COUSSMAKER, George (?1796-1821), of Poulton, nr. Dover, Kent and Kings Weston, nr. Bristol, Glos.

Coussmaker, whose ancestors had migrated from Flanders to southern England in the seventeenth century, continued to sit unopposed for Kinsale as the nominee of his maternal uncle and former guardian Edward, 21st Baron de Clifford. Genealogie de la Famille de Coussemaker, 24-30. Like de Clifford and his uncle by marriage John Calcraft*, who together had sponsored his admission to Brooks’s, 25 Jan. 1819, Coussmaker was deemed by the Liverpool ministry to be ‘in opposition’, but he was an infrequent attender and is not known to have spoken in debate. He voted against them on the civil list, 5, 8 May, and was probably in the opposition minority against Wilberforce’s attempt to compromise Queen Caroline’s claims, 22 June. He was so listed in Parl. Deb. n.s. i. 1314, but not in The Times, 26 June 1820. When de Clifford spoke and voted in the Lords against the bill of pains and penalties, 6 Nov. 1820, the Whig Thomas Creevey* reckoned it ‘an agreeable surprise’, for he was ‘such a cursed queen-hater that we always calculated upon his being for the bill’. Creevey Pprs. i. 336. Coussmaker divided against the omission of her name from the liturgy, 23, 26 Jan., but was absent from the division on the opposition censure motion, 6 Feb. 1821. On 28 Feb. he probably voted against Catholic relief, to which de Clifford, an absentee Irish landlord, was also hostile. He was so listed in The Times, 5 Mar. 1821, but not in Parl. Deb. n.s. iv. 1033. He took three weeks’ leave on account of ill health, 13 Mar., and died intestate in May 1821. His effects were sworn under £25,000. His only surviving sister and heiress Sophia (1791-1874), who in 1822 married ‘little, stubborn’ Jack Russell* (1796-1835), nephew of the 6th duke of Bedford, was declared Baroness de Clifford, 4 Mar. 1833, after her uncle’s death without issue the previous year. PROB 6/197/186; Fox Jnl. 135-6; Raikes Jnl. ii. 92.