Cornwallis lost America at Yorktown, then got India and Ireland
Charles Cornwallis is remembered in America for surrendering at Yorktown in 1781, the defeat that effectively ended the war. Britain didn't hold it against him. Five years later he was running British India, and later Ireland, where he helped bring about the union with Great Britain. Earlier, he had opposed the Stamp Act.
Born in London's Grosvenor Square on 31 December 1738, Cornwallis came from a well-connected Suffolk family: his mother was a niece of Robert Walpole, and one uncle was Archbishop of Canterbury. After Eton, where a hockey accident injured his eye, and Cambridge, he joined the army in 1757 and studied at the military academy in Turin. He fought in the Seven Years' War, including the Battle of Minden, and in 1762 inherited his father's title and a seat in the House of Lords.
As a Whig he sympathised with the colonists. In 1765 he was one of only five peers who voted against the Stamp Act. When war came, though, he sought active service. He led from the front in the New York campaign and pursued George Washington across New Jersey, but at Assunpink Creek in January 1777 he failed to post proper patrols, and Washington slipped away overnight behind burning campfires to strike Princeton. His wife Jemima's illness took him home in 1778; she died the following February.
Back in America he led Britain's southern strategy, which counted on Loyalists rising to help. He won a major victory at Camden in 1780 and a costly one at Guilford Court House in March 1781. His relationship with his superior, Sir Henry Clinton, soured badly, and the southern campaign ended with his surrender to a combined French and American force at Yorktown in October 1781.
His reputation survived. Knighted and sent to India in 1786 as governor-general, he pushed through the Cornwallis Code, including the Permanent Settlement land-tax reform, and fought the Third Anglo-Mysore War against Tipu Sultan from 1789 to 1792. In 1798 he took charge in Ireland during the rebellion and a French invasion, then signed the 1802 Treaty of Amiens as Britain's chief negotiator. Reappointed to India, he died there on 5 October 1805, soon after arriving.
Source: Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis
