Henry Ellis (diplomat)

Sir Henry Ellis, KCB, PC (1 September 1788 – 28 September 1855) was a British diplomat.

Ellis was the illegitimate son of Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire. The identity of his mother is unknown, but he was brought up in his father's household. He was educated at Harrow School in 1799–1803, and at William Nicholson's Private Academy in Soho in 1804–5. He joined the Honourable East India Company in 1805, and in 1808, became an assistant to Sir John Malcolm. In 1809, Malcolm obliged Lord Minto by sending Ellis to join his second mission to Sindh. On his return, Ellis wrote a damning account of the Emir, which formed the basis of British attitudes to the territory until it was annexed in 1843.

In 1810, Ellis joined Malcolm's third mission to Persia. From 1812 to 1814, he served as private secretary to his father when the latter was President of the Board of Control. In 1814, he returned to Persia on a secret mission to obtain revisions of the Preliminary Treaty of Friendship and Alliance of 1809. He was successful, and the revised treaty provided the basis of Anglo-Persian relations until 1838. In 1815, he advised Castlereagh on the best way to deal with the perceived Russian threat to India. Castlereagh, following Ellis's advice, persuaded the Russians to return Qarabagh and Talesh to Persia. In the summer of 1815, Ellis acted as a secretary during the Anglo-American negotiations.

In 1816, Ellis accompanied Earl Amherst on his mission to China, and he recorded his experiences in "A Journal of the Proceedings of the Late Embassy to China" (1817). The mission, to negotiate a new trade agreement, was unsuccessful. Ellis was not impressed by the Chinese, whom he considered xenophobic, ultra-traditional, and 'uninteresting'. On the return voyage, Ellis and his companions were wrecked in the Gaspar Strait and only reached Batavia after a perilous journey of several hundred miles in an open boat. Later they called at St Helena, where Ellis met Napoleon. Napoleon later hotly disputed Ellis's account of the meeting.

Ellis unsuccessfully contested Boston at a by-election in 1818; he was helped in his campaign by Frederick Robinson. Robinson had married Lord Buckinghamshire's only legitimate child, Sarah, who inherited her father's considerable wealth, and, after the earl's death in 1816, Robinson accepted her illegitimate brother as 'a sort of charge upon the estate' and acted as his patron. Ellis was elected for Boston in 1820 but, in the meantime, had accepted the posts of Deputy Secretary of State for the Colonies and Commissioner of Stamps in Cape Town, and was unseated on the grounds that he held an office of profit under the crown. On 10 June 1820 at Cape Town, he married Louisa Amelia Wilson of Leominster; they had three sons. Ellis returned to Britain and was Commissioner of Customs in 1824–5, Clerk of the Pells in 1825–34, and Commissioner of the Board of Control in 1830–35. In 1830, he published "A Series of Letters on the East India Question", addressed to Members of Parliament, in which he defended the role of the East India Company.

Ellis was sworn of the Privy Council in 1832. He was briefly Minister to Persia "ad interim" in 1835–6, but advised that Afghanistan was now more important to Britain than Persia. He unsuccessfully contested Lincoln in the 1837 general election. In 1842, Lord Aberdeen, at Ripon's request, asked Ellis to head a special trade mission to Brazil. The mission failed, partly because of the offence caused by Britain's unilateral action to suppress the Brazilian slave trade. In 1848, Ellis was named as a delegate for the abortive Brussels conference on the affairs of Italy; the same year he was appointed a KCB. Ellis died at Marine Parade, Brighton, on 28 September 1855.

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