It is with great diffidence that I lay this memoir before the public; it is my first experience in such work, but my reasons for so doing appear to me unanswerable. It was to my care and judgment that my father, by his will, committed his letters and journals, and my heart confirms the judgment of my mind, that his active and interesting life, so varied in the many different positions he was called upon to fill, and the considerable part he played in the affairs of his time, deserve a fuller rec

CHARLES PHILIP, FOURTH EARL OF HARDWICKE From a painting by E. U. Eddis THE HONBLE. CHARLES YORKE SOLICITOR-GENERAL From a painting by Allan Ramsay (?) SIR JOSEPH SYDNEY YORKE As A MIDSHIPMAN, R.N. From a painting by George Romney SIR JOSEPH SYDNEY YORKE As A LIEUTENANT, R.N. from a painting by George Romney CHARLES PHILIP, FOURTH EARL OF HARDWICKE From a chalk drawing by E. U. Eddis SUSAN, COUNTESS OF HARDWICKE From a chalk drawing by E. U. Eddis...

The family of Yorke first came into prominence with the great Chancellor Philip Yorke, first Earl of Hardwicke. This remarkable man, who was the son of an attorney at Dover, descended, it is claimed, from the Yorkes of Hannington in North Wiltshire, a family of some consequence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was born in that town in the year 1690, and rose from a comparatively humble station to the commanding position he held so long in English public life. My object in this chapter i

Charles Philip Yorke was born on April 2, 1799, at Sydney Lodge, Hamble, and like his father, was destined from the first for a naval career. He must have been quite a small boy when Sir Joseph presented him to Lord Nelson, and the family tradition is that the hero accosted him with a kind smile and said, 'Give me a shake of your daddle, my boy, for I've only one to shake you with.' The boy was sent to Harrow, and after a few years at that school was entered, in his fourteenth year, at the Royal

A few letters which my father wrote home from the Halifax station, covering a period of about twelve months from July 1817, I set out here as giving better than any comment of my own an account of his life and experiences in Nova Scotia at that time. They present a self-reliant character, and the young midshipman who was so early recognised by his superior officers as efficient and capable was found worthy of a small, but most important, command soon after joining this station. His father, Sir J

Charles Yorke, having attained the rank of commander in May of 1822, was in August of the same year appointed to the command of the sloop Alacrity , and in her sailed to the Mediterranean in the autumn, anchoring at Gibraltar on November 29. He was dispatched to that station to take up some important duties in the Greek Archipelago, which arose out of the Greek War of Independence, then in full progress. Until the year 1821, the Greeks, though often ready to rebel against the Turkish government

My father appears to have had a long leave between the two commands, in the Alacrity (1826) and the Alligator (1829), during which commands he was employed in the Mediterranean, with a roving commission—a free lance, in short—to put down piracy and watch the War of Independence between the Greeks and the Turks. He never let the grass grow under his feet, so off he started with his friend Walrond on a roving tour through the greater part of Scandinavia, and his journals contain a daily record, ex

In letters written from Stockholm to his father and brother in the autumn of 1828, Captain Yorke expresses very urgently his desire to find himself again on active service. 'I see the Lord High Admiral is out,' he wrote to Sir Joseph in September of that year, 'and whoever comes in, pray try and get me to the Mediterranean if it is possible.' A month later his brother, the Rev. Henry Yorke, is reminded of the same wish. 'Since the Russians have blockaded the Dardanelles and old Melville has agai

On the voyage home from the Mediterranean in the steamship Meteor , which is described in the journal I have quoted in the last chapter, my father received the sad news of the death of Sir Joseph Sydney Yorke, an event to which he makes no allusion in the journal. Admiral Sir Henry Hotham, who had just been appointed to the command of the Mediterranean station, and had sailed in the St. Vincent from Portsmouth, was the bearer of a last letter written by Sir Joseph to his son on the 3rd of April

In spite of the many interests of his position as a great landowner and the distractions of politics at a time of great political unrest, Lord Hardwicke had never wavered in his love for his true profession of the sea. In his own words, 'in piping times of peace he was loth to take the bread out of his brother officers' mouths after he became a peer,' by applying for active employment in the navy. He had, nevertheless, always placed himself at the disposal of the Admiralty, where his wish to ser

Having resumed the profession to which he had always been devoted, it was the ambition of Lord Hardwicke's life to continue his naval career, and to complete a period of active service afloat which would have entitled him to promotion to flag rank. He was encouraged in this desire by all his friends, even by those who, like John Wilson Croker, had opposed his return to active service. In a letter written by that gentleman to Lady Hardwicke in 1849, he said: 'I never was very favourable to his go