Lord Cornwallis: Defender of British and American Liberty?
From the Journal of the American Revolution published on June 1, 2023.
General Charles, 1st Marquess, Cornwallis remains one of the most recognizable British figures of the American Revolution. Over the past two centuries, he has come to be invariably known as one of the “men who lost America.” This appellation has greatly overshadowed his less heralded service in Parliament, India, Europe, and Ireland. In Parliament, during the 1760s, Cornwallis was one of several lords opposing taxation and the infringement of British and American rights. Governing in India, he reformed civil, criminal, and economic systems that would expand the rights and privileges of its British and Indian imperial subjects there. In Ireland, he sought political rights for the Catholic majority while implementing a political union with England. Broadly speaking, Lord Cornwallis deserves more consideration than merely the general who surrendered an army at Yorktown.
Charles Cornwallis was born in 1738 and, from an early age, had the “irresistible impulse” to be a soldier.[1] After receiving an ensign’s commission in the 1st Foot Guards in 1756, he briefly attended the military academy at Turin before serving in the Seven Years’ War. In 1760, Lord Brome (as he was then known) was elected to the House of Commons for the Eye constituency.[2] While still serving in Germany in June 1762, he learned of his father’s death and his new status as the second Earl Cornwallis.[3] Returning to England, he took his seat in the House of Lords where he generally voted with Lords Shelburne and Temple.[4] Cornwallis’s political associations, at least during these early years, seem to have been a family tradition, his forebears being Whigs going back to the Glorious Revolution.[5]
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