# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Gosselin, Martin Le Marchant Hadsley

​GOSSELIN, Sir MARTIN LE MARCHANT HADSLEY (1847–1905), diplomatist, born at Walfield, near Hertford, on 2 Nov. 1847, was grandson of Admiral Thomas Le Marchant Gosselin [q. v.] and eldest son of Martin Hadsley Gosselin of Ware Priory and Blakesware, Hertfordshire, by his wife Frances Orris, eldest daughter of Admiral Sir John Marshall of Gillingham House, Kent. Educated at Eton College and at Christ Church, Oxford, he entered the diplomatic service in 1868, and after working in the foreign office was appointed attaché at Lisbon in 1869. He was transferred to Berlin in 1872, where he remained till promoted to be second secretary at St. Petersburg in 1874. During the congress at Berlin in 1878 he was attached to the special mission of the British plenipotentiaries, Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury. He was transferred from St. Petersburg to Rome in 1879, returned to St. Petersburg in the following year, and to Berlin in 1882. In 1885 he was promoted to be secretary of legation, and was appointed to Brussels, where he served till 1892, taking charge of the legation at intervals during the absence of the minister, and being employed on occasions on special service. In November 1887 he was appointed secretary to the duke of Norfolk's special mission to Pope Leo XIII on the occasion of the pontiff's jubilee. In 1889 and 1890 he and Mr. (afterwards Sir Alfred) Bateman of the board of trade served as joint British delegates in the conferences held at Brussels to arrange for the mutual publication of customs tariffs, and in July of the latter year he signed the convention for the establishment of an international bureau for that purpose. He was also employed as one of the secretaries to the international conference for the suppression of the African slave trade, which sat at Brussels in 1889 and the following year and resulted in the General Act of 2 July 1890. In recognition of his services he was in 1890 made C.B. Later in that year he was one of the British delegates at the conference held by representatives of Great Britain, Germany, and Italy to discuss and fix the duties to be imposed on imports in the conventional basin of the Congo, and he signed the agreement which was arrived at in December 1890. In April 1892 he was promoted to be secretary of embassy at Madrid, was transferred to Berlin in the following year, and to Paris in 1896, receiving at the latter post the titular rank of minister plenipotentiary. In 1897 he was selected to discuss with French commissioners the question of coolie emigration from British India to Réunion, and in that and the following year he served as one of the British members of the Anglo-French commission for the delimitation of the possessions and spheres of influence of the two countries to the east and west of the Niger river. The arrangement arrived at by the commission was embodied in a convention signed at Paris on 14 June 1898, and provided a solution of questions which had gravely threatened the good relations between the two countries. At the close of these negotiations he was created K.C.M.G. From July 1898 to August 1902 he held the home appointment of assistant under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, and was then sent to Lisbon as British envoy, a post which he held till his death there on 26 Feb. 1905 from the effects of a motor-car accident. The relations of Great Britain with Portugal during Gosselin's residence were uneventful, but King Edward VII's sense of his services was marked by his preferment as K.C.V.O. in 1903 and as G.C.V.O. in 1904.
Gosselin possessed in a high degree fair judgment, good temper, and charm of manner. He was an accomplished musician, and possessed a delicacy of touch and a power of artistic interpretation on the pianoforte almost unrivalled even among professional artists.
[The Times, 27 Feb. 1905; Oscar Browning's Memoirs, 1911; Foreign Office List, 1906, p. 397.]
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