Townshend, Horatio (1750–1837), clergyman and author, was born 5 November 1750, third son of Capt. Philip Townshend (1700–86), soldier and landowner, and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Hungerford. The Townshends had come to Ireland in the seventeenth century; Horatio's great-grandfather, Col. Richard Townsend (qv), a commander at the battle of Knocknanuss (November 1647), was MP for Baltimore (1661) and acquired Castletownsend as the family estate in 1668.
Horatio was educated at TCD, whence he graduated BA in 1770 and MA in 1776; in the latter year he was incorporated in Magdalen College, Oxford. He then took holy orders and was given the living at Rosscarbery, Co. Cork, where he resided the rest of his life as rector of Clonakilty and Carrigaline. During the 1798 uprising he addressed the catholic congregation of Clonakilty as his ‘deluded but still dear countrymen’ (New Cork Evening Post, 25 June 1798) in the chapel on 24 June 1798, just five days after a battle in which 100 insurgents were killed.
In 1810 appeared his Statistical survey of the county of Cork in one volume, a second two-volume edition being published in Cork in 1815. This work was undertaken for the Dublin Society, which in 1801 began to compile statistical surveys of every county, paying each contributor £80. Townshend's was comprehensive, dealing inter alia with landlords, tenants, leasing, housing, farming, markets, and practices of worship. Though not accounted as good as the survey of Roscommon by Isaac Weld (qv), Townshend's is still appealed to by historians, most notably by J. S. Donnelly in The land and people of nineteenth century Cork (1978). However, at the time of publication his survey was attacked by Dr William Coppinger (qv), catholic bishop of Cloyne, for representing the catholic clergy as ‘bigoted, opposed to improvement, keeping their flocks in ignorance and preying on the vitals of the poor’ (Berry, 185). Townshend replied that he had stated facts, and referred to the overweening authority assumed by the church of Rome.
Towards the end of his life the prospect of catholic emancipation alarmed him; among his last published works were two essays for Blackwood's Magazine under his usual pseudonym, ‘Senex’: ‘What will become of poor Ireland?’ (January 1827) and ‘The dangers of Roman Catholic emancipation’ (May 1828). His more usual contributions to Blackwoods were on literary and theatrical figures such as Garrick and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (qv), as well as travel pieces. Travel formed the basis of his only other full-length work, A tour through Ireland and the northern parts of Great Britain (1821). He died on 26 March 1837 and was survived by a daughter from his first marriage to Helena, daughter of the Rev. Robert Meade of Balintober, and by three sons and six daughters from his second marriage to Katherine, daughter of the Ven. Chambré Corker of Lota, Co. Cork, archdeacon of Ardagh. His eldest son, Chambré Corker Townshend, was rector of Kilmacabea, Co. Cork, and his second son, Horatio, was rector of Carrigaline.