Answers to Spot the Actual British Aristocrats!

On Saturday I challenged folks to identify, from a group of four men’s names, which were actual high-born friends of Gen. Charles Lee, and which were inventions of the comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse. I promised an answer on Sunday, and it’s still Sunday.

Three of the names were real, found in John R. Alden’s biography of Lee, and one fictional.

Clotworthy Upton (1721-1785) was made the first Baron Templetown on 3 Aug 1776, having served as clerk comptroller to the Princess Dowager of Wales. (Another Clotworthy Upton served as a captain in the Royal Navy during Britain’s wars with Napoleonic France.)

Capt. Primrose Kennedy of the 44th Regiment of Foot had the dubious distinction of being wounded on two of the British Army’s worst days in North America: Gen. Edward Braddock’s disastrous march to Fort Duquesne in 1755, and the Pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill twenty years later. He left the army in early 1779.

Godfrey “Biscuit” Brent, formally Viscount Biskerton, is one of the male leads in Wodehouse’s Big Money. He’s a member of the Drones Club, but doesn’t appear in any other stories.

Constantine Phipps (1744-1792, shown above) was a captain in the Royal Navy and a Member of Parliament. In 1773 he set out for the North Pole in the ship Racehorse, accompanied by the Carcass, commanded by Skeffington Lutwidge. The ships got to within about ten degrees of latitude of the Pole before ice forced them back. In his report on the voyage, Phipps was the first European to describe seeing a polar bear.

In 1775 Phipps succeeded his father and became the second Baron Mulgrave, but he continued to serve in the Navy. He participated in the Battle of Ushant in 1778, defending the British coast from the French. At the end of the American war he retired from active service.