Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 27.djvu/383

 studied drawing at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to Robert Scott [q. v.] the engraver, and worked under him for some years. Horsburgh was a good engraver in line, and engraved several plates after J. M. W. Turner, R.A., for ‘England and Wales,’ Cooke's ‘Southern Coast of England,’ Scott's ‘Poetical’ and ‘Prose’ works, and other publications. He engraved several single plates, including ‘Prince Charlie reading a Despatch,’ after W. Simson, ‘Sir Walter Scott,’ after Sir Thomas Lawrence, and another portrait of Scott after Sir J. Watson Gordon. At the age of about sixty Horsburgh retired from active work, and undertook gratuitously the duties of pastor in the Scottish baptist church. He died at 16 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, on 24 Sept. 1869. His pastoral addresses were published with a short memoir prefixed immediately after his death. 

HORSEY, EDWARD (d. 1583), naval and military commander, a member of a family of considerable note in Dorsetshire, connected with Clifton Maubank (now Maybank), Wyke in Sherborne, and Melcombe Horsey, was the son of Jasper Horsey of Exton, who was brother of Sir John Horsey (, Hist. of Dorset, ii. 459). He first appears as a soldier of fortune, serving with his brother Francis in the emperor's wars. In 1556 he was implicated with Uvedale, captain of the Isle of Wight, in the Throgmorton and Dudley conspiracy, set on foot in concert with the French for the dethronement of Mary in favour of Elizabeth. To forward the plot the two Horseys, with other conspirators, crossed to France, and had a midnight audience with Henry II, who gave them private encouragement, and assisted them with money, promising, if circumstances proved favourable, to help them openly. Absence from England, on the discovery of the conspiracy, saved Horsey's life. After the death of Mary, Horsey returned to England, and ingratiated himself with Leicester, by whom he was admitted to the closest intimacy. At a later period he was the confidant of Leicester's secret contract with Lady Sheffield, and on their clandestine marriage at Esher, May 1573, two days before the birth of their son, Sir Robert Dudley [q. v.], he gave the bride away.

Horsey soon proved his value as a daring and unscrupulous adventurer, half pirate, half soldier of fortune. In 1562–3 he served under the Earl of Warwick at the disastrous siege of Havre, accompanied by William Whittingham [q. v.], the Calvinist, for whom he had obtained the chaplaincy of the English forces (Camden Society's Miscellanies, vi. 11, 25). In December 1565 he was nominated one of the three commissioners for the Isle of Wight, of which he speedily became captain. That office he held to his death. For seventeen years he thus did good service to the government by keeping a sharp eye on foreign ships which were cruising in the narrow seas, especially those of Spain, and by reporting any suspicious proceedings. According to a letter sent by him to Cecil, he in 1568 seized fifty coffers of treasure on board a Spanish ship in Southampton Water. In 1570 he apprised Cecil that men-of-war were cruising off the island, under the assumed authority of the queen of Navarre (Jeanne d'Albret), with strong suspicion of piracy. He and others in the Isle of Wight had been accused of complicity with their proceedings, which had elicited a stern remonstrance from Cecil. This charge Horsey denied, but acknowledged that he had received ‘presents of spices, sweetmeats, and Canary wine.’ He detained ships and men in view of an expedition in 1570, and despatched vessels to watch the piratical craft hovering about the southern shores, and to capture them when necessary. He was zealous in surveying the defences of the Isle of Wight and ordering necessary repairs, and afforded help and encouragement to Cornelius Stevensen, a Dutchman, in his manufacture of saltpetre for gunpowder.

On the outbreak of the northern rebellion in 1569, under the Earls of Westmorland and Northumberland, Horsey was despatched at the head of five hundred well-furnished horsemen; contributed to the defeat of the insurgents and followed hard on their retreat. In his despatches to Cecil he railed at the faint heart of those who having ‘frowardly and villainously begun a lewd enterprise, had beastly and cowardly performed the same,’ and preferred to yield their necks to the halter, which he prayed God they might get, rather than ‘by fight persist in their vile and detestable quarrel’ (Horsey to Cecil, 22 Dec.; State Papers, Dom. 1569;, Hist. of England, ix. 538). The rebellion put down, Horsey returned to the Isle of Wight, where he reported to Cecil the preparations the Spaniards were making for the invasion of Ireland. On 29 Oct. 1570 he was admitted a burgess of the town of Southampton (Hist. MSS. Comm. App. 11th Rep. pt. iii. p. 20). In 1573 he was sent as ambassador to the court of France to plead the cause of Rochelle and the French protestants. The pacification between the king and the Huguenots was attributed to his