Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler (June 18, 1757 – August 26, 1826), American jurist and playwright who wrote "The Contrast" in 1787 and published "The Algerine Captive" in 1797. He also wrote several legal tracts, six plays, a musical drama, two long poems, a semifictional travel narrative, "The Yankey in London" (1809), and essays.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Tyler attended the Boston Latin School, Yale and then Harvard, where he earned a reputation as a quick-witted joker. He was also considered rather profligate, spending half his inheritance while in college. After graduation, he joined the Continental Army, where he served under John Hancock. In late 1778, he returned to Harvard to study law, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1780. He opened a practice in Braintree, Massachusetts, eight miles outside of Boston, and lodged with Mary and Richard Cranch. Mary was Abigail Adams's sister, and Tyler soon met the younger Abigail ("Nabby") Adams, for whom he began to nurse a deep affection. In a letter to her husband, Abigail Adams Sr. noted that despite having "a sprightly fancy, a warm imagination and an agreeable person," he was nonetheless "rather negligent in pursueing (sic) his business ... and dissipated two or 3 more years of his Life and too much of his fortune to reflect upon with pleasure; all of which he now laments but cannot recall." The relationship was broken off and Tyler fell into a depression.

After a brief stint in suppressing the 1787 Shays's Rebellion, Tyler moved to Boston and eventually wed Mary Palmer in 1794, with whom he had eleven children. In 1801, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Vermont as an assistant judge, and was later elected chief justice. In 1812 he ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate, losing due to a recent shift from being a Federalist to a Republican at a time when Vermont was controlled by the Federalists. He died in Vermont, of facial cancer that he had suffered from for ten years.

He has been identified as the model for Jaffrey Pyncheon in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.

Royall Tyler admitted to his youthfully arrogant and dissolute life, but only regretted the limitations which his seedy past placed upon his career and later ambitions. His illegitimate son Royal Morse (later a leader in the anti-Roman Catholic riots in Cambridge of 1834) was born in 1779 to Katharine Morse, a well-known "character", the sweeper and cleaning woman in the Harvard College buildings, the fact recorded by John Langdon Sibley, the long-time Harvard librarian and historian. Tyler later fathered at least one daughter, Sophia, born in 1786, and possibly another daughter, Catherine, born in 1791, on Mary Palmer's mother Elizabeth Hunt, Mrs. Joseph Pearse Palmer, when her husband was absent for a considerable time.

The main theater at the University of Vermont is named after him.

Sources

Carson, Ada Lou, "Thomas Pickman Tyler's'Memoirs of Royall Tyler': An Annotated Edition," University of Minnesota Ph.D. (University Mircofilms), 1985.

Carson, Ada Lou and Herbert L. Carson, "Royall Tyler," Twayne Publishers: 1979.

Lauter, Paul, Ed. "The Heath Anthology of American Literature." [http://college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/index.html] Vol. 1. 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 2002.

External links

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* [http://www.historicvermont.org/markers/markers2.html Tyler's Historical Marker]
* [http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/04/14/080414crat_atlarge_lepore Prior Convictions, a The New Yorker article that discusses The Algerine Captive and Royall's life]