commander-in-chief at Plymouth: he was still holding this command, when he died suddenly at Gosport, on 14 Feb. 1778, in his 59th year. He was buried in the parish church of Sevenoaks, where there is a tablet erected to his memory by his brother, Lord Amherst.
[Charnock's Biographia Navalis, v. 275; Official Letters, &c., in the Public Record Office.]
AMHERST, WILLIAM PITT, Earl Amherst of Arracan (1773–1857), diplomatist and statesman, was the son of Lieutenant-general William Amherst; was born in January 1773, and succeeded as second baron on the decease of his uncle, the late commander-in-chief in Great Britain, on 3 Aug. 1797. Being the son and nephew of officers who had held high positions in the colonies and elsewhere, he at all times took a keen interest in foreign affairs; and when, after the peace of 1815, the English government turned their attention to the complaints of injustice and exactions on the part of the Chinese mandarins which reached them from time to time from the English merchants at Canton, Lord Amherst was chosen to proceed to Peking as British envoy, to represent to the Emperor Kea K'ing the wrongs which British subjects were suffering under his rule. In February 1816 Lord Amherst sailed from Spithead, and after a voyage of no unusual length in those days arrived off Canton in the beginning of July. There he was met by mandarins of an inferior grade, who had been appointed to receive him, and with whom he very properly declined to communicate except through his secretaries. After considerable delay, permission was given him to proceed to Tientsin, by sea, on his way to the capital, and at that city he was again met by imperial commissioners. Being far removed from all semblance of English power, the commissioners, who, like all Asiatics, bow only when conscious of weakness, assumed an arrogant tone in their dealings with the envoy. The presents he brought from the prince regent for the emperor they described as articles of ‘tribute,’ and with more persistence than diplomatic skill they urged him to promise to perform the ‘kotow,’ or nine strikings of the forehead on the ground, on being admitted into the presence of the emperor. They even went the length of asserting, though falsely, that Lord Macartney, when granted audiences by the preceding emperor, K'een-lung, had gone through this degrading ceremony. But to all solicitations on this point Lord Amherst turned a deaf ear, and declared his intention of yielding only so far as to bow, instead of prostrating himself, nine times. So anxious were the commissioners to see for themselves what this concession amounted to, that, at a dinner which they gave in honour of the envoy, some imperial insignia were introduced before which they ‘kotow’-ed, while Lord Amherst and his staff made the promised number of bows. After much time had been consumed in these profitless discussions, the commissioners, finding Lord Amherst firm, arranged that he should leave Tientsin for the capital on 14 Aug. After a tedious journey by river the embassy reached T'ung-chow, and from thence were carried on to the palace of Yuen-ming-yuen, where they arrived on the evening of the 29th. Worn out with fatigue, Lord Amherst was about to retire for the night, when he was peremptorily invited into the presence of the emperor. Though such a breach of the commonest diplomatic courtesy might have been overlooked on the plea of ignorance, Lord Amherst, deeming it probable, from the hasty rudeness of the message and the insolent manner of the messengers, that an attempt would be made in the hurry of the moment to force him to perform an unbecoming ceremony, positively refused to obey the command. The result was that without further parley he was sent back the same evening to T'ung-chow, on his way to Tientsin. From this point, instead of returning as he came by sea, he was conducted down the Grand Canal, and over the celebrated Meling Pass, to Canton, where, on 20 Jan. 1817, he re-embarked for England.
Although he had thus failed in carrying out the object of his mission, the true cause of his want of success was duly recognised by his countrymen; and when, in 1823, the Marquis of Hastings retired from the governor-generalship of India, Lord Amherst was appointed by the directors to succeed him. On landing at Calcutta (1 Aug. 1823) he found the local politics much disturbed in consequence of the prosecution of Mr. Buckingham, a newspaper editor, by order of John Adam [see Adam, John, 1779–1825], who had held temporary office during the interval between the departure of Lord Hastings and Lord Amherst's arrival. By judicious firmness and conciliation, Lord Amherst succeeded in throwing oil upon the troubled waters on the spot, though Mr. Buckingham subsequently carried on the contention in England. But far more important matters demanded the immediate attention of the viceroy. The pretensions of the king of Burmah had for some time
