William Blount, 7th Baron Mountjoy, inherited a barony encumbered by his father’s financial profligacy and died at the age of thirty-three without having married or left legitimate issue. Contemporary accounts, including those cited by his brother’s biographers, suggest that his death in 1594 was hastened by ‘debauchery’, and his tenure of the title did little to restore the family’s fortunes.
The barony passed to his younger brother Charles, who would transform the family’s standing beyond all expectation.
Life
William Blount was born about 1561 at Hook, Dorset, the eldest son of James Blount, 6th Baron Mountjoy, and Catherine Leigh. He succeeded to the barony on his father’s death in 1581 or 1582. His tenure was brief and, by all accounts, unproductive: the family’s estates, already reduced by his father’s alchemical expenditure, were further diminished, and he contracted no marriage and produced no heirs.
He died in 1594 at Hook, Dorset, without issue, and the barony passed to his younger brother Charles, who had in the intervening years established himself at the court of Elizabeth I. Tudor Times records that Charles’s father ‘had dabbled unsuccessfully in alchemy and the death of his bachelor brother in 1594 was hastened by debauchery which dissipated what was left of the family patrimony’.
A scarcely documented life
Almost no independent contemporary sources address the 7th Baron’s life beyond bare succession details and a brief note in his brother’s biographies; he is, effectively, a biographical cipher. The year of his death, 1594, is consistent across all sources, while his date of birth (c. 1561) remains approximate.