suddenly at Ottawa on 21 Jan. 1884, leaving four sons and a daughter.
[Rose's Cyclopædia of Canadian Biogr. 1886; Morgan's Dominion Ann. Register for 1884, pp. 247–8; Appleton's Cyclopædia of American Biogr. vi. 125; Times, 7 Feb. 1884; Toronto Weekly Mail, 24 Jan. 1884; Toronto Globe, 23 Jan. 1884; Bourinot's Intellectual Development of the Canadian People, 1881, p. 113; Morgan's Bibl. Canad. 1867, p. 373; P. Gagnon's Essai de Bibliographie Canadienne, Quebec, 1895.]
TODD, ELLIOTT D'ARCY (1808–1845), British resident at Herat, third and youngest son of Fryer Todd, accountant, Chancery Lane, a Yorkshire gentleman of good family, and originally of good fortune, was born in Bury Street, St. James's, London, on 28 Jan. 1808. His mother was Mary Evans, the ‘Mary’ of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [q. v.] His father lost his fortune by speculation, the home was broken up, and Elliott D'Arcy Todd, when three years old, was consigned to the care of his maternal uncle, William Evans, of the East India Company's home establishment. He was educated at Ware and in London, and entered the military college of the East India Company at Addiscombe in 1822.
Todd received a commission as second lieutenant in the Bengal artillery on 18 Dec. 1823, landed at Calcutta on 22 May 1824, and was stationed at the artillery headquarters at Dum Dum until the rainy season of 1825, when he was posted to the 4th company 3rd battalion of foot artillery at Cawnpore. He went with his company to join Lord Combermere's army of thirty thousand men for the second siege of Bhartpur. When the place was carried by assault on 18 Jan. 1826, Todd received a share of the prize money, and the same year he was posted to the 1st troop 2nd brigade of the horse artillery; but, on promotion to be first lieutenant on 28 Sept. 1827, he reverted to the foot artillery. Having made an earnest request to serve in the horse artillery, he was posted in 1828 to a troop at Muttra. In January 1829 he went to Karnal, where bad health compelled him to go on sick leave to the hills, whither he was accompanied by his friend, James Abbott, of the artillery.
On 2 March 1831 Todd was transferred to the 1st troop 1st brigade horse artillery. He studied Persian with such assiduity and success that the Indian government, who, among their efforts to enable the shah of Persia to maintain his independence, had decided in 1833 to send British officers to instruct the Persian army in drill and discipline, selected Todd to serve with the disciplined troops in Persia under Major Pasmore's command, and to be instructor in artillery. He embarked in the Cavendish Bentinck at Calcutta on 7 Aug., taking with him a model of the field gun and carriage and ammunition wagon of the royal artillery pattern. He arrived at Teheran on 28 March 1834. He had little to do the first year, owing to the difficulty of getting his duties and responsibilities defined by the prime minister. After the death of Fatteh Ali and the accession of Muhammad Shah, a firman was issued placing all matters connected with artillery in Todd's hands.
In 1834, during a journey from Shiraz to Bushire, he was robbed, being stripped of everything, and carried a prisoner to the hills, but was subsequently released. He took great pains in drilling the Irak and part of the Azerbyan artillery at Teheran, and received from the shah the decoration of the second class of the order of the Lion and Sun. Sir Henry Ellis [q. v.], British minister at Teheran, was much impressed by a lengthy paper written by Todd on Sir Alexander Burnes's ‘Military Memoir on the Countries between the Caspian and the Indus,’ in which the opinions and reasoning of the traveller were somewhat roughly handled. Ellis wrote to Lord Auckland, the governor-general, urging the necessity of a political agent at Kabul, and recommending Todd for the appointment—‘a most intelligent, clear-headed young man; he has given much attention to the question of the possible invasion of India from the north-west; he is fully alive to and well acquainted with the views and designs of Russia; in short, I know of no one whom I could myself employ with more confidence’ (letter dated 3 Jan. 1836).
In the autumn of 1836 Todd was at Tabriz as military secretary to Major-general Sir Henry Lindesay Bethune [q. v.], commanding the Persian legion disciplined by British officers, but when Bethune declined to accompany the shah's troops beyond Khorasan and returned to Teheran, Todd was sent, in January 1837, by John McNeill (1795–1883) [q. v.], British minister, to proceed by the shores of the Caspian, Ghilan, and Rudbar, to Kazvin, and thence to Teheran. For his report on this route he received a complimentary letter from Lord Palmerston. He was granted the local rank of major while employed on particular service in Persia (London Gazette, 2 June 1837). In March 1838 Todd accompanied the British minister to the Persian camp before Herat, where he arrived on 6 April. His report on and map of the journey were sent to the foreign office. Todd was employed by McNeill to negotiate
