Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/46

 Ireland. He had four sons and two daughters.

 BARBELLION, W.N.P. (pseudonym), diarist and biologist. [See ]  BARING, EVELYN, first (1841-1917), statesman, diplomatist, and administrator, was the sixth son of the second marriage of Henry Baring, M.P., with Cecilia, eldest daughter of Admiral William Windham, of Felbrigge, Norfolk. He was born 26 February 1841 at Cromer Hall, Norfolk. His father died in 1848, and Evelyn was brought up by his mother, a remarkable lady who is said to have sung Anacreon to her children. Destined for the Artillery, he passed through the Rev. F. A. Bickmore’s hands into the Ordnance School, Carshalton. After objection had been taken to his defective eyesight, he entered at Woolwich in August 1855, and three years later was commissioned, and accompanied his battery to the Ionian Islands, a station which was to affect his future life. The local vernacular, which he learned passably, led him on to read Homer and Anacreon with M. Romanos, a Corfiote scholar; at Corfu he met his future wife, Ethel Stanley, then seventeen years old, the daughter of Sir Rowland Stanley Errington, of the elder Roman Catholic line of the Stanleys and holder of an ancient baronetcy; and there, too, becoming aide-de-camp to the high-commissioner, Sir [q.v.], he was introduced to diplomacy. The times were stirring: he assisted at the reception of Otho, the fugitive king of Greece, at the welcome offered by a British squadron to the new king, George, and at the transference of the Islands to the Greek crown. He followed his chief to Malta and thence in 1864 on a special mission to Jamaica, taking occasion to spend some weeks in General Grant’s camp before Petersburg. By the time young Baring had returned by way of Malta to England, in 1867, he had seen men and cities and acquired a working knowledge of at least three foreign languages.

He entered the Staff College, where, to judge by his three Staff College Essays published in 1870, he must have been a student of unusual industry, intelligence, and knowledge. Passing next into that department of the War Office which later became the Intelligence Division, he translated for publication two German manuals, one on ‘Kriegspiel’, the other on military training. Memories of his libido sciendi and almost inconvenient zeal long survived in the office. Nevertheless Captain Baring, when offered, in 1872, a choice between military or civil employ, chose the latter, and went out to India with his cousin, Lord Northbrook, the viceroy, as private secretary. He found his reward in varied experience of every headquarter department, and of much provincial administration, especially during the Bengal famine of 1874, which he investigated in Behar. His hand is said to be discernible in many of his chief’s dispatches, and he wrote the official memoir on the Northbrook viceroyalty. In May 1876 he returned, with the decoration of C.I.E., to London. His mother had died in 1874 and the home at 11 Berkeley Square was broken up. He resumed work at the War Office and, in June, married Miss Errington, their union having been facilitated by inheritances on both sides. Sir Louis Mallet of the India Office and others in the Whitehall world had marked him for civil promotion; but he was little known outside. Some astonishment was expressed, therefore, early in 1877 that Mr. Goschen, commissioned by the holders of Egyptian bonds to advise Khedive Ismail how to meet his liabilities, should nominate Captain Baring, R.A., to be first British commissioner of the Caisse de la Dette. The inquiring public, knowing no more than that he had a way with him which had fluttered Indian dovecotes and earned him the nickname of Overbaring, wondered what other qualifications, besides his family connexion, he might have for diplomatic finance.

In April 1876 Egypt, owing to the criminal extravagance of Khedive Ismail since 1863, failed to pay her foreign coupon, and had to submit her finance to international control. France, whose nationals held at home the bulk of the bonds and in Egypt the most important material interests, was the power chiefly interested; and her government, regarding the situation with complacency as a guarantee of French dominance, gratified financiers and electors by claiming her full pound of flesh. The British government, with fewer bondholders, but more humanitarians to consider, preferred to leave on Ismail the onus of skinning Egypt by methods for which it hoped to avoid responsibility. A year earlier it had refused to nominate any commissioner. Now, apprehensive of  20