Henry Ellis

1788 - 1855, Brighton

BiographyEllis, Sir Henry (1788–1855), diplomatist, was born on 1 September 1788, the illegitimate son of Robert Hobart, fourth earl of Buckinghamshire (1760–1816). The identity of his mother is unknown, but the boy was brought up in his father's household. He was educated at Harrow School (1799–1803) and at William Nicholson's private academy in Soho (1804–5). He joined the East India Company in 1805 and in 1808 became an assistant to Sir John Malcolm. In 1809 Malcolm obliged Lord Minto by sending Ellis to join his second mission to Sind. On his return, Ellis wrote a damning account of the Talpura emirs, which formed the basis of British attitudes to the territory until it was annexed in 1843.

In 1810 Ellis joined Malcolm's third mission to Persia. From 1812 to 1814 he served as private secretary to his father when the latter was president of the Board of Control. In 1814 he returned to Persia on a secret mission to obtain revisions of the 1809 treaty of Tehran. He was successful, and the revised treaty provided the basis of Anglo-Persian relations until 1838. In 1815 he advised Castlereagh on the best way to deal with the perceived Russian threat to India. Castlereagh, following Ellis's advice, persuaded the Russians to return Qarabagh and Talesh to Persia. In the summer of 1815 Ellis acted as a secretary during the Anglo-American negotiations.

In 1816 Ellis accompanied Earl Amherst on his mission to China, and he recorded his experiences in A Journal of the Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China (1817). The mission, to negotiate a new trade agreement, was unsuccessful. Ellis was not impressed by the Chinese, whom he considered xenophobic, ultra-traditional, and ‘uninteresting’ (Ellis). On the return voyage, Ellis and his companions were wrecked in the Strait of Gaspar and only reached Batavia after a perilous journey of several hundred miles in an open boat. Later they called at St Helena, where Ellis met Napoleon. Napoleon later hotly disputed Ellis's account of the meeting.

Ellis unsuccessfully contested Boston at a by-election in 1818; he was helped in his campaign by Frederick Robinson (later Viscount Goderich and earl of Ripon). Robinson had married Lord Buckinghamshire's only legitimate child, Sarah, who inherited her father's considerable wealth, and, after the earl's death in 1816, Robinson accepted her illegitimate brother as ‘a sort of charge upon the estate’ (Jones, 124) and acted as his patron. Ellis was elected for Boston in 1820 but, in the meantime, had accepted the posts of deputy colonial secretary and commissioner of stamps in Cape Town, and was unseated on the grounds that he held an office of profit under the crown. On 10 June 1820 at Cape Town he married Louisa Amelia Wilson of Leominster. They had three sons. Ellis returned to Britain and was made commissioner of customs (1824–5), clerk of the pells (1825–34), and commissioner of the Board of Control (1830–35). In 1830 he published A Series of Letters on the East India Question, addressed to members of parliament, in which he defended the role of the East India Company.

Ellis was sworn of the privy council in 1832. He was briefly ambassador in Persia (1835–6), but advised that Afghanistan was now more important to Britain than Persia. He unsuccessfully contested Lincoln in the 1837 general election. In 1842 Lord Aberdeen, at Ripon's request, asked Ellis to head a special trade mission to Brazil. The mission failed, partly because of the offence caused by Britain's unilateral action to suppress the Brazilian slave trade. In 1848 Ellis was named as a delegate for the abortive Brussels conference on the affairs of Italy; the same year he was made a knight commander in the Order of the Bath. Sir Henry Ellis died at Marine Parade, Brighton, on 28 September 1855.

R. M. HEALEY
Sources W. D. Jones, ‘Prosperity’ Robinson (1967) · E. Ingram, Britain's Persian connection, 1798–1828 (1992) · M. E. Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798–1850 (1980) · H. Ellis, Journal of the proceedings of the late embassy to China (1817) · A. K. Manchester, British preeminence in Brazil (1933) · B. E. O'Meara, Napoleon in exile, or, A voice from St Helena, 2 vols. (1822) · B. D. Mirchandani, ‘Sind in 1809: extracts from Henry Ellis's account’, Journal of the Sind Historical Society, 7 (1943), 254 · Annual Register (1855) · GM, 2nd ser., 44 (1855), 648 · P. Philip, British residents at the Cape (1981) · d. cert. · TNA: PRO, PROB 2/2220/834 · BL OIOC, J/1/19 f. 224 · private information (2005) [A. A. Hanham]
Archives BL OIOC, MSS · TNA: PRO, MSS :: Auckland Public Library, letters to Sir George Grey · BL, corresp. with Lord Aberdeen, Add. MSS 43124, 43160 · Derbys. RO, letters to Sir R. J. Wilmot-Horton · NL Scot., letters to J. G. Lockhart · U. Southampton L., corresp. with Lord Palmerston
© Oxford University Press 2004–14 All rights reserved

R. M. Healey, ‘Ellis, Sir Henry (1788–1855)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8695, accessed 18 April 2014]

Sir Henry Ellis (1788–1855): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8695

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Last Updated8/7/24

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