1831). Called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1831, he joined the western circuit in 1832, and was recorder of Portsmouth from 1840 to 1847, when he was appointed recorder of Prince of Wales Island, Singapore, and Malacca. In 1847 he was knighted. In 1849 he was appointed chief justice of the supreme court of judicature at Madras, and held that position till his retirement in 1859. In his charge to the grand jury on 5 Jan. 1859 he expressed the belief that great benefits would accrue from the recent transfer of the government of India from the East India Company to the crown, and refuted the assertion then commonly made by English officials in India, that no materials for self-government existed in the country. On 9 Feb. 1859 he was presented with a farewell address by the native community of Madras at an entertainment at which the governor, Lord Harris, was present. He died at 33 Eaton Square, London, on 28 March 1888.
On 27 May 1847 he married Georgina Maria, younger daughter of Alexander Radclyffe Sidebottom, barrister, by whom he had three sons—Christopher (b. 1850), Albemarle Alexander, late major 8th hussars, John Frederick Peel—and one daughter. In 1842 he published a work on ‘The Municipal Practices Act.’
[Madras Standard, 10 Jan. 1859; Times, 2 April 1888.]
RAWLINSON, Sir HENRY CRESWICKE (1810–1895), Assyriologist, born at Chadlington, Oxford, on 11 April 1810, sprang from an old north Lancashire family, and was the second son of Abram Rawlinson, a noted breeder of racehorses, who married a Gloucestershire lady, Miss Creswicke, and, selling his Lancashire property, bought the house at Chadlington in 1805. Educated at Wrington and Ealing, Rawlinson was nominated to a military cadetship in the East India Company's service, and had the good fortune to set sail for Bombay in July 1827, round the Cape, in the same ship as the governor, Sir John Malcolm [q. v.], the well-known diplomatist and oriental scholar, whose stimulating influence revealed itself in Rawlinson's later studies. He quickly distanced all competitors in the acquisition of Persian and the Indian vernaculars, and in less than a year was appointed interpreter, and, before he was nineteen, paymaster to the 1st Bombay grenadiers, with whom he served five years, and enjoyed great popularity, admired alike as a smart officer, a fine horseman, and a remarkable linguist. From 1833 to 1839 he was employed in Persia, with other English officers, in reorganising the Persian army, and rendered considerable services, not only by raising several excellent infantry regiments among the frontier tribes, but notably by a famous forced ride of 750 miles in 150 consecutive hours, which he made in order to warn the British minister at Tehrân of the presence of the Russian agent Vikovich at Herât. When the Afghan difficulty compelled England in 1838 to abandon her tutorship of Persia, Rawlinson returned to India by way of Sind, and was shortly afterwards appointed assistant to Sir W. Macnaghten in Afghanistan. He here narrowly escaped the fate of Conolly, whose expedition to Bokhâra he would have joined, but was detained by disturbances in the Ghilzai country. In October 1840 he was appointed political agent at Kandahar for Lower Afghanistan. Having already drawn up a detailed report on the state of the country for Macnaghten, and entirely mistrusting the optimistic views of the Indian authorities, whom, indeed, he had warned of the hostility of the Afghans towards Shujâ-al-mulk (‘Shah Soojah’), the troubles of 1841–2 did not find Rawlinson unprepared. He not only co-operated in every possible way, as resident, with the general in command of the army of Kandahar, Sir William Nott [q. v.], in repressing intrigue, disarming and expelling the Afghan population, and keeping the city quiet, but himself raised and trained a body of Persian cavalry. At its head he achieved notable distinction in the battle outside Kandahar of 29 May 1842, and was mentioned in despatches. After taking a brilliant part in the defence of the city, he in August accompanied Nott and the garrison in the march to Ghazni, assisted in its capture, went on to join Pollock at Kabul, and thence returned with ‘the avenging army’ to India. Rawlinson thus served through the whole Afghan movement, and he came out of it all with an enhanced reputation. For these services he was rewarded with the companionship of the Bath on 9 April 1844, besides the Persian order of the Lion and Sun, first class, and the third class Durrâni order. Here his military career ended, and the career of oriental research, with which his name is most closely associated, began in earnest.
Throughout his period of military command in Persia Rawlinson had never lost the habit of study. As early as 1837 he had written an account of a tour he made in Susiana in 1836, and afterwards of a journey through Persian Kurdistân in 1838, for the Royal Geographical Society, which awarded him its gold medal in 1839 for his explorations. Nothing had attracted his attention more than the celebrated cuneiform inscription of Darius
