Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/403

 major, and on 1 June of the same year to be lieutenant-colonel in the royal engineers. In this year he was a member of a committee on engineer field equipment, and expressed a preference for the stuffed gabion used at the siege of Valenciennes over other patterns of mantlets.

On 1 Jan. 1795 Twiss was appointed lieutenant-governor of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, in succession to Colonel Stehelin, and continued to hold the appointment for fifteen years. Its duties did not prevent his employment in other ways. He was commanding royal engineer of the southern military district, and between 1792 and 1803 reported upon and directed the reconstruction of the defences of the coasts of Kent and Sussex, and more particularly upon those at Dover, where Sir Thomas Hyde Page [q. v.] of the royal engineers carried out his instructions. In 1798 he was employed by government to report upon a project for a tunnel under the Thames at Gravesend, and so favourably was he impressed with the proposal that he joined the directorate of a company formed to carry it out. A shaft was sunk, and a good deal of money also, when the project was abandoned in 1802. In the spring of this year he was consulted as to the destruction of the sluice-gates and basin of the Bruges canal at Ostend; and his assistance in preparing the necessary instruments was warmly acknowledged by Major-general Eyre Coote in his despatch of 19 May 1798.

In September 1799, on the recommendation of the Marquis Cornwallis, Twiss went to Holland as commanding royal engineer of the Duke of York's army, and remained until the evacuation took place in November. On 1 Jan. 1800 Twiss was promoted to be colonel in the army.

In 1800 Twiss visited Jersey and Guernsey, and reported upon their defences. In 1802, in accordance with repeated representations made to the government by Cornwallis during his viceroyalty, that the advice of Twiss on the defence of Ireland would be of great benefit, Lord Chatham sent Twiss to make a tour through the country and report upon the subject. On 11 Feb. 1804 he was appointed a brigadier-general. In 1805 he was directed to carry into execution the system of detached forts and martello towers for the Kent and Sussex coasts, and a redoubt still existing on the coast near Dungeness was named, after him, Fort Twiss. He was further directed to report how far the same system of defence was applicable to the coasts of the eastern counties. These coast works were completed about 1809.

On 30 Oct. 1805 Twiss was promoted to be major-general. In this year he was a member of a committee which determined, by experiments conducted at Woolwich Warren, the best construction for traversing platforms for the heavy nature of ordnance. The form of platform recommended—with the centre of the traversing arc in the middle, front, or rear of the platform, as the situation might require—was approved and continued to be in principle the service pattern up to a comparatively recent date.

On 24 June 1809 Twiss became a colonel-commandant of the corps of royal engineers, and retired from active duty. In 1811 he was a member of a committee on the Chatham defences then in progress—Chatham Lines and Fort Pitt. Twiss was promoted to be lieutenant-general on 1 Jan. 1812, and general on 27 May 1825. He died at his residence, Harden Grange, Bingley, Yorkshire, on 14 March 1827.

[Royal Engineers Records; Royal Military Calendar, vol. iii. 1820; War Office Records; Despatches; Annual Register, 1798; Correspondence of Charles, first Marquis Cornwallis, ed. Ross, 3 vols. 8vo, London, 1859; Cust's Annals of the Wars of the Eighteenth Century, vol. iii.; Stedman's History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War, 2 vols. 4to, London, 1794; History of the Campaign of 1799 in Holland, translated from the French, 8vo, London, 1801; Carmichael Smyth's Chronological Epitome of the Wars in the Low Countries.]  TWISSE, WILLIAM, D.D. (1578?–1646), puritan divine, was born at Speenhamland in the parish of Speen, near Newbury, about 1578. The family name is variously spelled Twysse, Twiss, Twyste, and Twist. His grandfather was a German, his father a clothier. Thomas Bilson [q. v.] was his uncle. While at Winchester school where he was admitted, aged 12, in 1590, he was startled into religious conviction by the apparition of a ‘rakehelly’ schoolfellow uttering the words ‘I am damned.’ From Winchester he went as probationer fellow to New College, Oxford, in 1596, his eighteenth year (ib.), was admitted fellow 11 March 1598, graduated B.A. 14 Oct. 1600, M.A. 12 June 1604, and took orders. His reputation was that of an erudite student, equally remarkable for pains and penetration. Sir Henry Savile [q. v.] had his assistance in his projected edition of Bradwardine's ‘De Causa Dei contra Pelagium’ (published 1618), which Twisse, before 1613, had transcribed and annotated. His expository power was shown in his Thursday catechetical lectures in the college chapel.