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EDWARDS, AMELIA—EDWARDS, HENRY

the frontier tribes during the war. So effective was his procedure for the safety of the border that he was able to raise a large force in the Punjab and send it to co-operate in the siege and capture of Delhi. In 1859 Edwardes once more went to England, his health so greatly impaired by the continual strain of arduous work that it was doubtful whether he could ever return to India. During his stay he was created K.C.B., with the rank of brevet colonel; and the degree of LL.D. was conferred upon him by the university of Cambridge. Early in 1862 he again sailed for India, and was appointed commissioner of Umballa and agent for the Cis-Sutlej states. He had been offered the governorship of the Punjab, but on the ground of failing health had declined it. In February 1865 he was compelled to finally resign his post and return to England. A second good service pension was at once conferred on him; in May 1866 he was created K.C. of the Star of India; and early in 1868 was promoted major-general in the East Indian Army. He had been for some time engaged on a life of Sir Henry Lawrence, and high expectations were formed of the work; but he did not live to complete it, and after his death it was put into the hands of Mr Herman Merivale. He died in London on the 23rd of December 1868. Great in council and great in war, he was singularly beloved by his friends, generous and unselfish to a high degree, and a man of deep religious convictions.

See Memorials of the Life and Letters of Sir Herbert Benjamin Edwardes, by his wife (2 vols., London, 1886); T. R. E. Holmes, Four Soldiers (London, 1889); J. Ruskin, Bibl. pastorum, iv. “A Knight’s Faith” (1885), passages from the life of Edwardes.


Edwards, Amelia Ann Blandford (1831–1892), English author and Egyptologist, the daughter of one of Wellington’s officers, was born in London on the 7th of June 1831. At a very early age she displayed considerable literary and artistic talent. She became a contributor to various magazines and newspapers, and besides many miscellaneous works she wrote eight novels, the most successful of which were Debenham’s Vow (1870) and Lord Brackenbury (1880). In the winter of 1873–1874 she visited Egypt, and was profoundly impressed by the new openings for archaeological research. She learnt the hieroglyphic characters, and made a considerable collection of Egyptian antiquities. In 1877 she published A Thousand Miles up the Nile, with illustrations by herself. Convinced that only by proper scientific investigations could the wholesale destruction of Egyptian antiquities be avoided, she devoted herself to arousing public opinion on the subject, and ultimately, in 1882, was largely instrumental in founding the Egypt Exploration Fund, of which she became joint honorary secretary with Reginald Stuart Poole. For the business of this Fund she abandoned her other literary work, writing only on Egyptology. In 1889–1890 she went on a lecturing tour in the United States. The substance of her lectures was published in volume form in 1891 as Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers. She died at Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, on the 15th of April 1892, bequeathing her valuable collection of Egyptian antiquities to University College, London, together with a sum to found a chair of Egyptology. Miss Edwards received, shortly before her death, a civil list pension from the British government.


Edwards, Bela Bates (1802–1852), American man of letters, was born at Southampton, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July 1802. He graduated at Amherst College in 1824, was a tutor there in 1827–1828, graduated at Andover Theological Seminary in 1830, and was licensed to preach. From 1828 to 1833 he was assistant secretary of the American Education Society (organized in Boston in 1815 to assist students for the ministry), and from 1828 to 1842 was editor of the society’s organ, which after 1831 was called the American Quarterly Register. He also founded (in 1833) and edited the American Quarterly Observer; in 1836–1841 edited the Biblical Repository (after 1837 called the American Biblical Repository) with which the Observer was merged in 1835; and was editor-in-chief of the Bibliotheca Sacra from 1844 to 1851. In 1837 he became professor of Hebrew at Andover, and from 1848 until his death was associate professor of sacred literature there. He died at Athens, Georgia, on the 20th of April 1852. Among his numerous publications were A Missionary Gazetteer (1832), A Biography of Self-Taught Men (1832), a once widely known Eclectic Reader (1835), a translation, with Samuel Harvey Taylor (1807–1871), of Kühner’s Schulgrammatik der Griechischen Sprache and Classical Studies (1844), essays in ancient literature and art written in collaboration with Barnas Sears and C. C. Felton.

Edwards’ Addresses and Sermons, with a memoir by Rev. Edwards A. Park, were published in two volumes at Boston in 1853.


EDWARDS, BRYAN (1743–1800), English politician and historian, was born at Westbury, Wiltshire, on the 21st of May 1743. His father died in 1756, when his maintenance and education were undertaken by his maternal uncle, Zachary Bayly, a wealthy merchant of Jamaica. About 1759 Bryan went to Jamaica, and joined his uncle, who engaged a private tutor to complete his education, and when Bayly died his nephew inherited his wealth, succeeding also in 1773 to the estate of another Jamaica resident named Hume. Edwards soon became a leading member of the colonial assembly of Jamaica, but in a few years he returned to England, and in 1782 failed to secure a seat in parliament as member for Chichester. He was again in Jamaica from 1787 to 1792, when he settled in England as a West India merchant, making in 1795 another futile attempt to enter parliament, on this occasion as the representative of Southampton. In 1796, however, he became member of parliament for Grampound, retaining his seat until his death at Southampton on the 15th or 16th of July 1800. In general Edwards was a supporter of the slave trade, and was described by William Wilberforce as a powerful opponent. By his wife, Martha, daughter of Thomas Phipps of Westbury, he left an only son, Hume.

In 1784 Edwards wrote Thoughts on the late Proceedings of Government respecting the Trade of the West India Islands with the United States of America, in which he attacked the restrictions placed by the government upon trade with the United States. In 1793 he published in two volumes his great work, History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, and in 1797 published his Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St Domingo. In 1801 a new edition of both these works with certain additions was published in three volumes under the title of History of the British Colonies in the West Indies. This has been translated into German and parts of it into French and Spanish, and a fifth edition was issued in 1819. When Mungo Park returned in 1796 from his celebrated journey in Africa, Edwards, who was secretary of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, drew up from Park’s narrative an account of his travels, which was published by the association in their Proceedings; and when Park wrote an account of his journeys he availed himself of Edwards’ assistance. Edwards also wrote some poems and some other works relating to the history of the West Indies.

He left a short sketch of his life which was prefixed to the edition of the History of the West Indies, published in 1801.

EDWARDS, GEORGE (1693–1773), English naturalist, was born at Stratford, Essex, on the 3rd of April 1693. In his early years he travelled extensively over Europe, studying natural history, and gained some reputation for his coloured drawings of animals, especially birds. In 1733, on the recommendation of Sir Hans Sloane, he was appointed librarian to the Royal College of Physicians in London. In 1743 he published the first volume of his History of Birds, the fourth volume of which appeared in 1751, and three supplementary volumes, under the title Gleanings of Natural History, were issued in 1758, 1760 and 1764. The two works contain engravings and descriptions of more than 600 subjects in natural history not before described or delineated. He likewise added a general index in French and English, which was afterwards supplied with Linnaean names by Linnaeus himself, with whom he frequently corresponded. About 1764 he retired to Plaistow, Essex, where he died on the 23rd of July 1773. He also wrote Essays of Natural History (1770) and Elements of Fossilogy (1776).


EDWARDS, HENRY THOMAS (1837–1884), Welsh divine, was born on the 6th of September 1837 at Llan ym Mawddwy,