as having brought about the Danish invasion of Northumbria by cruel and unjust actions.
See The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, edited by C. Plummer (Oxford, 1892–1899); Bede, Historiae ecclesiasticae, edited by C. Plummer (Oxford, 1896); Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, edited by T. Arnold, Rolls Series (London, 1879); Asser, De rebus gestis Aelfredi, edited by W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904); J. R. Green, The Making of England (London, 1897), and the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. i. (London, 1895).
ELLAND, an urban district in the Elland parliamentary
division of Yorkshire, England, on the Calder, 212 m. S. of Halifax
by the Lancashire & Yorkshire railway. Pop. (1901) 10,412.
The church of St Mary is Decorated and Perpendicular. Cotton-mills,
woollen-factories, ironworks, flagstone quarries at Elland
Edge, and fire-clay works employ the industrial population.
Elland Hall, though almost rebuilt, retains the recollection of a
remarkable family feud between the Ellands and the Beaumonts
of Crosland Hall, the site of which may be traced in the vicinity.
A nephew of Sir John Elland, in 1342, met death at the hands
of a relative of the Beaumonts upon whom Sir John took
vengeance, as also upon the heads of the allied houses of Lockwood
and Quarmby. The children of these families were educated
in the hope of avenging their parents, and after many
years succeeded in doing so, cutting off Sir John Elland and
his heir.
ELLENBOROUGH, EDWARD LAW, 1st Baron (1750–1818),
English judge, was born on the 16th of November 1750, at
Great Salkeld, in Cumberland, of which place his father, Edmund
Law (1703–1787), afterwards bishop of Carlisle, was at the time
rector. Educated at the Charterhouse and at Peterhouse,
Cambridge, he passed as third wrangler, and was soon afterwards
elected to a fellowship at Trinity. In spite of his father’s strong
wish that he should take orders, he chose the legal profession,
and on quitting the university was entered at Lincoln’s Inn.
After spending five years as a special pleader under the bar,
he was called to the bar in 1780. He chose the northern circuit,
and in a very short time obtained a lucrative practice and a high
reputation. In 1787 he was appointed principal counsel for
Warren Hastings in the celebrated impeachment trial before
the House of Lords, and the ability with which he conducted
the defence was universally recognized. He had begun his
political career as a Whig, but, like many others, he saw in the
French Revolution a reason for changing sides, and became a
supporter of Pitt. On the formation of the Addington ministry
in 1801, he was appointed attorney-general and shortly afterwards
was returned to the House of Commons as member for
Newtown in the Isle of Wight. In 1802 he succeeded Lord
Kenyon as chief justice of the king’s bench. On being raised
to the bench he was created a peer, taking his title from the
village of Ellenborough in Cumberland, where his maternal
ancestors had long held a small patrimony. In 1806, on the
formation of Lord Grenville’s ministry “of all the talents,”
Lord Ellenborough declined the offer of the great seal, but
accepted a seat in the cabinet. His doing so while he retained
the chief justiceship was much criticized at the time, and, though
not without precedent, was open to such obvious objections on
constitutional grounds that the experiment has not since been
repeated. As a judge he had grave faults, though his decisions
displayed profound legal knowledge, and in mercantile law especially
were reckoned of high authority. He was harsh and overbearing
to counsel, and in the political trials which were so
frequent in his time showed an unmistakable bias against the
accused. In the trial of William Hone (q.v.) for blasphemy in
1817, Ellenborough directed the jury to find a verdict of guilty,
and their acquittal of the prisoner is generally said to have
hastened his death. He resigned his judicial office in November
1818, and died on the 13th of December following.
Ellenborough was succeeded as 2nd baron by his eldest son, Edward, afterwards earl of Ellenborough; another son was Charles Ewan Law (1792–1850), recorder of London and member of parliament for Cambridge University from 1835 until his death in August 1850.
Three of Ellenborough’s brothers attained some degree of fame. These were John Law (1745–1810), bishop of Elphin; Thomas Law (1759–1834), who settled in the United States in 1793, and married, as his second wife, Anne, a granddaughter of Martha Washington; and George Henry Law (1761–1845), bishop of Chester and of Bath and Wells. The connexion of the Law family with the English Church was kept up by George Henry’s sons, three of whom took orders. Two of these were Henry Law (1797–1884), dean of Gloucester, and James Thomas Law (1790–1876), chancellor of the diocese of Lichfield.
ELLENBOROUGH, EDWARD LAW, Earl of (1790–1871),
the eldest son of the 1st Lord Ellenborough, was born on the
8th of September 1790. He was educated at Eton and St John’s
College, Cambridge. He represented the subsequently disfranchised
borough of St Michael’s, Cornwall, in the House of
Commons, until the death of his father in 1818 gave him a seat
in the House of Lords. He was twice married; his only child
died young; his second wife was divorced by act of parliament
in 1830.
In the Wellington administration of 1828 Ellenborough was made lord privy seal; he took a considerable share in the business of the foreign office, as an unofficial assistant to Wellington, who was a great admirer of his talents. He aimed at succeeding Lord Dudley at the foreign office, but was forced to content himself with the presidency of the board of control, which he retained until the fall of the ministry in 1830. Ellenborough was an active administrator, and took a lively interest in questions of Indian policy. The revision of the company’s charter was approaching, and he held that the government of India should be transferred directly to the crown. He was impressed with the growing importance of a knowledge of central Asia, in the event of a Russian advance towards the Indian frontier, and despatched Burnes on an exploring mission to that district. Ellenborough subsequently returned to the board of control in Peel’s first and second administrations. He had only held office for a month on the third occasion when he was appointed by the court of directors to succeed Lord Auckland as governor-general of India. His Indian administration of two and a half years, or half the usual term of service, was from first to last a subject of hostile criticism. His own letters sent monthly to the queen, and his correspondence with the duke of Wellington, published in 1874, afford material for an intelligent and impartial judgment of his meteoric career. The events chiefly in dispute are his policy towards Afghanistan and the army and captives there, his conquest of Sind, and his campaign in Gwalior.
Ellenborough went to India in order “to restore peace to Asia,” but the whole term of his office was occupied in war. On his arrival there the news that greeted him was that of the massacre of Kabul, and the sieges of Ghazni and Jalalabad, while the sepoys of Madras were on the verge of open mutiny. In his proclamation of the 15th of March 1842, as in his memorandum for the queen dated the 18th, he stated with characteristic clearness and eloquence the duty of first inflicting some signal and decisive blow on the Afghans, and then leaving them to govern themselves under the sovereign of their own choice. Unhappily, when he left his council for upper India, and learned the trifling failure of General England, he instructed Pollock and Nott, who were advancing triumphantly with their avenging columns to rescue the British captives, to fall back. The army proved true to the governor-general’s earlier proclamation rather than to his later fears; the hostages were rescued, the scene of Sir Alexander Burnes’s murder in the heart of Kabul was burned down. Dost Mahommed was quietly dismissed from a prison in Calcutta to the throne in the Bala Hissar, and Ellenborough presided over the painting of the elephants for an unprecedented military spectacle at Ferozepur, on the south bank of the Sutlej. But this was not the only piece of theatrical display which capped with ridicule the horrors and the follies of these four years in Afghanistan. When Sultan Mahmud, in 1024, sacked the Hindu temple of Somnath on the north-west coast of India, he carried off, with the treasures, the richly studded sandal-wood gates of the fane, and set them up in his
