Grand Masters of Scotland - Onondaga and Oswego Masonic ...

Much remained to be done, and Elgin’s further four years in Canada called for the exercise of the same talents as did the
turbulent year 1849. There were local reforms to be carried out, such as the abolition of the clergy reserves and of seigneurial
tenure in Lower Canada. The latter was a clearly local issue and was dealt with by the Canadian parliament. But the clergy
reserves, governed by an imperial act of 1840, could not be touched without an act of parliament of the United Kingdom enabling
the Canadian legislature to deal with them. The question invited the same appeal to Britain as the Rebellion Losses Act had done,
especially as nothing could more symbolize an empire and a nation across the seas than a common established church. Elgin
recommended that the imperial parliament be asked to end the act of 1840 and leave the future of the reserves to the Canadian
parliament. After repeated efforts were foiled by opposition of the bishops in the House of Lords, this action was taken and in 1854
the reserves were ended, but on terms respecting vested interests. In the same year seigneurial tenure was abolished.
That this legislation was the work of a Liberal-Conservative Anglo-French party in coalition pleased Elgin, as such a union was
the outcome of the regime of local decisions by moderate and responsible men which he had made possible in Canada. But more
exhilarating, no doubt, was the long delayed conclusion of the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States, the final act of Elgin’s
personal diplomacy. Foreseen as early as 1846 in Canada as a necessary outcome of the dismantling of the protective system,
reciprocity had been repeatedly defeated in the United States for lack of evident advantage to American economic interests and
because of its implications as a possible prelude to annexation, a step which would upset the balance of free and slave soil in the
expanded republic of 1848. The inducements of free navigation on the Canadian section of the St Lawrence and of access to the
fisheries of the Atlantic provinces removed American objections that it conferred no benefits on the United States. In 1854 the British
government acknowledged the need to lobby Congress. Elgin went to Washington and in a diplomatic tour de force persuaded the
Southern senators that reciprocity would prevent, not provoke, annexation. It was a brilliant climax to seven years of intense
persuasion, in which he had established the conventions of constitutional, monarchical, and parliamentary government in Canada,
and ensured that prosperity without which he believed, as had Durham, Canadians could not be expected to prefer self-government
in the empire to annexation to the United States.
Elgin returned to Britain in December 1854. Despite approaches, he remained outside active politics there. In 1857 the dispute
with the empire of China over the lorcha Arrow and British trading rights in Canton led to his commission by the Palmerston
government as a special envoy to China. The mission was delayed by the need to assist in the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. In
1857, however, in consort with a French envoy, Elgin made his way by armed force into Canton, and in 1858 negotiated at Tientsin
with representatives of the imperial government a treaty providing for a British minister to China, additional trading rights, protection
of missionaries, and an indemnity. He then went to Japan where he concluded a commercial treaty. He returned to England in 1859
and accepted, as did other former Peelites, office in the new Palmerston government. He became postmaster general, not the best
use of his talents which were diplomatic rather than administrative. However, in 1860, as a result of the Chinese government’s
refusal to implement the Treaty of Tientsin, Elgin was again sent with an Anglo-French military force and a French colleague to
ensure the acceptance of the treaty. The army advanced to Peking and, after the murder of some English captives, the Summer
Palace of the emperors was burned on Elgin’s decision to avenge the insult and to enforce the signature of the treaty.
In 1861 he was appointed viceroy and governor general of India, but over-exertion on an official tour in 1862 brought a fatal
heart attack the next year. There is no evident connection between Elgin’s service in Jamaica and Canada and that in the Far East
and India. The same decisiveness and diplomatic skill are apparent. But it is perhaps the unusual degree to which he sympathized
with the Chinese he encountered and perceived the difficulties of a decadent empire that was most remarkable. He set out to
understand India also, not by study of the conventions of the British regime, but in travelling among the people. It was the same
desire and capacity to understand the society in which he was to govern that had enabled him to assist in creating in Canada a
locally acceptable government of moderates between the extremes of race, partisanship, and tradition. What was extraordinary in
Elgin’s career in Canada was his immediate and imaginative mastery of his role, and the creative spirit in which he developed it.
W. L. MORTON
Elgin-Grey papers (Doughty). Letters and journals of James, eighth Earl of Elgin, ed. Theodore Walrond (London, 1872).
R. S. Longley, Sir Francis Hincks; a study of Canadian politics, railways, and finance in the nineteenth century (Toronto, 1943).
D. C. Masters, The reciprocity treaty of 1854: its history, its relation to British colonial and foreign policy and to the development of
Canadian fiscal autonomy (London and Toronto, 1936). Monet, Last cannon shot. J. L. Morison, British supremacy & Canadian selfgovernment,
18391854 (Glasgow, 1919); The eighth Earl of Elgin . . . ([London], 1928). G. N. Tucker, The Canadian commercial
revolution, 18451851 (New Haven, Conn., 1936).
24. Thomas Alexander Erskine, 6th Earl of Kellie (G.M. of England: 1760-65) 1763-65
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Erskine%2C_6th_Earl_of_Kellie
Thomas Alexander Erskine, 6th Earl of Kellie (1 September 1732–9 October 1781), styled Viscount Fentoun and Lord
Pittenweem until 1756, was a British musician and composer whose considerable talent brought him international fame and his
rakish habits notoriety, but nowadays is little known. Recent recordings of his surviving compositions have led to him being reevaluated
as one of the most important British composers of the 18th century, as well as a prime example of Scotland's music.
His mother, Janet Pitcairn, was the daughter of a celebrated physician and poet. His father Alexander Erskine, the 5th Earl of Kellie,
was incarcerated in Edinburgh castle for supporting the Jacobites in the 1745 Jacobite Rising. Around 1752 Thomas left for
Mannheim in Germany to study under the elder Johann Stamitz and returned to Scotland in 1756 as a virtuoso violinist and
composer, nicknamed "fiddler Tam". He began propagating the modern Mannheim style, of which he was to become widely
acknowledged as the leading British exponent. Six of his three-movement "Overtures" (Symphonies) were published in Edinburgh in
1761. James Boswell borrowed five guineas from Erskine on 20 October 1762, and on 26 May 1763 took him on a visit to Lord
Eglinton's in London, where the overture the Earl composed for the popular pastiche The Maid of the Mill (at Covent Garden in
1765) became exceptionally popular. In 1767 the Earl returned to Scotland, where he became a leading light of the Edinburgh Music
Society, acting as deputy governor, and as an able violinist directed the concerts in Saint Cecillia's Hall in Niddry's Wynd,
Edinburgh.
His dissolute life style extended to founding an (all-male) drinking club, and reportedly the playwright Samuel Foote advised Kellie to
put his red nose into his greenhouse to ripen his cucumbers! He tended to compose on the spot and absent-mindedly give music
away without further thought for it. His health suffered and he visited Spa, Belgium, but while returning was "struck with a paralytic
shock" and while stopping for a few days at Brussels was attacked by a "putrid fever" and died at the age of 51.
Until the 1970s only a small number of his compositions was thought to survive, though the discovery in 1989 of two manuscripts
containing chamber works at Kilravock Castle has doubled the number of his surviving compositions - notably with nine trio sonatas
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