in the British Museum. He describes in it the battle of Steinkirk, in which he was engaged on 3 Aug. 1692. He gives also an Indian-ink sketch of the city of Ghent. Richards was present at the battle of Landen. In 1695–6 he acted temporarily as second engineer of Great Britain, and he was also employed with the ordnance trains which accompanied the summer expedition of the fleet against the French coast. He was in charge of the bomb vessels, and superintended the bombardment of Quince Fort and Daubour battery at the attack on St. Malo. The board of ordnance were highly pleased with Richards's contrivances for fitting up the bomb-ships, and recommended him for a handsome gratuity for his ‘great care and pains in that affair.’ The board reported that he had rendered the bombardment of towns more practicable and easy than formerly, ‘as appears by our last year's success upon the French coast.’ Another important suggestion, due to Richards, was the augmentation and diminution of charges to obtain accurate ranging in throwing bombs. The invention was successfully tried at the second siege of Limerick and in bombarding the coast towns of France in 1695–6. Richards also designed traversing mortars, and carried out many ingenious contrivances in gun and mortar carriages for the better working of ordnance both on land and on board ship.
In 1697 the treaty of Ryswick put an end to the war, and on 24 May 1698 a peace train of ordnance was for the first time formed, with a regular establishment. Richards was promoted to be colonel, and appointed to the command. At the same time he was continued in the post of third engineer of the kingdom, which he had held since 1686, until his death in 1701.
[Royal Engineers' Records; Board of Ordnance Minutes; King's Warrants; Lilly's Letter Book (Add. MSS. Brit. Mus.); Porter's History of the Corps of Royal Engineers; Storey's Impartial History of the Wars of Ireland, 1693; The Field of Mars, 1801; Walker's True Account of the Siege of Londonderry.]
RICHARDS, JAMES BRINSLEY (1846–1892), journalist, was born in London on 29 Aug. 1846. He was at Eton from 1857 to 1864, and the details of his school career are given in an entertaining form in his ‘Seven Years at Eton, 1857–64,’ published in 1883. At a comparatively early age he went abroad, and lived for several years in France. He acted for some time as secretary to M. Drouyn de Lhuys, and then as secretary to the Duc Decazes, and it was during this period that he acquired the intimate knowledge of French politics and politicians which was conspicuous in all he wrote. In 1882 he sent voluntary contributions to the ‘Times,’ and on the death of General Eber in February 1885 he was appointed to succeed him as the correspondent of the ‘Times’ in Vienna. From that time forward he contributed a series of admirable letters and articles on a variety of foreign topics, as well as lives of foreign statesmen and politicians, many of which attracted attention on the continent. On 2 Jan. 1892 he was transferred to Berlin. There he died at 1 Von der Heydtstrasse, Berlin, of a stroke of apoplexy, on 5 April 1892, and was buried in the Twelve Apostles cemetery, Berlin, on 9 April. The Empress Frederick sent a wreath of laurels fringed with gold. He married in Brussels, on 7 Jan. 1880, Blanche, daughter of J. Caldecott Smith, by whom he left four children.
Richards's earliest work of fiction, published anonymously, ‘The Duke's Marriage’ (1886, 3 vols.), contains a vivid picture of French political and social life in the later years of the second empire. His other works were ‘Prince Roderick’ (1889, 3 vols.), and ‘The Alderman's Children’ (1891, 3 vols.).
[Times, 6 April 1892, p. 9, 11 April, p. 9; Daily Graphic, 7 April 1892, p. 9, with portrait; information from Mrs. J. B. Richards, 22 Stanford Road, Brighton.]
RICHARDS, JOHN (1669–1709), major-general, governor of Alicant, born in 1669, was son of Jacob Richards and brother of Colonel Jacob Richards [q. v.], and of Brigadier-general Michael Richards [q. v.] He served with the Venetians against the Turks, and afterwards in the Polish army, which he left in 1703 to assist the Portuguese. Well known to, and esteemed by, Marlborough as an artillery officer of experience, he was unable as a Roman catholic to hold a commission in the English army. This did not prevent him receiving the command of the artillery in the army of the Duke of Schomberg and Leinster in the war of the Spanish succession.
Richards took part in the action near Monsanto on 11 June 1704, and the capture of the fortress of that name on the following day. In October he commanded the artillery at the bombardment of the Bourbon entrenchments on the bank of the Agueda. In May 1705 he was at the siege of Valenza, and commanded the Portuguese artillery at the siege of Albuquerque, where the Spaniards surrendered. In August he was colonel and director of the artillery under Peterborough
