Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 18 - Section VI
VI. Thellusson.
Monsieur de Thellusson was a Huguenot of noble birth who took refuge in Geneva. His son, Isaac de Thellusson, was born 14th, and baptized 15th October 1690, at St. Gervais in Geneva, and rose to be Ambassador from that Republic to the Court of Louis XV. He died in 1770; his wife was Sarah, daughter of Mr. Abraham le Boullenger, to whom he was married at Leyden, 11th October 1722. Peter Thellusson, son of Isaac, came to London in the middle of last century, and prospered; he purchased the manor of Broadsworth in Yorkshire. One of his sons, George Woodford Thellusson, married Mary Ann, third daughter of Philip Fonnereau, Esq.; and his youngest daughter, Augusta Charlotte, was married to Thomas Crespigny, Esq. (who died in 1799); his third son was Charles, M.P. for Evesham. Mr. Thellusson died on 21st July 1797; his eldest son, Peter Isaac, was made Baron Rendlesham, in the peerage of Ireland, in 1806, but survived only till 1808; the second, third, and fourth barons were his sons; the present, and fifth baron, was the only son of the fourth. The celebrated will of Peter Thellusson, Esq., dated 1796, is matter of history. He left £4500 a year of landed property, and £600,000 of personal property, to trustees for accumulation during the lives of his three sons, and of their sons alive in 1796; the vast fortune expected to have accumulated at the death of the last survivor was left to the testator’s eldest male descendant alive at that date. The will was disputed, but was confirmed by the House of Lords on 25th August 1805. Charles Thellusson (born 1797), son of Charles, M.P. (who died in 1815), was the last survivor of nine lives; he died 5th February 1856. Litigation was necessary to decide who was the heir intended by Peter Thellusson, and the decision was in favour of Lord Rendlesham on 9th June 1859. The fortune, however, was comparatively moderate, vast sums having been swallowed up by the sixty-two years of litigation. One good result of the monstrous will was the Act of Parliament (39-40 Geo. III. c. 98), “which restrains testators from directing the accumulation of property for a longer period than twenty-one years after death.”
The unsuccessful litigant was Arthur Thellusson, Esq. (born 1801, died 1858), sixth son of the first Lord Rendlesham, who reasonably thought that, having been born after his grandfather’s death, and being thirty-eight years the senior of his noble kinsman, he was the eldest male descendant He died before the decision, and left his claims to his only son, the present Colonel Arthur John Bethell Thellusson, of Thellusson Lodge, Aldeburgh, Suffolk. The Rendlesham estate is near Woodbridge in Suffolk. (Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, and other authorities.)
The fifth and present Lord Rendlesham (Frederick William Brook Thellusson), descended from a noble refugee, is now connected with England, Scotland, and Ireland — with Ireland by his title of nobility — with Scotland by his marriage on 4th July 1861, to Lady Egidia Montgomerie, daughter of Archibald William, 13th Earl of Eglinton and Earl of Winton (she died 13th January 1880) — and with England, as a landed proprietor and (late) M.P. for East Suffolk. His heir is the Hon. Frederick Archibald Charles Thellusson, born in 1868.