Rowland Gwynne

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Sir Rowland Gwynne (* 1659 in Llanelwedd, † January 24, 1726 in Southwark ) was an English - Welsh nobleman and politician.

Life

He was the squire of Llanelwedd in Radnorshire , Wales. 1674 he enrolled to study at St John's College of the University of Oxford 1679, at the Law Society of Gray's Inn . On May 28, 1680 he was promoted to Knight Bachelor .

As a Whig politician, Gwynne was a Member of the House of Commons in England several times , namely from 1679 to 1681 and 1689 to 1690 as Knight of the Shire for Radnorshire, from 1690 to 1695 as Knight of the Shire for Brecknockshire , from 1695 to 1698 as Burgess for the Borough of Bere Alston in Devon and again from 1698 to 1702 as Knight of the Shire for Brecknockshire. When he was not re-elected in 1702, he withdrew from politics.

About 1701 lived Gwynne already several years in Hannover , also the royal seat of the then Electorate of Hanover as the also living there philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to emphasize the inheritance rights of Electress Sophia of Hanover to the throne of the British monarchy a open letter to Lord Stamfort as a pamphlet wrote which he did not sign himself, but instead had the Englishman Rowland Gwynne signed and then printed in Holland .

The open letter, then referred to by the English as a " pamphlet ", led to a scandal in Great Britain ; the alleged author was expected to be punished by the Electorate of Hanover. Gwynne, who had only wanted to do his host country Hanover a favor, had to leave the country immediately and moved to Hamburg , where he - plagued by financial worries - initially had to lead "a miserable life". But the open letter from Leibniz, who never confessed to his authorship , moved the English parliament to pass both the Act of Regency and the Bill of Naturalization in favor of Electress Sophie in 1706 . When, after Sophie's death, her son Georg Ludwig ascended the throne of England as George I in 1714, thus establishing the 123-year personal union between Great Britain and Hanover , the now British king remembered the merits of Rowland Gwynne and gave him an annual pension £ 400. At the end of his life he was still in debt and died in 1726 in King's Bench Prison in Southwark.

His marriage to Mary Bassett († 1722), heir daughter of William Bassett, landlord of Broviscan in Glamorgan , remained childless.

literature

  • Gwynne, Sir Rowland . In: Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley, DW Hayton (Eds.): The History of Parliament. The House of Commons 1690-1715. Volume 5, Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 0521772214 ( History of Parliament Online ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Arthur Shaw: The Knights of England. Volume 2, Sherratt and Hughes, London 1906, p. 254.
  2. ↑ a b c d Wenchao Li : Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the personal union , opening lecture summer university 2014, August 19, 2014, with the addition "Draft, the spoken word counts, please do not quote", version May 18, 2015 online ( Memento from May 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Klaus Mlynek : Capital (functions). In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 274.
  4. ^ Klaus Mlynek: Personal union. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 498
personal data
SURNAME Gwynne, Rowland
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Anglo-Welsh nobleman and politician
DATE OF BIRTH 1659
PLACE OF BIRTH Llanelwedd
DATE OF DEATH January 24, 1726
Place of death Southwark