Summary

Sculpture, marble; portrait bust of Thomas Molyneux-Seel (1792-1881); Italy, Rome; 1824. In 1823 Thomas Molyneux-Seel married Agnes, daughter of Sir Richard Bedingfeld, 5th Baronet and his wife Charlotte Jerningham. The couple made their honeymoon on the Continent in 1824, visiting Rome, where they commissioned a pair of painted portraits as well as marble portrait busts of themselves. The companion bust of Agnes Bedingfeld, Mrs Molyneux Seel is also at Oxburgh Hall (NT 1210481).

Full description

A marble portrait bust of Thomas Molyneux-Seel (1792-1881), made in Rome in 1824, by an unknown sculptor. The subject is depicted facing to his left, dressed in a toga-like tunic, mostly concealed by a stole wrapped around his shoulders and falling down his front. Inscribed on the back ROMA 1824. Set on a white marble pedestal. A pair to the companion bust of his wife, Agnes Bedingfeld (NT 1210481). Thomas Molyneux-Seel, J.P. & D.L., of Huyton Hey, was a landowner from an old Catholic family. The family’s estates were in Lancashire including Huyton, today part of Liverpool. The Huyton property was inherited by a younger branch of Molyneux of Sefton from the Harringtons, an ancient Catholic family descended from a brother of the Sir William Harrington who had fought at the battle of Agincourt. The subject of the portrait was born plain Thomas Unsworth, the son of Thomas Unsworth of Maghull Hall and his wife Frances, eldest daughter of Thomas Seel of Liverpool. In 1815, on inheriting the estates of his maternal ancestors, he took the name and arms of Molyneux-Seel. Having inherited a sizeable fortune, Thomas quickly began to spend more time in London, being recorded in May 1818 as lodging at the Mount Hotel (‘Fashionable Arrivals’, The Morning Post, 22 May 1818). In August of the same year he was one of around twenty local notables assigned to the Grand Jury at the Lancaster Assizes (Lancaster Gazetter, 22 August 1818), at which the cases heard included one in which two young men, William and Daniel Fitzpatrick, were found guilty of highway robbery for stealing a watch and 20 shillings (£1) from none other than Thomas Molyneux. He would subsequently serve as a Justice of Peace for the counties of Lancashire and Norfolk. By 1820 he was spending evidently rising in the world, being recorded as among numerous gentlemen presented to the new monarch George IV at the King’s Levée and, a few weeks later, attending a reception given at His Majesty’s Drawing Room to celebrate the King’s Birthday (The Morning Post, 19 May 1820; ‘Fashionable World’, The Morning Post, 17 June 1820). Molyneux-Seel was also assuming an important role in Catholic social life, acting as a steward at the dinners of the Associated Catholic Charities (Morning Chronicle, 10 May 1820). All this, together with his considerable private wealth, should have made Thomas Molyneux-Seel a good catch for the young Agnes Bedingfeld, who in 1823 was living with her grandmother Frances, Lady Jerningham (1747-1825) in Bolton Row, Mayfair. The couple’s rapid courtship that summer is discussed in the Jerningham Papers, through a series of letters from Lady Jerningham to her daughter Charlotte, Lady Bedingfeld (née Jerningham, 1769-1854), Agnes Bedingfeld’s mother (Jerningham 1896, II, pp. 263-67). Lady Jerningham seems to have broadly approved of Thomas Molyneux-Seel, albeit with reservations as to his birth, writing to her daughter when a proposal seemed to be imminent: ‘A serious objection would be if there is any ground for the fear of Insanity, or that His fortune would not be equivalent to her Future Comfort’. However she was able to report on 24 June that ‘the Suitor has above £100,000 in Cash […] a pretty fund and He is said by every one to be a very respectable Character’. By 8 August, the date of the next letter to Charlotte, the engagement had been agreed, Lady Jerningham commenting that Mr Seel ‘has behaved with a degree of delicacy, worthy of Little Agnes’s retiring modest Character […] I really think there is reason to hope she will be happy with Him, tho’ the income but scantily Covers the want of Aristocracy. But her quietness & his good humour will, I trust, assimilate together.’ The wedding took place on 3 October 1823 in Ghent, the couple setting off the same day for Italy, where they would spend the winter (‘The Mirror of Fashion’, Morning Chronicle, 7 October 1823). They were in Rome by early December 1823, when Agnes wrote to her mother, and they arrived back in England from Paris in January 1825, bringing with them their first-born son Edmund Molyneux Seel (1824-1909). They subsequently had two more sons, Charles (1830-1880) and Henry Harrington Molyneux-Seel (1839-1882). After his marriage, Thomas Molyneux-Seel seems, from the evidence of occasional reports in newspapers, to have led the comfortable life of a moneyed gentleman, including a significant role in horse racing in the north of England and active membership of the Liverpool Agricultural Society. On 30 May 1825, he chaired an enormous dinner held in the Music Hall in Liverpool ‘In Honour of the Catholic Deputation, and in Celebration of the recent Struggle for Emancipation’ (Liverpool Mercury, 3 June 1825). Unfortunately the Irish Roman Catholic Deputation, led by Daniel O’Connell, failed to attend the lavish ceremony. On 6 September 1831 Thomas Molyneux-Seel’s fine collection of Old Master paintings was sold at auction, at Foster’s in Pall Mall, London (Morning Post, 22 August 1831). On 5 September 1836, Molyneux-Seel wrote from Great Yarmouth offering his candidature for the post of Auditor to the Unions of King’s Lynn and several other north Norfolk towns, pointing out that he had occupied magistrates’ positions in both Norfolk and Lancashire ‘which has rendered me competent in parochial affairs.’ (Bury and Norwich Post, 7 September 1836). In 1845, by now living in London at 18 Green Street, Grosvenor Square, Thomas Molyneux-Seel was recorded as one of the chief investors in the Lincoln and Grantham Direct Railway (Derby Mercury, 29 October 1845) and in May 1846 he was promoted Major in the Duke of Lancaster’s Own Militia (York Herald, 23 May 1846), a rank he retained and used for the rest of his life. In November 1847 Edmund Molyneux-Seel was married in Brussels to Anna de Lousade (Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 27 November 1847). In 1848, the year of revolution across much of Europe, there seems to have been serious concern that disorder would break out among the large Irish population of Liverpool. Troops were brought in in readiness, with among several buildings requisitioned to house them ‘The warehouses of Mr Molyneux, Sefton-Street’ (Leeds Intelligencer, 29 July 1848, and other papers). Thomas Molyneux-Seel continued actively to support Catholic causes, in 1860 giving an acre of land at Huyton for the erection of ‘a church, presbytery and school’. (Freeman’s Journal, 21 December 1860). The Molyneux-Seels seem to have spent much of the latter years living in Leamington Spa, where Agnes died on 7 September 1870. Thomas built in her memory the Roman Catholic church of St. Agnes at Huyton, which was replaced by a modern building in around 1965. He died at Huyton Hey on 16 January 1881, at the age of 89. The portrait busts of Agnes and Thomas Molyneux Seel are competent works, and it is perhaps surprising that they should be so prominently documented with the place and year of their production, but with no mention of the sculptor, of whom there were many working in Rome in the 1820s. But perhaps the inscription was intended above all to serve as a personal reminder of the couple's months in the Eternal City. Thomas Molyneux-Seel also commissioned painted portraits of himself and Agnes, from the neo-classical painter Ferdinando Cavalleri (1794-1867), the portrait of Agnes depicting her holding a pair of doves, referring to Venus, Goddess of Love (NT 1210343 and 1210896). Jeremy Warren February 2025