AUTOGRAPH LETTER INCLUDING COMMENTARY ON THE CONTROVERSIAL COLONEL CRAWLEY COURT MARTIAL [1863] SIGNED BY LORD HENRY PERCY.

Lord Percy writes a friendly letter to Mary Ford. After accepting an invitation from her and commenting on the weather and her case of influenza, he comments on the Prussian and Austrian forces crossing into Schleswig. "Oh the poor Danes!!" He devotes the rest of the letter to the case of Lieutenant-Colonel Crawley. Crawley was court-martialed for his role in a bungled court-martial in India in 1862. The deaths of a British soldier and his wife after their release from an Indian prison during that court case created a sensation in Victorian England. Crawley was acquitted in his own trial. His acquittal led the social reformer James Matthew Higgins to write an article for the "Cornhill Magazine" [November 1863] disputing the verdict. He published the article under the initials "J.O." He was subsequently rebuked in a letter to The Times signed "Verax".

Percy writes: "Mr. Higgins should be told by some lady from whom those things come best that as he is so sore about Verax's letter he may imagine what pain his indignant misinterpretations may have given Crawley & learn to be a little less Venomous.....I am surprised at the country being allowed to be burdened with the expense of printing the Crawley [ ---- ] as every paper had a very fair report of the same, [ __ ] for the satisfaction of the [ --- ] Fortescue". Dudley Fortescue was a British M.P. who initiated the Parliamentary debate on the death of the British soldier.

General Lord Henry Percy, VC, KCB [1817-1877] was a British army officer who served as a captain and lieutenant-colonel in the 3rd Battalion, Grenadier Guards during the Crimean War of 1854-55. At the battle of Inkerman he won the Victorian Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy,when, though wounded himself, he extricated some fifty men who were surrounded and under heavy fire. Outside his military career he was briefly a Conservative Member of Parliament.

From the autograph collection of Mrs. Mary Ford of Pencarrow, widow of Richard Ford who wrote the popular "Handbook for Travellers in Spain".