A Boston Boy Rebuilding the British Empire

Yesterday’s précis of the life of Charlotte Biggs promised a connection to pre-Revolutionary Boston.

You remember that young man whom Charlotte fell in love with as a teenager before her marriage? The one who went off to India to make his fortune?

His name was David Ochterlony, and he came from Boston.

Ochterlony (shown here) was born on 12 Feb 1758, eldest son of a Scottish merchant captain with the same name. His mother was Katherine Tyler, a niece of the first Sir William Pepperrell. The family house from 1762 was a brick mansion on Back Street.

In 1766 David entered John Lovell’s South Latin School. The year before, however, his father had died on a voyage to the Caribbean. The estate was in debt, not paid off until well after the war.

What happened next to young David and his siblings isn’t easy to sort out. There’s evidence he spent some time studying under Samuel Moody at the Byfield school endowed by Lt. Gov. William Dummer, now the Governor’s Academy.

Katherine Ochterlony moved to Britain and in the early 1770s married Sir Isaac Heard, a Royal Navy veteran, merchant, and, of all things, heraldric official.

The Ochterlony children joined their mother in Britain, and Heard welcomed them into his family. It’s said that David developed a close relationship with his stepfather.

When the American War began, David Ochterlony showed his loyalty to the British Empire by joining the army, or pledging to. During this time in London, the teenager evidently met Charlotte Williams, and she fell in love with him.

Ochterlony shipped out to India as an army cadet. In 1778 he gained the rank of ensign, and in three years became quartermaster for the 71st Regiment. During the Second Anglo-Mysore War, connected with Britain and France’s fight on the other side of the world, Ochterlony was captured and spent two years as a prisoner. Then he returned to army staff positions.

The loss of the most populous North American colonies turned British attention to India, and Ochterlony’s career rose with the empire there. In 1812 he became a major general, and in 1816 a baronet and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. (Those are the sorts of honors his stepfather loved studying.) In the first quarter of the nineteenth century Ochterlony was among the British Empire’s most powerful administrators on the subcontinent.

Gen. Sir David Ochterlony was known for adopting the local aristocratic lifestyle rather than maintaining British, or Boston, ways. He had thirteen concubines or wives, who reportedly paraded around Delhi on elephants. A son by one of those women became the heir to his baronetcy after the general died in India in 1825.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the teen-aged girl who had become Charlotte Biggs, author and intelligence source, was still carrying a torch for the aspiring officer she had met in the 1770s. When she wrote an autobiography late in life, she addressed it to Ochterlony, evidently still hoping to see him again. (That manuscript became the basis of Joanne Major and Sarah Murden’s biography, A Georgian Heroine.)

The Adventures of Mrs. Charlotte Biggs

From the essay I quoted yesterday I learned that Britain’s celebration of George III’s Jubilee in 1809–10 was “the brain-child of a middle-class widow from the Welsh Borders, Mrs Biggs.”

I wanted to learn more, and it turns out there’s a recent biography of Rachel Charlotte (Williams) Biggs (d. 1827) by Joanne Major and Sarah Murden: A Georgian Heroine: The Intriguing Life of Rachel Charlotte Williams Biggs.

Young Charlotte Williams’s early life reads like a novel—specifically, an imitation of Samuel Richardson. She was educated in France, a sign that her family had at least a toehold in the genteel class. She was about seventeen years old in the late 1770s when a lumber merchant abducted and raped her—repeatedly.

After escaping from that merchant, Williams fell in love with another young man, only to watch him head off to India to make his fortune.

She married Benjamin Hunt Biggs. The couple went to France during the first years of the republic, only to end up in prison during the Jacobin regime. After getting out and getting back to Britain, Mrs. Biggs published her first book, A Residence in France during the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795.

In quick succession Biggs wrote a play titled What Is She? and a pamphlet on agricultural policy. In the early 1800s she went back to Napoleon’s France, ostensibly for her poor health but gathering information she shipped home.

Politically, Biggs was a voice of loyalty to the British government under William Pitt. The same sentiment was behind her proposal for a nationwide celebration of the sixtieth year of George III’s reign. She claimed to have written hundreds of anonymous letters promoting the Jubilee.

Peace in Europe after the Battle of Waterloo left Biggs in France without government support. According to Benjamin Colbert at British Travel Writing:

In her last letter to Vansittart dated 21 April 1816, her attempt to underline her value (at a time when open access to the continent was no doubt depreciating it) strikes a gothic tone. She describes an unknown hand throwing a packet into her carriage unseen by the coachman. Opening it in the secrecy of her chambers, she finds a note warning her off her inquiries. Hardly has she read it when it spontaneously combusts (‘some chemical operation’), leaving no evidence of its existence.

Again, Biggs’s life story reads like a novel, at least in part because she wrote it that way.

TOMORROW: The connection to Revolutionary Boston (because of course there had to be one).