William Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst

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William Pitt Amherst, 1st Earl Amherst GCH (1773 - 1857), was Governor-General of India. He was the nephew of Jeffrey Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst, and succeeded to his title in 1797 by the remainder provided when the letters patent was renewed in 1788.

[edit] Ambassador extraordinary to China

In 1816 he was sent as ambassador extraordinary to the court of China's Qing Dynasty, with a view of establishing more satisfactory commercial relations between that country and the United Kingdom. On arriving at the Pei Ho (Hai River) he was given to understand that he could only be admitted to the Jiaqing Emperor's presence on condition of performing the kowtow, a ceremony which Western nations considered degrading, and which was, indeed, a homage exacted by a Chinese sovereign from his tributaries. To this Lord Amherst, following the advice of Sir George Leonard Staunton, who accompanied him as second commissioner, refused to consent, as Lord Macartney had done in 1793, unless the admission was made that his sovereign was entitled to the same show of reverence from a mandarin of his rank. In consequence of this he was not allowed to enter Peking (Beijing), and the object of his mission was frustrated.

His ship, the Alceste, after a cruise along the coast of Korea and to the Ryūkyū Islands, on proceeding homewards was totally wrecked on a sunken rock in Caspar Strait. Lord Amherst and part of his shipwrecked companions escaped in the ship's boats to Batavia, whence relief was sent to the rest. The ship in which he returned to England in 1817 having touched at St Helena, he had several interviews with the emperor Napoleon (see Ellis's Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China, 1817; McLeod's Narrative of a Voyage in H.M.S. Alceste, 1817).

[edit] Governor-general of India

Lord Amherst held the office of Governor-General of British India from August 1823 to February 1828. The principal event of his government was the first Burmese war of 1824, resulting in the cession of Arakan and Tenasserim to the British Empire. He was created Earl Amherst, of Arracan in the East Indies, and Viscount Holmesdale, in the County of Kent, in 1826. On his return to England he lived in retirement till his death in March 1857.

Preceded by John Adam

Governor-General of India 1823–1828

Succeeded by William Butterworth Bayley

Preceded by New Creation	Earl Amherst	Succeeded by William Pitt Amherst
Preceded by Jeffrey Amherst	Baron Amherst

[edit] References

• A. Thackeray and R. Evans, Lord Amherst (" Rulers of India * series), 1894.
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.