Bonwicke the elder [q. v.], was born 30 Sept. 1692 (Register of Merchant Taylors’ School), and entered the school, of which his father had been head-master, in 1703 (ib.). He spent more than seven years there, and, having reached the head form, was eligible for election to St. John's College, Oxford. But his refusal at school to read the prayer for the queen and the house of Hanover deprived him of this advantage, and compelled him to seek admission at the sister university. Entering St. John's College, Cambridge, in August 1710, his exemplary conduct and acquirements quickly procured him a scholarship, the enjoyment of which was somewhat marred by the scruples of an over-sensitive conscience. The statutes, to his mind, not only enjoined personal obedience, but implied some control over others. ‘Am I,' he asks his father, ‘by the words “faciam ab aliis observari," which are part of the oath, obliged to tell lads continually their duty as far as I know it., and also to inform against transgressors?’ Happily his mind was set at ease on this point, and he was able to continue in college, devoting hiinselfto study and to religious exercises with an ardour which could not but burn itself out. His health gave way beneath the severity of his self-discipline and the closeness of his application, and on 5 May 1714, alone, with his books of devotion beside him, he died in his college study, His father, at the suggestion of William Bowyer, drew up an account of his son`s life, but desired that its authorship should be concealed. Bowyer, however, who undertook to edit the book, disclosed the secret, and in 1729 published the memoir under the title, ‘A Pattern for Young Students in the University, set forth in the Life of Mr. Ambrose Bonwicke, sometime Scholar of St. John`s College in Cambridge’ It is interesting, not merely as a picture of college life a century and a half ago, but as showing the nature and development of the scrupulous conscience which made both father and son nonjurors.
[The Pattern, &c., by Bowyer, 1729, and ed. by J. E. B. Mayor, 1810; Nichols's Literary Anecd.; Wilson’s Hist. of Merchant Taylors’ School; Robinsons Reg. of same]
BONYTHON, CHARLES (d. 1705), lawyer, was the son and heir of John Bonython of Bonython, Cornwall who married Ann, daughter of Hugh Trevanion of Trelegan. He was admitted as a student at Gray’s Inn on 26 Oct. 1671 and was called to the bar on 12 June 1678. In some of the popish plot cases he appeared for the crown, notably in that against Lord Castlemaine (Willis Bund's Cases from the State Trials, ii. 1073). From April 1683 to 1705 he held the lucrative appointment of steward of the courts at Westminster, an office which no doubt paved the way to his election as one of the members of parliament for Westminster (1685-87). On two subsequent occasions (October 1691 and July 1698) he threatened to contest that city again in the ‘pure tory interest,’ but in neither instance was he returned (Letters of Rachel, Lady Russell, ii. 92, and James Vernon's Correspondance, ii. 126). He was appointed a serjeant-at-law in 1692. On 30 April 1705, in a fit of madness, he ‘shot himself through the body with a pistoll’ in his London house. His two sons were also of Gray’s Inn. Richard, the elder, ‘a very engenious gentleman,' having sold the family estates, ‘set fire to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn [should be Gray’s Inn], burnt all his papers, bonds, &c., and then stabbed himself with his sword, but not effectually; he then threw himself out of the window, and died on the spot.’ This occurred in 1720.
[Parochial Hist. of Cornwall, i. 287; Cummings’s Cury and Grunwalloe, 80-9; Luttrell's Hist. Relation, i. 255, v. 545; Woolrych’s Serjeants, ii. 464-5.]
BONYTHON, RICHARD (1580–1650?), an early American settler, was the second son of John Bonython of Bonython, and was baptised at St. Columb Major on 3 April 1580. His title of ‘captain,’ and a passage in the ‘Winthrop Papers’ (Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser. vii.), seem to prove that he served in the French wars with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who like himself was a west-country man. In 1630 he received a grant of a large tract of land on the east side of the Saco river, in Maine, or, as it was then called, New Somersetshire, and settled on his property in 1631 He was a commissioner under Gorges for the government of Maine in 1636; and when Gorges obtained a royal charter of the province Bonython was named in 1640 one of his council, and acted in that capacity to 1647. His uprightness as a magistrate is the theme of constant pntise, and it is added that he even entered a complaint against his own son, the turbulent John Bonython, who was outlawed for contempt of court, and bore an evil reputation throughout his life. Bonython died about 1650, leaving this son and two daughters. The name is now extinct in America; but the descendants of his daughters are numerous, the poet Longfellow tracing his ancestry back to Bonython's third daughter. The reckless John Bonython is introduced by Whittier as a character in ‘Mogg Megone.’
