In 1748, Nicholas Hardinge resigned as Clerk to the House of Commons and Jeremiah Dyson purchased the post for £6000. Despite buying his own post, Jeremiah condemned such procedures and he appointed all his subordinates on their merits. He appointed John Hatsell as Clerk Assistant without payment, forgoing the £3000 that Jeremiah might have realised by sale of this post.⁷

Jeremiah Dyson also refused to sell the Clerkship when he retired from that post in 1762.

The Speaker and the Clerks of the House of Commons in the time of Sir Robert Walpole

Source: ‘At the Sign of the Barber’s Pole’ by William Andrews   Published at Cottingham, Yorkshire 1904

Digitalised by Project Gutenberg

The office of Clerk of the House of Commons ‘is nearly six hundred and fifty years old. He or she is the principal adviser of the House, its committees, the Speaker and other occupants of the Chair and of members individually, on the practice and procedure of the House and the formal and informal rules which govern its everyday activities. The Clerk sits at the Table of the House, strategically sited close to the Speaker’⁸  

On 11 June 1756 Jeremiah Dyson married Dorothy Dyson at the Church of St Bartholmew the Great, West Smithfield, London. The witnesses were (Ely Dyson, Dorothy Dyson’s father) and Mark Akenside, (Jeremiah’s friend.) Dorothy was Jeremiah’s first cousin once removed. She was baptised at Elland, Yorkshire on 12 December 1706, the daughter of  Ely Dyson and his wife Deborah Holme.

The Church of St Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield, looking east

Copyright: John Salmon     Reproduced from Geograph in accordance with the terms of that website which may be read at this link:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Marriage certificate of Jeremiah Dyson   Copyright: Church of St Bartholomew the Great and reproduced here by kind permission of the Parish Office

In his ‘Ode on Recovering’ Mark Akenside commemorated the marriage of Jeremiah and Dorothy:

‘While around his sylvan scene

My DYSON led the white-winged hours

Oft from th’ Athenian academic bowers

Their sages came; oft heard our lingering walk;

The Mantuan music, warbling o’er the green, -

And oft did Tully’s reverend shade,

Though much for liberty afraid,

With us of letter’d ease or virtuous glory talk.

 But other GUESTS were on their way,

And reach’d, ere long this favour’d grove;

Ev’n the celestial progeny of Jove,

Bright VENUS! with her all-subduing son,

Whose golden shaft most willingly obey

The best and wisest. As they came,

Glad HYMEN waved his genial flame,

And sang their happy gifts, and praised their spotless throne. 

I saw, when through yon festive gate

He led along his chosen maid,

And to my friend with smiles presenting said: 

‘Receive that fairest wealth, which Heaven assign’d

To human fortune. Did the lonely state

One wish, one utmost hope, confess?

Behold! she comes t’ adorn and bless;

Comes, worthy of thy heart, and equal to thy mind.” ‘ ⁹

Jeremiah and Dorothy had eight known children: Henry, Jeremiah (1757), Elizabeth (1758), Dorothy (1760 who died in 1778), Francis (1761 who died in 1769), George (1764), Charlotte (1767 who died in 1782) and Frances (1769).

Before proceeding to Jeremiah’s career in the House of Commons, consideration should be given to his coat of arms and crest. The coat consisted of a shield divided vertically – the left side being gold and the right being blue, with a half-eclipsed golden sun superimposed. The sun would appear to a a pun on Dyson – i.e. ‘dying sun’. The crest consisted of a pascal lamb with a golden ring, on a green mount.

It is not clear how the Yorkshire Dysons acquired these arms and crest. They are first referred to as the arms of an Elizabeth Dyson, an heiress at Gunston in Staffordshire in the time of Elizabeth I. (The sun in this coat of arms is not elipsed).¹⁰ We do not know who Elizabeth was but we know that about 1552 a Margery Dyson, daughter and heir of Robert Dyson of Inkberrow, Worcestershire, married  William Fowke of  Gunston. ¹¹ 

This coat of arms (but with the sun eclipsed and with the addition of the crest described above) was attested on the Heralds Visitation of Staffordshire in 1663/4.The depiction of the coat and crest in the published pedigree is the one on which I have based the coat and crest below.¹²  

 The existence of early Dysons in Worcestershire came as a complete surprise to me. There was a John Dyesone who paid 9d in the Lay Subsidy of 1327 at Tardebigge in Worcestershire, but no Dysons appear in Worcestershire in the Lay Subsidies of 1332/3, 1340, 1346 0r 1358. It is fun to speculate that the John of 1327 was Dyonisia’s son cooling his heels a long way from Yorkshire after a further brush with the law. By about 1400, however, a Dyson family was well established at Inkberrow in Worcestershire where they  built a new Manor House and about 1470 built the church tower. The first of this family we can put a name to was a Henry Dyson who lived in the new Manor House and who was the ancestor of a very large family which still  continues today.¹³ 

It seems very likely that the Worcestershire family obtained  the coat of arms before the Yorkshire family and that the latter adopted it later on.  It was certainly used by the Dyson family branch at Clay House, Greetland, Halifax in the latter part of the eighteenth century¹⁴ and also by the branch at Willow Hall, Cote Hill, Halifax.¹⁵

I would like to think that the Worcestershire Dysons were a very early offshoot of the Lithwaite family but it is possible that they were indigenous to Worcestershire and that the Yorkshire Dysons simply made use of an existing coat of arms and crest without any  official right to do so.

 I now turn to the career of Jeremiah Dyson. Initially he was regarded as a Whig but when George III came to the throne in 1760 he began to side with the Tories  and his closest associates were within the group known as ‘the King’s Friends’. In 1762 Jeremiah resigned the Clerkship to enable him to take a more partisan role in politics. From 1762 to 1768 he was MP for Great Yarmouth, from 1768 to 1774 he was MP for Weymouth and from 1774 until his death in 1776 he was MP for Horsham. ¹⁶ 

Jeremiah held a number of high offices – for a short period in 1761 he was a Commissioner to execute the Office of the Keeper of the Privy seal, from May 1762 to April 1764 he acted as Joint Secretary to the Treasury and Secretary to the First Lord and from 1768 to 1774 he was a Lord of the Treasury. In March 1774 he obtained the post of Cofferer of the Household and was also appointed to the Privy Council.¹⁷ 

Although amongst his colleagues there was general agreement as to Jeremiah Dyson’s great knowledge of parliamentary forms and precedents, he was not liked by all.  The Marquis of Rockingham, whilst Premier, found Jeremiah to be a thorn in his side with his frequent criticisms and this came to head on 3 June 1766 when Jeremiah opposed the consideration by the House on that particular day of a message from the Crown regarding  a settlement for the Princess Caroline Matilda who was about to be married to the King of Denmark. Rockingham subsequently asked the King to dismiss Jeremiah Dyson but George III was unwilling to do this.^{16  19}

Jeremiah consistently opposed liberal proposals. He was against the repeal of the Stamp Act and supported Lord North’s measures against the American Colonies. ¹⁷ 

In his ‘Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham’, George Thomas, Earl of Albemarle made vitriolic comments about Jeremiah Dyson:

 ‘Among the most active opponents of the repeal of the Stamp Act was Mr Jeremiah Dyson, member for Great Yarmouth, and one of the Lords of Trade. He was one of those parasitical persons who serve governments a little, and disgrace them much. He was by birth a tailor, by education a Dissenter, and, from interest or vanity, in his earlier years a Republican. But he was not a person whose conscience at any time stood in the way of his preferment, and his republicanism speedily yielded to more profitable investments in politics. He was a quick, shrewd man, with a cool head and a prompt tongue, and an atrabilious temperament, that made him impatient of repose and obscurity. He entered Parliament with a character for holding anti-monarchical opinions, although he was at the time “secretly sold to Lord Bute.” For some time he was supposed to be a staunch supporter of George Grenville, but when the Grenvillian horizon became overcast, Jeremiah tacked to windward. Shortly after this desertion, having assumed a bag instead of a tye-wig, Lord Gower aptly remarked, “It was because no tie would hold him.” Whatever party he espoused, Dyson’s habits of business, skill in parliamentary forms, specious demeanor and general courtesy, rendered him a serviceable adjunct; nor, though he possessed neither fancy nor eloquence, was he by any means contemptible as a speaker and pamphleteer. But the best of his good gifts was his accommodating conscience. He was a ready-made ‘King’s friend,’ even before he attracted the royal notice.” ¹⁹ 

Charles: Marquis of Rockingham

Source: ‘Pictorial Fieldbook of the Revolution’  Benson J Locking  Published 1850

Digitalised by Project Gutenberg

Although the above paints rather an unpleasant picture of Jeremiah, we must assume a certain amount of bias in the comments made George Thomas - the biographer of Lord Rockingham – who was Jeremiah’s enemy.

A very different portrait of Jeremiah Dyson is provided by a letter of 17April 1744 from his friend Mark Akenside at Leyden:

 ‘Believe me, my dear, my honour’d friend, I look upon my connection with you as the most fortunate circumstance of my life. I never think of it without being happier and better for the reflection. I injoy, by means of it, a more animated, a more perfect relish of every social, of every natural pleasure. My own character, by means of it, is become an object of veneration and applause to myself. My sense of the perfection and goodness of the Supreme Being is nobler and more affecting. It is that good, that beauty  with which my mind is fill’d, and which serves as a sacred antidote against the influence of that moral evil which is in the world, when it would perplex and distress me. It has the force of an additional conscience, of a new principle of religion: nor do I remember one instance of moral good or evil offer’d to my choice of late, in which the idea of your mind and manners did not come in along with the essential beauty of virtue and the sanction of the divine laws to guide and determine me. It has inlarg’d my knowledge of human nature, and ascertain’d my ideas of the oeconomy of the universe. In whatever light I consider, with whatever principle or sensation I compare it, it still continues to receive strength from the best and highest, and in return confirm and inlarge them’. ¹⁸

In February 1770, Jeremiah Dyson was  granted a pension on the Irish List of £1,500 a year for his own life and that of his three sons, but on 25 November 1771 there was a fierce debate about this in the Committee of Supply of the Irish House of Commons and the pension was condemned by 107 ayes to 106 noes and Jeremiah’s name was  struck off the list. ¹⁷

 During the debate the following scathing remarks were made by Henry Flood: ‘

Who does not know Jeremiah Dyson Esq? We know little of him, indeed, otherwise than by his name on the Pension List. There are others who know him by his actions. This is he who is endued with those happy talents that he has served every administration, and served every one with equal success – a civil, pliable, good-natured gentleman who will do what you will, and say what you please – for payment’ ¹⁹

Rt. Hon. Henry Flood

Source: ‘The Story of Ireland’ Hon. Emily Lawless with some additions by Mrs Arthur Bronson 1896

Digitalised by Project Gutenberg

Jeremiah Dyson by this time was suffering from ill health and in October 1774 he was seized with a stroke of the palsey and withdrew from the business of the House.  In  about 1765 Jeremiah had purchased  a large estate at Stoke Park near Guildford and it was there that he passed away on 16 December  1776. His wife Dorothy had died many years before on 16 December 1769. A white marble monument in the church of St John The Baptist at Stoke next Guildford commemorates Jeremiah, his wife Dorothy, three of their children and Elizabeth the wife of his son and heir, Jeremiah. ¹⁶

Memorial to Jeremiah Dyson and members of his family  Church of St John the Baptist, Stoke next Guildford

Copyright: Parish Office of Stoke next Guildford and reproduced here by their kind permission.

A man of great talent and skills, a friend of George III, the poet Mark Akenside, and the novelist Samuel Richardson amongst others, Jeremiah Dyson undoubtedly had many failings but  he was perhaps not so very different from the politicians of our own  times. We have read much about him from the view point of his enemies, but, as attested by Dr Samuel Johnson, to his own friends he was both loyal and generous and Jeremiah deserves to be remembered alongside the many other distinguished members of the Dyson family of Halifax and Huddersfield. 

Notes

1 ‘Adams Curse’ by Bryan Sykes  Bantam Press 2003  page 198

2 ‘History of Brighouse, Rastrick and Hipperholme’ J Horsfall Turner

Published by Thomas Harrison and Sons  Bingley 1893  page 72

3 ‘The Dyson Family’  Part 1   E W Crossley  Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society  1917 page  289.

4 The Dyson Family’  Part 2   E W Crossley  Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society  1918 page  184

5 The Will of  Jeremiah Dyson of Bartholomew Close, Smithfield

The National Archive      Cat. Ref: Prob  11/635

6 ‘Index to English Speaking Students who have graduated at the University of Leyden’   Edward Peacock    Index Society

Published by Longmans and Green  London  1883

7 ‘Dictionary of National Biography’  Volume 16

Oxford University Press

8 ‘The Clerk of the House’  Factsheet G16  General Series

House of Commons Information Office  October 2006

9  ‘Life, Writings and Genius of Akenside with some account of his friends’   Charles Bucke

Published by John Cochrane and Co.  London 1832

10 ‘The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales’ Sir Bernard Burke    Published by Harrison of Pall Mall  1884

11 ‘Fowke Pedigree’ at stirnet.com  

12 ‘Staffordshire Pedigrees based on the Visitation of William Dugdale  1663/4’   Gregory King  page 77    Published by the Harleian Society Volume 63   1912

13 Jeff Dyson  http://www.dyson-family-of-worcestershire.co.uk/

14 ‘History of Halifax’ page 200   Watson

15 ‘The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales’ Sir Bernard Burke    Published by Harrison of Pall Mall  1884

16 ‘Dictionary of National Biography’  Volume 16

Oxford University Press

17  Article by William Prideaux Courtney published in 1888, from the website www.historyhome.co.uk

18 ‘Life of Akenside’ by Rev. Alexander Dyce, within ‘ The Poetical works of Mark Akenside   Published by William Pickering   London 1835

19 ‘Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and his Contemporaries’

George Thomas Earl of Albemarle 

Published by Richard Bentley   London 1852