Protestant Exiles from France/Book First - Chapter 13 - Section XIV
XIV. Anthony Lefroy, Esq.
Anthony Lefroy was born on 10th December 1703, the eldest child and ultimately the only son of Thomas Lefroy, of Canterbury, and Phoebe Thompson, his wife (see my memoir of this family). He was apprenticed by his father to Mr. Mark Weyland (or Wayland), a merchant in London. He had not completed his twentieth year when his father died (3d November 1723), and the widowed mother removed to Bartlett Buildings in London, to be near her son. Her brother, young Lefroy’s uncle, had taken a great interest in him. This Major Edward Thomson, who was quartered in Ireland, wrote to his sister on 29th March 1721, “I had a letter from my best nephew Anthony very lately; he has made a good use of his time, and writes an incomparable good hand, fitt for the business he is put to.” Anthony Lefroy went out to Leghorn in the end of 1728; it is said that he had obtained a share in the house of Langlois & Son. At that date Miss Elizabeth Langlois was only eight years of age; to her he was married nearly ten years afterwards, viz., on February 27, 1738. This young wife had four brothers. Of these, Christopher, John, and Benjamin, were bachelors to the end, and concentrated all their father-like affection upon their sister’s children. (Her other brother, Peter, was Field-Marshal-Lieutenant and Grand Master of the Ordnance in the Austrian service.)[1] Mr Anthony Lefroy was energetic and successful in business, and founded a house of his own. He also devoted himself to the study of antiquities, and was elected a Member of the Etrusca Academia in 1753. He seems to have been a Levant merchant, and to have prosecuted a commercium nobile in plures Asiaticas regiones. His wonderful collection of medals contained coins of Asia, Cappadocia, Pergamos, Numidia, Mauritania, Cyrene, Syria, Egypt, Pontus, Thracia, Parthia, Paconia. These with his other collections were brought into public notice through a reverse of fortune which overtook him in 1763. An elaborate catalogue with a preface was drawn up, and is still known as the Catalogus Numismaticus Musei Lefroyani. There was some hope that the King of Great Britain might be induced to buy the collection as a whole; and with this hope Mr. Wortley Montague wrote the following letter to his brother-in-law, the Earl of Bute:—
“My Lord, I should not have troubled your lordship at present, and particularly as I wrote so long a letter very lately, which I hope deserv’d your consideration; but, my Lord, I think it my duty to inform you of anything I meet with that may be worth your notice, and much more so when I find anything that may afford both use and delight to his Majesty. I leave at Leghorn to be sent to your lordship by the first ship catalogues of the Greek and Latin gold, silver, and copper medals which comprise the cabinet of Mr. Lefroy of this place. I shall not take upon me to tell your lordship how compleat and magnificent a cabinet this is, nor how many of the most rare medals there are in it, much less to point out those which are not to be found anywhere, I mean in no other cabinet. You are so well acquainted with these matters that I shall only say that y{{sup|e]] gold and silver ones are perfectly preserv’d. I have pass’d some hours in examining them, and I do not think any of them can be doubted of, and indeed was glad to find by the proofs Mr. Lefroy shew’d me afterwards, that my opinion coincided with those of the ablest antiquarians. The statues and busts are undoubted and excessively fine; the intaglios are few but extreamly fine. Among the statues that of Paris is extreamly beautiful; the whole composes the richest private cabinet I believe to be met with. Mr. Lefroy’s family having taken a different turn from what he propos’d, he would be glad that this treasure he has been collecting this forty years was dispos’d of all together, that the work of his life may not be torn to pieces; that is an idea he cannot bear. If your lordship thinks it would be pleasing to his Majesty, whoever you please may examine the whole — Mr. Dalton (if he is still in Italy), or whoever else you please. I know nothing of the price, but can answer for the magnificence of this cabinet. If this meet with approbation I shall be happy in having given on this, as I shall on every occasion, a mark of my attention to what may be conducive to his Majesty’s service . . . .
“I have the honour to be with the greatest truth and respect, my Lord, your Lordship’s most affectionate and most obedient servant,
“Ed. Wortley Montague.”
“Leghorn, the 8th April 1763.”
A cabinet, containing 6550 pieces, would have found a fitting home in a royal palace. But such was not to be its fate; it was sold by auction in the year 1763.
Mr. Lefroy, desiring some learned leisure, had assumed a partner, and his house had become Lefroy and Charron. But M. Charron, a French gentleman, was unsuccessful in his management, and the house had become unsteady in 1763. A crisis came on 29th November 1772, when Mr. Lefroy’s partner committed suicide. From Mr. Lefroy’s letters of 1773, I find the following extracts:— “The weight of all the dependancies lays upon me to finish . . . . I trust in the Divine Providence that He may grant me life and strength to go through with them.” “I am now upwards of seventy years of age, daily decline, and have a very bad sight.”
In 1774 his eminent friend, Mr. Thomas Hollis, died. This admirable man had often presented books to Mr. Lefroy’s library; one of these was a reprint of Sir Samuel Morland’s History of the Church of Piedmont, printed and bound under Mr. Hollis’s directions; “the binding is blotched with red to imitate stains of blood, the tools are reversed, and the whole ornamentation is made significant of the persecutions the book records.” Mr. Lefroy’s name occurs in the published Life of Hollis in a manner that shows in what esteem the hero of the memoir held his correspondent as an accomplished and scientific man.
Mr. Lefroy’s two sons, Anthony and George, had been sent to England in boyhood, and no doubt he had hoped to spend the evening of his days with them in his native country. But in 1770 he had given up this hope, as appears from a sentence in his letter to Louis Chauvel, Esq., dated Leghorn, November 2, 1770, in which, after alluding to his loss of £30,000, he says, “As my income, I am told, will scarce be sufficient to live upon in England, where living is dearer than in Italy, I may not have the pleasure of seeing you.” On 24th January 1775 he made his Will, appointing his brothers-in-law, Christopher and John Langlois, and his two sons, Captain Anthony Peter Lefroy, and the Reverend Isaac Peter George Lefroy, his sole executors, and Harry Fonnereau, Esq., his assignee at Leghorn. In November of that year George Lefroy visited his father and mother, and found them in good health, “after an absence of upwards of twenty-three years.” This is the last sight of him which I can obtain. He died at Leghorn on 17th July 1779, in his seventy-sixth year. His epitaph was written by Dr. Gentili:—
Antonio Lefroy, Cantuarensi, claris orto majoribus, cujus animus a naturâ bene informatus juventutem egit in literis — qui deinde Liburnum se contulit ubi mercaturam excoluit honestè et decorè Bonarum artium fautor adjutor statuas, tabulas pictas, antiqua numismata, sibi studiosè comparavit. Vir autem bonus et prudens familiam, patriam, sapientts unicè amavit. Officia auxit liberalitate, multa passus et gravia, asquam semper servans mentem. Obiit in hac urbe Anno mdcclxxix. prid id. Julii.
(His widow came to England in 1781, but died 30th November 1782, and was buried at Basingstoke).
*⁎* Mr. Lefroy’s name may be seen in the vestibule of the library of All Souls’ College, Oxford, engraved on the base of a Corinthian tripod discovered and presented by him:—
Aram Tripodem olim matri deum in templo Corinthi consecratam
dedit donavit Custodi et Collegio Omnium Animarum
Antonius Lefroy, armiger, mdcclxxi.
This tripod was drawn and engraved for Sir Egerton Brydges, and the plate, along with another page of engraved coins from the Lefroy Cabinet, is to be found in his periodical, The Topographer.
It is singular that a similar honour was done to Mr. Lefroy’s two great-grandsons, Charles Edward Lefroy and Anthony Cottrell Lefroy, aged respectively eighteen and sixteen, who in the year 1823, while snipe-shooting in the parish of Crondel on Bagshot Heath, discovered a hoard of 101 gold coins of a great many varieties, and many of them unique. Two pages of engravings of these coins may be found in Akerman’s “Numismatic Chronicle,” vol. vi.
- ↑ Langlois is a refugee family of the Revocation period; see my vol. ii.