Indies, and took a leading part in the suppression of the maroon insurrection in Jamaica. The Trelawney maroons, who had risen, numbered fewer than seven hundred, but they had been joined by about four hundred runaway slaves, and the insurrection threatened to spread. The country was extremely difficult for regular troops, and two of the detachments sent against the maroons fell into ambushes, and their commanders (Colonels Sandford and Fitch) were killed. At the beginning of October Walpole was charged with the general conduct of the operations, and the governor—Alexander Lindsay, sixth earl of Balcarres [q. v.] —gave him the local and temporary rank of major-general. By skilful dispositions he captured several of the maroon ‘cockpits’ or stockades. On 24 Oct. the governor wrote to the secretary of state: ‘General Walpole is going on vastly well. His figure and talents are well adapted for the service he is upon, and he has got the confidence of the militia and the country.’ By 22 Dec. he had come to terms with the insurgents. They were to ask pardon, to leave their fastnesses and settle in any district assigned to them, and to give up the runaway slaves. On these conditions he promised that they should not be sent out of the island; and the terms were ratified by the governor.
Only a few of the insurgents came in, and in the middle of January Walpole moved against them with a strong column, accompanied by dogs which had been brought from Cuba. They then surrendered, and were sent down to Montego Bay; and in March the assembly and the governor decided to ship them to Nova Scotia. Walpole strongly remonstrated against what he regarded as a breach of faith. He argued that the treaty might have been cancelled when the maroons failed to fulfil its terms, but that the governor had deliberately abstained from cancelling it. He declined a gift of five hundred guineas which the assembly voted for the purchase of a sword, and obtained leave to return to England. His letter declining the sword was expunged from the minutes of the house (cf. Dallas, Hist. of the Maroons, 1803; Gardner, Hist. of Jamaica, 1873, pp. 232–6).
He was made colonel in the army on 3 May 1796, but he retired from the service before 1799. In January 1797 he was returned to parliament for Derby, which he represented till 1806. He was a follower of Fox, and voted for reform. He was Tierney's second in his duel with Pitt on Putney heath on 27 May 1798. When Fox came into office as foreign secretary, Walpole was appointed under-secretary (20 Feb. 1806); but he did not retain this office long after Fox's death. He was made comptroller of cash in the excise office for the rest of his life. He was M.P. for Dungarvan from 1807 till 1820, when he resigned his seat. He died in May 1835, unmarried.
[Gent. Mag. 1835, ii. 547; Collins's Peerage, ed. Brydges, v. 674; Lord Lindsay's Lives of the Lindsays, iii. 1–146 (for the maroon war); Lord Holland's Memoirs of the Whig Party, i. 142; Burke's Peerage.]
WALPOLE, HENRY (1558–1595), jesuit, eldest son of Christopher Walpole of Docking and of Anmer Hall, Norfolk, by Margery, daughter and heiress of Richard Beckham of Narford in the same county, was born at Docking, and baptised there in October 1558. Michael Walpole [q. v.] and Richard Walpole [q. v.] were his younger brothers. Henry was sent to Norwich school in 1566 or 1567, where his master was Stephen Limbert, a Cambridge scholar of some repute in his day. He entered at St. Peter's College, Cambridge, on 15 Jan. 1575, but he left the university without taking a degree, and in 1578 he became a student at Gray's Inn, intending to follow in the footsteps of his father, who appears for some time to have practised as a consulting barrister, and of his uncle, John Walpole, a serjeant-at-law who would certainly have been promoted to a judgeship but for his early death in 1568. While Henry Walpole was at Gray's Inn he appears to have brought himself under the notice of the government spies by habitually consorting with the recusant gentry and the Roman partisans; and when Edmund Campion [q. v.] came over to advocate a return to the papal obedience, Walpole was a conspicuous supporter of the jesuit and his friends. Campion was hanged at Tyburn on 1 Dec. 1581, and Walpole stood near to the scaffold when the usual barbarities were perpetrated upon the mangled corpse. The blood splashed into the faces of the crowd that pressed round, and some of it spurted upon young Walpole's clothes. He accepted this as a call to himself to take up the work which Campion had begun; and under the inspiration which the dreadful scene had aroused he sought relief for this feeling in writing a poem of thirty stanzas, which he entitled ‘An Epitaph of the Life and Death of the most famous Clerk and virtuous Priest, Edmund Campion, a Reverend Father of the meek Society of the blessed name of Jesus.’ The poem, which contains many passages of much beauty and sweetness, and indicates the possession of great poetic gifts on the part of the writer,
