arrangements best calculated to ensure success; thirdly, not making any effectual attempt to co-operate with or support the different columns when engaged in the streets; fourthly, concluding a treaty by which he unnecessarily and shamefully surrendered the advantages he had gained at heavy cost, and delivered up the fortress of Montevideo. The trial lasted seven weeks, and on 18 March the court found him guilty of all the charges, with the exception of that part of the second charge which related to the order that ‘the columns should be unloaded, and that no firing should be permitted on any account,’ to which they attached no blame. They sentenced him to be cashiered. The sentence was confirmed by the king, and ordered to be read out to every regiment in the service.
Whitelocke had much to urge in his defence. The expedition had been sent out under the profoundly false impression that the inhabitants would be friendly, from experience of ‘the difference between the oppressive dominion of Spain and the benign and protecting government of his Majesty.’ The season and the swamps embarrassed him. The plan of assault was drawn up by Gower, and none of the other officers raised any objection to it, or showed any doubt of its success. Had Craufurd fallen back on the Residencia, as Pack, who knew the place, advised, the town would probably have been surrendered next day.
But Whitelocke had shown himself incompetent throughout; infirm of purpose and wanting in resource, prone to lean on others, yet jealous of his own authority. He left a rearguard of sixteen hundred men idle, on the east of the Chuello, during the assault, and he himself remained passive all day, and went back to his headquarters to dine and sleep, without making any serious attempt to learn what had happened to his columns on the right. In the words of the general order, he was ‘deficient in zeal, judgment, and personal exertion.’
People asked how he came to be appointed. According to Lord Holland, who was in the cabinet, he was an opponent to Windham's plan of limited enlistment, and Windham wished to get rid of him as inspector-general of recruiting (Memoirs of the Whig Party, ii. 116). But Windham himself mentions that he suggested Sir John Stuart (of Maida), and the choice seems to have been mainly due to the Duke of York (Windham, Diary, p. 467).
He spent the rest of his life in retirement, latterly at Clifton. He died on 23 Oct. 1833 at Hall Barn Park, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Gore Ouseley [q. v.], who had married his eldest daughter. Another daughter was married to Captain George Burdett, R.N. He was buried in the west aisle of Bristol Cathedral.
[Georgian Era, ii. 475; Records of the 13th Regiment; Bryan Edwards's Hist. of the British West Indies, iii. 155–60; War Office Original Correspondence, No. 43, P.R.O. (1807, Buenos Ayres and Montevideo); Trial at large of General Whitelocke, 1808; Craufurd's Life of Craufurd; Memoirs of Sir Samuel Ford Whittingham; Memoirs of M. G. Lewis; Erskine Neale's Risen from the Ranks, p. 67–95; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. ix. 201, 455, x. 54, 8th ser. xii. 492; Gent. Mag. 1833, ii. 475.]
WHITER, WALTER (1758–1832), philologist, born at Birmingham on 30 Oct. 1758, was at school under Dr. Edwards for ten years at Coventry, where Robert Bree, M.D. [q. v.], was a fellow-pupil. He was admitted at Clare College, Cambridge, on 19 June 1776 as sizar, and graduated B.A. 1781, M.A. 1784, but did not go out in honours. On 4 April 1782 he was elected a fellow of Clare, probably on account of his reputation for classical and philological knowledge. He lived in his rooms in college from 1782 to 1797. Porson was one of his intimate friends, and often wrote notes on the margin of Whiter's books. Whiter's nephew possessed a copy of ‘Athenæus,’ once the property of his uncle, with these annotations (Watson, Porson, pp. 31–2). Porson in 1786 added some notes of his own and of Whiter to an edition by Hutchinson of Xenophon's ‘Anabasis’ (ib. p. 49). These were issued separately from Valpy's press in 1810, and George Townsend added them to his edition of 1823.
Whiter was presented by his college in 1797 to the rectory of Hardingham in Norfolk, and held the benefice until his death. His sense of clerical decorum was the reverse of strict. Baron Merian, in a letter to Dr. Samuel Butler of Shrewsbury school, writes: ‘I pity Whiter. A great etymologist, perhaps the greatest that ever lived. A genius certainly, but it seems, like most eminent artists, dissolute’ (Butler, Life and Letters, i. 186). Every year on 23 April, the day of St. George (titular saint of Hardingham church), it was his harmless practice to collect his friends at a picnic under a beech on a hillock called St. George's Mount, and to claim from each of them an appropriate poem in Latin or English. A specimen of his verses on one of these occasions is in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ (1816, i. 542–3). He died at Hardingham rectory on 23 July 1832, aged 73 years (Norfolk Chronicle, 4 Aug. 1832), and was buried in its
