Early Life and Career
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Bourke was educated at Westminster and read law at Christ Church, Oxford. He was a cousin of Edmund Burke and spent school and university holidays at Burke's home, and acquired some influential friends. He joined the British Army as an ensign in the Grenadier Guards on 22 November 1798, serving in the Netherlands with the Duke of York before a posting in South America in 1807 where he participated in the siege and storming of Montevideo. He was promoted major-general in 1821. He retired from the army after the Peninsular War to live on his Irish estate but eventually sought Government office to increase his income. He was appointed to the Cape Colony and was promoted to Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern District of the Cape of Good Hope, acting as Governor for both eastern and Western Districts. Under Bourke's governorship, much was done to reform the old, mercantilist system of government inherited from the Dutch East India Company at the Cape.
Read more about this topic: Richard Bourke
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“I could be, I discovered, by turns stern, loving, wise, silly, youthful, aged, racial, universal, indulgent, strict, with a remarkably easy and often cunning detachment ... various ways that an adult, spurred by guilt, by annoyance, by condescension, by loneliness, deals with the prerogatives of power and love.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)