Hugh Macauley Boyd

Life
1746-1794 [alt. McAuley]; b. Ballycastle, Co. Antrim; ed., St. John’s College, Cambridge, MA 1776; studied law in London; became prominent as political journalist, acquainted with Goldsmith, Garrick, Burke and Reynolds; secretary to Lord George Macartney, 1781; Master-Attendant at Madras; ed. Madras Courier and other Anglo-Indian journals; believe by some to be the author of the Junius Letters, more commonly ascribed to Sir Philip Francis [q.v.]; d. Madras; L. D. Campbell edited a life of Boyd with some of his poems in 1798; Miscellaneous Works of Hugh Boyd appeared in 1800. RR ODNB PI DIW DUB OCIL

[ See Linde Lunney, “Hugh Macauley Boyd’, in Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA 2009) - online; accessed 10.01.2024. ]

 

Works
Miscellaneous Works of Hugh Boyd, 2 vols. (London 1800).

 

Criticism
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies (1821), vol. I, p.124.

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References

Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica: Irish Worthies, Vol. I [of 2] (London & Dublin 1819), pp.124-27.
On Boyd’s purported authorship of the Junius Letters:

[...]

That Boyd was an author possessed of some ingenuity, we are not disposed to deny, but that he was any thing more would be somewhat difficult to prove; and we beg the reader (if he imagines we have treated Boyd with undue levity) to remember, that this sketch is taken from a life written by one of his most intimate friends, every line of which renders both conspicuously ridiculous.

Boyd’s Political Tracts were reprinted in one octavo volume, with a view to establish an assertion, that Almon is supposed to have been the first to have made, purporting Mr. Boyd to be the author of Junius. - We certainly have heard the letters of Junius attributed to several individuals, whose incomparable vacuity of head seemed their only claim to the distinction; but never before Boyd was mentioned did we see a feeble imitator mistaken for an original writer. (p.126)

See full copy in RICORSO > Library > Criticism > History > Legacy - via index, or as attached.

Dictionary of National Biography avers that he was prob. ed. TCD; but note ODNB Corrig [Seventh Impression]: MA St John’s College, Cambridge, 1776.

D. J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co 1912); b. Ballycastle, 1746, d. Madras 1794, name also given as M’Aulay; ‘one of the writers supposed to be Junius’; cites Life of H.M.B., with some poems, ed. L. D. Campbell (London 1798); acc. to O’Donoghue his mother was an O’Boyd, but there is no evidence of this in Anglican church at Ballycastle, which is full of monuments to the Boyd family.

Notes
Ethel Mannin cites Select Passages from the Fathers (Dublin 1814) in Two Portraits of Integrity (1954).

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