relating to the drafting of the troops, which had formed part of the Irish military establishment, to America.
Harcourt retired to Nuneham. where, on 16 Sept. 1777, he met his death by falling into a well, from which he was trying to extricate a favourite dog. Harcourt was buried at Stanton Harcourt. He was a man of immense fortune, of agreeable manners, and of average ability. Walpole, more suo, unkindly describes him as 'civil and sheepish,' and as being unable to teach the prince; other arts than what he knew himself, hunting and drinking' (Memoirs of the Reign of George II, 2nd edit., i. 86). The Record Office possesses a collection, made by Blaquiere, of the despatches relating to Harcourt's Irish administration, and a large quantity of his correspondence during this period will be found in vols. ix. and x. of the 'Harcourt Papers.' He married on 16 Oct. 1735 Rebecca, only daughter and heiress of Charles Samborne Le Bas of Pipe well Abbey, Northamptonshire, by whom he had four children: George Simon, who succeeded him as second earl; William [q. v.], who succeeded his brother as third earl; Elizabeth, who, born on 18 Jan. 1738, was married on 30 June 1763 to Sir William Lee, bart., of Hartwell, Buckinghamshire, and died in 1811, leaving issue, now all extinct; and Anne, who died young. The Countess Harcourt died on 16 Jan. 1765. Portraits of Harcourt by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hunter, and Doughty are in the possession of Colonel Edward William Harcourt at Nuneham Park. There is an engraving by McArdell after a portrait by Wilson.
[Harcourt Papers, i. 253-4, iii. 1-155, vols. ix. and x.; Life of Henry Grattan, by his son, vol. i. chap. xii. and xiii.; Hardy's Memoirs of the Earl of Charlemont, pp. 161-87; Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George II (2nd edit.), i. 86, 284, 289-90, 316, 323-4, 325, 332; Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 70, 74, 259, iii. 248, 271; Lecky's Hist, of England, iv. 401-42; Doyle's Official Baronage, ii. 113-14; Burke's Extinct Peerage, 1883, p. 263; Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. i. 325; Army List for 1776.]
HARCOURT, THOMAS (1618–1679), Jesuit, whose real name was Whitbread, was born in Essex in 1618. He was sent to the college of the Jesuits at St. Omer, and at the age of seventeen entered the novitiate of the English province at Watten on 7 Sept. 1635. He came upon the English mission about 1647, and in 1649 he was in the Suffolk district. On 8 Dec. 1652 he was solemnly professed of the four vows. He laboured in England for thirty-two years, was twice superior of the Suffolk district, and once of the Lincolnshire district. He was chosen provincial of his order on 14 Jan. 1677-8, and it was during his visitation of the Belgian colleges of the English province that Titus Oates, after having been expelled from two of the colleges of the society, applied to him to be admitted as a member of the order, and, on being refused, uttered the threat that he would be either a Jesuit or a Judas. Harcourt returned to England to attend the triennial meeting of the English province held at the Duke of York's residence, St. James's Palace, on 24 April 1678. He was seized within the purlieus of the residence of the Spanish ambassador, Count Egremont, Wyld House, Wyld Street, formerly called Weld Street, on 29 Sept., and committed to Newgate. He was tried at the Old Bailey on 13 June following, was convicted of complicity in the 'popish plot' on the perjured testimony of Oates, Bedloe, and Dugdale, and was executed at Tyburn on 20 June (O. S.) 1679. His remains, with those of his four companions, Fathers Waring, Fenwick, Turner, and Gavan, were buried in the churchyard of St. Giles-in-the-Fields.
His two short poems, 'To Death' and 'To his Soul,' are preserved in the 'Remonstrance of Piety and Innocence,' London, 1683, 12mo, where is also his 'Devout elevation of the Mind to God.' He had prepared for the press an English version of Père Hayneuf's 'Meditations.'
There is a portrait of him, engraved by Martin Bouche of Antwerp, in Matthias Tanner's excessively rare work, entitled 'Brevis Relatio felicis Agonis quern pro Religione Catholica gloriose subierunt aliquot e Societate Jesu Sacerdotes,' Prague, 1683. In 1871 W. H. James Weale of Bruges had in his possession a small half-length portrait of him on canvas, found in a farmhouse at Courtrai, and said to have been formerly in the house of the Jesuits in that town (Notes and Queries, 4th ser. viii. 330).
[Challoner's Missionary Priests, 1803, ii. 200; De Backer's Bibl. des Ecrivains de la Compagnie de Jesus, 1872, ii. 31; Dodd's Church Hist, iii. 317; Floras Anglo-Bavaricus, pp. 151, 162; Foley's Records, v. 233, 1067, vii. 832; Granger's Biog. Hist. of England, 5th edit. v. 93; Oliver's Jesuit Collections, p. 111; Tanner's Brevis Relatio; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. (Bliss), iii. 1263, iv. 117, 771.]
HARCOURT, WILLIAM (1625–1679), Jesuit, whose real name was Aylworth, born in Monmouthshire in 1625, entered the Society of Jesus at Watten in 1641. He taught first philosophy and then theology at Liège for eleven years, and afterwards spent nine years as a missioner, partly in Holland and
