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, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“We do not preach great things but we live them.”
—Marcus Minucius Felix (late 2nd or early 3rd ce, Roman Christian apologist. Octavius, 38. 6, trans. by G.H. Rendell.
“In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)