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Henry Walton Ellis
Colonel Sir Henry Walton Ellis (29 November 1782 – 20 June 1815) was a British soldier in the Napoleonic Wars. Life He was the son of Major General Joyner Ellis, and grandson of J. Joyner of Berkeley, Gloucestershire. He was born in Cambray, Cheltenham in 1782 and baptised 6 October 1783, almost a year later, in Worcester, England. His father, Joyner Ellis, had taken the name Ellis in consequence of his adoption by 'Governor' Henry Ellis, lieutenant governor of Georgia, 1758, who lived for some time at Lansdowne Place, Bath, and died at Naples in 1806. Joyner Ellis served successively in the 18th, old 89th, and 41st Foot, became lieutenant-colonel of the 23rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers in 1793, major-general in 1798 and died 1804. He was member of parliament for Worcester for some years. By his wife, whose maiden name was Walton, he had several children, the eldest of whom, Henry Walton Ellis, was born at Worcester in 1783, and immediately appointed an ensign in the 89th foot, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cheltenham
Cheltenham (), also known as Cheltenham Spa, is a spa town and borough on the edge of the Cotswolds in the county of Gloucestershire, England. Cheltenham became known as a health and holiday spa town resort, following the discovery of mineral springs in 1716, and claims to be the most complete Regency town in Britain. The town hosts several festivals of culture, often featuring nationally and internationally famous contributors and attendees; they include the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, the Cheltenham Science Festival, the Cheltenham Music Festival, the Cheltenham Cricket Festival and the Cheltenham Food & Drink Festival. In steeplechase horse racing, the Gold Cup is the main event of the Cheltenham Festival, held every March. History Cheltenham stands on the small River Chelt, which rises nearby at Dowdeswell and runs through the town on its way to the Severn. It was first recorded in 803, as ''Celtan hom''; the meaning has not been resol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battle Of Copenhagen (1807)
The Second Battle of Copenhagen (or the Bombardment of Copenhagen) (16 August – 7 September 1807) was a British bombardment of the Danish capital, Copenhagen, in order to capture or destroy the Dano-Norwegian fleet during the Napoleonic Wars. The incident led to the outbreak of the Anglo-Russian War of 1807, which ended with the Treaty of Örebro in 1812. Britain's first response to Napoleon's Continental System was to launch a major naval attack on Denmark. Although ostensibly neutral, Denmark was under heavy French pressure to pledge its fleet to Napoleon. In September 1807, the Royal Navy bombarded Copenhagen, seizing the Danish fleet and assured use of the sea lanes in the North Sea and Baltic Sea for the British merchant fleet. A consequence of the attack was that Denmark did join the Continental System and the war on the side of France, but without a fleet it had little to offer. The attack gave rise to the term to ''Copenhagenize''. Background Despite the defeat a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battle Of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815, near Waterloo, Belgium, Waterloo (at that time in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, now in Belgium). A French army under the command of Napoleon was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition. One of these was a British-led coalition consisting of units from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Kingdom of Hanover, Hanover, Duchy of Brunswick, Brunswick, and Duchy of Nassau, Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington (referred to by many authors as ''the Anglo-allied army'' or ''Wellington's army''). The other was composed of three corps of the Kingdom of Prussia, Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, von Blücher (the fourth corps of this army fought at the Battle of Wavre on the same day). The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle was contemporaneously known as the Battle of Mont Saint-J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Duke Of Wellington
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, (1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852) was an Anglo-Irish soldier and Tory statesman who was one of the leading military and political figures of 19th-century Britain, serving twice as prime minister of the United Kingdom. He is among the commanders who won and ended the Napoleonic Wars when the coalition defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Wellesley was born in Dublin into the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. He was commissioned as an ensign in the British Army in 1787, serving in Ireland as aide-de-camp to two successive lords lieutenant of Ireland. He was also elected as a member of Parliament in the Irish House of Commons. He was a colonel by 1796 and saw action in the Netherlands and in India, where he fought in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War at the Battle of Seringapatam. He was appointed governor of Seringapatam and Mysore in 1799 and, as a newly appointed major-general, won a decisive victory over the Maratha Con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Order Of The Bath
The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by George I of Great Britain, George I on 18 May 1725. The name derives from the elaborate medieval ceremony for appointing a knight, which involved Bathing#Medieval and early-modern Europe, bathing (as a symbol of purification) as one of its elements. The knights so created were known as "Knights of the Bath". George I "erected the Knights of the Bath into a regular Order (honour), Military Order". He did not (as is commonly believed) revive the Order of the Bath, since it had never previously existed as an Order, in the sense of a body of knights who were governed by a set of Statute, statutes and whose numbers were replenished when vacancies occurred. The Order consists of the Sovereign (currently Charles III, King Charles III), the :Great Masters of the Order of the Bath, Great Master (currently vacant) and three Classes of members: *Knight Grand Cross (:Knights Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battle Of Roncesvalles (1813)
The Battle of Roncesvalles (french: Roncevaux) (25 July 1813) was a battle between French and Anglo-Portuguese forces during the Peninsular War (1808–1814). Background After the decisive victory of Allied forces under Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington over French forces under King Joseph Bonaparte at the Battle of Vitoria, Wellington advanced to capture San Sebastián and Pamplona, the last French outposts on Spanish soil. While Wellington concentrated his efforts on capturing the strategically important port of San Sebastián, he sent 11,000 men under the Irish-Spanish General O'Donnell to blockade Pamplona. To prevent a French counter-attack over the Pyrenees Wellington positioned General Hill's Corps over a front, to cover the coastal road and the main passes over the mountains. Battle Having rapidly rebuilt and reorganised his forces after their defeat, the French under Marshal Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult launched an attack towards Pamplona through the pass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Siege Of Badajos
In the siege of Badajoz (16 March – 6 April 1812), also called the third siege of Badajoz, an Anglo-Portuguese Army under the Earl of Wellington (later the Duke of Wellington) besieged Badajoz, Spain, and forced the surrender of the French garrison. The siege was one of the bloodiest in the Napoleonic Wars and was considered a costly victory by the British, with some 4,800 Allied soldiers killed or wounded in a few short hours of intense fighting during the storming of the breaches as the siege drew to an end. Enraged at the huge number of casualties they suffered in seizing the city, the troops broke into houses and stores consuming vast quantities of alcohol with many of them then going on a rampage, threatening their officers and ignoring their commands to desist, and even killing several. It took three days before the men were brought back into order. When order was restored, an estimated 200-300 civilians had been killed or injured. Background The allied campaign ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battle Of Albuera
The Battle of Albuera (16 May 1811) was a battle during the Peninsular War. A mixed British, Spanish and Portuguese corps engaged elements of the French Armée du Midi (Army of the South) at the small Spanish village of Albuera, about south of the frontier fortress-town of Badajoz, Spain. From October 1810, Marshal Masséna's French Army of Portugal had been tied down in an increasingly hopeless stand-off against Wellington's Allied forces, safely entrenched in and behind the Lines of Torres Vedras. Acting on Napoleon's orders, in early 1811 Marshal Soult led a French expedition from Andalusia into in a bid to draw Allied forces away from the Lines and ease Masséna's plight. Napoleon's information was outdated and Soult's intervention came too late; starving and understrength, Masséna's army was already withdrawing to Spain. Soult was able to capture the strategically important fortress at Badajoz on the border between Spain and Portugal from the Spanish, but was forced t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peninsular War
The Peninsular War (1807–1814) was the military conflict fought in the Iberian Peninsula by Spain, Portugal, and the United Kingdom against the invading and occupying forces of the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. In Spain, it is considered to overlap with the Spanish War of Independence. The war started when the French and Spanish armies invaded and occupied Portugal in 1807 by transiting through Spain, and it escalated in 1808 after Napoleonic France occupied Spain, which had been its ally. Napoleon Bonaparte forced the abdications of Ferdinand VII and his father Charles IV and then installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne and promulgated the Bayonne Constitution. Most Spaniards rejected French rule and fought a bloody war to oust them. The war on the peninsula lasted until the Sixth Coalition defeated Napoleon in 1814, and is regarded as one of the first wars of national liberation. It is also significant for the emergence of larg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Beckwith (British Army Officer)
General Sir George Beckwith GCB (1753 – 20 March 1823) was a British Army officer. Military career Beckwith was commissioned into the 37th Regiment of Foot in 1771. He distinguished himself as a regimental officer in the American Revolutionary War, where he was assistant to Major Oliver Delancey responsible for British Intelligence. In July 1782, he replaced Delancey and after the war he worked for Sir Guy Carleton in Canada. His efforts were aimed at stirring up trouble in Vermont, Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee. At the time Britain thought the weak American government might ask for British help. He was then appointed Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Bermuda in 1797, when a colonel. His baggage and furniture left England on 23 September 1797, aboard the ''Caledonia'', travelling in a convoy bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, but was lost when the ''Caledonia'' was captured by the French. Beckwith was to follow aboard a Royal Navy frigate and so escaped the fate of his ba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Firelock
The lock of a firearm is the mechanism used to initiate firing. It is a historical term, in that it generally refers to such mechanisms used in muzzle-loading and early breech-loading firearms. Side-lock refers to the type of construction, in which the individual components of the mechanism are mounted either side of a single plate. The assembly is then mounted to the stock on the side of the firearm. In modern firearm designs, the mechanism to initiate firing is generally constructed within the frame or receiver of the firearm and is referred to as the firing or trigger mechanism. Hand cannon Hand cannon, the earliest of firearms, had arrived in Europe by 1338. These cannons were loaded from the muzzle. The propellent charge is lit through a touch hole. A small priming charge over the touch hole is ignited with a lit piece of slow match or similar. These hand cannons were ungainly: the difficulty being in holding and aiming the weapon while manipulating the slow burnin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fort Bourbon
Fort Bourbon was one of the forts built by La Vérendrye during his expansion of trade and exploration west from Lake Superior. Besides providing support for the important fur trade in what is now Manitoba, La Vérendrye wanted to conduct exploration of potential routes for what he believed was an interior western sea. The name "Fort Bourbon" was also given to York Factory while it was occupied by the French. ''First Fort Bourbon'' was at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River on Lake Winnipeg. The youngest La Vérendrye son, Louis-Joseph Gaultier de La Vérendrye, led an initial exploration to the area in 1737. An epidemic of smallpox thwarted the mission. In 1740 Louis-Joseph had a successful trip exploring the Saskatchewan River to a short distance west of Cedar Lake and mapping the site for the first Fort Paskoya at the west end of Cedar Lake. On his return toward Lake Winnipeg, he mapped the area and established a site for the first Fort Bourbon. The map of 1740 indicated a si ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
