De Vere (Hunt), Sir Aubrey (1788–1846), 2nd baronet, dramatist, poet, and country gentleman, was born 28 August 1788 at Curragh Chase, parish of Adare, Co. Limerick, eldest son of Sir Vere Hunt, and his wife Eleanor, daughter of William Cecil Pery (1721–94), bishop of Limerick. Sir Vere Hunt (1761–1818), landowner and MP, was the eldest son of Vere Hunt (d. 1787), a landowner of Curragh, Co. Limerick, and his second wife Anne Browne of New Grove, Co. Clare. He entered TCD (1777), but there is no record of his graduation. After serving as sheriff of Limerick (1784), he was created baronet (8 December 1784). During the 1790s he raised three infantry regiments, including the 135th foot and the Co. Limerick Fencibles. He was MP for Askeaton, Co. Limerick (1798–1800) and supported the union, for which he was later made weighmaster of Cork (1804). Involved in numerous business speculations, in 1803 he bought Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel and settled it with natives of Co. Limerick. He also attempted – without great success – to establish a new town (New Birmingham) on his second estate near Killenaule, Co. Tipperary. He died 11 August 1818.
After receiving an elementary education at home, Aubrey was sent to Ambleside, in the English Lake District, for private tuition under the Rev. John Dawes (1798–1800). A further six years at Harrow School ended his formal education. Removal to England for a period of years was seen primarily as a means of separating the child from the unhealthy ‘adulation of dependents’. In 1818 he succeeded as second baronet and inherited an estate encumbered with debt as a result of the reckless gambling and mismanagement of his father. After some hesitation, he became a candidate for Co. Limerick at the general election of March 1820, coming a respectable third at the polls, though (to family surprise) crucially suffering rejection by the tenants of a neighbouring landowner, who used the opportunity to take revenge for an obscure slight once given him by Aubrey's uncle, the earl of Limerick. Characteristically, he did not allow the action to affect relations with the neighbouring household. His political convictions amounted to a moderate, old-fashioned toryism, perturbed over the long-term consequences of the reform act of 1832. He saw no incongruity between thoroughgoing support for the catholic emancipation movement of the 1820s (proposing the co-establishment of protestant and catholic churches in Ireland) and a passionate advocacy of the union in the face of the repeal movement in the 1830s and 1840s.
Regular county assize and sessions work was complemented by high-minded attention to the welfare of his tenantry. In 1832 he assumed the name of de Vere by letters patent. By the mid 1820s the estate at Curragh had been returned to solvency: his four-year residence in England at the start of the decade may have been part of a policy of retrenchment. The demesne was landscaped and planted under the influence of the prevailing Gothic taste.
A mild romanticism pervades the verse published in 1822–3. The juvenilia (c.1808–10) show little particularity, though faithful to vague impressions of the north Limerick countryside. There is greater stringency, and intellectual energy, in the blank verse drama, though de Vere did not have the talent to overcome the obvious peril of generating Shakespearean pastiche. Occasional contributions to literary magazines such as the Dublin Literary Gazette and the Keepsake kept his hand in until he was moved to produce a series of devotional sonnets in the early 1840s. Dedicated to Wordsworth, a valued friend and sometime visitor to Curragh Chase, the poems in Song of faith have greater clarity than his earlier verse but to the detriment of any sentimental charm, de Vere's intentions being plainly didactic. Wordsworth gave excessive praise to this collection.
It seems curious that he was impelled, while suffering stomach and intestinal pain in 1844, to write his final verse drama, Mary Tudor, specifically to exonerate the catholic queen from unfair charges of arrogance historically laid against her character. Chivalrous royalism, a deeply paternal social philosophy, and a facility for verse were all passed on to two of his older sons, Sir Stephen de Vere (qv) and Aubrey Thomas de Vere (qv). A number of verse fragments, dating to 1845–6, have emotional substance. He was a very minor poet, but may have some stature as a dramatist. Weakened by a series of operations in 1844 and 1845, he died at Curragh Chase, 5 July 1846, and was buried at Askeaton. The family permitted the poorest tenants to pay their respects within his room in the family mansion on the night of his death.
At the age of 18 he married (12 May 1807) Mary, eldest daughter of Stephen Edward Rice of Mount Trenchard, Co. Limerick, sister to Thomas Spring-Rice (qv), 1st Lord Monteagle. They had five sons and three daughters, two of whom died young.