Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava


Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was a British statesman, traveller and prominent member of Victorian society. He served as Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India.
In his youth he was a popular figure in the court of Queen Victoria, and became well known to the public after publishing a best-selling account of his travels in the North Atlantic.
He is now best known as one of the most successful public servants of his time. His long career in public service began as a commissioner to Syria in 1860, where his skilful diplomacy maintained British interests while preventing France from instituting a client state in Lebanon. After his success in Syria, Dufferin served in the Government of the United Kingdom as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Under-Secretary of State for War. In 1872 he became Governor General of Canada, bolstering imperial ties in the early years of the Dominion. In this position, he was Queen Victoria's representative in Canada, promoting a British perspective and raising funds for Quebec City. In 1884 he reached the pinnacle of his official career as Viceroy of India.
He served as ambassador to France from 1891 to 1896. Following his retirement from the diplomatic service in 1896, his final years were marred by personal tragedy and a misguided attempt to secure his family's financial position. His eldest son was killed in the Second Boer War and another son was badly wounded. He was chairman of a mining firm that went bankrupt after swindling people, although he was ignorant of the matter. One biographer, Richard Davenport-Hines says he was "imaginative, sympathetic, warm-hearted, and gloriously versatile." He was an effective leader in Lebanon, Canada and India, averted war with Russia, and annexed Burma. He was careless with money but charming in high society on three continents.

Early life

He was born Frederick Temple Blackwood into the Ascendancy, Ireland's Anglo-Irish aristocracy, the son of Price Blackwood, 4th Baron Dufferin and Claneboye. On his father's side, Dufferin was descended from Scottish settlers who had moved to County Down in the early 17th century. The Blackwood family became prominent landowners in Ulster over the following two hundred years, and were created baronets in 1763, entering the Peerage of Ireland in 1800 as Baron Dufferin. The family had influence in parliament because they controlled the return for the borough of Killyleagh. Marriages in the Blackwood family were often advantageous to their landowning and high-society ambitions. His mother, Helen Selina Sheridan, was the granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and through her, the family became connected to English literary and political circles.
Dufferin was born in 1826 in Florence, then the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the Italian peninsula, with great advantages. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became president of the Oxford Union Society for debate, although he left Oxford after only two years without obtaining a degree. While still an Oxford undergraduate, he visited Skibbereen in County Cork to see the impact of the Irish Famine first-hand. He was appalled by what he saw, prompting him to raise money on behalf of the starving poor. In 1841, while still at school, he succeeded his father as Baron Dufferin and Claneboye in the Peerage of Ireland and in 1849 was appointed a Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria. In 1850 he was additionally created Baron Claneboye, of Clandeboye in the County of Down, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. He inherited 18,000 acres in County Down.
In 1856, Dufferin commissioned the schooner Foam and set off on a journey around the North Atlantic. He first made landfall on Iceland, where he visited the then very small Reykjavík, the plains of Þingvellir, and Geysir. Returning to Reykjavík, Foam was towed north by Prince Napoleon, who was on an expedition to the region in the steamer La Reine Hortense. Dufferin sailed close to Jan Mayen Island, but was unable to land there due to heavy ice and caught only a very brief glimpse of the island through the fog. From Jan Mayen, Foam sailed on to northern Norway, stopping at Hammerfest before sailing for Spitzbergen.
On his return, Dufferin published a book about his travels, Letters From High Latitudes. With its irreverent style and lively pace, it was extremely successful and can be regarded as the prototype of the comic travelogue. It remained in print for many years and was translated into French, German and Urdu. The letters were nominally written to his mother, with whom he had developed a very close relationship after the death of his father when he was 15.

A natural diplomat

Despite the great success of Letters From High Latitudes, Dufferin did not pursue a career as an author, although he was known for his skilful writing throughout his career. Instead, he became a public servant, with his first major public appointment in 1860 as British representative on a commission to Syria to investigate the causes of a civil war earlier that year in which the Maronite Christian population had been subject to massacres by the Muslim and Druze populations. In light of this work in June 1861 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. Working with French, Russian, Prussian and Turkish representatives on the commission, Dufferin proved remarkably successful in achieving the objectives of British policy in the area. He upheld Turkish rule in the area, and prevented the French from establishing a client state in Lebanon, later securing the removal of a French occupying force in Syria. He also defended the interests of the Druze community, with whom Britain had a long association. The other parties on the commission were inclined to repress the Druze population, but Dufferin argued that had the Christians won the war they would have been just as bloodthirsty. The long-term plan agreed by the commission for the governance of the region was largely that proposed by Dufferin — that Lebanon should be governed separately from the rest of Syria, by a Christian Ottoman who was not a native of Syria. He was appointed a Knight of the Order of Saint Patrick on 28 January 1864.
Dufferin's achievements in Syria launched his long and successful career in public service. In 1864 he became Under-Secretary of State for India, moving to Under-Secretary of War in 1866, and from 1868 he held the position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Prime Minister Gladstone's government. In 1871 he was raised in the Peerage as Earl of Dufferin, in the County of Down, and Viscount Claneboye, of Clandeboye in the County of Down.

Family

Lord Dufferin took the name Hamilton by royal licence on 9 September 1862, shortly before his marriage to Hariot Georgina Rowan-Hamilton on 23 October 1862. He was distantly related to the Hamilton family by previous marriages, and the union was partly designed to eliminate some long-standing hostilities between the families. Dufferin also took the name of Temple, on 13 November 1872. They had seven surviving children; the two youngest, a son and a daughter, were born in Canada:
Shortly after his marriage, he was deeply upset when his mother married his friend George Hay, Earl of Gifford, a man some 17 years her junior. The marriage scandalised society, but Lord Gifford died only weeks afterwards. Despite his disapproval of his mother's second marriage, Lord Dufferin was devastated by her death in 1867, and built Helen's Tower, a memorial to her, on the estate at Clandeboye. A nearby bay was also named Helen's Bay, and a railway station of that name was built there by him, seeding the growth of the modern Belfast commuter town of Helen's Bay.