Ancestors

Eyles Irwin

Eyles Irwin was born in Calcutta, the younger son of James Irwin, a servant of the East India Company, of Hazeleigh Hall in Essex, and his wife Sarah. He was baptized at Calcutta on 23 February 1751. His elder brother James had been born there on 11 October 1748. The Dictionary of National Biography gives his mother as Sarah Beale, the widow of Henry Palmer. He was sent to England for school and was taught by Dr. Rose at Chiswick.

On 21 November 1766 he was appointed to a writership in the Company's service at Madras. A writer was the lowest grade of the Company's civil servants, a clerk who could rise to govern a district. He sailed back to India in February 1768. In 1771 he became "superintendent of the company's grounds within the bounds of Madras."

In 1776 the Madras council deposed and imprisoned its own governor, Lord Pigot. Irwin signed a protest against what he called a revolution. When the council then posted him as an assistant at Vizagapatam, he refused, and was suspended from the Company's service. Early in 1777 he sailed for England to put his case to the directors.

The journey took eleven months. He went by the Red Sea, the coasts of Arabia and Egypt, and overland across the desert of the Thebaid. He published the story in 1780 as A Series of Adventures in the course of a Voyage up the Red Sea, written as letters to a lady. It went through three editions and was translated into French in 1792. When he reached England at the end of 1777 he found he had already been reinstated.

In 1778 he married Honor Brooke, daughter of the Rev. William Brooke of Dromavana and Firmount, County Longford. She was a first cousin once removed of Henry Brooke, author of the novel The Fool of Quality. They had three sons and two daughters, by the Dictionary's count.

He went back to India in the autumn of 1780 by another route, through Aleppo, Baghdad and down the Tigris to Basra. In October 1781 Lord Macartney made him a member of the committee of the assigned revenue. In 1783 he became superintendent of revenue in the Tinnevelly and Madura districts in the far south. On his advice Colonel William Fullarton led a successful expedition against the local chiefs, the Poligars. In 1785 he negotiated for the cession of the Dutch settlements on the Tinnevelly coast, and handed the district back to the Nawab's agents that July.

Ill health sent him home at the end of 1785. In 1789 the directors voted him six thousand pagodas for his "able, judicious, and upright management" of the districts south of the Coleroon river. In 1792 he went to China as one of three commissioners for the Company's affairs at Canton, and stayed there almost two years. He retired in 1794. In 1795 he stood for a seat on the Company's board of directors and lost.

He spent the rest of his life writing. His poems ran from Indian pastorals to odes on Hyder Ali and on the release of the French princess from the Temple prison. He wrote three pamphlets on Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, an elegy on Nelson's victory at the Nile, and a comic opera, The Bedouins, performed in Dublin. His letter from Canton on the Chinese game of chess was read to the Royal Irish Academy.

His eldest son, Captain James Brooke Irwin of the 103rd Regiment, was killed leading the assault on Fort Erie in Upper Canada on 15 August 1814. His father printed an elegy for him. His eldest daughter, Eliza Selina, had married Dr. Benjamin Hayward Browne in 1810, and a daughter Georgina had married a clergyman.

In his will he called himself "Eyles Irwin of Slieve Russell in the County of Fermanagh in that part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland called Ireland but now residing at Clifton in the County of Gloucester". He confirmed the settlement made on his marriage with his wife Honora, and provided for his daughter Frances Sophia at twenty-one or on her marriage. He died at Clifton, near Bristol, on 12 August 1817 and was buried in the old churchyard there. The will was proved on 23 September 1817.

If Eyles Irwin is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Eyles Irwin (1751-1817)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/eyles-irwin-1751-1817-26a3a2.