Sir James Steuart-Denham, 8th Baronet

General Sir James Steuart-Denham, 8th and 4th Baronet, GCH (7 August 1744 – 12 August 1839) was a British Army officer and politician.

Born James Steuart at Goodtrees, near Edinburgh, he was the only son of Sir James Steuart (later Steuart-Denham), 7th and 3rd Baronet (1713–1780), a political economist, and his wife, Lady Frances (1722–1789), daughter of James Wemyss, 5th Earl of Wemyss. A year after his birth, James was left in the care of relatives on his father's political exile, but he later joined his parents in Angoulême, France. On the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, the family removed itself from Paris, first to Flanders and then, in 1757, to Tübingen in Württemberg, where young James enrolled in the university. He studied there until 1761, when, through the good offices of the Secretary at War, Lord Barrington, he was given a cornetcy in the 1st (Royal) Regiment of Dragoons; he subsequently served with his regiment throughout the Westphalian campaign of 1762. On 13 January 1763, he purchased a captaincy in the 105th Regiment of Foot (Queen's Own Royal Regiment of Highlanders), went on half pay when his regiment was reduced a year later, and then spent two years travelling on the continent until the opportunity arose for him to purchase a troop in the 5th Regiment of Dragoons. Posted in consequence to Ireland, in 1769 he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Townshend, and in 1772 he married Alicia (died 1840), daughter of William Blacker of Carrick, County Antrim. The same year, he purchased a majority in the 13th Regiment of Dragoons and, in 1776, after a brief spell with the 1st Irish Horse, returned to the 13th Dragoons as a lieutenant colonel.

Steuart succeeded to his father's baronetcies and the seat at Coltness, Lanarkshire, in 1780 and took the additional surname of Denham, which his father had adopted upon inheriting Westshield (also in Lanarkshire) four years earlier. Promoted to brevet colonel in 1782, he became Member of Parliament for Lanarkshire in 1784, a seat which he held for the next eighteen years. In 1788, while stationed in Dublin, he was entrusted with improving the training of the cavalry in Ireland; the changes which he introduced to its system of field movements was much commended by headquarters. However, neither this achievement nor the support that he gave to the Pitt administration in parliament, sufficed to win him the colonelcy of a regiment of foot, something which he earnestly sought: he was given instead the colonelcy of the 12th (The Prince of Wales's) Regiment of (Light) Dragoons on 9 November 1791. In October 1793, he was promoted to major general, which had the effect of making him too senior to join the Siege of Toulon, where he had previously been ordered. He was also disappointed when, in 1794, having been given command of the cavalry intended to accompany Lord Cornwallis' mission to the Prussian army, the enterprise was cancelled. That September, he accepted Henry Dundas' offer of a post on the staff in Scotland with a brief to superintend the fencible cavalry.

In March 1798, as a newly promoted lieutenant general, Steuart-Denham arrived to take command of Ireland's southern district. Major-General John Moore found him to be suffering from a nervous complaint which 'completely unfitted him for business'. None the less, Steuart-Denham persisted and, in the months before the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1798, pursued a conciliatory policy. During the Wexford Rebellion, he took credit to himself for his subordinate General Henry Johnson's victory at New Ross on 5 June 1798. But within a fortnight he received an official reprimand from the commander-in-chief, General Lake, for failing — until the order was repeated — to send troops from Munster against Wexford from the west. In response, Steuart-Denham claimed that he had possessed discretionary powers to withhold the troops, and resigned from the Irish staff in protest a month later. He received no further employment.

Steuart-Denham was promoted to a full general in 1803 and exchanged the colonelcy of the 12th Dragoons for that of the 2nd (Royal North British) Regiment of Dragoons on 12 January 1815. He was appointed a GCH in 1830. Although never rich, Steuart-Denham expended his fortune on hospitality and improvements to the neighbourhood, 'leaving to his latter days a pittance barely adequate for comfortable subsistence, and that, ere his death, his heritage had passed to strangers'. He died at Cheltenham on 12 August 1839; his baronetcies descended to a cousin.

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