Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Rumbold, Horace
RUMBOLD, Sir HORACE, eighth baronet (1829–1913), diplomatist, the fifth son of Sir William Rumbold, third baronet, by his wife, Henrietta Elizabeth, second daughter of Thomas Boothby Parkyns, first Baron Rancliffe, was born in Calcutta 2 July 1829. His father had served on the staff of the second Earl of Moira (afterwards Marquess of Hastings) when governor-general of Bengal. Horace was sent home from India when he was three years old, and was privately educated in Paris, where he had many relations amongst the old French aristocracy. No examinations were required in those days for the diplomatic service, and he was nominated to it by Lord Palmerston in 1849. In the next ten years he held appointments in Washington and Turin (1849), Paris and Frankfort (1852), Stuttgart (1854), and Vienna (1856). In December 1858 he was appointed secretary of the legation in China on the staff of (Sir) Frederick William Adolphus Bruce [q.v.] and proceeded to China in March 1859. Bruce sent him back to England in January 1860 to report to the government the active resistance which was offered to the progress of the British mission to the Chinese capital. This report led to the Anglo-French expedition to Peking in that year. Promotion came slowly to Rumbold, and he held in succession a long series of minor diplomatic posts. After serving at Athens (1862, 1866–1867), Berne (1864), St. Petersburg (1868–1871), and Constantinople (1871), he became consul-general in Chile (1872–1878), minister at Berne (1878), and envoy extraordinary to Argentina (1879–1881), Sweden and Norway (1881–1884), Greece (1884–1888), and the Netherlands (1888–1896). In 1896 he was appointed ambassador at Vienna. To his friends' congratulations he replied that it was ‘not promotion but reparation’, and four years later he retired (1900).
Rumbold occupied his leisure in writing accounts of his wide experience as a diplomatist. He was the author of The Great Silver River: Notes of a Residence in Buenos Ayres (1887), Recollections of a Diplomatist (1902), Further Recollections (1903), and Final Recollections (1905). In 1909 he published The Austrian Court in the Nineteenth Century, a book which created some sensation, and was regarded as a grave indiscretion at a time when high officials had not acquired the habit of writing memoirs.
Rumbold succeeded his brother, Sir Charles Hale Rumbold, as eighth baronet, in 1877 (the baronetcy having passed in turn, since his father's death in 1833, to his three elder surviving brothers and a nephew). He was made a privy councillor in 1896 and G.C.B. in 1897. He died at Lymington, Hampshire, 3 November 1913.
Rumbold married twice: first, in 1867 Caroline Barney (died 1872), daughter of George Harrington, United States minister at Berne, of Washington, U.S.A., by whom he had three sons; secondly, in 1881 Louisa Anne, daughter of Thomas Russell Crampton, and widow of Captain St. George Francis Robert Caulfield, 1st Life Guards, by whom he had one son. He was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son, Horace George Montagu (born 1869), also a distinguished diplomatist, who in 1920 was appointed British ambassador at Constantinople.
[Official records; private letters.]