Warburton, George Drought 1816-1857, writer on Canada, third son of George Warburton of Aughrim, and younger brother of Bartholomew Elliott George Warburton [qv.], was born at Wicklow in 1816. He was educated at the Royal Military College, Woolwich, and served in the royal artillery from June 1833. In 1837 he was sent with a detachment of the royal artillery to assist the Spanish legion in Spain, and was severely wounded in action. In the middle of July 1844 he embarked from Chatham for Canada, and wrote an agreeable description of the dominion, under its ancient vernacular name of Hochelaga; or England in the New World. The work was published anonymously in 1846 in two volumes, as edited by Eliot Warburton, and the fifth edition, revised, came out in 1854. It was also printed in New York, although the portion devoted to the United States was scarcely more complimentary to the manners of the republicans than the well-known work of Mrs. Trollope. He returned from Canada in 1846, and was afterwards stationed at Landguard Fort, near Harwich (Leslie, Landguard Fort, 1898, p. 80).
     The success of his first book encouraged him to publish another anonymous work, The Conquest of Canada, dated 1850, and also in two volumes. This passed through three editions in England, and was issued at New York in 1850. A compilation of a different kind, the Memoir of Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough and Monmouth, by the author of Hochelaga, 1853, 2 vols., has through fresh research been superseded. He wrote with skill and spirit.
     Warburton married at St. George's, Hanover Square, on 1 June 1853, Elizabeth Augusta Bateman-Hanbury, third daughter of the first Lord Bateman, and had an only daughter, who became the wife of Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill. In November 1854 he retired from the army as major on full pay, and resided at Henley House, Frant, Sussex. On 28 March 1857 he was elected by a large majority as an independent liberal member for the borough of Harwich in Essex. He was subject to severe pains and attacks of indigestion, and in a fit of temporary insanity resulting from these troubles shot himself through the head at Henley House on 23 Oct. 1857, aged 41. He was buried at Iffley, near Oxford. It was said of him and his brother Eliot, their lives were sunshine, their deaths tragedies. In April 1869 his widow married George Rushout, third lord Northwick, and she was in 1886 the recipient of the Dunmow Flitch (G. E. C[okayne], Complete Peerage, sv. Northwick).

Sources:
     Essex Standard, 30 Oct. 1857, p. 4
     Athenĉum, 1857, p. 1359
     Burke's Peerage, sub Bateman
     Gent. Mag. 1853, ii. 305
     information from Rev. Canon Warburton of Winchester, his surviving brother.

Contributor: W. P. C. [William Prideaux Courtney]

Published: 1899