Viscount Chelsea
(1812-1873)
2 March 1861

Volume 2, page 255, sitting number 2312.

Identified in the Silvy daybooks as 'Lord Viscount Chelsea,' this is the Right Honourable Henry Charles Cadogan, Viscount Chelsea, eldest son of the 3rd Earl of Cadogan.

Born on 15 February 1812 in South Audley Street, Mayfair, he was baptised at Palermo in Sicily on 8 October 1813. He was educated at Eton and Oriel College, Oxford (BA, 1832). On 12 July 1836 in Durham Cathedral, he married Mary Sarah Wellesley, daughter of the Hon. and Rev. Gerald Valerian Wellesley, Dean of Windsor, and Lady Emily Maud Cadogan. From 1841 to 1847 he was the (Conservative) Member of Parliament for Reading, and from 1852 to 1857, he was the Conservative representative for Dover. From 1858 to 1859, he was Secretary of the Embassy at Paris. He succeeded his father on 15 September 1864, becoming the 4th Earl of Cadogan.

Lord Cadogan died on 8 June 1873, at the age of 61, in Woodrising, Norfolk, and was buried in Chelsea.

According to the Dover Express (13 June 1873), the death of Earl Cadogan 'occurred at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon, while on a visit to his son, Viscount Chelsea, M.P., at Woodrising Hall, Norfolk. His lordship was seized with epidemic pneumonia, and the symptoms being very severe from the first, Dr. Eade and Dr. Lock, the medical gentlemen in attendance, sought the advice of Sir W. Gill, but their skill was of no avail, for his lordship, as already stated, died yesterday afternoon. Lord Chelsea succeeds to the title, and a vacancy is thus caused in the representation of Bath.'

[From an album compiled by Elizabeth Van de Weyer, the American wife of Jean Sylvain Van de Weyer, Belgian ambassador to the Court of St James.]