the frontier throughout that year and 1812. In June 1813 he joined Wellington's army, and commanded an independent Portuguese brigade at the siege of San Sebastian, the passage of the Bidassoa, and the battle of Nivelle. He was severely wounded on 18 Nov. during the establishment of the outposts before Bayonne. He was made knight-commander of the Portuguese order of the Tower and Sword, a distinction which, it seems, he would have received two years before but for a confusion between him and Sir Robert Wilson (ib. viii. 367, 435). He was made brevet colonel on 4 June 1814 and was knighted, and in 1815 he was made C.B. He received the gold medal for San Sebastian, and afterwards the silver medal with clasps for Vimiero and Nivelle.
He was placed on half-pay on 25 Dec. 1816, and promoted major-general on 27 March 1825. He commanded the troops in Ceylon from December 1830 till his promotion to lieutenant-general on 28 June 1838. He was made K.C.B. on 6 Feb. 1837, and colonel of the 82nd foot on 5 Dec. 1836, from which he was transferred to the 11th foot on 10 May 1841. He became general on 20 June 1854, and died at 67 Westbourne Terrace, London, on 22 June 1856, aged 76.
[Annual Register, 1856, p. 260; Times, 25 June 1856; Gent. Mag. 1856, ii. 257; Naval and Military Gazette, 28 June 1856; Narrative of the Campaigns of the Loyal Lusitanian Legion.]
WILSON, JOHN (1804–1875), missionary and orientalist, born at Lauder in Berwickshire on 11 Dec. 1804, was the eldest son of Andrew Wilson, for more than forty years a councillor of the burgh of Lauder, by his wife Janet, eldest daughter of James Hunter, a farmer of Lauderdale. When about four years old he was sent to a school in Lauder taught by George Murray, and about a year later he was transferred to the parish school under Alexander Paterson. In his fourteenth year he proceeded to Edinburgh University with a view to studying for the ministry. In his vacations he was employed at first as schoolmaster at Horndean on the Tweed, and afterwards as tutor to the sons of John Cormack, minister of Stow in Midlothian. While at the university he became more and more inspired by Christian zeal, and on 22 Dec. 1825 he founded the ‘Edinburgh Association of Theological Students in aid of the Diffusion of the Gospel.’ His attention was drawn to the mission field, and in the same year he offered himself to the Scottish Missionary Society as a missionary candidate. In 1828 he published anonymously ‘The Life of John Eliot, the Apostle of the Indians’ (Edinburgh, 16mo). His attention had been directed to India while acting as tutor to Cormack's nephews, the sons of (Sir) John Rose, an Indian soldier, and by the influence of Brigadier-general Alexander Walker [q. v.], former resident at Baroda; and to prepare himself for work in that country he studied anatomy, surgery, and the practice of physic at Edinburgh in 1827–8. In 1828 he was licensed to preach by the presbytery of Lauder, and on 21 June was ordained missionary. In the same year he was married, and sailed from Portsmouth in the Sesostris, East Indiaman.
On his arrival at Bombay in 1829 Wilson devoted himself to the study of Maráthí, and made such rapid progress that he was able to preach in the tongue in six months, delivering his first sermon on 1 Nov. After visiting the older stations of the Scottish Missionary Society at Harnai and Bánkot, Wilson and his wife returned to Bombay on 26 Nov. 1829. Wilson immediately commenced to labour energetically among the native population, and by 4 Feb. 1831 he had formed a native church on presbyterian principles. In 1830 he founded the ‘Oriental Christian Spectator,’ the oldest Christian periodical in India, which continued to appear for thirty years.
About 1830 an important undertaking was begun by Mrs. Wilson with her husband's advice—the establishment of schools for native girls, the first of their kind in India. The first school was opened on 27 Dec. 1829, and half a year later six others had been set on foot. These, and some elementary schools for boys established by Wilson, were supplemented on 29 March 1832 by the foundation of a more advanced college for natives of both sexes. Wilson's institution invites comparison with that founded almost contemporaneously in Calcutta by Alexander Duff [q. v.] Wilson devoted more attention to female education, and gave more prominence to the study of native languages. While Duff's instrument was the English tongue, Wilson employed the vernaculars of a varied population—Maráthí, Gujaráthí, Hindustání, Hebrew, and Portuguese; with Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit for the learned classes. Both systems, however, were equally adapted to their environment: neither could have flourished amid the surroundings of the other. Wilson's college was at first known as the ‘Ambrolie English School.’ On 1 Dec. 1835, after some differences with the Scottish Missionary Society, Wilson and his colleagues in India were transferred to the church of Scotland, and the school was denominated the Scottish
