of his regiment. He was placed on half-pay with the rank of colonel, when forming the long connection with the civil administration of the army, which began by his acceptance, after Sir Gilbert Elliot had strongly recommended him to Pitt, of a commission to arrange and settle the complicated accounts connected with the English occupation of Toulon and Corsica. In 1799 he was appointed commissary-general of the force which was being despatched to the Helder, and which he accompanied. In 1801 he accepted an honorary appointment in the household of the Duke of Kent. In 1805 he was nominated a member of the parliamentary commission of military inquiry, becoming afterwards its chairman. In 1807 he declined the under-secretaryship of state for war and the colonies offered to him by Windham. In 1811 he was appointed comptroller of army accounts, and filled the office for five-and-twenty years, until it was abolished in 1835. In 1840 he republished, in aid of the fund for the Nelson testimonial, and with an acknowledgment of its authorship, his 'Narrative of the Battle of St. Vincent, adding to it some new anecdotes of Nelson. He was preparing an enlarged edition of the history of the siege of Gibraltar, of the garrison of which he was then, it is said, the sole survivor, when he died, aged 81, on 16 Jan. 1844, at Thomcroft, near Leatherhead, in Surrey. After his withdrawal from public life, and on the death of his brother-in-law, whose property, Balfour Castle in Fifeshire, his wife inherited, he had assumed the surname of Bethune. Besides being the author of the two works already mentioned, he published in 1830 'A Compendium of the Regent's Canal, showing its connection with the metropolis,' and in 1835 he printed for private circulation 'Statements respecting the late Departments of the comptrollership of the Army Accounts, showing the inconveniency which will probably result from its abolition.'
[Gent. Mag. for April 1844; Lancashire "Worthies, second series (1877); Catalogue of the British Museum Library.]
BETHUNE, JOHN ELLIOT DRINKWATER (1801–1851), an eminent Indian legislator and educationist, was the eldest son of Lieutenant-colonel John Drinkwater Bethune, C.B. and F.S.A. [q. v.], author of the 'History of the Siege of Gibraltar.' Having been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and called to the bar in 1827, Bethune was employed by Lord Grey's government, shortly after its accession to office, on several important commissions, and subsequently as counsel to the Home Office, which appointment he retained for nearly fourteen years. While holding this office he drafted, among many other legislative measures, the Municipal Reform Act, the Tithe Commutation Act, and the County Courts Act. In 1848 Bethune was appointed fourth ordinary, or legislative member of the Supreme Council of India, and after his arrival at Calcutta accepted the additional unpaid office of president of the Council of Education. In India, as in England, his principal official duties engaged him in the consideration of questions of legislative reform. Two of the most important of these were a bill for removing the exemption enjoyed by European British subjects from the jurisdiction of the criminal courts of the East India Company, and a bill for extending to the whole of British India the law passed for Bengal by Lord William Bentinck's government in 1832, relieving native converts to Christianity or to any other religion from forfeiture of rights or property or of rights of inheritance. The first of these measures was postponed until the Indian penal code should have been enacted, and has not yet become law to the extent contemplated by Bethune and his colleagues; the second was passed a few months before his death. An act for establishing small cause courts at the presidency towns, upon the principle of the English county courts, was another of the measures which illustrated his career as a legislator.
As an educationist, Bethune's name is identified with the establishment at Calcutta of a school for educating native girls of the higher classes, which he endowed by his will with lands and other property in that city. This institution, still called the Bethune Girls' School, was for some time after Bethune's death supported by the governor-general. Lord Dalhousie, from his private funds, and was subsequently taken charge of by the state, by which it is still maintained.
Bethune died at Calcutta on 12 Aug. 1851, greatly lamented by all classes, native as well as European.
[Annual Reg. 1851, pp. 319–320; The Unrepealed Acts of the Grovernor-General of India in Council, vol. i., Calcutta, 1875; Report of the Indian Education Commission, p. 525, Calcutta, 1883.]
BETTERTON, THOMAS (1635?–1710), actor and dramatist, was born in Tothill Street, Westminster, and was apprenticed by his father, who was under-cook to Charles I, to a bookseller. These are the only undisputed facts concerning his life before he adopted the stage as a profession. The mystery with which his early years are surrounded
