Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/167

 Rockburne Church in Hampshire, close to his estate of West Park, where the East India Company erected a monument over it with an epitaph by Mr. Henry Bankes, M.P. Coote was married, but had no children, and left his vast property to his nephew, the second Sir Eyre Coote, K.B. [q. v.]

Colonel Wilks, in his ‘Historical Sketches of the South of India,’ thus shortly describes the character of Coote, under whom he served: ‘Nature had given to Colonel Coote all that nature can confer in the formation of a soldier; and the regular study of every branch of his profession, and experience in most of them, had formed an accomplished officer. A bodily frame of unusual vigour and activity, and mental energy always awake, were restrained from excessive action by a patience and temper which never allowed the spirit of enterprise to outmarch the dictates of prudence. Daring valour and cool reflection strove for the mastery in the composition of this great man. The conception and execution of his designs equally commanded the confidence of his officers; and a master at once of human nature and of the science of war, his rigid discipline was tempered with an unaffected kindness and consideration for the wants and even the prejudices of the European soldiers, and rendered him the idol of the native troops.’ His portrait still hangs in the exchange at Madras, and, when Colonel Wilks wrote, no sepoy who had served under him ever entered the room without making his obeisance to Coote Bahadur (, Historical Sketches of the South of India, ed. 1869, i. 251, 252).

 COOTE, EYRE (1762–1824?), general, was the second son of the Very Rev. Charles Coote, dean of Kilfenora, brother of Charles Henry Coote, who succeeded the last Earl of Mountrath as second Lord Castle Coote in 1802, and nephew of Sir Eyre Coote, K.B., the celebrated Indian general [q. v.], to whose vast estates in England and Ireland he eventually succeeded. He was born in 1762, was educated at Eton, and received his first commission at the age of fourteen as an ensign in the 37th regiment. He at once embarked for America with his regiment, and carried the colours at the battle of Brooklyn on 27 Aug. 1776. He was then promoted lieutenant, and served with that rank at York Island, Rhode Island, the expedition to the Chesapeake, and the battles of Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth Court House. He was promoted captain on 10 Aug. 1778, and served in the campaign in New York in 1779, at the siege of Charleston in 1780, and finally throughout Lord Cornwallis's campaigns in Virginia up to the capitulation of Yorktown, when he became a prisoner. After his release he returned to England, and became major of the 47th regiment in 1783, and lieutenant-colonel of the 70th in 1788. In 1793, on the outbreak of the war with France, he accompanied Sir Charles Grey to the West Indies in command of a battalion of light infantry, formed from the light companies of the various regiments in the expedition, and greatly distinguished himself throughout the operations there, and especially at the storming of the Morne Fortuné in Guadeloupe, for which he was thanked in general orders (see Military Panorama for May 1813). He was promoted colonel on 24 Jan. 1794, and returned with Sir Ralph Abercromby in 1795 to the West Indies, where he again distinguished himself, and for his services was made an aide-de-camp to the king. In 1796 he was made a brigadier-general, and appointed to command the camp at Bandon in Ireland, and on 1 Jan. 1798 he was promoted major-general, and shortly after given the important command of Dover. From his holding that post he was appointed to command the troops employed in the expedition which had been planned by Sir Home Popham to cut the sluices at Ostend, and thus flood that part of the Netherlands which was then in the possession of the French. The troops were only thirteen hundred in number, and were successfully disembarked and cut the sluices as proposed on 18 May. A high wind off the land then sprang up, and the ships could not come in to take the troops off. French troops were hurried up, and the small English force was completely hemmed in, and after a desperate resistance, in which he lost six officers and 109 men killed and wounded, Coote, who was himself severely wounded, was forced to surrender. He was soon exchanged, and then returned to his command at Dover, but was summoned from it in 1799 to command a division in the expedition to the Helder. Coote's and Don's division formed Sir J. Pulteney's column in the fierce battle of Bergen, but the successes of Pulteney's and Abercromby's columns could not make up for the failure of the rest, and the Duke of York had to sign the disgraceful convention of Alkmaer. In 1800 Coote was appointed to command a brigade in the Mediterranean, and bore his part in the disembarkation of Sir Ralph 