward to "...being at Hyde House in a fortnight.

My garden, farm, plantations and library are the prevailing ideas, and every purchase I have lately made, whether books or pruning-knives are all with a view to my long wished retreat.

[9] His office as auditor of the Civil List was incorporated into the treasury in January 1831, and, again a widower, he spent time abroad.

[10] Early in 1846 he moved with his wife to the official residence of her father, who was the governor of Chelsea Hospital, and died there on 13 August the same year.

Memoirs of the Political and Literary Life of Robert Plumer Ward appeared in 1850, edited by Edmund Phipps.