Everything about George Macartney Earl Macartney totally explained
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George Macartney shouldn't be confused with Sir George McCartney, a later British statesman.
George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney,
KB (
14 May,
1737 -
31 May,
1806) was a
British statesman, colonial administrator and diplomat.
Biography
George Macartney was descended from an old
Scottish family, the Macartneys of
Auchinleck, who had settled in 1649 at Lissanoure, near
Loughguile,
Ballymoney,
County Antrim,
Ireland, where he was born. After graduating from
Trinity College, Dublin, in 1759, he became a student of the Temple, London. Through
Stephen Fox, elder brother of
Charles James Fox, he was taken up by
Lord Holland.
Appointed envoy extraordinary to
Russia in 1764, he succeeded in negotiating with
Catherine II an alliance between
England and that country. After occupying a seat in the British parliament, he was returned in 1769 to the
Irish House of Commons as
MP for
Armagh Borough, in order to discharge the duties of
Chief Secretary for Ireland. On resigning this office he was
knighted.
In 1775 he became governor of the
British West Indies was created
Baron Macartney in the
Peerage of Ireland in 1776, and became governor of Madras (now known as
Chennai) in 1780. He declined the governor-generalship of India (then the British territories administered by the
British East India Company), and returned to
Great Britain in 1786.
Embassy to China
After being created
Earl Macartney in the Irish peerage (1792), he was appointed the first envoy of Britain to
China (his visit followed by more than a hundred years the first visit to England by a Chinese man,
Michael Shen Fu-Tsung in 1685). He led the
Macartney Embassy to
Beijing in 1793 with a large British delegation on board of a 64-gun man-of-war. He met the Emperor
Qianlong, despite his famous refusal to
kowtow and insult over a jade gift (which Macartney referred to as a worthless rock), but failed in negotiating the British requests:
» *the relaxation of the restrictions on trade between Britain and China
*the acquisition by Britain of "a small unfortified island near
Chusan for the residence of British traders, storage of goods, and outfitting of ships"
» *the establishment of a permanent British embassy in Beijing
The policies of the
Thirteen Factories remained. The embassy returned to Britain in 1794.
On his return from a confidential mission to
Italy (1795) he was raised to the British peerage as
Baron Macartney, and in the end of 1796 was appointed governor of the newly acquired territory of the
Cape Colony, where he remained until ill health compelled him to resign in November 1798. He died at
Chiswick,
Middlesex, on
May 31,
1806, the title becoming extinct, and his property, after the death of his widow (Lady Jane Stuart, daughter of the
3rd Earl of Bute; they were married in 1768), going to his niece, whose son took the name.
Further Information
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