slave trade, the case of the Alabama, and other difficult points. These long and intricate negotiations, added to the laborious duty of informing the foreign office as to the progress of the war, and advising upon the question of recognising the confederacy as independent, were so heavy that his health gave way, he was obliged to return to England, and at last, in February 1865, he was allowed to resign his post. In August of the same year he was appointed ambassador at Constantinople, and in July 1867 ambassador at Paris. This post he filled, and with a success no less than that of his predecessor, Earl Cowley, for twenty years. He was in the confidence of Napoleon III, and used every effort to avert war in 1870, short of pledging England to bring pressure to bear upon the king of Prussia on the question of the candidature of the Prince of Hohenzollern for the throne of Spain. After Sedan, and before Paris was invested, he arranged an interview, through Mr. Malet, secretary to the embassy, between Count Bismarck and M. Jules Favre, but no result followed from it. On the investment of Paris he was forced to seek a place of safety and of free communication with his government; but having taken his departure for Tours, and afterwards for Bordeaux, along with a portion of the provisional government, he was attacked in the House of Commons for so completely identifying himself with them. England, however, had already recognised the provisional government as the de facto government of France, and his conduct was entirely justified (see correspondence in Times, 6 March 1871). After the conclusion of the war he returned to Paris. In 1873 he negotiated the renewal of the commercial treaty of 1860. He received the queen on her visit to France in 1876, and in 1886, on the formation of the Salisbury administration, he was reported on good authority to have received the offer of the secretaryship for foreign affairs. He resigned his post in November 1887, and was succeeded by the Earl of Lytton. At the close of his life he was preparing to join the church of Rome, and although he was attacked by his last illness before being formally admitted, Dr. Butt, bishop of Southwell, administered to him extreme unction on his deathbed. He was seized with a stroke of paralysis while staying with his nephew, the Duke of Norfolk, at Norfolk House, St. James's Square, on 28 Nov., and died there on 5 Dec. 1887, and was buried at Arundel on 10 Dec. He had been made a K.C.B. in 1860, a G.C.B. in 1862, and was sworn of the privy council on 9 March 1865. In the same year he received the degree of honorary D.C.L. of Oxford. He was made a G.C.M.G. on 24 May 1879. In November 1881 he was created Viscount Lyons of Christchurch, Southampton, and in 1887 Earl Lyons, but he was unmarried, and the titles became extinct at his death.
[Times, 1 Nov., 6 Dec., and 10 Dec. 1887; Foreign Office List, 1887; Ann. Reg. 1887; Foreign Office Blue Books.]
LYONS, ROBERT SPENCER DYER (1826–1886), physician, born at Cork in 1826, was son of Sir William Lyons (1794–1858), a merchant there, who was mayor in 1848 and 1849, and was knighted by the queen on her visit to Cork, 3 Aug. 1849. His mother was Harriet, daughter of Robert Spencer Dyer of Kinsale. Robert was educated at Hamlin and Porter's grammar school, Cork, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1848 as a bachelor in medicine. He became a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in the following year, and in 1855 was appointed chief pathological commissioner to the army in the Crimea, where he reported on the disease then prevalent in the trenches before Sebastopol. On 8 Sept. 1855 he was awarded the Crimean and Turkish medals and clasps for Sebastopol. In 1857 he undertook a voluntary mission to Lisbon to investigate the pathological anatomy of the yellow fever which was raging there, and for his report on that subject received from Dom Pedro V the cross and insignia of the Ancient Order of Christ. He then joined St. George's Hospital, Dublin, where he took an active share in the education of the army medical staff. He was also professor of medicine in the Roman catholic university medical school, a senator of the Royal University, 1880, crown nominee for Ireland in the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom on 29 Nov. 1881, physician to the House of Industry hospitals, and visiting physician to Maynooth College. In 1870 he was invited by Mr. Gladstone's government to act on a commission of inquiry into the treatment of Irish treason-felony prisoners in English gaols, and in connection with this inquiry he visited many French prisons and reported on the discipline exercised in that country. He enthusiastically recommended the reafforesting of Ireland, and with concurrence of government collected information on forests from foreign countries, which was embodied in an article in the ‘Journal of Forestry and Estate Management,’ February 1883, pp. 656–9. He sat in the House of Commons for the city of Dublin as a liberal from April 1880 till the general election in 1885, and spoke
