William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst

The Right Honourable The Earl Amherst GCH PC
Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William
In office 1 August 1823 – 13 March 1828
Monarch	George IV
Prime Minister	See list The Earl of Liverpool George Canning The Viscount Goderich The Duke of Wellington
Preceded by	John Adam As Acting Governor-General
Succeeded by	William Butterworth Bayley As Acting Governor-General
Personal details
Born	14 January 1773 Bath, Somerset
Died	13 March 1857 (aged 84) Knole House, Kent
Nationality	British
Spouse(s)	(1) Hon. Sarah Archer (1762–1838) (2) Lady Mary Sackville (1792–1864)
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford

William Pitt Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst, GCH, PC (14 January 1773 – 13 March 1857) was a British diplomat and colonial administrator. He was Governor-General of India between 1823 and 1828.

Background and education

Born at Bath, Somerset, Amherst was the son of William Amherst and Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Paterson. He was the grand-nephew of Jeffrey Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst, and succeeded to his title in 1797 according to a special remainder in the letters patent. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford.^[1]

Ambassador extraordinary to China

In 1816 he was sent as ambassador extraordinary to the court of China's Qing dynasty, with a view of establishing more satisfactory commercial relations between China and Great Britain. On arriving at Pei Ho (Baihe, today's Haihe), he was given to understand that he could only be admitted to the Jiaqing Emperor's presence on condition of performing the kowtow, a ceremony which Great Britain considered degrading (a view that was not shared by either the Netherlands nor Russia, which also traded with China), and which was, indeed, a homage exacted by a Chinese sovereign from his tributaries. To this, Amherst, following the advice of Sir George Thomas Staunton, who accompanied him as second commissioner, refused to consent, as Macartney had done in 1793, unless the admission was made that his sovereign was entitled to the same show of reverence from a mandarin of his rank. In consequence of this, he was not allowed to enter Peking (Beijing), and the object of his mission was frustrated.

His ship, the Alceste, after a cruise along the coast of Korea and to the Ryukyu Islands on proceeding homewards, was totally wrecked on a submerged rock in Gaspar Strait. Amherst and part of his shipwrecked companions escaped in the ship's boats to Batavia, whence relief was sent to the rest. The ship in which he returned to England in 1817 touched at St Helena and, as a consequence, he had several interviews with the emperor Napoleon (see Ellis's Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China, 1817; McLeod's Narrative of a Voyage in H.M.S. Alceste, 1817). During one of the interviews, Napoleon was attributed of saying "China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep. For when she wakes, she will shake the world."^[2]

Governor-General of India

Amherst was Governor-General of India from August 1823 to February 1828. The principal events of his government were annexation of Assam leading to the first Burmese war of 1824, resulting in the cession of Arakan and Tenasserim to the British Empire.^[3] His appointment came on the heels of the removal of Governor-General Lord Hastings in 1823. Hastings clashed with London over the issue of lowering the field pay of officers in the Bengal Army, a measure that he was able to avoid through successive wars against Nepal and the Marathas. However, his refusal in the early 1820s during peacetime to lower field pay resulted in the appointment of Amherst, who was expected to carry out the demands from London.

However, Amherst was an inexperienced governor who was, at least in the early days of his tenure in Calcutta, influenced heavily by senior military officers in Bengal such as Sir Edward Paget. Not willing to lose face in a time of Burmese territorial aggression, when a territorial dispute that he inherited from John Adam, acting Governor-General prior to his arrival, involving the Anglo-Burmese border on the Naaf River spilled over into violence on 24 September 1823, he ordered the troops in.

The war was to take two years, with 15,000 killed on the British side and cost 13 million pounds, contributing to an economic crisis in India. It was only due to the efforts of powerful friends such as George Canning and the Duke of Wellington that he was not recalled in disgrace at the end of the war. The war significantly changed Amherst's stance on Burma, now adamantly refusing to annexe Lower Burma, but did not repair his reputation entirely, and he was replaced in 1828. He was created Earl Amherst, of Arracan in the East Indies, and Viscount Holmesdale, in the County of Kent, in 1826. On his return to England he lived in retirement till his death in March 1857.

Family

Lord Amherst's first wife was Lundy, Darryl. "Sarah, Dowager Countess of Plymouth". The Peerage. External link in |publisher= (help) (1762–1838), daughter of Andrew Archer, 2nd Baron Archer and widow of Other Windsor, 5th Earl of Plymouth (d. 1799). He married his first wife in 1800. They had two sons. After Sarah's death in May 1838, Lord Amherst, aged 75, married his second wife, who was his first wife's widowed daughter-in-law. Although this was an unusual marriage, it was not forbidden by Church law nor civil law. Fortunately, his second wife had no children by either marriage; otherwise, their relationship to his children by the first marriage would have been more confused. Mary, Dowager Countess of Plymouth (1792–1864) elder daughter and co-heiress of John Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset, and widow of his stepson Other Windsor, 6th Earl of Plymouth (1789–1833), in 1839. They had no children.

Lord Amherst died Knole House, Kent (the seat of the Dukes of Dorset and his wife's inheritance), in March 1857, aged 84. He was succeeded in his titles by his second and only surviving son, William. Lady Amherst, heiress of Knole died in July 1864, aged 71.^[4]

Lady Amherst's pheasant was named after his first wife; it was at her instigation that the species was introduced from Asia to Bedfordshire. The genus Amherstia, a Burmese flowering tree, is also named after her.

Notes

1. Lundy, Darryl. "Peerage.com". The Peerage. External link in |publisher= (help)
2. Reported as being from an 1817 conversation in The Mind of Napoleon, ed. and trans. J. Christopher Herold (1955), p. 249. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
3. Karl Marx, "War in Burma—The Russian Question—Curious Diplomatic Correspondence" contained in the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Volume 12 (International Publishers: New York, 1979) p. 202.
4. Lundy, Darryl. "p. 2803 § 28026". The Peerage. External link in |publisher= (help)

References

• "Amherst, William Pitt". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/445. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• A. Thackeray and R. Evans, Amherst (Rulers of India series), 1894.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Amherst, William Pitt Amherst, Earl". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Webster, Anthony. (1998) Gentlemen Capitalists: British Imperialism in Southeast Asia, Tauris Academic Studies, New York, ISBN 1-86064-171-7.

External links

• Archival material relating to William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst listed at the UK National Archives