HUGHES, JOHN (1677-1720), English poet and miscellaneous writer, was born at Marlborough, Wiltshire, on the 29th of January 1677. His father was a clerk in a city office, and his grandfather was ejected from the living of Marlborough in 1662 for his Nonconformist opinions. Hughes was educated at a dissenting academy in London, where Isaac Watts was among his fellow scholars. He became a clerk in the Ordnance Office, and served on several commissions for the purchase of land for the royal dockyards. In 1717 Lord Chancellor Cowper made him secretary to the commissions of the peace in the court of chancery. He died on the night of the production of his most celebrated work, The Siege of Damascus, the 17th of February 1720.
His poems include occasional pieces in honour of William III., imitations of Horace, and a translation of the tenth book of the Pharsalia of Lucan. He was an amateur of the violin, and played in the concerts of Thomas Britton, the “musical small-coal man.” He wrote some of the libretti of the cantatas (2 vols., 1712) set to music by Dr John Christopher Pepusch. To these he prefixed an essay advocating the claims of English libretti, and insisting on the value of recitative. Others of his pieces were set to music by Ernest Galliard and by Händel. In the masque of Apollo and Daphne (1716) he was associated with Pepusch, and in his opera of Calypso and Telemachus (1712) with John E. Galliard. He was a contributor to the Tatler, the Spectator and the Guardian, and he collaborated with Sir Richard Blackmore in a series of essays entitled The Lay Monastery (1713-1714). He persuaded Joseph Addison to stage Cato. Addison had requested Hughes to write the last act, but eventually completed the play himself. He wrote a version of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise ... (1714) chiefly from the French translation printed at the Hague in 1693, which went through several editions, and is notable as the basis of Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717). He also made translations from Molière, Fontenelle and the Abbé Vertot, and in 1715 edited The Works of Edmund Spenser ... (another edition, 1750). His last work, the tragedy of The Siege of Damascus, is his best. It remained on the list of acting plays for a long time, and is to be found in various collected editions of British drama.
His Poems on Several Occasions, with some Select Essays in Prose ... were edited with a memoir in 1735, by William Duncombe, who had married his sister Elizabeth. See also Letters by several eminent persons (2 vols., 1772) and The Correspondence of John Hughes, Esq. ... and Several of his Friends ... (2 vols., 1773), with some additional poems. There is a long and eulogistic account of Hughes, with some letters, in the Biographia Britannica.
HUGHES, JOHN (1797-1864), American Roman Catholic divine, was born in Annaloghan, Co. Tyrone, Ireland, on the 24th of June 1797. In 1817 he followed his father to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. He was ordained deacon in 1825 and priest in 1826; and as vicar in St Augustine’s and other churches in Philadelphia he took a prominent part in the defence of ecclesiastical authority against the lay trustee system. In 1837 he was consecrated coadjutor to Bishop Dubois in New York. In the New York diocese, of which he was made administrator in 1839 and bishop in 1842, besides suppressing (1841) church control by lay trustees, he proved himself an active, almost pugnacious, leader. His unsuccessful attempt to build in Lafargeville, Jefferson county, a seminary of St Vincent de Paul, was followed by the transfer of the school to Fordham, where St John’s College (now Fordham University) was established (1841), largely out of funds collected by him in Europe in 1839-1840. His demand for state support for parochial schools was favoured by Governor Seward and was half victorious: it was in this controversy that he was first accused of forming a Catholic party in politics. John McCloskey was consecrated his coadjutor in 1844; in 1847 the diocese of New York was divided; and in 1850 Hughes was named the first archbishop of New York, with suffragan bishops of Boston, Hartford, Albany and Buffalo. In the meantime, during the “Native American” disturbances of 1844, he had been viciously attacked together with his Church; he kept his parishioners in check, but bade them protect their places of worship. His attitude was much the same at the time of the Anti-Popery outcry of the “Know-Nothings” in 1854. His early anti-slavery views had been made much less radical by his travels in the South and in the West Indies, but at the outbreak of the Civil War he was strongly pro-Union, and in 1861 he went to France to counteract the influence of the Slidell mission. He met with success not only in France, but at Rome and in Ireland, where, however, he made strong anti-English speeches. He died in New York City on the 3rd of January 1864. Hughes was a hard fighter and delighted in controversy. In 1826 he wrote An Answer to Nine Objections Made by an Anonymous Writer Against the Catholic Religion; he was engaged in a bitter debate with Dr John Breckenridge (Presbyterian), partly in letters published in 1833 and partly in a public discussion in Philadelphia in 1835, on the subject of civil and religious liberty as affected by the Roman Catholic and the Presbyterian “religions”; in 1856, through his organ, the Metropolitan Record, he did his best to discredit any attempts by the Catholic press to forward either the movement to “Americanize” the Catholic Church or that to disseminate the principles of “Young Ireland.”
His works were edited by Laurence Kehoe (2 vols., New York, 1864-1865). See John R. G. Hassard, Life of the Most Rev. John Hughes (New York, 1866); and Henry A. Brann, John Hughes (New York, 1894), a briefer sketch, in “The Makers of America” series.
HUGHES, THOMAS, English dramatist, a native of Cheshire, entered Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1571. He graduated and became a fellow of his college in 1576, and was afterwards a member of Gray’s Inn. He wrote The Misfortunes of Arthur Uther Pendragon’s son reduced into tragical notes by Thomas Hughes, which was performed at Greenwich in the Queen’s presence on the 28th of February 1588. Nicholas Trotte provided the introduction, Francis Flower the choruses of Acts I. and II., William Fulbeck two speeches, while three other gentlemen of Gray’s Inn, one of whom was Francis Bacon, undertook the care of the dumb show. The argument of the play, based on a story of incest and crime, was borrowed, in accordance with Senecan tradition, from mythical history, and the treatment is in close accordance with the model. The ghost of Gorlois, who was slain by Uther Pendragon, opens the play with a speech that reproduces passages spoken by the ghost of Tantalus in the Thyestes; the tragic events are announced by a messenger, and the chorus comments on the course of the action. Dr W. J. Cunliffe has proved that Hughes’s memory was saturated with Seneca, and that the play may be resolved into a patchwork of translations, with occasional original lines. Appendix II. to his exhaustive essay On the Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (1893) gives a long list of parallel passages.
The Misfortunes of Arthur was reprinted in J. P. Collier’s supplement to Dodsley’s Old Plays; and by Harvey Carson Grumline (Berlin, 1900), who points out that Hughes’s source was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Britonum, not the Morte D’Arthur.