Page:Tupper family records - 1835.djvu/233

 MEMOIR

OF

THE LATE

COLONEL HAVILLAND LE MESURIER.

��Colonel Havilland Le Mesurier was of a family which had been settled in the island of Guernsey from a very early period ; as far back indeed as any authentic records can be traced. The branch to which he belonged has now (1815) for more than a century enjoyed the government and lordship of the neighbouring island of Alderney, which came to them by intermarriage with a niece of Sir Edmund Andros, to whom a grant of the island for a term of ninety-nine years had been made by Charles the Second. John Le Mesurier, son of John, the husband of Anne Andros, in the early part of his present Majesty's reign, having surrendered the existing patent, obtained a new grant for ninety-nine years, which is now possessed by another John, his grandson and heir.* Havilland Le Mesurier,f the father of the colonel, was a younger son of that John, by whom the patent was renewed, and is well known by the ability and integrity with which he discharged the office of commis- sary-general in the north of Germany, in the years 1795 and 1 796 ; and, afterwards, in the year 1798, in the southern department of England ; and, lastly, in the years 1801 and 1802, in Egypt and the Mediterranean.

The subject of this article was educated at Salisbury and Win- chester, and, being destined for commercial pursuits, was sent to Berlin to acquire the German language. Here, however, the sight of the grand reviews, and all the military pomp which was kept up at that court, had such an effect upon the young man that he wrote to his father, earnestly entreating to be allowed to enter into the army j for which he said he had always felt the strongest predilec-

government in 1824 or 25. — Ed. t Brother of the late Paul Le Mesurier, Esq. M. P.— Ed.
 * The present Major-General Le Mesurier, who disposed of his patent to

�� �