Thomas Borrow, his father, an eighth and youngest son, was born in 1758 of a yeoman family long and still settled in Cornwall, near Liskeard. He worked for some time on his brother's farm. At nineteen he joined the Militia and was apprenticed to a maltster, but, having knocked his master down in a free fight at Menheniot Fair in 1783, disappeared and enlisted as a private in the Coldstream Guards. He was then a man of fresh complexion and light brown hair, just under five feet eight inches in height. He was a sergeant when he was transferred nine years later to the West Norfolk Regiment of Militia. In 1798 he was promoted to the office of adjutant with the rank of captain. In 1793 he had married Ann Perfrement, a tenant farmer's daughter from East Dereham, and probably of French Protestant descent, whom he had first met when she was playing a minor part as an amateur at East Dereham with a company from the Theatre Royal at Norwich. She had, says Borrow, dark brilliant eyes, oval face, olive complexion, and Grecian forehead. The first child of this marriage, John Thomas, was born in 1800. Borrow describes this elder brother as a beautiful child of "rosy, angelic face, blue eyes and light chestnut hair," yet of "not exactly an Anglo-Saxon countenance," having something of "the Celtic character, particularly in the fire and vivacity which illumined it." John was his father's favourite. He entered the army and became a lieutenant, but also, and especially after the end of the war, a painter, studying under B. R. Haydon and old Crome. He went out to Mexico in the service of a mining company in 1826, and died there in 1834.