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 and later at Munich and at the smaller German courts) and Frances Theresa Duncombe. The family was an Anglo-Scottish Highland line of the Roses of Kilravock in Strathnairn, Inverness-shire, with the senior diplomatic career of his father giving the boy a childhood in continental Europe and the set of European languages (German, French, Italian, Russian) that would matter through his Crimean and Indian career. He was schooled privately by his father's German tutors and at the English school for diplomatic families at Berlin; he was commissioned an ensign in the 19th Regiment of Foot on 17 May 1820, on the purchase of a commission the family connection had paid for, and was on the regimental rolls of the British army of the long peace from then forward.

The Syrian posting of 1839 to 1840 was his first military distinction. He was sent as a liaison officer to the Egyptian army of Ibrahim Pasha (son of the Khedive Mehmet Ali) for the campaign the Egyptian army was running against the Ottoman empire in the Syrian theatre of the Eastern Question crisis. He worked alongside Ibrahim through the campaigning of 1840, took part in the actions across the Lebanon and northern Palestine of that summer, was severely wounded at Boghaz on the Syrian coast, and was awarded the Order of the Bath at twenty-nine on the strength of the service. He came home to half-pay, was placed on a second diplomatic-military posting at Beirut and Damascus across 1841 to 1848 as British military attaché to the Ottoman army, and took the Turkish service medal *Order of the Medjidie* through the period.

The Crimean War took him into senior field service. He was sent as senior British commissioner to the headquarters of the French army at Varna and then in the Crimea in 1854 on the principle that his French was excellent and his diplomatic and military experience of the previous decade was the combination needed for the difficult Anglo-French command interface of the war. He worked alongside Marshal Saint-Arnaud, then Marshal Canrobert, then Marshal Pélissier across the three French commanders-in-chief of the Crimean campaign; the Anglo-French strategic-and-operational coordination through the twelve months of the trench-and-assault siege of Sebastopol from October 1854 to September 1855 was, in senior accounts of the campaign, substantially Rose's achievement. He was promoted major-general at the end of the war in 1855, awarded the Knight Commander of the Bath, and given the command of the Poona division of the Bombay army in November 1856.

The Indian Mutiny broke out in May 1857 while he was at his Poona command. The senior military problem of the late-1857 phase of the rebellion across central India was the uprising of the princely states between Bombay and the Ganges, in particular the rebel position of the Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi and the rebel centre at Kalpi on the Yamuna river. Rose was given command of the new Central India Field Force on 17 December 1857 and marched out of Mhow on 16 January 1858 with about four and a half thousand British and loyalist Indian troops and a siege train. The campaign that followed was the offensive of the Mutiny in central India. He broke through Ratghur and Saugor across late January and February 1858, took Garhakota on 12 February, broke the rebel position on the Betwa river at Rajghat on 25 March, and laid siege to Jhansi from 21 March. The Jhansi siege ran for two weeks; the assault on 3 April broke the city; the Rani Lakshmi Bai escaped on a galloping reconnaissance across the Bundi river to the rebel command of Tatya Tope at Kalpi. The Battle of Kunch on 7 May broke the Tope-Lakshmi Bai field army. The Battle of Kalpi on 23 May 1858 took the central rebel position on the Yamuna. The Battle of Gwalior on 18 June broke the remaining rebel field force and killed the Rani Lakshmi Bai in a cavalry action at the city wall. The campaign across the four hundred and eighty miles of central India in five months had broken the central-Indian arm of the rebellion.

He was made Grand Cross of the Bath in November 1858, promoted lieutenant-general in May 1860, and appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army in India in June 1860, a tenure of three years to June 1863. He was Commander-in-Chief Ireland from 1865 to 1870, was created Baron Strathnairn of Strathnairn (the family location, the valley of the upper river Nairn between Daviot and Loch Ruthven) and of Jhansi (the central-Indian battlefield) in 1866, and was promoted Field Marshal in 1877. He never married. He died at the Hôtel Royal in Versailles on 16 October 1885, eighty-four years old, of a sudden heart failure on a morning walk in the Parc de Versailles he had taken every day in his retirement. He is buried at Christ Church, Down Street, Mayfair, London. The Rose name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the Highland Roses of Kilravock and Strathnairn, the senior cadet Highland-Norman line of the Inverness-shire low country; he carried it from a Berlin diplomatic childhood into the central-Indian command of the 1857 Mutiny campaign.