On this day … 19 July 1862

Sir Henry Bold Hoghton, the 8th baronet, died aged sixty-three at Anglesey, a resort on the South Coast in Hampshire.

After he succeeded his father in 1835, Sir Henry had little use for the ancestral home, Walton Hall, in Walton-le-Dale, where his forbears had been lords of the manor for centuries, or for the family’s other property, Hoghton Tower, then falling into ruin. This meant that his father, another Henry, was the last resident lord of the manor of Walton.

In 1820, the then Henry Hoghton esquire had married into the wealthy Bold family, of Bold Hall, St Helens, and added the Bold name to his, becoming Henry Bold Hoghton.

When he succeeded to the title after his father’s death, he demolished Walton Hall and held a grand sale of the building material and the contents of the house (including his father’s Egyptian sarcophagus). He was by then living at Bold Hall, which his wife, Dorothea, had inherited following the death of her sister, Princess Sapieha, the wife of a Polish nobleman. The sister had inherited the vast 7,000-acre estate following the death of their father, but died childless. So it passed to the Bold Hoghtons.

Sir Henry’s main interest was, apparently, cockfighting and the gambling that went with it. At the hall, there was a dedicated cockfighting room and Sir Henry kept as many as 500 fighting cocks and paid the man employed to look after them £600 a year, a princely salary at that time.

He may not have chosen to live on his ancestral estate, but he sired the next three Hoghton baronets, who all made their home there, restoring Hoghton Tower, and making it the family seat. They built another Walton Hall a short distance from the one demolished by their father. The new hall, itself demolished around seventy years ago, served as the home of the family’s estate manager, Richard Flowerdew.

Sir Henry Bold Hoghton was succeeded by his son, also Henry, as the ninth baronet. He started life as plain Henry Hoghton, becoming Henry Bold Hoghton, at the age of four, when his father adopted that surname. After his father’s death, he dropped the Bold from his surname and added a ‘de’ becoming Sir Henry de Hoghton.

He died childless and was succeeded by his brother, Charles, as the tenth baronet. Charles, too, died childless, and the title passed to his half-brother, James.

Actually, Sir Henry might not have been childless, depending on who was the father of the child of his first wife, whose elopement with her lover caused a public scandal.

The wife, Louisa, in her early twenties and six months pregnant, had sailed for India with her lover. Lieutenant Clarence Whitney. Sir Henry first brought a charge of ‘criminal conversation’ with his wife against Lieutenant Whitney, who was fined £3,000.

Next, given the complicated procedures then required to obtain a divorce, Sir Henry had to get an Act of Parliament passed to gain that divorce, with all his marital troubles made public.

It is not known if the child survived, or which man was the father. If it had survived and if it had been Henry’s and if had it been a boy, would it have had a claim on the de Hoghton title?

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Sources
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/lancs/vol3/pp402-409#fnn83
http://www.19thcenturyphotos.com/Sir-Henry-de-Hoghton-125509.htm
https://www.suttonbeauty.org.uk/suttonhistory/sutton_halls_houses/