Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/1129

 1112

WOLFF.

Division of Lancashire without op- position till 1868 ; on the county being again sub-divided he was elected for the present Northern Division and remained one of its representatives till 1871, when he was called to the House of Peers. Thus for forty-two years Colonel Wilson-Patten represented North Lancashire in the House of Com- mons, where he acquired great popularity and a high reputation for skill in debate. While in the Lower House he filled the offices of Chairman of Committees of the whole House, from Nov., 1852, till April, 1853 ; Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from June, 1867, to "Sept., 1868; and Chief Secretary for Ireland from the last date to December following. The services rendered by him to the Conservative party were rewarded by his elevation to the peerage in .March, 1874, when, on the recom- mendation of Mr. Disraeli, he was created Baron Winmarleigh. From 1842 to 1872 he wasH^olonel of the 3rd Eoyal Lancashire Militia, and he continues to be its honorary Colonel. He accompanied the regi- ment to Gibraltar at the time of the Crimean War, and on his return to England he was appointed one of Her Majesty's Aides-de-Camp. His Lordship has acted as Vice- Lieutenant of Lancashire in the absence of the Lord Lieutenant, and he has taken an active interest in most of the agricultural, com- mercial, and manufacturing ques- tions which have been brought for- ward in the present half century.

WOLFF, Sib Henry Drummond, K.C.B., G.C.M.G., M.P., is the eldest son of that eminent mis- eionary and traveller the late Rev. Dr. Joseph Wolff, vicar of Isle- Brewers, Somersetshire, by Lady Georgiaua Mary Walpole, daughter of Horatio, second Earl of Oi-ford, of the present creation. He was bom at JMalta, Oct. 12. 1830, and was educated at Rugby under Dr. Tait, and on the Continent; he

entered the Foreign Office in 1846, and was made a permanent clerk in 1849. He was an Attache at Florence in 1852-53, during part of which time he was Acting Charge d' Affaires. In July, 1856, he was attached to the late Earl of West- moreland's special mission to Bel- gium. In 1858 he wae appointed Assistant Private Secretjay to the Earl of Malmesbury, and afterwards to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, and the following year was promoted to an assistant clerkship in the Fo- reign Office. In the same year he was appointed a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, and also Secretary to the Lciti High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. In that and the two fol- lowing years he sat as a member of several commissions of inquiry into the civil administration, taxation, and education of the Ionian Is- lands and their inhabitants, and in 1862 was a conmiissioner to re- present the interests of those is- lands at the Great Exhibition of that year. He was nominated a K.C.M.G. in 1862, and retired on a pension in June, 1864, on the cessation of the British Protec- orate over the Ionian Islands. In 187 * he was elected M.P. for Christ- church in the Conservative interest He was a member of the Boyal Commission on Copyright. In 1878 he was appointed Her Majesty^s Commissioner in Eastern Roumelia to represent Great Britain in the preparation of an autonomous con- stitution for that province. This was carried out in 1879, and is now workingsucc388fully. For this service he was appointed a K.C.B., having previously been in successi^Hi C.M.G., K.C.M.G., and G.C.M.G. At the election of 1880 he was elected M.P. for Portsmouth. He is J.P. for Hampshire and Middle- sex, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Colonial Institute ; is the author of a work on "The Residence of the First Napoleon at Elba,*' of a trans-