Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 16.djvu/35

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Drummond
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Drummond

dian frontier, but his most important feat of arms was winning the battle of Niagara on 25 July 1814. The year 1813 had been marked by many disasters to the inadequate English fleet on the great lakes, and it was not until 1814 that Drummond, after receiving reinforcements from the Peninsular regiments, was able to make a real impression on the American troops. He had his forces, amounting in all to not more than 2,800 men, conveyed across Lake Erie to Chippewa, and they had hardly established themselves near the Niagara Falls before they were fiercely attacked by the American troops under General Brown. The attacks lasted until midnight, when the Americans were at last totally repulsed with heavy loss; but the fierceness of the battle may be judged by the fact that the English casualties amounted to no less than 878 men killed, wounded, and missing, including Major-general Phineas Riall, Drummond's second in command, who was wounded and taken prisoner. Drummond immediately followed up his success by attacking the enemy's headquarters at Fort Erie, which had been actually carried on 25 Aug., when a terrible explosion caused a panic, and the fort which had been so hardly gained was evacuated by his troops. He remained in front of Fort Erie, repulsed a violent assault made upon his position on 18 Sept., and on 6 Nov. successfully occupied that post, which was abandoned by the American troops. Peace was concluded with the United States in the following year, but the services of the army which had wiped out the disgrace of the defeats of 1813 were not forgotten, and Drummond was gazetted a K.C.B. Drummond returned to England in 1815, and after being made colonel of the 97th regiment in 1814, of the 88th in 1819, of the 71st in 1824, of the 49th in 1829, and promoted general in 1825, he was transferred in 1846 to the colonelcy of his old regiment, the 8th, which had distinguished itself at the battle of Niagara in 1814. He was made a G.C.B. in 1827, and died in Norfolk Street, Park Lane, London, on 10 Oct. 1854, at the age of eighty-two.

[Royal Milit. Cal.; Gent. Mag. December 1854; Belsham's American War of 1814; Despatches in Lond. Gazette.]

H. M. S.

DRUMMOND, HENRY (1786–1860), politician, eldest son of Henry Drummond, banker, of the Grange, Hampshire, by his wife Anne, daughter of Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville [q. v.], was born in 1786. His father died in 1794, and his mother marrying again and going to India about 1802, the boy was left in charge of his grandfather, Lord Melville, and at his house often saw and became a favourite of Pitt. From his seventh to his sixteenth year he was at Harrow, and afterwards passed two years at Christ Church, Oxford, but took no degree. He became a partner in the bank at Charing Cross, and continued for many years to attend to the business. In 1807 he made a tour in Russia, and on his return to England married Lady Henrietta Hay, eldest daughter of the ninth earl of Kinnoull. He had two daughters by her, one of whom married Lord Lovaine, and the other Sir Thomas Rokewood Gage, bart. In 1810 he entered parliament as M.P. for Plympton Earls, and succeeded in getting passed the act (52 Geo. III, c. 63) against embezzlement by bankers of securities entrusted to them for safe custody; but after three years his health failed, and he retired. In June 1817, ‘satiated with the empty frivolities of the fashionable world,’ he broke up his hunting establishment and sold the Grange, and was on his way with his wife to the Holy Land, when, under circumstances which he seems to have thought providential, he came to Geneva as Robert Haldane was on the point of leaving it, and continued Haldane's movement against the Socinian tendencies of the venerable company and the consistory, the governing bodies at Geneva. His wealth and zeal made him so formidable that he was summoned before the council of state, and thought it safer to withdraw from his house at Sêcheron, within the Genevese jurisdiction, to a villa, the Campagne Pictet, on French soil, whence for some time he carried on the movement of reform. He addressed and published a letter to the consistory, circulated Martin's version of the scriptures, encouraged the ministers rejected by the company to form a separate body, which was done 21 Sept. 1817, despatched at his own cost a mission into Alsace, and in 1819 helped to found the Continental Society, and continued for many years largely to maintain it (A. Haldane, Lives of the Haldanes). Though accustomed to attack the political economists, he in 1825 founded the professorship of political economy at Oxford. He was an enthusiastic supporter and one of the founders of the Irvingite church, in which he held the rank of apostle, evangelist, and prophet. It was at Drummond's house at Albury, Surrey, that at Advent 1826 the ‘little prophetic parliament’ of Irving, Wolff, and others met for six days' discussion of the scriptures, when the catholic apostolic church was practically originated. Edward Irving introduced Drummond to Carlyle, who caustically described ‘his fine qualities and capacities’ and ‘enormous conceit of himself’ in his ‘Reminiscences’ (ed. Norton, ii. 199). When Carlyle dined with Drummond at Belgrave Square in August 1831, he wrote that he was ‘a