Garnet Wolseley (4 June 1833 – 25 March 1913) was a Field Marshal of the British Army who served as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces from 1895 to 1900, succeeding Prince George, Duke of Cambridge and preceding Frederick Roberts.
Biography[]
Garnet Wolseley was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1833 to an Anglo-Irish family. He was commissioned into the British Army in 1852 and served in the Second Anglo-Burmese War, as an engineer at the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, in the Sepoy Mutiny (during which he called the sepoys "beastly ni****s", and in the Second Opium War before serving as a military observer in the Confederacy during the American Civil War. After the war, he was breveted a colonel in Canada and helped defend the province against the Fenian raids launched from the United States, as well as leading the Red River Expedition against the Métis rebel Louis Riel. During the 1870s, he supervised reforms in the British Army, including the building of reserves. He was dispatched to West Africa in 1873 and fought against the Ashanti Empire, burning Kumasi in 1874. Wolseley was breveted a major-general and granted several honors in recognition of this achievement. In 1879, he was sent to South Africa to replace Frederic Thesiger, 2nd Baron Chelmsford in command of the war effort against the Zulus, but he arrived as the Anglo-Zulu War ended. In 1882, he led the suppression of the Urabi revolt, and he led the 1884 Nile Expedition to relieve the Siege of Khartoum. However, the expedition arrived too late to save General Charles Gordon and the city of Khartoum, which had fallen to the Mahdists. In 1895, he was appointed commander-in-chief, but the fiasco of "Black Week" in 1899 during the Second Boer War resulted in Wolseley's replacement with Frederick Roberts. He retired that same year, and he died in 1913.
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