born Sept. 8, 1790, London, Eng. died Dec. 22, 1871, Southam Delabere, Gloucestershire
![Earl of Ellenborough, detail of an oil painting by F.R. Say, c. 1845; in the National …[Credits : Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London]](http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/71/24571-003-253DBE4C.gif)
British governor-general of India (1842–44), who also served four times as president of the board of control for India and was first lord of the British Admiralty. He was recalled from India for being out of control and later resigned another office under pressure.
Educated at Eton and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he entered the House of Commons in 1813 and the House of Lords as a baron following his father’s death in 1818. He served as lord privy seal in 1828 and was president of the board of control for India in 1828–30 and for brief periods in 1834–35 and 1841. In the latter year Ellenborough was appointed governor-general of India. He had opposed since 1839 the costly intervention in Afghanistan, and after the First Afghan War he decided to make the Indus River his frontier, retaining only those strong-points upon it which ensured free navigation. However, rash opportunism led him to acquiesce in actions of Sir Charles James Napier, his governor in Sind, which drove the Sindhi emirs (rulers) into war and defeat (1843).
Ellenborough then pursued his plans to promote trade by ending tolls and duties throughout Sind, Bahāwalpur, the North Western Provinces, Madras, and Bombay. But a war with Gwalior in December 1843, designed to keep its large army out of hostile hands, frustrated these plans, and the directors, exasperated by Ellenborough’s arrogant self-will, resolved, in April 1844, to recall him. On his return he was created an earl and viscount.
Ellenborough served under Sir Robert Peel as first lord of the Admiralty in 1846 and under Lord Derby at the Board of Control in 1858. There he drafted the new plan for the government of India, which the Indian Mutiny had rendered necessary; but, by making public a caustic dispatch censuring Lord Canning’s Oudh proclamation, which Ellenborough thought betrayed a desire for indiscriminate vengeance, he roused such opposition that he chose to resign. He never held office again.
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