capacity to Berlin, 28 April 1851; made ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Emperor of Austria, 22 Nov. 1860, but resigned 28 Oct. 1871, when he retired on a pension and was created a peer of the United Kingdom. Previously to this date he had succeeded his father as second Baron Bloomfield in the peerage of Ireland, 15 Aug. 1846, had been made a C.B. 1848, K.C.B. 1851, G.C.B. 3 Sept. 1858, and a privy councillor 17 Dec. 1860. He died at his residence, Giamhaltha, Newport, co. Tipperary, 17 Aug. 1879. He married, 4 Sept. 1845, the Hon. Georgiana, sixteenth and youngest child of Thomas Henry Liddell, first Baron Ravensworth. She was born at 51 Portland Place, London, 13 April 1822, was maid of honour to the queen from December 1841 to July 1845, and in the month after her marriage accompanied her husband to Russia. Her ‘Reminiscences’ of the state of society at the various courts where she resided is a work of much interest.
[Reminiscences of Court and Diplomatic Life, by Georgiana, Baroness Bloomfield (1883); Memoirs of Sir William Knighton (1838), ii. 130-1; Dod’s Peerage, 1879; E. Walford’s Tales of our Great Families (1877), i. 298-304.]
BLOOMFIELD, ROBERT (1766–1823), author of the ‘Farmer’s Boy,’ was born at Honington, a village in Suffolk, on 3 Dec. 1766. His father, George Bloomfield, a tailor, died when Robert was a year old, leaving a family of six children. By his mother, who kept the village school, and by a Mr. Rodwell of Ixworth, the boy was taught to read and write. His mother married again when he was seven years old, and had another family. At eleven years of age he was taken into the house of his mother’s brother-in-law, William Austin, a farmer in the neighbouring village of Sapiston. Here he acquired his knowledge of rustic manners. At the age of fifteen he was so diminutive in size as to be of little use on the farm. So the mother wrote to the elder sons, George and Nathaniel, the former a shoemaker and the latter a tailor, to inquire whether they could help their younger brother. George engaged to teach him the shoemaking business, and Nathaniel undertook to keep him provided with clothes. Accordingly, the boy came to London, and was domiciled in his brother’s garret in Fisher’s Court, Bell Alley, Coleman Street. Four men besides the brother lived and worked in the one garret. Robert was chiefly employed in running errands for the men, or reading the newspaper to them. At first he found in the newspapers many words that he could not understand; but after providing himself with a dictionary he was soon able to read with fluency ‘the long and beautiful speeches of Burke, Fox, or North.’ He further improved his intellect by attending on Sunday evenings the discourses of a dissenting minister named Fawcett, who officiated at a meeting~house in the Old Jewry. By attention to the teaching of this gentleman (whose language, as George Bloomfield puts it, ‘was just such as the "Rambler" is written in') he ‘gained the most enlarged notions of Providence,’ and learned the correct pronunciation of ‘hard words.’ His reading at this time embraced the history of England, the ‘British Traveller,’ and a book of geography. He was particularly fond of scanning the poets’ corner of the ‘London Magazine,’ and was one day induced by his brother to send the editor of that journal some verses entitled the ‘Milkmaid,’ which were accepted and published. Another trifle, the ‘Sailor’s Return,’ soon followed. About this time the brothers changed their lodging to a garret in Blue-hart Court, Bell Alley, where they had for companion a Scotchman named Kay, who was possessed of a few books (including 'Paradise Lost' and Thomson’s 'Seasons'), of which Robert was allowed the use. A dispute arising between the masters and journeymen shoemakers as to the masters’ right to employ those who had not served an apprenticeship, Robert, only too glad of the change, accepted an invitation to stay under the roof of his former employer, Austin, until the difference should be settled. After an absence of three months he returned, and was apprenticed to his brother’s landlord, continuing to work under his brother’s eye until he had completely qualified himself. In 1785 George removed to Bury St. Edmunds. Robert remained in London, and on 12 Dec. 1790 wrote to his brother that he ‘had sold his fiddle and got a wife.’ The young couple lived in the most squalid poverty: it took them several years to acquire a bed of their own. In a garret where five or six others were at work, Bloomfield composed his ‘Farmer’s Boy.’ He was accustomed to keep fifty or a hundred lines in his head until he could find an opportunity of putting them on paper. The whole of ‘Winter’ and a great part of ‘Autumn’ were finished before a line of them had been written. In November 1798, after passing through various hands, the manuscript came under the notice of Capel Lofft, by whose efforts it was published (in sumptuous quarto), with cuts by Bewick and a preface by Lofft, in March 1800. The success of the ‘Farmer’s Boy’ was remarkable; twenty-six thousand
