of Bhurtpore being not unlikely, Combermere was selected by the court of directors of the East India Company as the fittest man for the post, it is said, on the advice of the Duke of Wellington (see Comb. Corresp. ii. 29–30). Combermere, who attained the rank of general on 27 May 1825, had by that time started for India, leaving Lady Combermere at home. The expedition against Bhurtpore was successfully carried out; the great Jât fortress, which had been a standing menace to British rule ever since Lord Lake failed against it twenty years before, was taken with comparatively little loss and razed to the ground. Combermere was made a viscount in 1827, and on 16 Sept. 1829 colonel of the 1st life guards, having already been colonel of the 20th light dragoons 1813–18 and of the 3rd light dragoons 1821–29. He remained in India for the customary period of five years, during nine months of which he acted as governor-general while Lord Amherst was away on the hills, and returned home in 1830. On his return Combermere parted from his second wife. On her deathbed, at Dover, in January 1837, Lady Combermere ‘absolved him of all blame and unkindness throughout their union, and regretted the years of happiness lost to both by the misunderstanding’ (ib. ii. 243). In 1838 Combermere married his third wife, Mary Woolley Gibbings, only child of Mr. Gibbings of Gibbings Grove, co. Cork, and grandniece of an old Minden officer of the same name, who was in command of the royal Welsh fusiliers when Combermere served in that corps in Dublin forty-eight years before. The last thirty years of his long life were passed in the unostentatious performance of his parliamentary and social duties. An old-fashioned conservative, he was opposed to catholic emancipation, and voted against the reform bill, the repeal of the corn laws, army short service, and other innovations, but his modest, kindly nature made no political foes. He was governor of Sheerness from 1821 until 1852. On the death of the Duke of Wellington he was made constable of the Tower of London, and in 1855 a field-marshal. His last public duty was in April 1863, at the marriage of the Prince of Wales, when, in the ninetieth year of his age and the seventy-third of his military service, he attended as gold stick in brigade waiting. His death was accelerated by a severe cold. He died peacefully on 21 Feb. 1865. He was buried in the family vault in the parish church of Wrenbury, Shropshire, where is a monument to his memory. His third wife and three children by his second wife, a son and two daughters, survived him. At the time of his death Lord Combermere held the military appointments before recounted, was a grand cross of the Bath (1815) having been K.B. from 1812; was knight of the Hanoverian Guelphic order (1817), and of the Portuguese order of the Tower and Sword; was knight of Star of India (1861) and of St. Ferdinand and of Charles III in Spain; and was lord-lieutenant of the Tower Hamlets. For forty-five years he had been provincial grand master of the Freemasons in the county of Cheshire. A small cabinet portrait of him, about the time he was commander-in-chief in Ireland, taken in the now obsolete uniform of a general of British hussars—the gold-barred jacket and pelisse and scarlet overalls, which were his favourite battle garb in the Peninsula—is in the National Portrait Gallery. Two others, in possession of the family—one representing him as a youthful lieutenant-colonel of twenty-one, in the French-grey uniform of the 25th dragoons, the other as a field-marshal of ninety—are engraved in the ‘Combermere Correspondence.’ A memorial, in the shape of an equestrian statue, by Marochetti, for which the field-marshal sat repeatedly a year or two before his death, has been erected at Chester Castle, the cost of which, amounting to 5,000l., was defrayed by public subscription in the county.
[An excellent biography of Lord Combermere was prepared some years back, from original materials, by his widow, Mary, Viscountess Combermere, assisted by Captain (now Colonel) W. W. Knollys, and published under the title of the Combermere Correspondence, 2 vols. 8vo (London, 1866). It should be collated with the notices of Lord Combermere in the Wellington Despatches and Supplementary Despatches and Correspondence, and with the personal narratives, English and German (for the latter see the works of North Ludlow Beamish), of those present in the campaigns wherein he was engaged.]
COTTON, Sir SYDNEY JOHN (1792–1874), lieutenant-general, governor of Chelsea Hospital, was one of the twelve children of Henry Calveley Cotton of Woodcote, Oxfordshire, uncle of the first Viscount Combermere, by his wife, the daughter and heiress of John Lockwood of Dewshall, Essex. Among his brothers were the present General Sir Arthur Cotton, K.C.S.I., the late Admiral Francis Vere Cotton, royal navy, General Frederic Cotton, royal engineers, and Richard Lynch Cotton [q. v.], provost of Worcester College, Oxford. Sydney Cotton, the second son, was born 2 Dec. 1792, and on 19 April 1810 was appointed cornet without purchase in the late 22nd light dragoons in India, in which regiment he became lieutenant 13 Feb. 1812. When the 22nd dragoons was disbanded,
