John Dunn Gardner

John Gardner (20 July 1811 – 11 January 1903), formerly of Soham Mere and later of Chatteris House, Isle of Ely, in the county of Cambridge, known as John Townshend until 1843 and sometimes styled "Earl of Leicester", was a British Member of Parliament from 1841 to 1847, elected to represent Bodmin as a Conservative. He was also a Justice of the Peace, a Deputy Lieutenant, and High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1859.

He is otherwise notable for the tangled marital history of his mother, the Marchioness Townshend.

Baptised John Townshend on 26 December 1823 at St. George's, Bloomsbury, he was the eldest surviving son of the brewer John Margetts and the heiress Sarah (née Dunn Gardner), estranged wife of George Townshend, 3rd Marquess Townshend.

All the children of this union were declared illegitimate by a private Act of Parliament in 1843. Dunn Gardner, who had styled himself "Earl of Leicester" (the courtesy title used by the heir apparent to the marquessate of Townshend) before his election to parliament, then assumed his mother's maiden name of Dunn Gardner.

Dunn Gardner died in January 1903, aged 91.

Sarah and her husband married on 12 May 1807, and were known as Lord and Lady Chartley, a courtesy title from his grandfather, the 1st Marquess Townshend. In September 1807, on the death of the 1st Marquess, the couple became the Earl and Countess of Leicester, also by courtesy. They separated a few months later, in May 1808, and she filed an ecclesiastical suit for annulment, alleging non-consummation, i.e. that the couple had never had sex. While the suit was still pending, Lady Leicester eloped with John Margetts, a brewer, and married him in a bigamous ceremony at Gretna Green in October 1809. Her first marriage was never dissolved, which became a legal problem for the succession of the Townshend peerage. In 1811 her legal husband became the 3rd Marquess Townshend, but after leaving him, she did not use his name for over a decade, calling herself Mrs. Margetts; and Margetts gave his name to their children. Sarah survived both men: Margetts died in 1842, and Marquess Townshend died abroad in December 1855. She remarried a few weeks after her legal widowhood, to James Laidler on 10 January 1856, and died on 11 September 1858.

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