Charles Ashe à Court-Repington

Charles Ashe à Court-Repington CB KH (born June 17, 1785 in Heytesbury , Wiltshire , † April 19, 1861 in Amington , then Warwickshire ) was a British general and in 1820 briefly a member of the House of Commons .

Life

Charles Ashe à Court - his birth name - came from the south-west English gentry family Ashe à Court . He was the third and youngest son of the officer and parliamentarian Sir William Pierce Ashe à Court, 1st Baronet , and his wife Laetitia Wyndham. His older brothers were the diplomat William à Court, 1st Baron Heytesbury , and the naval officer Edward Henry à Court-Repington .

As usual in the family, Charles began a military career after finishing school in Eton ; In 1801 he joined an infantry regiment in the British Army as an ensign . In the next fifteen years he fought in the Napoleonic Wars in the Mediterranean and rose to Lieutenant-Colonel in 1813 . In 1806 he was involved in an attack on the Tremiti Islands in the Adriatic Sea and the siege of Scilla in Calabria . The following year he took part in the Fraser expedition against Alexandria - Ottoman Egypt had switched sides - and fought at Rosetta . After the unsuccessful end of this campaign he was responsible for the Quartermaster-General's Department during the siege of Santa Maura . This was followed by an operation in the siege of Capri . In 1809 he became aide-de-camp of the adjutant- general of the British troops in Sicily . In this position he commanded the advance guard , which captured about a thousand enemy soldiers, and personally captured an enemy standard . In the next few years Charles Ashe à Court served in various general staffs in Sicily, Spain and Italy: on the Iberian Peninsula , he was present at the siege of Tarragona in 1811 ; in Italy then later involved in the conquest of Livorno and Genoa . From 1814 Ashe à Court ran a light Greek volunteer association. The war ended for him with the capitulation of Naples in 1815, where he met his brother William - now British envoy to the Kingdom of Naples-Sicily . For his military achievements, he was later named a knight of the Hanover Guelph Order (1818), the Sicilian Order of St. Ferdinand and of Merit and the Sardinian Order of St. Mauritius and Lazarus excellent.

In the same year Charles Ashe à Court married Mary Elizabeth Catherine (Anna Maria) Gibbs (1792–1878) in Palermo , the daughter of the influential British trader Abraham Gibbs , who lived there . The father agreed to donate a large dowry to the couple , but went bankrupt and committed suicide the following year. Through her maternal grandfather, the British Consul General in Naples Sir James Douglas , Mary Gibbs was also the heir to holdings on St. Kitts in the Caribbean. Charles Ashe à Court stayed with his wife - who gave birth to twin daughters in 1816 who died shortly after birth - in southern Italy until 1818 and tried, with partial success, to obtain the promised dowry. After returning to England together, the couple remarried in 1819 because there were doubts about the legality of the Sicilian marriage. Shortly thereafter, the son Charles Henry Wyndham was born, three years later the daughter Elizabeth . The family lived on the family estate in Heytesbury, which Charles managed after the death of his father for his eldest brother William, the new but absent landlord.

The second brother Edward Henry stood as a supporter of the Tory government of Lord Liverpool in the general election of the House of Commons in March 1820 in the home constituency of Heytesbury, which, given the influence of the à Court family in the region, meant a safe seat in Parliament. Since the constituency sent two MPs and the two previous MPs moved to other districts, Charles Ashe à Court was also set up to fill the gap. As a result, both brothers were elected to parliament. In contrast to Edward, who sat in Parliament for decades, Charles was absent after a short time and vacated his seat in the summer of the election year; Henry Handley followed. Nevertheless, he remained politically active, especially when it came to supporting his family members.

Charles Ashe à Court came from a strictly Protestant family and often acted accordingly. During the conflict over the Irish Catholic politician Daniel O'Connell in 1828, he called for possible pro-Catholic unrest to be put down with violence. In 1829 he spoke out in the Bath primary for the Whig Charles Palmer instead of the pro-Catholic Tory Lord Brecknock ; on the other hand, at the same time, he resolutely refused to subscribe to an anti-Catholic declaration.

In late 1830 he was involved in suppressing the swing riots in Wiltshire. The following year he was named Companion of the Order of the Bath . He tried in vain the constituency reform to prevent the 1832 domestic constituency Heytesbury as " pocket borough " fell victim. From 1834 to 1842, Charles Ashe à Court was an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner .

After he had been promoted to Colonel in 1830 , he was appointed Major General in 1841 , Lieutenant General in 1851 , and finally General in 1856 . From 1848 until his death he was also Colonel of Honor of the 41st (the Welsh) Regiment of Foot .

In 1837 Charles' brother Edward Henry became heir to his childless cousin, Charles Edward Repington . He inherited the Amington Hall estate near Tamworth and took the additional surname Repington for it. Since Edward Henry himself died again in 1855 with no descendants, the Repington inheritance including the additional surname now fell to Charles. Amington Hall has become his home in recent years; he died there in 1861 at the age of 75.

His son and heir Charles Henry Wyndham à Court-Repington also sat temporarily in Parliament. His son was in turn Charles à Court Repington , who became known as a war correspondent during the First World War. The daughter Elizabeth married the up-and-coming politician Sidney Herbert in 1846 and gained notoriety among the British upper class at his side. After the early death of her husband in August 1861, she converted to Catholicism.

literature

• A'COURT, Charles Ashe (1785-1861), of Heytesbury, Wilts. In: David R. Fisher (Ed.): The History of Parliament. The House of Commons 1820-1832. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009 ( online )

Individual evidence

1. ^ William Arthur Shaw: The Knights of England. Volume 1, Sherratt and Hughes, London 1906, p. 463.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Obituary in the Times , April 20, 1861 (available from the online genealogy holmesacourt.org )
3. ^ University College London Department of History: Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Charles Ashe A'Court Esq., Profile & Legacies Summary