Robert Stuart
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Robert Stuart was born in Ireland in about 1812 to Thomas Stuart (of Whitehall, County Clare, and Lifford, County Limerick, the illegitimate son of Thomas Smyth and brother of Major-General Charles Stuart). On 2 June 1842 he married Elizabeth Sarah Cathcart, youngest daughter of the Hon. and Rev. Archibald Hamilton Cathcart and Frances Henrietta Fremantle); they had no children.
He served in the Crimean War, rising to the rank of Major, and remained in the region after the war; in 1858 he was appointed Vice-Consul at Volo, and in 1860 was sent to investigate the condition of Christians in Thessaly and Epirus; in 1861 he became Consul at Janina. In 1873 he was made Consul-General for the Russian ports in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azof, and was based at Odessa - at this time his Private Secretary was his nephew, William Horwood Stuart. In 1874 he became Consul-General in Haiti and Chargé d'Affaires of the Dominican Republic.
In 1856, Major Stuart led an expedition to the summit of Mount Ararat, along with Major Fraser, Rev. Walter Thursby, Mr. Theobald and Mr. Evans.
The Bermuda Sun newspaper reported in 1999 that a letter from a Major Stuart to his wife, bearing unusually marked Bermuda stamps and dated 4 June 1874 was to be auctioned and would probably fetch nearly £10,000. It is possible that the author of this letter was Major Robert Stuart.
Stuart retired in 1883 and settled in Leamington Spa, where he died on 17 June 1901. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and could speak several languages. Two of his nephews, William Horwood Stuart (1857-1906) and Charles Leader Justice Stuart (1869-1885), the sons of his brother the Rev. William Stuart (Vicar of Mundon, Essex (1882-1889) and Rector of Hazeleigh, Essex (1889-1896)), also entered the diplomatic service and served around the Black Sea, although both also had their careers cut short: Charles drowned in the Danube at Brăila in Romania in 1885 and William was murdered at Batum in Georgia in 1906.
