James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin

The Right Honourable The Earl of Elgin KT, GCB, PC
Viceroy of India
In office 21 March 1862 – 20 November 1863
Monarch	Victoria
Preceded by	The Earl Canning
Succeeded by	Sir Robert Napier As Acting Governor-General
Governor General of the Province of Canada
In office 1847–1854
Monarch	Victoria
Preceded by	The Earl Cathcart
Succeeded by	Sir Edmund Walker Head, Bt
Governor of Jamaica
In office 1842–1846
Monarch	Victoria
Preceded by	Sir Charles Metcalfe, Bt
Succeeded by	George Henry Frederick Berkeley As Acting Governor
Personal details
Born	(1811-07-20)20 July 1811 London, United Kingdom
Died	20 November 1863(1863-11-20) (aged 52) Dharamsala, Punjab, British India
Nationality	British
Spouse(s)	(1) Elizabeth Cumming-Bruce (d. 1843) (2) Lady Mary Lambton (d. 1898)
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford
Signature

James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin and 12th Earl of Kincardine, KT, GCB, PC (20 July 1811 – 20 November 1863), was a British colonial administrator and diplomat. He was the Governor General of the Province of Canada, a High Commissioner in charge of opening trades with China and Japan, and Viceroy of India. As British High Commissioner in China during the Second Opium War in 1860 he infamously ordered the destruction of one of Asia's most important historical sites, the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.

Early life and education

Lord Elgin was the son of the 7th Earl of Elgin and 11th Earl of Kincardine and his second wife. Elgin's wife, Lady Mary Lambton, was a daughter of the 1st Earl of Durham, a prominent author of the Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839), and niece of the Colonial Secretary the 3rd Earl Grey.

He shared his birthday 20 July with his father. He had seven brothers and sisters and four half-sisters and one half-brother from his father's first marriage. Lord Elgin's father was reportedly impoverished by the purchase of the Elgin Marbles. His father had acquired them at great expense, but sold them to the British government for much less.

James Bruce was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, graduated with a first in Classics in 1832. While at Oxford he became friends with William Ewart Gladstone.

Career

He was elected at the 1841 general election as a Member of Parliament for Southampton, but the election was declared void on petition. He did not stand in the resulting by-election.

Jamaica

James Bruce became Governor of Jamaica in 1842, and in 1847 was appointed Governor General of Canada.

Canada

Under Lord Elgin, the first real attempts began at establishing responsible government in Canada. In 1848, the moderate reformers of both Canada East and Canada West, Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin, won their elections, and Lord Elgin asked them to form a government together. Lord Elgin became the first Governor General to remove himself from the affairs of the legislature, leading to the essentially symbolic role that the Governor-General has since had with regards to the political affairs of the country. As Governor-General, he wrestled with the costs of receiving high levels of immigration in the Canadas, a major issue in the constant debate about immigration during the 19th century.^{[citation needed]}

In 1849 the Baldwin-Lafontaine government passed the Rebellion Losses Bill, compensating French Canadians for losses suffered during the Rebellions of 1837.^{[citation needed]} Lord Elgin granted royal assent to the bill despite heated Tory opposition and his own personal misgivings, sparking riots in Quebec, during which Elgin himself was assaulted by an English-speaking mob and the Parliament buildings were burned down. The French-speaking minority in the Canadian legislature also unsuccessfully tried to have him removed from his post.^{[citation needed]}

In 1849, the Stony Monday Riot took place in Bytown on Monday 17 September. Tories and Reformists clashed over the planned visit of Lord Elgin, one man was killed and many sustained injuries. Two days later, the two political factions, armed with cannons, muskets and pistols faced off on the Sappers Bridge. Although the conflict was defused in time by the military, a general support for the Crown's representative, triumphed in Bytown (renamed Ottawa by Queen Victoria in 1854). In 1854, Lord Elgin negotiated the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States in an attempt to stimulate the Canadian economy. Later that year, he granted royal assent to the law that abolished the seigneurial system in Quebec, and then resigned as Governor-General.^{[citation needed]}

China and Japan

In 1857 he became High Commissioner to China and travelled to China and Japan in 1858-59, where he led the bombing of Canton and oversaw the end of the Second Opium War by signing the Treaties of Tianjin on 26 June 1858.

In June 1860 he returned to China to assist with further attacks that were initially led by his brother. On 18 October 1860, Elgin, not having received the Chinese surrender and wishing to spare Beijing itself, ordered the complete destruction of the Yuan Ming Yuan (or Old Summer Palace) outside Beijing in retaliation for the imprisonment, torture, and execution of almost twenty European and Indian prisoners (including two British envoys and a journalist for The Times). The Old Summer Palace was a complex of palaces and gardens eight kilometres northwest of the walls of Beijing; it had been built during the 18th and early 19th centuries and was where the emperors of the Qing Dynasty resided and handled government affairs. An alternative account says that Elgin had initially considered the destruction of the Forbidden City, but fearing that it might interfere with the signing of the Convention of Beijing, which was where it was being negotiated, he opted for the destruction of the Old Summer Palace in its stead.

Entry of Lord Elgin into Beijing, 1860

The Old Summer Palace was fired by 3,500 British troops and burned for three days. Elgin and his troops also managed to loot many treasures from the Yuan Ming Yuan imperial gardens and took them to Britain. Attacks on the Summer Palace, were also made but the extent of destruction was not as great as to Yuan Ming Yuan. On 24 October 1860 Elgin signed the Convention of Beijing, which stipulated that China was to cede part of Kowloon Peninsula and Hong Kong in perpetuity to Britain.^{[citation needed]}

In between Elgin's two trips to China he had visited Japan and signed in August 1858 a Treaty of Amity and Commerce whose negotiation was much eased by the recent Harris Treaty between Japan and the United States. Elgin was ambivalent about the British policy on forcing opium on the people in the Far East. It was not without internal struggle that he carried out the duty laid on him by Britain. In a letter to his wife, in regard to the bombing of Canton he wrote, "I never felt so ashamed of myself in my life."

India

Grave memorial at St. John in the Wilderness church in Dharamsala

James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin sculpture in front of Parliament Building (Quebec)

He became Viceroy of India in 1861, and was the first to use Peterhoff, Shimla as the official residence of the Viceroy. He died in 1863 of a heart attack while crossing a swinging rope and wood bridge over the river Chandra, on the lap between Kullu and Lahul. He was buried in the churchyard of St. John in the Wilderness in Dharamshala.

Legacy

The towns of Kincardine, Port Elgin and Bruce Mines and the counties of Bruce and Elgin in Ontario are named after him, as is the community of Elgin, New Brunswick. Numerous Elgin Roads and Elgin Streets in Canada, India and Hong Kong are also named in his honour, as is the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa.

His legacy in Canada was the subject of a 1959 National Film Board of Canada short docudrama, Lord Elgin: Voice of the People, directed by Julian Biggs.

See also

• List of Lieutenant Governors of Ontario
• List of Lieutenant Governors of Quebec
• Anglo-Chinese relations
• Anglo-Japanese relations

Sources

• Wrong, George M. The Earl of Elgin. Toronto : G.N. Morang, 1906. Also digitized by Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions 2003.
• Morison, John Lyle. The eighth Earl of Elgin : a chapter in nineteenth-century imperial history. London : Hodder and Stoughton, 1928.
• Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's mission to China and Japan, 1857-8-9 (2 volumes), Laurence Oliphant, 1859 (reprinted by Oxford University Press, 1970) {No ISBN}
• Checkland, S.G. The Elgins 1766-1917 : a tale of aristocrats, proconsuls and their wives. Aberdeen : Aberdeen University Press, 1988. ISBN 0-08-036395-4.
• Harris, David. Van Slyke, Lyman P. (2000). Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato's Photographs of China. University of California Press. ISBN 0-89951-100-7.
• John Newsinger, 'Elgin in China,' The New Left Review, 15 May/June, 2002. pp. 119–40.
• James L. Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)
• Moving Here, Staying Here: The Canadian Immigrant Experience at Library and Archives Canada - A letter from Lord Elgin, Governor General of the Canadas, to the Colonial Office

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by the Earl of Elgin
• Works by James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin at Project Gutenberg
• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Erik Ringmar, "Liberal Barbarism and the Oriental Sublime: The European Destruction of the Emperor’s Summer Palace," Millennium, 34:3, 2006. pp. 917–33.
• Lord Elgin, "Second Mission to China, 1860," from Extracts from the Letters of James, Earl of Elgin to Mary Louisa, Countess of Elgin, 1847-1862 (London, 1864)
• Venn, J.; Venn, J. A., eds. (1922–1958). "Elgin and Kincardine, James, Earl of". Alumni Cantabrigienses (10 vols) (online ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Leigh Rayment's Peerage Pages
• Leigh Rayment's Historical List of MPs

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Abel Rous Dottin Viscount Duncan	Member of Parliament for Southampton 1841–1842 With: Charles Cecil Martyn	Succeeded by Humphrey St John Mildmay George William Hope
Political offices
Preceded by The Lord Colchester	Postmaster General 1859–1860	Succeeded by The Lord Stanley of Alderley
Government offices
Preceded by Sir Charles Metcalfe, Bt	Governor of Jamaica 1842–1846	Succeeded by George Henry Frederick Berkeley (acting)
Preceded by The Earl Cathcart	Governor General of the Province of Canada 1847–1854	Succeeded by Sir Edmund Walker Head, Bt
Preceded by The Earl Canning	Viceroy of India 1862–1863	Succeeded by Sir Robert Napier (acting)
Honorary titles
Preceded by James Erskine Wemyss	Lord Lieutenant of Fife 1854–1863	Succeeded by James Hay Erskine Wemyss
Academic offices
Preceded by The Earl Cathcart	Chancellor of King's College 1847–1849	Succeeded by Peter Boyle de Blaquière (as Chancellor of the University of Toronto)
Preceded by The Lord Lytton	Rector of the University of Glasgow 1859–1862	Succeeded by The Viscount Palmerston
Peerage of Scotland
Preceded by Thomas Bruce	Earl of Elgin Earl of Kincardine 1841–1863	Succeeded by Victor Bruce