# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Walsham, John

​WALSHAM, Sir JOHN, second baronet (1830–1905), diplomatist, born at Cheltenham on 29 Oct. 1830, was eldest of four sons of Sir John James Walsham, first baronet, of Knill Court, Herefordshire, high sheriff of Radnorshire in 1870, by Sarah Frances, second daughter of Matthew Bell of Woolsington House, Northumberland. The father's family, of Norfolk origin, migrated to Radnorshie in the sixteenth century, and acquired by marriage the estates of the Knill family. The baronetcy conferred on a direct ancestor, General Sir Thomas Morgan [q. v.], on 1 Feb. 1661, became extinct in 1768, and was revived in 1831 in favour of Sir John's father.
After education at Bury St. Edmund's grammar school and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1854 and M.A. in 1857, Walsham entered the audit office in March 1854. In October of the same year he was appointed a clerk in the foreign office, and was temporarily attached to the British legation at Mexico 30 Dec. 1857. He was appointed paid attaché there in 1860, and remained there till 1866, when he was transferred as second secretary to Madrid. The British legation ​was at that time engaged in correspondence arising out of the practice persisted in by the Spanish authorities of firing upon merchant vessels passing by the Spanish forts in the Straits of Gibraltar if they failed to display their national flags. This practice was abandoned in pursuance of an agreement signed in March 1865, but claims for losses occasioned by it still remained unsettled. Among these was one preferred by the owners of the schooner Mermaid of Dartmouth, alleged to have been sunk by a shot fired from the batteries at Ceuta. After much controversy it was referred by agreement to the arbitration of a joint commission, and Walsham, who had thoroughly mastered the details of this and other cases, was appointed to be one of the British commissioners. In 1870, after working for some time at the foreign office during the pressure of business occasioned by the outbreak of the Franco-German war, he proceeded to the Hague, and in 1873 was nominated as secretary of legation at Peking, but did not take up the appointment, withdrawing from the service shortly before his father's death on 10 Aug. 1874, when he succeeded as second baronet. In January 1875 he rejoined the service, being appointed secretary of legation at Madrid and remaining there till May 1878, when he was promoted to be secretary of embassy at Berlin. In 1883 he was transferred to Paris, receiving promotion to the titular rank of minister plenipotentiary, and on 24 Nov. 1885 was made British envoy at Peking. This onerous post he held for seven years, until his health was seriously affected by the combined strain of work and climate. On 31 March 1890 he obtained from the Chinese government the signature of an additional article to the Chefoo agreement of 1875, formally declaring Chungking on the Yang-tsze river to be open to trade on the same footing as other treaty ports. In 1891 a succession of outbreaks occurred in different parts of China, in which missionary establishments were plundered and destroyed and several British subjects lost their lives. Walsham pressed with vigour for adequate measures to ensure punishment of those responsible and better protection in the future, and his efforts, supported by the home government, were attended with considerable success. In April 1892 he was transferred to Bucharest, and retired on a pension in September 1894. He was made K.C.M.G. in Febuary 1895.
Walsham was a hardworking and meritorious public servant, whose unselfishness and kindness of heart earned for him great popularity, but whose work, partly on account of his naturally retiring disposition, partly in consequence of physical breakdown from over-exertion, scarcely received full public recognition. He died in Gloucestershire on 10 Dec. 1905, and was buried at the ancestral home of the family, Knill Court. He married on 5 March 1867 Florence, only daughter of the Hon. Peter Campbell Scarlett, by whom he left two sons.
[The Times, 12 Dec. 1905; Foreign Office List, 1906, p. 401; Burke's Peerage; Papers laid before Parliament.]
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