case of hostilities. In July he succeeded Sir, Donald Stewart as commander-in-chief in India, and during his seven years tenure of this high position instituted many measures for the benefit of the army, and greatly assisted the development of frontier communications and defence. At the end of 1886, at the request of the viceroy, he took personal command for a time of the forces in Burma, and organized measures for the suppression of dacoity. For his services he received the medal, was created G.C.I.E., and promoted supernumerary general. In 1890 he did the honours of the army to Prince Albert Victor at a standing camp at Muridki, and in 1891 his attention was occupied with the Zhob and Hunza Nagar frontier campaigns. On the 1st of January 1892 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Roberts of Kandahar and Waterford. In 1893 he left India for good, and the G.C.S.I. was bestowed upon him. He was promoted to be field-marshal in 1895, and in the autumn of that year succeeded Lord Wolseley in the Irish command and was sworn a privy councillor. At Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 he was created K.P.
After the disastrous actions in the Boer war in South Africa in December 1899 at Magersfontein, Stormberg and Colenso, where his only son was killed, Lord Roberts was sent out as commander-in-chief. He arrived at Cape Town on the 10th of January 1900, and after organizing his force, advanced with sound strategy on Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, and soon changed the aspect of affairs. The sieges of Kimberley and Ladysmith were raised, and the Boer general, Cronje, flying towards the capital, was overtaken at Paardeberg and, after a fine defence, compelled to surrender, with 5000 men, on the anniversary of Majuba Day, the 27th of February 1900. Roberts entered Bloemfontein on the 13th of March, and after six weeks’ preparation, advanced on Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal. Mafeking was relieved on the 17th of May, and Pretoria occupied on the 5th of June. The two Boer states were annexed, and the war gradually assuming a guerilla character, Roberts handed over the command to Lord Kitchener and returned to England to fill the office of commander-in-chief of the army in succession to Lord Wolseley.
He arrived in the Solent on the 2nd of January 1901, and the same day, at Osborne, had an audience of Queen Victoria, who handed him the insignia of the Order of the Garter. The next day he was received at Paddington by the prince and princess of Wales, and drove in procession to Buckingham Palace, where he was entertained as the guest of the queen. He again had an audience of the queen at Osborne on the 14th of January on his elevation to an earldom, the last audience given by her majesty before her death, which took place eight days later. When the German emperor came to London for the queen’s funeral, he decorated Lord Roberts with the Order of the Black Eagle. Earl Roberts received the thanks of both Houses of Parliament and a grant of £100,000 for his services in South Africa. In 1905 he resigned his post on the Committee of National Defence, and devoted himself to attempting to rouse his countrymen to the necessity of cultivating rifle-shooting and of adopting systematic general military training and service. As an author he is known by his Rise of Wellington (1895), and his Forty-One Years in India (1897), an autobiography which has passed through numerous editions.
ROBERTSON, FREDERICK WILLIAM (1816–1853), English
divine, known as Robertson of Brighton, was born in London
on the 3rd of February 1816. The first five years of his life
were passed at Leith Fort, where his father, a captain in the
Royal Artillery, was then resident. The military spirit entered
into his blood, and throughout life he was characterized by
the qualities of the ideal soldier. In 1821 Captain Robertson
retired to Beverley, where the boy was educated. At the age
of fourteen he spent a year at Tours, from which he returned
to Scotland; and continued his education at the Edinburgh
Academy and university. In 1834 he was articled to a solicitor
in Bury St Edmunds, but the uncongenial and sedentary
employment soon broke down his health. He was anxious
for a military career, and his name was placed upon the list
of the 3rd Dragoons, then serving in India. For two years he
worked hard in preparing for the army, but, by a singular
conjunction of circumstances and at the sacrifice of his own
natural bent to his father’s wish, he matriculated at Brasenose
College, Oxford, just two weeks before his commission was
put into his hands. Oxford he did not find wholly congenial
to his intensely earnest spirit, but he read hard, and, as he
afterwards said, “Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne,
Jonathan Edwards, passed like the iron atoms of the blood
into my mental constitution.” At the same time he made a
careful study of the Bible, committing to memory the entire
New Testament both in English and in Greek. The Tractarian
movement had no attraction for him, although he admired
some of its leaders. He was at this time a moderate Calvinist
in doctrine, and enthusiastically evangelical. Ordained in
July 1840 by the bishop of Winchester, he at, once entered on
ministerial work in that city, and during his ministry there
and under the influence of the missionaries Henry Martyn and
David Brainerd, whose lives he studied, he carried devotional
asceticism to an injurious length. In less than a year he was
compelled to seek relaxation; and going to Switzerland he
there met and married Helen, third daughter of Sir George
William Denys, Bart. Early in 1842, after a few months
rest, he accepted a curacy in Cheltenham, which he retained
for upwards of four years. The questioning spirit was first
aroused in him by the disappointing fruit of evangelical doctrine
which he found in Cheltenham, as well as by intimacy with
men of varied reading. But, if we are to judge from his own
statement in a letter from Heidelberg in 1846, the doubts
which now actively assailed him had long been latent in his
mind. The crisis of his mental conflict had just been passed
in Tirol, and he was now beginning to let his creed grow again
from the one fixed point which nothing had availed to shift:
“The one great certainty to which, in the midst of the darkest
doubt, I never ceased to cling—the entire symmetry and
loveliness and the unequalled nobleness of the humanity of
the Son of Man.” After this mental revolution he felt unable
to return to Cheltenham, but after doing duty for two months
at St Ebbe’s, Oxford, he entered in August 1847 on his famous
ministry at Trinity Chapel, Brighton. Here he stepped at
once into the foremost rank as a preacher, and his church was
thronged with thoughtful men of all classes in society and of
all shades of religious belief. His fine appearance, his flexible
and sympathetic voice, his manifest sincerity, the perfect
lucidity and artistic symmetry of his address, and the brilliance
with which he illustrated his points would have attracted
hearers even had he had little to say. But he had much to
say. He was not, indeed, a scientific theologian; but his insight
into the principles of the spiritual life was unrivalled.
As his biographer says, thousands found in his sermons “a
living source of impulse, a practical direction. of thought, a
key to many of the problems of theology, and above all a path
to spiritual freedom.” His closing years were full of sadness.
His sensitive nature was subjected to extreme suffering, arising
mainly from the opposition. aroused by his sympathy with
the revolutionary ideas of the 1848 epoch. Moreover, he was
crippled by incipient disease of the brain, which at first inflicted unconquerable lassitude and depression, and latterly
agonizing pain; On the 5th of June 1853 he preached for the
last time, and on the 15th of August he died.
Robertson’s published works include five volumes of sermons, two volumes of expository lectures, on Genesis and on the epistles to the Corinthians, a volume of miscellaneous addresses, and an Analysis of “In Memoriam.” See Life and Letters by Stopford A. Brooke (1865).
ROBERTSON, GEORGE CROOM (1842–1892), Scottish
philosopher, was born at Aberdeen on the 10th of March 1842.
In 1857 he gained a bursary at Marischal College, and graduated
M.A. in 1861, with the highest honours in classic sand philosophy.
In the same year he won a Fergusson scholarship
of £100 a year for two years, which enabled him to pursue
his studies outside Scotland. He went first to University
