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.

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.

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.

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.

Sarah Fletcher (dates unknown): She ran a school for girls in Ambleside and was well known to William Wordsworth and his family. Wordsworth described her, in a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson, 3 March 1822, as having ‘very good dispositions and I believe a good temper … but she was very deaf’, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edn, The Later Years: Part 1, 1821–1828, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1978), p. 111. Miss Fletcher became a great friend of Mary Barker, with whom she lived in 1818 after debts forced her to give up her school.

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.

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).

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.

John Wilson Croker (1780-1857): Irish Protestant politician and writer. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and called to the Irish Bar in 1802. In 1807 he was elected MP for Downpatrick and became Secretary to the Admiralty 1809–1830. He was a close friend of Wellington and, particularly, of Peel. Croker was a prolific writer of light verse and often acted as an intermediary between the government and the literary world – he played a key role in making changes to Southey’s early odes as Poet Laureate.

Herbert Croft, 5th Baronet (1751-1816): Writer and lexicographer. Born at Dunster Park, Berkshire, the son of Richard Croft. He inherited the Croft baronetcy from a relative in 1797, but no money or lands to accompany the title. He practised as a barrister in London in the late 1770s, and gained some reputation as a miscellaneous writer. Perennially short of money, Croft changed direction and graduated from University College, Oxford in 1785 and was appointed Vicar of Prittlewell in Essex and chaplain of the British garrison in Quebec.