General Sir Edward Cust 1st Bart.

Although not listed as an awardee in the Parliamentary Papers list, Edward Cust, together with the heirs of the late Mrs L. W. Boode (his mother-in-law), made a claim on Greenwich Park in British Guiana and was awarded £5029 7s 8d as 716A (pace Parliamentary Papers): the remainder of the compensation for the enslaved on the estate went to Cust's brother John, Earl Brownlow and Wilbraham Egerton, appointed trustees and executors of Mrs L.W. Boode in place of James Dannett. In pursuit of the compensation, Edward Cust wrote to Henry Frederick Stephenson, one of the Commissioners of Compensation in 1835: 'Dear Stevenson [sic]: how much might I hope to receive? I trust I am not intruding an impertinent request... I see your Brother in Law at Holkham received one royal duchess with very great splendour' [Stephenson had married the sister of the wife of Thomas William Coke, later Earl of Leicester, reportedly to the great displeasure of Coke].

As an MP voted in planter interests throughout 1820s-1832. [And see note 2 below].

Son of Brownlow Cust, 1st Baron Brownlow and brother of John Cust, 1st Earl Brownlow, and Frances, daughter and heir of Sir Henry Bankes of Wimbledon, Surrey. Educ. Eton and Sandhurst.

Married 11 January 1821, Mary Anne, only child of Lewis William Boode, 'of Amsterdam and Peover Hall Cheshire', and heir of her mother, Margaret Dannett, of Leasowe Castle, Birkenhead, daughter of the Revd Thomas Dannett, rector of Liverpool. Lewis William Boode, who had died c. 1800, was a member of a major family of British Guiana slave-owners and the brother of Andreas Christian Boode (q.v.).

Army officer who served in the Peninsula War, eventually rising to General (1866). Knighted 1831.

Mary Cust was lady of the bedchamber to Queen Victoria's mother, duchess of Kent.

Equerry to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, from 1816. Master of the ceremonies to Queen Victoria 1847-76. One of the commissioners for the new Houses of Parliament.

Cust the author of works on West Indian affairs and the colonies and also wrote military histories and other works;  included Annals of the Wars of the Eighteenth Century (5 vols., 1857) and Lives of the Warriors of the Thirty Years' War (2 vols., 1865). Received the gold medal of the Austrian empire from the emperor for these in in 1869. Also wrote Noctes dominicae, or, Sunday Night Readings (1848) and Family Readings: the New Testament Harmonised and Explained  (1850). Hon. DCL from the University of Oxford, 1853.

Senior magistrate for the hundred of Wirral. It is not clear where his main residence was: Boyle's Directory 1835 lists him as living at he died in Jermyn Street, St James's, London, but had properties elsewhere - including Leasowe Castle, in the Wirral. [See physical legacies].

Active in the West India Committee (e.g. in April 1823) pressing for ameliorative measures to prevent full emancipation.

T71/885 British Guiana no. 716A & B; T71/1610: letter, dated 30/09/1835, from Leasowe Castle; http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/member/stephenson-henry-1790-1858 [accessed 12/09/2017]; R. G. Thorne (ed.), The House of Commons, 1790-1820 (5 vols., London, Secker & Warburg for the History of Parliament Trust, 1986), vol. 3, pp. 554-5; Oxford DNB, (article by [Anon.], rev. James Lunt.); D. R. Fisher (ed.), The House of Commons 1820-1832 (7 vols., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press for the History of Parliament Trust, 2009), vol. 4.

Alexandra Franklin, Enterprise and advantage: The West India interest in Britain, 1774-1840 (University of Pennsylvania, Unpub. PhD, 1992), p. 214.