It is difficult to know whether, when he was born in 1785, the people around William Cotgrave expected him to be comfortably off in life or not. His father John appears to have been the son of a wealthy man, but if so, John was illegitimate. The doubt is obvious even in what is written down about William’s place of birth – he believed he had been born in Tarvin, in rural Cheshire from where his ancestors hailed, but he was actually baptised in urban Warrington, dominated by the burgeoning cotton industry, where his parents were actually living at the time.

When his brother was married in 1809, there was a hint of former status when the local newspaper slightly grandly announced the wedding of “Mr Cotgreave of Stockport to Miss Davies of Oscoft [a hamlet near Tarvin]“. But by then William’s fortunes had taken a very different path, and his own wedding had certainly not attracted any interest from polite society. It was a shotgun affair after he had been imprisoned for failing to provide funds to raise what would have been an illegitimate son if he had not rapidly married the mother.

At the age of 20, he had joined the military, first travelling to Eastbourne and signing on with the 1st Derby Militia, at a time when the Napoleonic Wars were hungry for soldiers. As the battalion prepared, he moved around to Colchester and Ipswich and then transferred to the regular army as a private in the 45th Regiment of Infantry. It was when his battalion was stationed at Nottingham that his regimental authorities recorded that he was “confined by civil power” for failing to provide sureties that his responsibilities would be met after he left for whichever theatre of war he was sent to, and an unmarried 18-year-old woman called Mary Fox gave birth to the child she was carrying. He solved the problem in the short term by marrying her (she was sufficiently educated to sign her name in the register, he was illiterate) and sending her back to his home county, where their son – also called William – was baptised at Warrington in June 1809.

By then William himself was on his way to fight in Spain and Portugal and his name appears regularly (generally as Codgrove) at places named in the regimental musters as Val du Mora, Fuente de Gualel, Vimiosa, Zugramundi and Pamplona. Regardless of the dangers of fighting, the life was unhealthy. William was “sick in hospital” in July 1812, and on short pay the following month because he was not well enough to go to the front. By October, he was listed as sick again, but in November was finally back on duty. There was a lot of marching involved, traipsing around Spain and Portugal – the musters for May and June 1813 show that the battalion was moving an average of about 20 miles a day for several weeks. Sometimes they went over the border into France, where William was wounded in early 1814. Whether it was that injury or some other cause, he was listed again as being sick when the battalion returned to the British Isles in the summer and he was stationed at Cork in Ireland. Because he had by now served for more than seven years, he was entitled to a higher rate of pay, and whereas his sick allowance had previously been six pence per day, he was now receiving one shilling and 11 pence.

Back home in Cheshire, Mary’s live was miserable. Their son must have died as an infant – he was never mentioned again after his baptism and was certainly dead by 1813, when the authorities in Warrington had Mary and her new baby removed. The daughter (named Mary after her mother) was baptised as William’s child, but that cannot have been true because he had been continuously overseas for several years before her birth. In any case, the churchwardens in Warrington were not going to tolerate the costs of having to keep the poverty-stricken mother and child, so they had them removed to the parish of Barrow, where Mary (or perhaps William before he enlisted) must have lived at some stage long enough to acquire a legal right of settlement, which included entitlement to claim poor relief.

William Cotgrave was discharged from the army towards the end of 1814, having served in excess of the seven years for which he had signed on, and perhaps because his injury or sickness ruled him out of further active duty. He presumably came home to Cheshire, although there is no record until 1820, when he married a woman called Sarah Brown at Cheadle in what we now call Greater Manchester. Mary was presumably dead, although there does not appear to be any record of her death or burial and perhaps she had gone off with someone else, maybe the biological father of her daughter.

Given the penury, injury, sickness and war that characterised the first half of William Cotgrave’s life, and the hard work that continued afterwards, he lived a long life for someone of his generation. He and Sarah lived at Heaton Norris until she died in 1857, after which he lived with some of her relations. He had a small army pension and worked in the cotton industry until he died in July 1862 at the age of 77, having suffered from bronchitis for the previous year. Maybe he had the right genes for longevity. His brother John, who lived nearby and worked as a labourer, with no military pension to fall back on, lived to be 90.

Sources
Chester Chronicle, 24 July 1809
Parish Registers of Tarvin, Warrington, Stockport (Cheshire); Cheadle (Lancashire); Bingham and Southwell Minster (Nottinghamshire)
National Archives, Kew: RG9/2561, f.14, p.26; WO12/ 5793, 5727, 5728, 5729, 5730; WO13/455, 456, 457.
Civil Death certificates
Lancashire Record Office: QSP 2630/165
Nottinghamshire Archives: C/QSG/1 [Midsummer 1808]; C/QSM/1/35