served (1862–1865) in the Army of the Potomac, rising to the command of a brigade and the rank of colonel; and in 1866–1867 he was war correspondent of the New York Herald in Mexico. He explored the Amazon (1868–1879), and gradually became the leading authority on that region of South America, being appointed United States commissioner to report on Ecuador in 1880, and visiting Costa Rica in 1895 to report on its debt and railways. He wrote extensively on South and Central American geography, and became a vice-president of the Royal Geographical Society (London), and in 1898 president of the geographical section of the British Association.
CHURCH, SIR RICHARD (1784–1873), British military officer
and general in the Greek army, was the son of a Quaker, Matthew
Church of Cork. He was born in 1784, and at the age of sixteen
ran away from home and enlisted in the army. For this violation
of its principles he was disowned by the Society of Friends, but
his father bought him a commission, dated the 3rd of July 1800,
in the 13th (Somersetshire) Light Infantry. He served in the
demonstration against Ferrol, and in the expedition to Egypt
under Sir Ralph Abercromby in 1801. After the expulsion of the
French from Egypt he returned home, but came back to the
Mediterranean in 1805 among the troops sent to defend the
island of Sicily. He accompanied the expedition which landed in
Calabria, and fought a successful battle against the French at
Maida on the 6th of July 1806. Church was present on this
occasion as captain of a recently raised company of Corsican
Rangers. His zeal attracted the notice of his superiors, and he
had begun to show his capacity for managing and drilling foreign
levies. His Corsicans formed part of the garrison of Capri from
October 1806 till the island was taken by an expedition directed
against it by Murat, in September 1808, at the very beginning of
his reign as king of Naples. Church, who had distinguished
himself in the defence, returned to Malta after the capitulation.
In the summer of 1809 he sailed with the expedition sent to occupy the Ionian Islands. Here he increased the reputation he had already gained by forming a Greek regiment in English pay. It included many of the men who were afterwards among the leaders of the Greeks in the War of Independence. Church commanded this regiment at the taking of Santa Maura, on which occasion his left arm was shattered by a bullet. During his slow recovery he travelled in northern Greece, and Macedonia, and to Constantinople. In the years of the fall of Napoleon (1813 and 1814) he was present as English military representative with the Austrian troops until the campaign which terminated in the expulsion of Murat from Naples. He drew up a report on the Ionian Islands for the congress of Vienna, in which he argued in support, not only of the retention of the islands under the British flag, but of the permanent occupation by Great Britain of Parga and of other formerly Venetian coast towns on the mainland, then in the possession of Ali Pasha of Iannina. The peace and the disbanding of his Greek regiment left him without employment, though his reputation was high at the war office, and his services were recognized by the grant of a companionship of the Bath. In 1817 he entered the service of King Ferdinand of Naples as lieutenant-general, with a commission to suppress the brigandage then rampant in Apulia. Ample powers were given him, and he attained a full measure of success. In 1820 he was appointed governor of Palermo and commander-in-chief of the troops in Sicily. The revolution which broke out in that year led to the termination of his services in Naples. He escaped from violence in Sicily with some difficulty. At Naples he was imprisoned and put on his trial by the government, but was acquitted and released in January 1821; and King George IV. conferred on him a knight commandership of the Hanoverian order.
The rising of the Greeks against the Turks, which began at this time, had his full sympathy from the first. But for some years he had to act only as the friend of the insurgents in England. In 1827 he took the honourable but unfortunate step of accepting the commandership-in-chief of the Greek army. At the point of anarchy and indiscipline to which they had now fallen, the Greeks could no longer form an efficient army, and could look for salvation only to foreign intervention. Sir Richard Church, who landed in March, was sworn “archistrategos” on the 15th of April 1827. But he could not secure loyal co-operation or obedience. The rout of his army in an attempt to relieve the acropolis of Athens, then besieged by the Turks, proved that it was incapable of conducting regular operations. The acropolis capitulated, and Sir Richard turned to partisan warfare in western Greece. Here his activity had beneficial results, for it led to a rectification in 1832, in a sense favourable to Greece, of the frontier drawn by the powers in 1830 (see his Observations on an Eligible Line of Frontier for Greece, London, 1830). Church had, however, surrendered his commission, as a protest against the unfriendly government of Capo d’Istria, on the 25th of August 1829. He lived for the rest of his life in Greece, was created general of the army in 1854, and died at Athens on the 30th of March 1873. Sir Richard Church married in 1826 Elizabeth Augusta Wilmot-Horton, who survived him till 1878.
See Sir Richard Church, by Stanley Lane Poole (London, 1890); Sir Richard Church in Italy and Greece, by E. M. Church (Edinburgh, 1895), based on family papers (an Italian version, Brigantaggio e società segrete nelle Puglie, 1817–1828, executed under the direction of Carlo Lacaita, appeared at Florence in 1899). The MS. Correspondence and Papers of Sir Richard Church, in 29 vols., now in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 36543–36571), contain invaluable material for the history of the War of Greek Independence, including a narrative of the war during Church’s tenure of the command, which corrects many errors in the published accounts and successfully vindicates Church’s reputation against the strictures of Finlay, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and other historians of the war (see Cam. Mod. Hist. x. p. 804). (D. H.)
CHURCH, RICHARD WILLIAM (1815–1890), English divine,
son of John Dearman Church, brother of Sir Richard Church (q.v.),
a merchant, was born at Lisbon on the 25th of April 1815,
his early years being mostly spent at Florence. After his
father’s death in 1828 he was sent to a school of a pronounced
evangelical type at Redlands, Bristol, and went in 1833 to
Wadham College, Oxford, then an evangelical college. He took
first-class honours in 1836, and in 1838 was elected fellow of
Oriel. One of his contemporaries, Richard Mitchell, commenting
on this election, said: “There is such a moral beauty about
Church that they could not help taking him.” He was appointed
tutor of Oriel in 1839, and was ordained the same year. He was
an intimate friend of J. H. Newman at this period, and closely
allied to the Tractarian party. In 1841 No. 90 of Tracts for the
Times appeared, and Church resigned his tutorship. In 1844–1845
he was junior proctor, and in that capacity, in concert with
his senior colleague, vetoed a proposal to censure Tract 90 publicly.
In 1846 Church, with others, started The Guardian newspaper,
and he was an early contributor to The Saturday Review. In
1850 he became engaged to Miss H. F. Bennett, of a Somersetshire
family, a niece of George Moberly, bishop of Salisbury.
After again holding the tutorship of Oriel, he accepted in 1852
the small living of Whatley in Somersetshire, near Frome, and
was married in the following year. He was a diligent parish
priest and a serious student, and contributed largely to current
literature. In 1869 he refused a canonry at Worcester, but in
1871 he accepted, most reluctantly (calling it “a sacrifice en
pure perte”), the deanery of St Paul’s, to which he was nominated
by W. E. Gladstone.
His task as dean was a complicated one. It was (1) the restoration of the cathedral; (2) the adjustment of the question of the cathedral revenues with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners; (3) the reorganization of a conservative cathedral staff with anomalous vested rights. He described the intention of his appointment to be “that St Paul’s should waken up from its long slumber.” The first year that he spent at St Paul’s was, writes one of his friends, one of “misery” for a man who loved study and quiet and the country, and hated official pomp and financial business and ceremonious appearances. But he performed his difficult and uncongenial task with almost incredible success, and is said never to have made an enemy or a mistake. The dean was distinguished for uniting in a singular degree the virtues of austerity and sympathy. He was pre-eminently endowed with the faculty of judgment, characterized by Canon Scott Holland as the gift of “high and fine and sane
