to Turin, Italy, where he attended a military academy.
Thereafter, he served in Germany during the Seven
Years’ War (1756–63), rising to the rank of lieutenant
colonel. In 1762, with his father’s death, he was styled
as the second earl Cornwallis. He took his seat in the
House of Lords as a Whig, and when Charles Watson-
Wentworth, the second marquess Rockingham, became
prime minister in 1765, Cornwallis was named lord of
the bedchamber.
Cornwallis served in the House of Lords as an aide-
de-camp to King George III, as chief justice in Eyre,
south of the Trent River, and as the joint vice treasurer of
Ireland. He opposed the Tory program in the American
colonies, and, sympathetic to the aims of the colonists,
he voted against the Declaratory Act in 1766. However,
when war broke out against the British in the colonies,
Cornwallis accepted the command of British troops.
He sailed from England on 10 February 1776 in com-
mand of seven British regiments. Prior to Cornwallis’s
arrival, Lord William Howe, the commander of all Brit-
ish forces in North America, had evacuated Boston (17
March 1776) under threat of a siege and had withdrawn
to Halifax in Canada. Cornwallis brought reinforce-
ments to Howe, and their combined army marched back
into the colonies, seeing action at Staten Island (July
1776) and New York (15 September). After the battle
at White Plains (1 November 1776), Cornwallis seized
Fort Lee on 16 November. He pursued General George
Washington toward Trenton, but on 26 December,
Washington crossed back over the Delaware River and
inflicted a severe blow on Cornwallis’s forces. On 3 Janu-
ary 1777, he struck again at Princeton. Cornwallis did
win a victory for the British at Brandywine, Pennsylvania
(11 September 1777), and took control of Philadelphia
on 28 September 1777. He also won a decisive victory
over General Horatio gates at Camden, South Caro-
lina (16 August 1780).
The remainder of the war would not go so well for
Cornwallis. After Camden, he marched north and set
up his headquarters at Yorktown, a seaport in Virginia,
where he won a quick battle against General Nathanael
greene and seized the Americans’ cannons. In a letter
to a General William Phillips, Cornwallis wrote:
I have had the most difficult and dangerous cam-
paign, and was obliged to fight a battle two hun-
dred miles from my communication, against an
enemy seven times my number. The fate of it waslong doubtful. We had not a regiment or corps
that did not at some time give way. It ended,
however, happily, in our completely routing the
enemy and taking their cannon.... I last night
heard of your arrival in the Chesapeake. Now, my
dear friend, what is our plan? If we mean an of-
fensive war in America, we must abandon New
York, and bring our whole force into Virginia;
we then have a stake to fight for, and a successful
battle may give us America. If our plan is defen-
sive, mixed with desultory expeditions, let us quit
the Carolinas (which cannot be held defensively
while Virginia can be so easily armed against us),
and stick to our salt pork at New York, sending
now and then a detachment to steal tobacco, &c.At Yorktown, the Americans under General Wash-
ington, combined with French soldiers under Jean-
Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau,
encircled Cornwallis’s regiments and laid siege to them.
On 14 October 1781, the outer portions of the English
fortifications were breached, and five days later Corn-
wallis was forced to surrender his entire army. Sir Henry
clinton had left New York for Yorktown with rein-
forcements, but arrived too late to change history. The
treaty signed two years later in Paris (November 1783)
ended the war. Although Cornwallis is widely blamed
by historians for his conduct in fighting the war, he re-
turned home and remained a hero to the British people.
(Clinton received the majority of blame for not reinforc-
ing Cornwallis soon enough.)
In 1785, Cornwallis was named as the English
envoy to the court of frederick ii (the Great) of Prus-
sia. On 23 February 1786, he was named governor-gen-
eral of India, where he served until August 1793. His
series of reforms of British rule in India, known as the
Cornwallis Code, aided in the administrative control
of that country. After the Third Mysore War broke out
in 1790, Cornwallis was named commander of British
troops in India on 29 January 1791. In a series of battles,
including Bangalore (21 March 1791) and Seringapa-
tam (5 February 1792), he defeated the Mysoris, under
Tipu (also Tippoo) Sahib, and Tipu sued for peace, sign-
ing the Treaty of Seringapatam in March 1792. For his
services in this conflict, Cornwallis was made Marquis
Cornwallis of Eye.
Cornwallis served two additional tours overseas: as
viceroy of Ireland (1798–1801), when he worked to end coRnwAlliS, chARleS