Thomas John Hussey

According to a deed of gift written by (or as if by) Catherine, young Thomas, whilst still at Eton, "rendered me miserable...took a considerable sum of money from me, and went away, I knew not whither.

He enlisted: my hopes were blasted of ever seeing him either respectable in life, or a man of education...I knew my unfortunate boy well and feared the worst.

A case against Maccabe went to the Irish Court of Chancery where he was judged to have obtained the money by "undue influence, fraud, and misrepresentation".

In 1831, Hussey became rector of Hayes, Kent, and married Anna Maria Reed who was later a noted mycologist and illustrator.

[9] Though it must have represented many years' work, it received lukewarm contemporary reviews, The Athenaeum, for example, noted laconically that "Dr Hussey has done much – much to deserve our gratitude; but he is often too brief and has no foot-notes.

[11] Hussey achieved some contemporary celebrity as being one of the first people in Britain (along with Sir James South) to see the return of Halley's Comet on 22 August 1835,[18] communicating his subsequent observations with enthusiasm.

[19][20][21] At the time, Hussey was engaged in publishing a Catalogue of Comets in a series of papers for the Philosophical Magazine.

In November 1834, Hussey therefore wrote to the eminent British astronomer George Biddell Airy, who was later to become Astronomer Royal, reporting the "apparently inexplicable discrepancies", suggesting "the possibility of some disturbing body beyond Uranus, not taken into account because unknown", and asking for help in calculating where he should look for the putative new planet.

Airy, who later published the correspondence in a post-mortem on events, replied negatively, saying there was not "the smallest hope of making out the nature of any external action on the planet" and that the anomalies were probably based on observational errors.

The planet Neptune was discovered twelve years later by Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Luis d'Arrest based on calculations supplied by Urbain Le Verrier.

In February 1893, Hussey's daughter made an application to the Probate Court to have her father presumed dead, which was granted.