Ramsay Weston Phipps

Ramsay Weston Phipps (10 April 1838 – 24 June 1923) was an Irish-born military historian and officer in Queen Victoria's Royal Artillery. The son of Pownoll Phipps, an officer of the British East India Company's army, he was descended from the early settlers of the West Indies; many generations had served in the British, and the English military. Phipps served in the Crimean War, had a stint of duty at Malta, and helped to repress the Fenian uprising in Canada in 1866. Phipps is known for his study of The Armies of the First French Republic and the Rise of the Marshals of Napoleon I, a five-volume set published posthumously from 1926–1939 by Oxford University Press. He also edited L.A. Fauvelet de Bourrienne's Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, a three-volume work published in 1885 and Madame Campan's The private life of Marie Antoinette, queen of France and Navarre; with sketches and anecdotes of the courts of Louis XVI, published in 1889. Background Ramsay Weston Phipps descended from generations of military and political men. Colonel William Phipps, a Yeoman of Lincolnshire, raised a regiment of horse for Charles I. Another of his ancestors was Lord Chancellor of Ireland in the reign of Queen Anne. Captain James Phipps settled the Island of St. Christopher, in the West Indies in 1676. The family was rewarded for its loyalty with titles and lands in Ireland. Ramsay Phipps was also a cousin of the Earls of Mulgrave. In 1791, Phipps' grandfather, Constantine (1746–1797), rented the Hotel d'Harcourt in Caen, France, from the Duke of Harcourt; in 1793, he returned briefly to England in 1793 for the wedding of one of his daughters, leaving eight of his children in France. When War of the First Coalition broke out in 1793, the children were separated from their parents. Ramsay Phipps' father, Pownoll Phipps (1780–1858) and his siblings grew up in the French city during the French revolution, and lived under the threat of anti-English violence. Only after the Treaty of Campo Formio could the children return to England, arriving on 2 October 1798, all of them fluent in French; Pownoll Phipps reportedly spoke with French-accented English for the rest of his life. By the end of October, Pownoll had a commission as a lieutenant and joined the Bengal Army of the East India Company. The following June, he embarked for India on the Bombay-built ship Britannica.