Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 08.djvu/418

  MacLenin, and its substance has been worked up into Colgan's account; Bollandi Acta SS. (8 March), 760–79; O'Hanlon's Lives of Irish Saints, i. 464, &c.] 

CANNING, CHARLES JOHN, (1812–1862), governor-general of India, was the third son of the celebrated statesman, George Canning [q. v.] He was born on 14 Dec. 1812, at Gloucester Lodge, an Italian villa, at one time the property of the Duchess of Gloucester, situated in what was then an almost rural tract between Brompton and Kensington. His education was commenced at a private school at Putney, and continued at Eton, which he left at the end of 1827, carrying away with him ‘a reputation rather for intelligence, accuracy, and painstaking, than for refined scholarship or any remarkable powers of composition.’ After spending nearly a year under private tuition in the house of the Rev. John Shore, of Potton in Bedfordshire, where he contracted a lasting friendship with the third Lord Harris, one of his fellow-pupils, and afterwards governor of Madras, he entered Christ Church, Oxford, in December 1828. At Oxford he was the contemporary of Gladstone, Dalhousie, and Elgin. In 1832 he took his degree with a first class in classics and a second in mathematics. In 1835 he married the Honourable Charlotte Stuart, eldest daughter and coheiress of Lord Stuart de Rothesay, and in 1836 entered parliament as member for Warwick. In 1837, both his elder brothers having died some years previously, he succeeded, on the death of his mother, to the peerage, which had been created in her favour after her husband's death, and became Viscount Canning of Kilbrahan in the county of Kilkenny. On the formation of Sir Robert Peel's government in 1841, he was appointed under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, and held that office for nearly five years, becoming chief commissioner for woods and forests shortly before the downfall of Peel's government in 1846. He continued to be a follower of Peel during the remainder of that statesman's life, and, adhering, after Peel's death, to the Peelite party, he declined an offer of the post of foreign secretary which was made to him by Lord Derby on the occasion of the latter being invited to form an administration, when Lord Russell's cabinet resigned office in February 1852. In 1853 he joined Lord Aberdeen's cabinet as postmaster-general, holding the same office for a short time under Lord Palmerston, by whom he was selected in 1855 to succeed Lord Dalhousie as governor-general of India. In his management of the postal department, Canning established a reputation for administrative ability, evincing in a marked degree some of the qualities which distinguished him in his after career. The unremitting industry, the habit of careful inquiry into facts, and the caution, sometimes perhaps carried to excess, which were exhibited by the governor-general during the terrible events of the Indian mutiny, all characterised his performance of the far less responsible duties which devolved upon the postmaster-general. He introduced several beneficial changes in the organisation of the department, establishing, among other reforms, the practice of annually submitting to parliament a report of the work achieved by the post office. Sir Rowland Hill, whose appointment as sole secretary to the post office in 1854 was made on the advice of Canning, described the period during which he served under him as ‘the most satisfactory period of his whole official career, that in which the course of improvement was steadiest, most rapid, and least chequered.’

Canning assumed the government of India on the last day of February 1856, having visited en route Bombay and Madras, at the latter of which places he spent some days with his old friend and fellow-student, Lord Harris, who was then governor of Madras. India at that time was at peace. During Lord Dalhousie's government large additions had been made to British territory; the Punjáb, Pegu, Nágpur, Satára, Jhánsi, and Oudh had been annexed; the Berár territories of the Nizam of the Dekhan had been placed under British administration; the mediatised courts of Arcot and Tanjore had ceased to exist; and the recognition of the grandson of the king of Delhi, then an elderly man, as the future successor of the latter, had been granted, subject, among other stipulations, to the condition that he should as king ‘receive the governor-general at all times on terms of perfect equality.’ By the recent annexations of territory four millions sterling had been added to the revenues of British India. Great progress, both moral and material, had been made in the various branches of the administration. In an elaborate minute recorded by the retiring governor-general on the eve of his departure, emphatic stress was laid on the prosperous and peaceful condition of affairs, qualified only by the remark that ‘no prudent man, who has any knowledge of eastern affairs, would ever venture to predict the maintenance of continued peace within our eastern possessions.’ Canning was not less desirous than the majority of his predecessors for a peaceful administration. In his speech at the banquet given by the court of directors in his honour before his departure from England, he gave expression to his desire for a peaceful time of