Lazarus Steele Roberts Junior (1789–1865)

This son is of particular interest. 

On 9 November 1814, a Lazarus Roberts, described as a supernumerary midshipman of HMS Severn, was court martialled, probably on the North America and West Indies station. The charge was ‘disobedience of orders, ungentlemanlike conduct, creating a disturbance and behaving in a riotous and contemptuous manner and for writing an anonymous letter’. According to this book, during his trip out to the station,

Roberts challenged an officer to a duel in the fore top and refused to do any work as there were too many midshipmen. He also fell under suspicion for sending an anonymous letter that said the crew would not fight unless treated in a better fashion. Furthermore, he was accused of twice cutting the tackle on several guns. When addressing these problems with officers, Roberts apparently acted in an insolent and contemptuous manner towards his superiors.

Perhaps his disaffection with the way the ship was run resulted from orders given during this action with the French on 18 January 1814 in the mid Atlantic, as the Severn, under the command of Captain Nourse, led a convoy from England to Bermuda? With circumstantial evidence, the court found Midshipman Roberts guilty of cutting the tackle, writing the letter and disobedience and he was:

Dismissed from His Majesty’s Service, rendered incapable of ever serving His Majesty, His Heirs or Successors, as an officer again, and to be confined for the space of twelve calendar months in His Majesty’s Prison of the Marshalsea. (Court Martial number 799) 

The trial was referred to in Hansard and the Gentleman’s Gazette (and elsewhere) in April 1815 (although here Lazarus Roberts is described as ‘a midshipman of the Hamadryad’). 

This was not my 3xgreat grandfather Lazarus Roberts, who certainly was also in the Royal Navy, so this mutinous midshipman must have been Lazarus Steele’s son, Lazarus junior, who would have been twenty-five in 1814. Like his cousin, Lazarus junior was baptised in Plymouth and no doubt grew up there, so it is quite possible he too joined the Royal Navy.

He found a new and very different career after his release from the Marshalsea, presumably at the end of 1815. By the 1820s he was working as an artist and a painter of miniatures, an occupation which apparently kept him on the move around southern England. During this decade and the next he lived in several counties. 

He lived first at Chard, Somerset, where he met eighteen-year-old Fanny Silvester. They were married by banns at Chard on 8 May 1823 (it is of note that this was two months after his cousin and namesake, my 3xgreat grandfather, married at Weymouth, just a few miles away. Did the two men know each other?) 

Although Lazarus was a bachelor and Fanny a spinster, they seem to already have had one child and another on the way when they married. The first, named Lazarus as might be expected, was born in 1820. Perhaps because he was illegitimate, he remained unbaptised until a month after the wedding. The second was Henry, born in February 1823. He was baptised in the month of his birth, just as the curate was beginning the announcement of the marriage banns, as was the custom, three months before the wedding. In the baptism record, Henry is given as the ‘base born [illegitimate] son of Fanny’ and no father is mentioned. His father must have been Lazarus?

It is possible the family suffered an illness such as smallpox or typhus fever at the end of that year, as Henry (now a Roberts) died aged nine months and was buried at Chard in November 1823, followed by Lazarus, who died the following month, his age in the burial record given as three years. Typhus was certainly prevalent, for example in 1825 the infant son of another painter of Chard, a Mr Buckland, died from the disease.

After the tragedy of losing their two sons, Lazarus and Fanny left Chard for the town of Bridport, in the neighbouring county of Dorset. At Bridport they were even closer to cousin Lazarus, who was now living at Upwey, half a day’s walk away. Here, at the end of the following year another child was born. He was named Erasmus, the son of Lazarus and Frances (not Fanny) Roberts, and baptised a year after the deaths of their first sons, on Christmas Day 1824. 

[The choice of the name Erasmus is interesting and might suggest this Roberts family had connections with the landowning family of Erasmus Roberts of Trevol at Antony/Torpoint (1754–1816). According to his will dated 1813, Erasmus had the tenement of Liscawn at Sheviock, until c.1802 the home of one branch of the Dunrich family. The will also mentions a nephew, John Coryton Roberts (1789–1864) of Trevol, born within a year or so of both my 3xgreat grandfather Lazarus and his cousin Lazarus Steele junior. John Coryton Roberts had a son named Erasmus Coryton Roberts (born 1833) who accidentally shot dead the family dressmaker at the age of fourteen: an event that must have shocked readers of the local newspapers at the time.]

Unfortunately, it appears Lazarus and Fanny’s third son did not survive long either: he does not appear in any census records and an Erasmus Roberts, aged five, died at Brockenhurst in the New Forest, just before Christmas 1829, an unlucky time of the year for this family. Perhaps this was him and the family lived here too? If so, their route to the New Forest was via Dorchester, as a daughter, Mary, was baptised there at the parish of Fordingham in 1826, of Lazarus and Fanny Roberts. 

It is not clear what kept the family on the move (probably work) but by 1833 Lazarus was a few miles further east, in the county of Sussex. A Laz Steele Roberts was baptised at Somerstown, Chichester, on 13 May 1833, his father given as Lazarus Steele Roberts, an artist. Naming him Laz avoided tarnishing the memory of their first son, who must have been still in their thoughts a decade on. Strangely, Laz’s mother is listed as Sarah on the baptism record, not Fanny. This must be an error: Lazarus was definitely still married to Fanny in 1833, as they went on to have more children and were still together in the 1851 census. Lazarus apparently remained in Chichester at least until the autumn of 1833, so it seems implausible that Fanny was not with him. 

In September 1833, the populist anti-establishment weekly, Poor Man’s Guardian (slogan: ‘published in defiance of “law” to try the power of “right” against “might”’), reported on the following interesting incident:

The case of Lazarus Roberts, of Summers-town, near Chichester, is a shameful act of Government interference. Roberts states that having published several poetical little pieces with great success, he was solicited by a printer of Portsea, named Gardiner, to write a few things for him. He did so, and they were exhibited in the printer’s shop-window. One of them was ‘A voice from Nelson,’ on the abuses of the navy. Seeing his compositions removed from the window he inquired the cause, and the printer told him that a Lieutenant of the Portsmouth Dock-yard induced him to remove them on the bargain of getting a large job of printing from the Commissioners’ office, which job be got, adding that he also got a 5/. note. He afterwards denied having received the 5/. Roberts says that he petitioned the Admiralty for the dismissal of the Lieutenant who bribed the printer, but obtained no redress; and adds, that the printer has lately joined a Political Union. We should like to know is Gardiner trustworthy?

This probably referred to Thomas Gardner, bookseller, printer and engraver of Queen Street, Portsea. Sadly, nothing of Lazarus’s poetic writing has come to light. Twenty years after his dismissal though, he was clearly still angry at his treatment by the Royal Navy. 

After this Lazarus and Fanny seem to have returned to Chard where they had another son, Thomas Hopper (Hooper?), in October 1835. They then baptised two daughters at Chard, Ann and Fanny, in October 1838 (although it is noted Fanny was born ten years earlier, during their time at Dorchester). 

By the 1840s this branch of the family had reached London, where Lazarus junior carried on his profession as a miniaturist. In the 1841 census he and Fanny were in Bishopsgate with their children Mary, Fanny, eight-year-old Laz (now going by Lazarus), Thomas and Ann. Ten years on the family was at 28 Primrose Street, Bishopsgate. The children living with them were Mary, Fanny and Thomas, all now reaching adulthood. Another ten years on, in 1861, Mary and her sister Fanny, both still unmarried, were lodging together in Holborn and working as envelope packers and stampers. Laz was married and living south of the river at Lambeth. Their mother had died.

Leaving behind his grown-up children, Lazarus returned to the countryside. He is difficult to find in the 1861 census but there is a widowed artist named Roberts, born at Plymouth and aged seventy, lodging in a cottage at Tintinhull, near Yeovil, fifteen miles from Chard. His name is hard to decipher (although it begins with L) and Lazarus was actually seventy-two, but I believe this is him, although it is not clear why he was back in Somerset. Even more puzzling, four years later he was in Farnham workhouse, a hundred miles away in Surrey. Why he ended up in the workhouse is unknown. 

Miniaturist

Lazarus had been an artist for fifty years and described as a ‘miniature painter’, or more properly a miniaturist, from the early 1820s:

1823 miniature painter

1824 miniature painter

1826 artist

1833 artist

1835 painter

1838 miniature painter

1851 miniature painter

1853 portrait painter

1861 artist

Before the advent of photography, a miniature portrait of a loved one was a popular and personal momento. They were generally painted on ivory and mounted behind glass, sometimes with a lock of the subject’s hair encased on the reverse. 

It seems Lazarus moved around the southern counties, setting up his studio for a year or two, before moving on to the next town. The mobility of others of a similar occupation seems commonplace: for example, a Mr Hervé, ‘Miniature Painter and Profilist’, advertised in 1839 that he would ‘for a short time only, exercise his Profession’ at Union Street, Stonehouse, Plymouth, ‘Miniatures on ivory from £3 3s 0d’. 

There were still fifty miniaturists around the country according to the 1851 census, including Lazarus in Bishopsgate, but by now the art form was in decline and many at the cheaper end of the market had taken to the new medium of photography, as did Lazarus’s son, Laz (see below). Lazarus did not though. None of his art is known to exist, so the precise nature of his work is speculation. 

Lazarus Steele junior died at Farnham, Surrey aged seventy-six and was buried on 13 March 1865 at St John’s church, Hale, where workhouse residents tended to end up. It is unlikely I think that my 3xgreat grandfather, down in Plymouth, was aware of his cousin and namesake’s death, if he was aware of him at all.