Sir Richard Vyvyan, 8th Baronet

Sir Richard Rawlinson Vyvyan, 8th Baronet (6 June 1800 – 15 August 1879) was an English landowner and Tory politician who sat in the House of Commons variously between 1825 and 1857.

Vyvyan was born at Trelowarren, Cornwall, the son of Sir Vyell Vyvyan, 7th Baronet and his wife Mary Hutton Rawlinson, daughter of Thomas Hutton Rawlinson of Lancaster. He was educated at Harrow School and at Christ Church, Oxford but did not take a degree. In 1820, he succeeded to the baronetcy and Vyvyan family estates on the death of his father. He became a lieutenant-colonel commandant in the Cornwall yeomanry cavalry on 5 September 1820.

On his death his estate consisted of 9,738 acres (3,941 ha) in twenty-five Cornish parishes with a rent roll of £18,147.^[1] He left no issue and his successor was Sir Vyell Donnithorne Vyvyan, 9th Baronet (1826–1917)

In 1825, Vyvyan was elected Member of Parliament for Cornwall.^[2] He held the seat until 1831. From 1831 he represented Okehampton,^[3] but upon the passage of the Reform Act 1832, he moved to Bristol, serving until 1837.^[4] He later served as Member for Helston from 1841 until 1857.^[5] Vyvyan was High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1840.

In 1826, Vyvyan was made a Fellow of the Royal Society for his "considerable literary and scientific acquirements especially in the Philosophy of Natural History",^[6] previously having been a Fellow of the Geological Society.^[6] He was also the patron of Charles Thomas Pearce, who he initially employed as his secretary in about 1843, and with whom he undertook "researches on light, heat, and magnetism of the Moon's rays" over a period of years. Between 1846 and 1848, they shared a house built by Decimus Burton in London's Regent's Park, called St. Dunstan's Villa.

Vyvyan was an advocate of Lamarckian evolution and transmutation of species. He was erroneously suspected of writing Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation until he denied authorship.^[7] Historian of science Pietro Corsi has written that Vyvyan "endorsed a quasi-Lamarckian transformation of species, together with phrenology and a broadly evolutionary cosmology."^[8]

• An Essay on Arithmo-physiology, privately printed, 1825
• Psychology, or a Review of the Arguments in proof of the Existence and Immortality of the Animal Soul, vol. i. 1831; called in immediately after publication
• The Harmony of the Comprehensible World (anon.), 1842, 2 vols
• The Harmony of the Comprehensible World (anon.), 1845

He also published several letters and speeches. His letter to the magistrates of Berkshire on their practice of 'consigning prisoners to solitary confinement before trial, and ordering them to be disguised by masks,' passed into a second edition in 1845. His account of the fogou or cave at Halligey, Trelowarren, is in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall (1885, viii. 256–8).

• M. Coate. (1950). The Vyvyan Family of Trelowarren. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 32: 111–119.

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Vyvyan, Richard Rawlinson (DNB00)

• Family genealogy
• Trelowarren web site
• Trelowarren garden description
• W. P. Courtney, rev. Rita M. Gibbs, 2004 in: Dictionary of National Biography (2004). "Vyvyan, Sir Richard Rawlinson, eighth baronet (1800–1879)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). transcription. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/28362. Retrieved 30 June 2007.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Leigh Rayment's list of baronets
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Sir Richard Vyvyan