Charles Hanbury Williams

Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, KB (8 December 1708 – 2 November 1759) was a Welsh diplomat, writer and satirist.

The son of John Hanbury, a Welsh ironmaster, he assumed the name of Williams in 1720, under the terms of a bequest from his godfather [Charles Williams of Caerleon].

On 1 July 1732 at Saint James, Westminster, London, he married Lady Frances Coningsby (15 January 1707/1708 – buried at Westminster Abbey, 31 December 1781), daughter of Thomas Coningsby, 1st Earl Coningsby and Lady Frances Jones. They had two daughters: Frances married William Capel, 4th Earl of Essex and Charlotte Robert Boyle Walsingham, youngest son of the Earl of Shannon.

He entered Parliament in 1734 for the Monmouthshire constituency as a supporter of Robert Walpole, and held the seat until 1747. He then won the seat of Leominster in 1754 and held it until his death.

In 1739 Williams gave support for the establishment of the Foundling Hospital and served as one of its founding governors.

From 1747 till 1750, he was the British ambassador in Dresden. In 1748 he was in Poland and witnessed a Polish Sejm, where he met members of the influential Czartoryski family (August Aleksander Czartoryski). When the future King of Poland, Stanisław Poniatowski, was receiving medical treatment in Berlin, he met Sir Charles, who was sent there as ambassador (1750–1751). The Englishman became part of Polish and Russian history by introducing Stanisław to the Russian Grand Duchess Catherine Alexeyevna (Saint Petersburg 1755, the future Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia). From that moment began the famous romance between Catherine and Czartoryski.

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