SWYMMER, Anthony Langley (?1724-60), of Mold, Flints. and Longwood House, nr. Winchester.

A member of a good Bristol merchant family, Swymmer, who was born in Jamaica, where his grandfather owned a plantation,V. L. Oliver, Caribbeana, iv. 227-32, where there is some confusion. was returned for Southampton as a Tory in 1747. In March 1752, when a scheme was afoot for a restoration of the Stuarts with Prussian help, he went over to Paris with his father-in-law, Sir John Astley, meeting the Young Pretender, and bringing a paper from England for the Jacobite Earl Marischal, then Prussian ambassador to France. He and his wife then travelled to Rome, with a recommendation to the Pretender’s secretary, who described him as ‘a most agreeable companion, and which is more a perfect honest man [i.e. Jacobite]’, adding: ‘If you will make him happy ... let him know H.R.H. [the Young Pretender] is well, for surely no man on earth loves him better nor would do more to serve him’.28 Sept., 29 Nov. 1752, Stuart mss 336/7, 338/69; A. Lang, Pickle the Spy, 190, 213, who misdates a letter.

He died 4 Jan. 1760 in Jamaica.