Charles Cornwallis, First Marquess Cornwallis

British military commander and colonial governor

• Born: December 31, 1738
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: October 5, 1805
• Place of death: Ghazipur (now in Uttar Pradesh), India

Cornwallis served his country on three continents, combining military skill with private and public probity as the chief civil administrator in India and Ireland.

Early Life

Charles Cornwallis was the eldest son of the Fifth Baron Cornwallis and Elizabeth, daughter of the Second Viscount Townshend. When his father rose in 1753 to become Earl Cornwallis and Viscount Brome, Charles received the courtesy title of Viscount Brome. The family estates lay in Suffolk, where an ancestor had built Brome Hall in the sixteenth century and where the larger and more recent inheritance of Culford Hall stood.

Cornwallis attended Eton, where, while playing hockey, he received an eye injury that gave him a heavy-lidded appearance. Before his eighteenth birthday, he determined upon a military career, and on December 8, 1756, he became an ensign in the Grenadier Guards. Cornwallis sought to broaden his professional knowledge through formal instruction. Since England had no military academies, he crossed the channel to Europe in the summer of 1757 to attend one. He journeyed on the Continent and then entered the military academy at Turin, where he studied for several months. Cornwallis left to travel to Europe again when the Seven Years’ War erupted. After he learned that his regiment had departed to join an Anglo-German army commanded by Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, he joined the prince’s force directly. Cornwallis then secured an appointment, on August 6, 1758, as aide-de-camp to the Marquess of Granby, who would next year command the British forces in Germany.

Life’s Work

First Marquess Cornwallis served almost continuously throughout the war in Germany. He became a captain in the Eighty-fifth Foot in 1759 and lieutenant colonel commanding the Twelfth Foot in 1761. In the latter capacity, he distinguished himself at the battles of Kirch Donkern and Grebenstein. When in the summer of 1762, however, he learned that his father had died, he returned to England and, as Second Earl Cornwallis (he had thus far been known as Brome), entered the House of Lords.

In 1768, Cornwallis married Jemima Tullekin Jones, the daughter of Colonel James Jones of the Third Regiment of Foot Guards. Their happy marriage produced two children, Mary and Charles. Cornwallis’s service in the colonies during the American Revolution would interrupt their felicitous family life. During his absence, Lady Cornwallis would grow so ill that he would come home in 1778 to attend her. She would die in February of 1779, to his unbounded grief.

During the 1760’s, Cornwallis consistently championed American liberty, voting against the Stamp Act in 1765 and in 1766 voting for the repeal of the Stamp Act and for outlawing general warrants. He was one of only five peers who opposed the Declaratory Act. Yet Cornwallis still received governmental favors. He became aide-de-camp to the king in 1765, the next year colonel of the Thirty-third Regiment of Foot, and in 1770 privy councillor and constable of the Tower of London. When the American Revolution began, he was promoted to major general and then to lieutenant general in America. Despite his opposition to the government’s American policy, his sense of duty caused him to volunteer to go to America to crush the rebellion that broke out in 1775.

Cornwallis arrived off the North American coast on May 3, 1776, to come under the command of General Henry Clinton during the bungled British campaign against Charleston, South Carolina. Thereafter, he sailed with Clinton’s force to New York, where General William Howe was commander in chief. Under Howe, Cornwallis fought at the Battle of Long Island, and he led Howe’s forces when they chased George Washington across New Jersey. After Washington defeated the Hessians at Trenton, Howe sent Cornwallis to catch him, but Washington eluded him yet again. Cornwallis’s next major campaign did not come until autumn, 1777, when he ably seconded Howe’s crushing victory over the Americans at the Battle of Brandywine. After a trip to England in December, 1777, Cornwallis returned to America, on June 3, 1778. By then, command in America had devolved upon Clinton (who had by this time been knighted). Ordered to evacuate Philadelphia, Clinton led his army overland toward New York. During that march, he fought the hotly contested Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, in which American artillery severely pounded a charge that Cornwallis led.

Monmouth Courthouse was Cornwallis’s last major battle under another officer’s direct command. After returning to England in December of 1778 because of his wife’s fatal illness, he came back to the United States in July of the next year to bury himself in activity and forget his grief. Anxious for an independent command, he got one after Clinton besieged and then captured Charleston, South Carolina, in May of 1780. When Sir Henry returned north in June, he left Cornwallis in charge in the South. Clinton expected him to pacify the two Carolinas and then subdue Virginia. For these tasks, he had a woefully inadequate number of troops. Yet he began well, smashing the Americans at the Battle of Camden. Cornwallis then entered North Carolina, believing that regular American armies to his north kept rebellion alive in the South. Unfortunately for him, the defeat of his subordinates, Major Patrick Ferguson at King’s Mountain in October, 1780, and Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens in January, 1781, combined with his costly victory over General Nathanael Greene at Guilford Courthouse in March of 1781, severely crippled his army. Believing that he could do little in the Carolinas, Cornwallis pushed northward into Virginia. There, he took over forces Clinton had previously dispatched. The earl now commanded about five thousand men and again undertook an offensive war. In late June, however, he received Clinton’s orders to fortify a defensive station. Cornwallis chose Yorktown, and in August he began building fortifications there.

By the middle of September, a large French fleet lay in the Chesapeake Bay and a French army larger than his own camped at Williamsburg, while the forces of Washington approached. Cornwallis planned to break out from his position, when he received a dispatch from Clinton promising reinforcements. That dispatch caused the earl to abandon his plans and to await the relief that never came. Once Washington’s army arrived, the odds against him were overwhelming. The Siege of Yorktown followed, lasting only a few weeks. On October 19, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered, virtually ending the struggle for American independence.

The earl returned to England seeking new employment. Negotiations with the Pitt government, continuing spasmodically for five years, eventually resulted in Cornwallis’s appointment as governor general and commander in chief in India, where he arrived in 1786. A man of the utmost integrity, he now worked to rid the British East India Company of the profiteers who had defrauded it. Through reform and retrenchment in administration and through commercial expansion and improvements in communications, he sought to gain the company a profit and give the Indians an honest government. He established the controversial “permanent settlement” of the revenues in Bengal. Cornwallis also enacted reforms in criminal and civil justice. Since he thought—typically for his class and time—that the British would not respect Indians in positions of authority, he decreed that no native person or half-caste could hold civil or military office. Although he lacked the authority to stop slavery, a practice he loathed, Cornwallis ended the slave trade in children. He tried but failed to effect major changes in the military system because many entrenched interests opposed him. Finally, he waged successful war against Tippu, the Muslim ruler of Mysore, after the latter in 1789 attacked a native ruler allied to the British. Although he defeated Tippu in battle initially, he had to suspend operations because of shortages of supplies and the imminence of the monsoon season. When he resumed the campaign, however, he showed himself a master of logistics, using elephants to better advantage than any previous British commander, establishing supply depots, and employing more than fifty thousand human bearers. He then besieged Tippu’s capital and forced his surrender in February, 1792.

The earl now seemed to mark time until he left India in August, 1793, arriving in Great Britain on February 3, 1794. In the meantime, the king had advanced him to marquess in 1792 (he had previously bestowed on him the Order of the Garter). The East India Company in 1793 voted him their thanks and an annuity of œ5,000 per year for twenty years. Also in 1793, Cornwallis gained the rank of general.

The marquess soon found new work at home. In February of 1795, he became master general of the ordnance. His responsibilities included providing ordnance for the army and the navy, control of Woolwich Academy (which trained engineer and artillery officers), and command of the engineers and artillery. During his tenure, he strengthened England’s coastal defenses and raised the standards of admission to Woolwich. He also served as the only professional soldier in the cabinet and its chief military adviser. Although he held the master generalship officially until 1801, he left most of the work to subordinates in 1798, when the government called upon him for a new venture.

In Ireland in 1798, a rebellion exploded. In June, Cornwallis took the joint appointment of lord lieutenant and commander in chief there. By the time he arrived, the major uprising had failed, but a small French army had landed, hoping to encourage further rebellion. Cornwallis, however, captured it before it could reach Dublin. After that, he worked mainly to effect a legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland, necessarily using methods he found highly repugnant. Under the proposed union, Ireland would give up its own Parliament but have one hundred seats in the British House of Commons. Some large landholders who “owned” boroughs in the Irish legislature thereby stood to lose those seats. To these disenfranchised “owners” went an outright monetary payment of œ15,000 each; Cornwallis also promised them posts and pensions. The resulting Act of Union went into effect on January 1, 1801; unfortunately, it excluded Catholics, the majority of the Irish, from voting for or sitting in the new parliament. Cornwallis had sought, and even had led some people to believe, that Catholic “emancipation” would come about with union. King George III stubbornly refused to permit it. As a result, Cornwallis resigned.

By the time the marquess returned to England, negotiations had already begun for a peace with Napoleon’s France. In the autumn, the government asked Cornwallis to conclude the arrangements. He accepted without enthusiasm, beginning official talks with the French at Amiens in December of 1801. The treaty eventually signed in March, 1802, scarcely favored Great Britain, but the British government approved it. Cornwallis returned to England shortly after its ratification.

Although by that time he was more than sixty years old, the marquess still desired employment. In January of 1805, he again accepted appointment as governor general and commander in chief in India. He reached Madras in July, but almost at once his health began to decline. By late September, his condition deteriorated rapidly, and at Ghazipur he died, on October 5, 1805.

Significance

First Marquess Cornwallis, truly an imperial figure, was a man of integrity and humanity. In America, he displayed great tactical ability as a general but suffered the frustration of never holding the supreme command. There and only there, and only partly through his own fault, he suffered defeat. In India, he showed his character through his many reforms and his considerable military skill in defeating Tippu. In Ireland, he faced less of a military threat, but his character showed again in his clemency toward rebels and in his attempt to gain emancipation for Catholics. He did not display outstanding skills as a diplomat, yet the peace he concluded at Amiens was one the British government desperately needed and the only one Great Britain had with France between 1793 and 1815.

Bibliography

Aspinall, Arthur. Cornwallis in Bengal. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1931. Deals with Cornwallis’s administrative and judicial reforms in India.

Cornwallis, Charles. The Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis. Edited by Charles Ross. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1859. The most important published edition of Cornwallis’s letters.

List and Index Society. Gifts and Deposits, Part 1. Vol. 10. London: Swift, 1966. An important research tool that describes the Cornwallis Papers available in the Public Record Office.

Patterson, Benton Rain. Washington and Cornwallis: The Battle for America, 1775-1783. Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade, 2004. A military history of the major campaigns and battles in the American Revolution. Contrasts the characters of Cornwallis and Washington and analyzes their performance as military commanders.

Seton-Karr, W. S. The Marquis Cornwallis and the Consolidation of British Rule. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1914. Studies the regulations for the settlement of land revenue in Bengal.

Stevens, Benjamin Franklin, comp. The Campaign in Virginia 1781: An Exact Reprint of Six Rare Pamphlets on the Clinton-Cornwallis Controversy. 2 vols. London, 1888. A specialized study of the dispute between Clinton and Cornwallis.

Ward, Christopher. The War of the Revolution. Edited by John R. Alden. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1952. A good overall study of the American Revolution.

Wickwire, Franklin, and Mary Wickwire. Cornwallis: The American Adventure. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. The first part of a two-volume biography, this study goes through the surrender at Yorktown.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Cornwallis: The Imperial Years. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Completes the biographical study of Cornwallis, dealing with India, the ordnance, Ireland, and Amiens.