Richard Colley-Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley

Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley

Coat of arms of Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley as Knight of the Order of the Garter

Richard Colley Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley (born June 20, 1760 in Dangan Castle, County Meath , Ireland , † September 26, 1842 in Kingston House near Brompton ) was a British statesman. He was twice Lord Lieutenant of Ireland , 1797-1805 Governor General of the East India Company , and from 1809 to 1812 Secretary of State ( Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs ).

Political career

He was the firstborn son of Garret Colley Wesley, 1st Earl of Mornington, and until 1781 he apparently carried the courtesy title Viscount Wellesley as his marriage . In 1789 he changed the spelling of his family name from Wesley to Wellesley . One of his younger brothers was Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington .

After studying at Harrow School , Eton College and Christ Church College at the University of Oxford , he began a political career. In 1780 he was elected to the House of Commons as Burgess for Trim . He lost this mandate when he inherited his father's property and title as 2nd Earl of Mornington on the death of his father in 1781  and thus received a seat in the Irish House of Lords , which he held until the Irish Parliament was dissolved by the Act of Union 1800 . In 1783 he was accepted as a Knight Companion in the Order of St. Patrick .

He then ran for the British House of Commons and was there from 1784 to 1786, he was Burgess for Beeralston , 1786 to 1787 for Saltash , 1787 to 1796 for Windsor and 1796 to 1797 for Old Sarum MP.

Under Prime Minister Pitt he was from 1786 to 1793 Lord of the Treasury , one of the leading members of the government in the Treasury, and then appointed commissioner for Indian affairs . In 1797 he was raised to Baron Wellesley in the Peerage of Great Britain . Associated with this was a seat in the British House of Lords , for which he resigned from the House of Commons. At the same time Wellesley became Governor of Madras and Governor General of Bengal.

Governor General of India

Pitt's great political spirit seems to have rubbed off on Wellesley during their communion from 1793 to 1797. It is not guaranteed whether both of them deliberately designed a strategy to compensate for the loss of the North American colonies by building a large empire in India. In any event, the rivalry with France that put the United Kingdom at the head of all successive coalitions against France in Europe made Wellesley's rule in India an epoch in which British power expanded enormously in a very short space of time.

Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive, fought for British ascension in India and Warren Hastings consolidated it. But it was Wellesley that expanded British rule into an empire . During his crossing to India, Wellesley devised a plan to completely eliminate French influence in the highlands of the Dekkan . When the alliance between Tipu Sultan , Raja of Mysore , and the French, which was extremely dangerous for British rule , had been concluded in 1799 , Wellesley prevented the allies from unifying, anticipated the attacks of Tipu Sultan, and on March 4th and 6th he was split in two Battles, took its capital Srirangapatna on May 4th and subjected all of Mysore to British rule. For this purpose, the king raised him to Marquess Wellesley in the Peerage of Ireland .

In 1803 Wellesley opened the Second Marath War in 1809 in which Delhi, large parts of India and the Mughal Mughal Shah Alam II came under the control of the British.

The result of the Marathas and the treaties that followed it was the complete extinction of French influence in India, the expansion of British territory by 40 million people and a government revenue of 10 million pounds. The power of the Marathas and the other Indian princes had been reduced to such an extent that actual rule over all of India was now in British hands.

Wellesley was a skilled administrator and also cared about the training of his staff by creating a training facility for young British government officials with the establishment of College Fort William . Working closely with the college , he also built the governor-general's office, where the most talented graduates could gain practical government experience in close contact with their supervisors.

Since Wellesley, like Pitt, was a free trade advocate, he made efforts to dismantle some trade restrictions between the United Kingdom and India. Both his trade policy and his educational projects brought him into opposition to the court of directors and he sought his recall more than once, but it was not until the fall of 1805 that Cornwallis replaced him and was able to return to England just in time for Pitt's death.

Napoleonic Wars

In 1807, Wellesley declined an invitation to join the cabinet of William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland . At the same time, attempts in both houses of parliament to convict him of alleged abuse of power while working in India failed.

At the beginning of 1809 he went to Spain as British ambassador to the central junta and tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to work with his brother Arthur, who was fighting in Portugal.

A few months later, Wellesley took over the Foreign Office in Spencer Perceval's cabinet and ran the Spanish affair in particular. Although he was considered a Tory , he was a proponent of Catholic emancipation because of the experiences he had in Ireland . In this he differed significantly from his younger brother. He therefore proposed in 1812 the repeal of the laws against the Catholics, but could not get through and resigned.

In 1810 he was accepted into the Order of the Garter as a Knight Companion .

Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1821 to 1828 and again from 1833 to 1834 , Wellesley associated great temperance with energy in this difficult office. During his first term in office, there was hope that restrictions on Catholics would be lifted. These were initially disappointed; when his brother became Prime Minister, Wellesley resigned from office. However, a year later, contrary to his original conviction, the latter enforced the relevant laws.

family

Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland around 1791

Wellesley's longtime partner was Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland, an actress at the Palais Royal in Paris . The couple had three sons and two daughters before Wellesley married Hyacinthe on November 29, 1794. One of her daughters, Anne, was an ancestor of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon , better known as Queen Mum .

The marquess separated from her all his life, however, because Hyacinthe did not follow him to India.

After Hyacinthes death in 1816, Wellesleys married Marianne (Caton) Patterson on October 29, 1825, whose mother Mary Caton was the daughter of Charles Carroll , the only Catholic and last surviving signer of the United States' 1776 Declaration of Independence . This marriage remained childless.

Wellesley died on September 26, 1842 in Kingston House near Brompton .

Since none of his sons survived him, the titles of nobility that had been bestowed upon him became extinct. Only the dignity of Earl of Mornington and subordinate titles inherited from his father passed to his younger brother William Wellesley-Pole .

Honor

Matthew Flinders named the Wellesley Islands off the coast of Australia after him.

literature

• RM Martin: Despatches, minutes and correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley, KG, during his Administration in India (London 1836–37, 5 volumes)
• RM Martin: Despatches and correspondence of the Marquess Wellesley during his lordships mission to Spain in 1809 (London 1838)
• RR Pearce: Memoirs and correspondence of Richard Marquis Wellesley (London 1845, 3 volumes)
• Paul E. Roberts: India Under Wellesley (1929)
• John Kenneth Severn: A Wellesley Affair: Richard Marquess Wellesley and the Conduct of Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy, 1809-1812 . Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1981. ISBN 0-8130-0684-8
• Wellesley, Richard Colley Wesley, Marquess . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 28 : Vetch - Zymotic Diseases . London 1911, p. 506 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

• Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley of Norragh on thepeerage.com

predecessor	Office	successor
Alured Clarke	Governor of the East Indies 1798–1805	Charles Cornwallis
Garret Wesley	Earl of Mornington 1781-1842	William Wellesley
New title created	Baron Wellesley 1797-1842	Title expired
New title created	Marquess Wellesley 1799-1842	Title expired
Charles Chetwynd-Talbot	Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 1821-1828	Henry Paget
Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville	Lord Steward 1830-1833	George Campbell
Henry Paget	Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 1833-1834	Thomas Hamilton
George Child Villiers	Lord Chamberlain 1835	Francis Conyngham