Royall Tyler
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
jurist
Jurist
A jurist or jurisconsult is a professional who studies, develops, applies, or otherwise deals with the law. The term is widely used in American English, but in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth countries it has only historical and specialist usage...
and playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
who wrote The Contrast
The Contrast (play)
The Contrast, written in 1787 by Royall Tyler, is an American play in the tradition of the English Restoration comedies of the seventeenth century; it takes its cue from Sheridan's The School for Scandal, a British comedy of manners that had revived that tradition a decade before. Royall uses the...
in 1787 and published The Algerine Captive
The Algerine Captive
The Algerine Captive: or the Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill: Six Years a Prisoner among the Algerines is a novel published anonymously in 1797 by early American playwright and novelist Royall Tyler...
in 1797. He wrote several legal tracts, six plays, a musical drama, two long poems, a semifictional travel narrative, The Yankey in London (1809), and essays. He frequently collaborated with his friend Joseph Dennie
Joseph Dennie
Joseph Dennie was an American author and journalist who was one of the foremost men of letters of the Federalist Era. A Federalist, Dennie is best remembered for his series of essays entitled The Lay Preacher and as the founding editor of Port Folio, a journal espousing classical republican values...
, including co-writing a satirical column which appeared in Dennie's newspaper The Farmer's Weekly Museum.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts to politician Royall Tyler and Mary (Steele) Tyler and christened William, Tyler attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard, where he earned a reputation as a quick-witted joker. He was also considered rather profligate, spending half his inheritance while in college. In addition to his late father's money, he also legally took his father's first name.
After graduation, the young Royall Tyler briefly served in the Massachusetts militia under John Hancock
John Hancock
John Hancock was a merchant, statesman, and prominent Patriot of the American Revolution. He served as president of the Second Continental Congress and was the first and third Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts...
during the abortive Rhode Island expedition
Battle of Rhode Island
The Battle of Rhode Island, also known as the Battle of Quaker Hill and the Siege of Newport, took place on August 29, 1778. Continental Army and militia forces under the command of General John Sullivan were withdrawing to the northern part of Aquidneck Island after abandoning their siege of...
. 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
Abigail Adams
Abigail Adams was the wife of John Adams, who was the second President of the United States, and the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth...
's sister, and Tyler soon met the younger Abigail ("Nabby") Adams
Abigail “Nabby” Adams Smith
Abigail "Nabby" Adams Smith was the firstborn of Abigail and John Adams, founding father and second President of the United States...
, 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 boarded in the house of Elizabeth Palmer. Eventually, in 1794, he wed her daughter Mary Palmer, took her to his new home in Vermont, and with her had eleven children. In 1801, Tyler 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
Federalist
The term federalist describes several political beliefs around the world. Also, it may refer to the concept of federalism or the type of government called a federation...
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.
Tyler has been identified as the model for Jaffrey Pyncheon in Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
's The House of the Seven Gables
The House of the Seven Gables
The House of the Seven Gables is a 1668 colonial mansion in Salem, Massachusetts, USA. The house is now a non-profit museum, with an admission fee charged for tours, as well as an active settlement house with programs for children...
. Hawthorne's wife was a descendant of Elizabeth Palmer, and her branch of the family preserved stories of Tyler's sexual misbehavior as a young man.
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.
According to descendants of his wife's sisters, Tyler fathered at least one daughter on Elizabeth Palmer while her husband, Joseph Pearse Palmer, was away from Boston. The girls in question were Sophia, born in 1786, and possibly Catherine, born in 1791. Tyler was also said to have had sexual relations with Mary Palmer before she was old enough to marry. Mary Palmer Tyler's own account says that for many months her neighbors believed that she had been impregnated out of wedlock, but that she and Tyler had actually married in secret.
The main theater at the University of Vermont
University of Vermont
The University of Vermont comprises seven undergraduate schools, an honors college, a graduate college, and a college of medicine. The Honors College does not offer its own degrees; students in the Honors College concurrently enroll in one of the university's seven undergraduate colleges or...
is named after Tyler.