Edward Fitzroy Talbot
and the Honourable R. Howard
(1812-1890 and 1812-1873)
8 August 1861

Volume 4, page 331, sitting number 5393.

Edward Fitzroy Talbot was the sixth son of the Very Reverend Charles Talbot, Dean of Salisbury, and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of the 5th Duke of Beaufort. Born on 6 March 1812, he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford (MA, 1837), and was called to the bar on 3 May 1839. He lived at 15 Upper Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London. He died in 1890.

The Honourable R. Howard is probably Richard Edward Howard (1812-1873), third son of Thomas Howard, 16th Earl of Suffolk, born at Chorlton Park, in Wiltshire. According to the Times, the Honourable Richard Edward Howard graduated from Oxford in 1845, with a Doctorate in Civil Law, so perhaps the legal profession is how the two friends originally met. However, Howard seems to have left the bar and entered the civil service, for on 3 October 1857, The Times repeated a report from the Civil Service Gazette that included the information that the Honourable Richard Edward Howard had been appointed stamp distributor for Manchester.

He appears on the 1861 and 1871 censuses, a 'Stamp Distributor' living in Smedley Lane, Cheetham, near Manchester, with his housekeeper, Catherine Palser. He was unmarried and she was 16 years younger than him, and there was only one other servant in the house, a maid-of-all-work, so it seems more than likely that Catherine was his common-law wife. This would explain his relatively lowly profession, and his relocation away from London.