ABSTRACT
In the churchyard of St Thomas’s Parish Church at Lymington, Hamp shire, stands a small group of stone monuments that appear to be doing their best to burst through the thongs of ivy which enlace them; or perhaps it is the ivy which is preventing their final collapse. They mark the graves of members of the Burrard family, whose men were distin guished in the early nineteenth century for service in the armed forces during the Napoleonic wars, and whose women, presumably, waited at home for them and got on with their daily lives. The Burrards had been a prominent family in the area since the fifteenth century, and the name appears time and again among the burgesses and mayors of Lymington, as well as its MPs. Lymington remained a close borough until 1832, and the Burrards retained fairly tight control of local politics, with chal lenges few and far between.1 All now appear equally forgotten: Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Burrard (1755-1813), commander in the Peninsular War, lies beneath the most cracked and toppled of the stone coffins; it has been recently vandalised. Most of his family lie quite effaced under the very weathered stone of the adjacent plot. Only his eldest son, Paul H. D. Burrard, who died a hero after the battle of Corunna in 1809, at the tender age of 18 years and 11 months, has a readable monument: a grand marble bas-relief inside the church. Two of his younger brothers were lost at a later stage of the same war, and it is perhaps not surprising that their father died within two months of the third loss.
