Rev. Thomas Barnard

Will of Rev. Thomas Barnard clerk of Eton College Bucks proved 04/01/1785. Under the will he bequeathed the [unnamed] sugar estate on the parishes of St Peter and St Lucy with the 'negro slaves thereon male and female' which and whom had been settled on him and his late wife Mary Grey, and which he possessed in right of his late wife, to their children Thos. Barnard, Mary, Penelope, Eliz., Jane [possibly one daughter Eliz. Jane] and Ann Dorothy. The land and enslaved people which and whom he held 'by purchase' in his own right he left in trust to raise £700 for his son George and £1000 for his second wife Frances, with the residue to his children by his first wife.

In a List of inhabitants of St Peter, Barbados, 1780, Barnard was listed as owning 108 enslaved.

'Nor is there much more to be recorded of the Fellows [of Eton College between 1764 and 1791] of whom nearly all had moved entirely in the narrow worlds of Eton and King's College. The election, indeed, of Thomas Barnard, who belonged neither to Eton nor to King's, and who had spent some years of his life in the Barbados, was almost an outrage, and must be imputed to the influence exercised by his brother who was at that time Provost.' Thomas Barnard's son and co-heir Thomas Barnard (1756-1798) was Registrar at Eton 1781-1796.

Thomas Barnard's brother Edward Barnard was the Headmaster of Eton 1754-1765 and Provost of Eton 1765-1781. He had married Susannah Haggatt, daughter of Nathaniel Haggatt (q.v.), who settled £13,000 on the couple on their wedding [Haggatt's own will talks of £6000 settled on his daughter Susannah). Much of the will of Edward Barnard is taken up with the transmission of this £13,000 to his son Edward Barnard failing whom to the children of his brother Thomas. Edward Barnard has an entry in the ODNB as 'College Head' that describes his wife as 'Susannah Haggatt of Richmond.'

PROB 11/1125/17

Barbados Department of Archives, RB9/3/6.

Eton College Register 1753-1790, p. xxii.

Will of Dr Edward Barnard DD Provost of Eton College proved 14/12/1781, PROB 11/1084/360; Tim Card, ‘Barnard, Edward (1717–1781)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1449, accessed 18 Oct 2016].