Sir Hugh Rose(1801–1885)

Hugh Henry Rose was born at Berlin on 6 April 1801, son of Sir George Henry Rose, the British minister at Berlin, of the Highland Roses of Kilravock in Strathnairn. A continental diplomatic childhood gave him the German, French, Italian and Russian that would matter through his later career. He was commissioned an ensign in the 19th Foot in 1820.

His first military distinction came as a liaison officer to the Egyptian army of Ibrahim Pasha in the Syrian campaign of 1840, where he served through that summer's actions, was severely wounded at Boghaz, and was awarded the Order of the Bath at twenty-nine. He spent the following years as British military attaché to the Ottoman army at Beirut and Damascus.

The Crimean War took him into senior field service as senior British commissioner to the headquarters of the French army, his excellent French and his diplomatic and military experience making him the man for the difficult Anglo-French command interface. The Anglo-French coordination through the twelve-month siege of Sebastopol was, in senior accounts, substantially his achievement; he was promoted major-general at the end of the war and given the Poona division of the Bombay army.

His decisive command came in 1857. Given the new Central India Field Force in December 1857, he marched out of Mhow in January 1858 with about four and a half thousand troops and a siege train and ran the offensive of the campaign across central India: through Ratghur and Saugor, the Betwa river, the storming of Jhansi on 3 April, the Battle of Kunch, the Battle of Kalpi on 23 May, and the Battle of Gwalior on 18 June. In five months across four hundred and eighty miles he had broken the central-Indian arm of the rebellion.

He was made Grand Cross of the Bath in 1858, appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army in India in 1860, and Commander-in-Chief Ireland from 1865 to 1870. He was created Baron Strathnairn, of his family's Strathnairn and of Jhansi, in 1866, and promoted Field Marshal in 1877. He died at Versailles on 16 October 1885, eighty-four years old, and is buried at Christ Church, Mayfair. The Rose name, the Highland Roses of Kilravock and Strathnairn, he carried from a Berlin diplomatic childhood into the central-Indian command of 1858 and the senior commands of the Victorian army.