Hanover in 1805. The expedition, however, did nothing, and after its failure Cookson returned to Dublin. He was again, upon Lord Cathcart's request, ordered to accompany that general's more important expedition to Denmark in 1807, and commanded the batteries on the right during the bombardment of Copenhagen; but he received no recognition of his services on this occasion, though the officer commanding the artillery, Colonel Blomefield, was made a baronet. In October 1808 he embarked in command of the forty-eight guns and twelve hundred artillerymen ordered to form part of Sir David Baird's army intended for the Peninsula, and when Baird joined Sir John Moore, Cookson took command of all the horse artillery with the combined army. He commanded it with great ability throughout Moore's retreat, and especially distinguished himself at the action off Benevente on 29 Dec. 1808, when General Lefevre-Desnouettes was taken prisoner. At the close of the retreat, when but three miles from Corunna, he successfully blew up two great magazines of powder, containing twelve thousand barrels, to save them from the enemy, but he missed the battle of Corunna, as he had embarked with the horse artillery the night before. In April 1809 he received the command of the artillery in the Sussex district, which he held until 1 Aug. 1814, except in July 1809, when he commanded the artillery in South Beveland during the Walcheren expedition up to the fall of Flushing. Few artillery officers saw more varied service than Cookson, but as he did not happen to serve in the Peninsula or at Waterloo he never even received the C.B. for his services. He was promoted in regular course colonel on 17 March 1812, major-general on 4 June 1814, and lieutenant-general on 22 July 1830. He died at Esher on 12 Aug. 1835. He was married three times, and his eldest son, an officer in the 3rd guards, was killed at the battle of Fuentes de Onoro on 5 May 1811.
[Royal Military Calendar; Duncan's History of the Royal Artillery; Gent. Mag. for October 1835.]
COOKSON, HENRY WILKINSON, D.D. (1810–1876), master of Peterhouse, born 10 April 1810 at Kendal, Westmoreland, was the sixth son of Thomas and Elizabeth Cookson. Wordsworth, for whose poetry he always cherished a reverential admiration, was one of his godfathers. He was educated at Kendal grammar school and at Sedbergh school, then under the head-mastership of the old friend of the family from whom he derived his second baptismal name. In October 1828 he commenced residence at St. Peter's College, as he always preferred to style the most ancient college in the university of Cambridge. His private tutors were Henry Philpott, who as bishop of Worcester pronounced the last words over his grave, and the famous Hopkins of Peterhouse. In due time he was appointed to the tutorship; his pupils included Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). He was proctor in 1842. In 1847 he succeeded Dr. Hodgson as master of his college, and as rector of Glaston in Rutlandshire till 1867, when this rectory was by the new college statutes detached from the headship with which it had hitherto been combined. In 1855 he married Emily Valence, elder daughter of Gilbert Ainslie, D.D., master of Pembroke College, by whom he had one daughter. He died, after an illness of a few days, on 30 Sept. 1876, in Peterhouse Lodge; and, in accordance with a wish expressed by him in writing two months before, he was buried in the churchyard of the college benefice of Cherry Hinton, near Cambridge, a simple academical funeral appropriately closing a university life of great though absolutely unostentatious usefulness.
During a large proportion of the twenty-nine years through which he held his mastership Cookson was one of the most influential, as he was always one of the most active and most conscientious, members of his university. With mathematical acquirements he combined strong scientific sympathies and distinct literary tastes; he was a sound protestant of the least sensational type; in politics his clear-eyed conservatism shrank with unconcealed dislike from the more imaginative phases of party opinion. His services to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, of which he was president 1865–6, were too solid to be forgotten; and he worked with a will when chairman of Mr. Cleasby's committee at the parliamentary election of 1868. It remained no secret that in 1867 he was offered, through Lord Derby, the bishopric of Lichfield, which he declined. He was energetic in his college and the university. Not only was he elected vice-chancellor on five occasions (1848, 1863, 1864, 1872, 1873); but he was almost continuously a member of the council of the senate from the institution of that body in 1856; and there was hardly a syndicate of importance concerned with the organisation or reconstruction of the university studies and examinations from 1851 onwards of which he was not a member. He also contributed very materially to the settlement of the relations between the university and the town of Cambridge, which came under discussion during his vice-chancellorship in 1873. In all the transactions in which
