Background
Baptised at Newbury, Berkshire, on 9 September 1742, he was the eldest son of Thomas Penrose, rector of Newbury parish, who died on 20 April 1769.
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Thomas Penrose
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After 1762 Penrose left university and joined a private Anglo-Portuguese expedition to attack of Buenos Aires, under the command of an adventurer named Captain Macnamara. The party left the River Tagus on 30 August 1762, and on its way attacked the settlement of Nova Colonia de Sacramento in the Río de la Plata, which had been seized by the Spanish. The operation was at first successful.
But the flagship, the Lord Clive, caught fire, and Macnamara was drowned, with most of the crew.
The second vessel, the Ambuscade, of 40 guns, in which Penrose served as a lieutenant of marines, escaped, and ultimately arrived at the Portuguese settlement of Rio de Janeiro. Penrose returned to England: he had been wounded in the fighting and his health was affected, He graduated Bachelor of Arts at Hertford College, Oxford on 8 February 1766, took holy orders, and became curate to his father at Newbury.
About 1777 he was appointed by a friend to the rectory of Beckington-cum-Standerwick, near Frome in Somerset. But his health failed.
He died at Bristol on 20 April 1779, and was buried at Clifton, where a monument was erected in his memory.
Penrose"s portrait was engraved by William Bromley. In 1768 Penrose married Mary, eldest daughter of Samuel Slocock of Newbury. She remarried at Newbury, in February 1786, the Review
Thomas Best, master of the free grammar school, and died about 1840, at the age of 94.
Penrose"s only child, Thomas, went to Winchester College, and became Fellow of New College, Oxford, and vicar of Writtle-cum-Roxwell. He wrote Sketch of the Lives and Writings of Dante and Petrarch (anon 1790) and died in 1851.
