William Napier, 9th Lord Napier

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William John Napier, 9th Lord Napier (born October 13, 1786 in Kinsale , † October 11, 1834 in Macau ) was a British naval officer , politician and diplomat . He carried out an unsuccessful diplomatic mission to Canton with the aim of obtaining better economic conditions for British merchants. He died shortly after the failure of his mission in East Asia.

Origin and career

Napier was born in Kinsale , Ireland , into a noble Scottish family. He was the eldest son of Francis Napier, 8th Lord Napier from his marriage to Maria Margaret Clavering.

Napier served as an officer in the Royal Navy . During the Napoleonic Wars he fought in the Battle of Trafalgar and rose to the rank of captain .

During his training he was deployed on the same ship as the future King Wilhelm IV , with whom he developed a personal friendship. This later awarded him the court office of Lord of the Bedchamber .

politics

When his father died on August 1, 1823, he inherited his Scottish title of nobility as 9th Lord Napier , of Merchistoun, and 4th Baronet , of Thirlstane in the County of Selkirk.

From 1824 to 1832 he represented the Scottish nobility in the British House of Lords as a representative peer .

In 1834 he was appointed to the newly created position of trading superintendent in Canton after the East India Company's crown had revoked its trade monopoly for the Far East in 1833 . In this position Napier was supposed to take over the position of British traders and the Crown in dialogue with the Hong trading houses monopolized by the Chinese side and the Chinese authorities. In February 1834 he and his family began his voyage from Plymouth to the Far East on the British frigate HMS Andromache . Napier's aims went beyond the instructions of Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston . Instead of renegotiating the trade terms, he spoke out in favor of violent action to open up China to free trade according to British interests. He also toyed with the idea of overthrowing the ruling Manchurian Qing dynasty through military action , which he viewed as the usurper of power in the Han - Chinese country. Napier justified his call for military action as an act of grace in which the British crown was to free China from its backwardness.

In July 1834 he reached Macau and continued his journey to Canton. In doing so, he ignored the previous regulations of the Chinese authorities applicable to representatives of the East India Company. He entered the Pearl River Delta without permission and entered Canton without prior permission from the authorities. He refused to communicate with Houqua , the trader appointed by the Chinese state as an intermediary, and tried several times without success to obtain an audience with the governor of Liangguang Lu Kun . Napier found the treatment by the Chinese authorities dishonorable and reciprocated by printing and displaying Chinese-language leaflets in Canton defaming the Qing dynasty.

Thereupon Lu Kun responded in September 1834 with the blockade of the Thirteen Factories and withdrew all Chinese personnel from the building complex reserved for foreigners. Napier called his two frigates, the HMS Andromache and the HMS Imogene , to help and ordered them to sail from the Delta to Canton against Chinese resistance. A gun battle broke out with the Chinese coastal defense in the Estuary. The British ships were finally prevented from continuing their journey by the Chinese troops by sinking obstacles and had to anchor in Whampoa without fulfilling their mission. In a militarily and politically hopeless situation, Napier withdrew with his warships to Macau, where he died in October 1834 due to illness.

Napier's failure and death served as an argument for local British merchants in Canton to demand a punitive expedition against the Chinese Empire from the Crown. The demands were finally fulfilled after further escalation of the trade crisis and ended in the First Opium War .

Memberships

In 1818 he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

souvenir

A given by the British government commissioned memorial stele from the 19th century is located in the Museum of History of Hong Kong .

literature

  • George Edward Cokayne (Ed.): The Complete Peerage . Volume 1, Alan Sutton Publishing, Gloucester 2000, p. 56.
  • Charles Mosley (Ed.): Burke's Peerage . Volume 3. Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, Wilmington 2003, p. 2862.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Stephen R. Platt: Imperial Twilight - The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age. New York 2019, pp. 285-301
  2. ↑ Julia Lovell: The Opium War. London 2011, p. 51, p. 62
  3. ↑ Stephen R. Platt: Imperial Twilight - The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age. New York 2019, p. 386
  4. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed March 24, 2020 .
predecessor Office successor
Francis Napier Lord Napier
1823-1834 		Francis Napier
personal data
SURNAME Napier, William, 9th Lord Napier
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Napier, William John, 9th Lord Napier
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British politician, member of the House of Lords and envoy to Canton
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1786
PLACE OF BIRTH Kinsale , Ireland
DATE OF DEATH October 11, 1834
Place of death Macau