Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 32.djvu/432

 raised for home defence. He was among the first who proffered his services to the crown when Bonaparte threatened to invade the country, and raised the regiment eventually called the king's regiment of Cheshire yeoman cavalry. Some years afterwards, in 1817, this regiment received the thanks of the prince regent and government for its activity in dispersing the Blanketeers in Lancashire. Leicester was created Baron De Tabley on 16 July 1826. He died at Tabley House on 18 June 1827.

Part of his collection of pictures of the English school, of which a descriptive catalogue by William Carey was published in 1810, was sold by auction soon after his death and realised 7,466l.

Leicester married, on 9 Nov. 1810, Georgiana Maria, youngest daughter of Lieutenant-colonel Cottin. She was remarkable for her beauty. Her portrait in the character of Hope, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, is well known, and has been many times engraved. There are also engraved portraits of her after Simpson, and one kit-cat size by Charles Turner, from a full-length painting by Owen, which is at Tabley.

Of Leicester himself there are engraved portraits by Young, Bell, and Thomson, all after Sir Joshua Keynolds; another, by H. Meyer, of Lord de Tabley as colonel of the kings Cheshire yeomanry, and a folio engraving by S. W. Reynolds, after Sir Joshua Keynolds and J. Northcote, in uniform with horse.



LEICESTER, ROBERT (fl. 1320), Franciscan, was a protege of Richard Swinfeld, bishop of Hereford, to whom he dedicated some treatises on Jewish chronology in 1294. He was D.D. and in residence at Oxford in 1325; he was forty-eighth lecturer or regent master of the Franciscan schools about the same time or shortly before. In 1325 he was one of the two magistri extranet of Balliol College. The two masters, or visitors, were called upon to decide whether the statutes of the college allowed the members to attend lectures in any faculty except that of arts, and ordained, 'in the presence of the whole community, that it was not permissible. According to Bale, Robert died at Lichfield in 1348, but the statement lacks authority.

Digby MS. 212 (sec. xiv.) contains his three works on Hebrew chronology, written in 1294 and 1295. At Pembroke College, Cambridge (MS. 220), is 'Enchiridion pœnitentiale ... distinctionibus. . . Roberti de Leycester,' and others. Leland ascribes several other works to him which do not seem to be extant; among them is a treatise, 'De Paupertate Christi.'



LEICESTER, WILLIAM, or WILLIAM MONTE (d. 1213), chancellor of Lincoln. [See ]

LEICHHARDT, FRIEDRICH WILHELM LUDWIG (1813–1848), Australian explorer, son of Christian Hieronymus Matthias Leichhardt, was born at Trebatsch near Beeskow in Prussia, 23 Oct. 1813, and studied at Göttingen and Berlin. With William Nicholson of Clifton he travelled in France, Italy, and England. In 1841 he went to New South Wales, where he pursued petrological and botanical investigations, and sent numerous fossils to Professor Owen from Darling Downs. The results of his labours appeared in 'Beitrage zur Geologie von Australien,' 'Abhandlungen der naturforschenden Gesellschaft zu Halle' (1856), iii. 1-62, in 'Documents pour la Geologie de l'Australie,' edited by Girard, published at Halle in 1855, and in Owen's 'Reports' to the British Association in 1844.

The colonial government having proposed an overland expedition from Moreton Bay on the east coast of Australia to Port Essington on the north coast, the governor, Sir Thomas Mitchell, recommended Leichhardt for the leadership. Accompanied by nine persons he left Sydney on 14 Aug. 1844. Passing along the banks of the Dawson and the Mackenzie tributaries of the Fitzroy river in Queensland, he advanced northwards to the source of the Burdekin river; then turning westwards, made an easy descent to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and skirting the low shores round the upper half of the gulf to the Roper, he arrived, by way of Arnheim Land and the Alligator river, at Port Victoria, otherwise Port Essington, on 17 Dec. 1845. He thus completed three thousand miles amid many hardships within fifteen months. On his return to Sydney on 29 March 1846 he was most cordially received. On 24 May 1846 he obtained the patron's medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and he published an account of his wanderings in a 'Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, during the years 1844-6.' London, 1847, 8vo.

On 7 Dec. 1846, with eight persons,