John Baker Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield (1735–1821): Politician, close friend and executor of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794; DNB). He was an MP for Coventry, 1780–1784, and Bristol, 1790–1802. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Sheffield in 1802, and obtained an earldom in 1816. Southey corresponded with him in 1817–1818, when Sheffield offered Southey sight of the papers of his son-in-law, General Sir Henry Clinton (1771–1829; DNB), to help with his History of the Peninsular War (1823–1832).

William Heathcote, 5th Baronet (1801–1881): Landowner and politician. He was the only son of William Heathcote (1772–1802), Rector of Worting, and Elizabeth (1773–1855), a daughter of Lovelace Bigg-Wither (1741–1813) – he was thus a nephew of Herbert Hill’s wife. Heathcote was educated at Winchester College and then at Oriel College, Oxford, where he was taught by John Keble (1792–1866; DNB) and struck up a friendship with John Taylor Coleridge.

Elton Hamond (1786–1820): Businessman, writer and suicide. The son of a wealthy London tea merchant, he was a cousin of Stamford Raffles (1781–1826; DNB), colonial administrator and founder of Singapore. One of Hamond’s sisters lived for a time in the household of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Hamond’s business failed in 1813. He committed suicide by shooting himself through the head on 1 January 1820. He had, he explained in a p left for the coroner, been planning his death for seven years.

Edward John Littleton (formerly Walhouse; 1791–1863), Lord Hatherton: Politician. The son of Moreton Walhouse, he changed his name to Littleton in 1812 in order to comply with the terms of the will of his great uncle Sir Edward Littleton, the bulk of whose estates he inherited. He married Hyacinthe Mary (1789?–1849), the illegitimate daughter of Richard, 1st Marquess Wellesley. He was elected MP for Staffordshire in 1812, and supported Canning and Catholic emancipation. In 1835 he was created Baron Hatherton of Hatherton.

Mary Gonne (1768-1825): Daughter of Robert and Mary Harding, of Broxbourne, Hertfordshire and wife of William Gonne, whom she married in 1790. She was the godmother of Edith May Southey and the mother of Henry Herbert Southey’s second wife, Louisa Gonne. Southey greatly admired her.

William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville (1759–1834): Foreign Secretary 1791–1801, Prime Minister 1806–1807. Grenville was the uncle of Southey’s friend and patron Charles Watkin Williams Wynn.

John Feltham (c. 1770– c. 1813): Miscellaneous writer from Salisbury. He lived in London from 1799 and wrote a number of guide books and descriptions of his travels. Feltham corresponded briefly with Southey about his A Tour Through the Island of Mann (1798).

John Hookham Frere (1769–1846): Poet, diplomat, Hispanist, Frere had parodied Southey’s radical ballads in ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-grinder’ in the Anti-Jacobin (1797). Three of Frere’s translations from the Poema del Cid were appended to Southey’s edition of the Chronicle of the Cid. Frere had been Britain’s ambassador to Portugal while Southey’s uncle had lived there; from 1808–1809 he was ambassador to Spain.

Henry Fisher (1781–1837): Printer, publisher and head of the largest periodicals warehouse in England. His firm was devoted to cheap editions of popular works, sold in monthly instalments. In 1819 he asked Southey to write a life of George III, a proposal that Southey swiftly declined.

Andreas Andersen Feldborg (1782–1838): Danish author who was resident in England 1802–1810 and 1821–1824. Southey drew on some of his works in his Life of Nelson (1813). Feldborg visited Southey in 1821 and they corresponded intermittently.