Career
Commissioned as an ensign in the British Army's 2nd Regiment of Foot Guards in March 1752, he was promoted to captain in the 20th Regiment of Foot on 18 June 1753 studying the fortified towns of the Low Countries under his military tutor, Captain Guy Carleton, appointed on the recommendation of Colonel James Wolfe. On 11 December 1755, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Promoted to lieutenant colonel in the 33rd Regiment of Foot on 7 June 1756, a second battalion of the 33rd Foot was raised in 1757 and redesignated the following year as its own regiment, the 72nd Regiment of Foot, with Richmond as its commanding officer, while his younger brother Lord George Lennox took command of the 33rd Foot. In May 1758 he was appointed colonel of the 72nd Foot. Richmond took part in the raid on Cherbourg in August 1758 and served as aide-de-camp to Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel at the Battle of Minden in August 1759. Promoted to major general on 9 March 1761, at the end of the Seven Years' War he oversaw the 72nd Foot's disbandment in 1763.
Appointed Lord Lieutenant of Sussex by George III on 18 October 1763, Richmond was sworn of the Privy Council in 1765 being posted to the court of Louis XV in Paris as British ambassador extraordinary, and in the following year he served briefly in the Rockingham Whig administration as Southern Secretary of State, resigning office on the accession of Pitt the Elder in July 1766. He was promoted Lieutenant-General on 30 April 1770 and served briefly as parliamentary Leader of the Whigs in Opposition in 1771 when Rockingham's wife was ill. Richmond's strongly pro-Patriot sympathies earned him the epithet "the Radical Duke."
In policy debates leading up to the American War of Independence, Richmond was a firm supporter of the Patriots, initiating the parliamentary debate in 1778 which called for the removal of British forces from the Thirteen Colonies, during which Pitt (now Earl of Chatham) died from a heart condition. Nevertheless, as Lord-Lieutenant, he raised the Sussex Militia for home defence, taking personal command as Colonel of the Regiment until 1804, resigning in view of his advanced age.
Richmond also advocated a policy of concession in regards to British policy towards Ireland, coining the phrase "a Union of Hearts" which remained in use long after his political lifetime. In 1779 Richmond brought forward a motion for retrenchment of the Civil List, and in 1780 he embodied in a Bill proposals for parliamentary reform, which included male suffrage, annual parliaments and equal electoral areas. In 1787, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. Richmond joined the Second Rockingham ministry as Master-General of the Ordnance in March 1782; he was appointed a Knight of the Garter on 17 April 1782 and promoted to general on 20 November 1782. He resigned as Master-General of the Ordnance when the Fox–North coalition came to power in April 1783.
In January 1784 he joined the first Pitt ministry, again serving as Master-General of the Ordnance; in this role he reformed the Department of State, introducing salaries for office holders, establishing a survey of the South Coast (which led to the formation of the Ordnance Survey) and introducing new artillery (leading to the formation of the Royal Horse Artillery). As Master-General of the Ordnance, Richmond's operational headquarters was at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, where he oversaw the Royal Military Repository (established 1778) under its first Commandant, Sir William Congreve. Richmond supervised Congreve's development of the Repository's artillery collection and his gunpowder experiments at the Royal Laboratory, including improvements in powder manufacture and the establishment of facilities at Portsmouth and Plymouth for powder recovery.
In 1794, Richmond formally established the Corps of Royal Artillery Drivers by Royal Warrant to provide professional teams for field artillery, complementing his earlier formation of the Royal Horse Artillery and ending the reliance on civilian contractors for moving guns. He further commissioned London gunsmith Henry Nock to design and manufacture a new "Duke of Richmond's musket" to replace the Brown Bess musket. The first practical example of using interchangeable parts, just as Nock succeeded in producing the weapon at scale Richmond lost his post as Master-General, ending the prospect of the weapon being adopted officially. However, similar designs continued to be associated with the Duke. After conversion, the majority of these muskets were lost in the Tower of London fire of 1841, along with other ordnance stored there. Contemporary sources report that the fire destroyed over 280,000 small arms, which included numerous Nock screwless-lock "Duke of Richmond's musket" pattern.
By now developing strongly Tory persuasions, his alleged desertion of the Reform cause led to accusations of apostasy and an attack on him by Lord Lauderdale in 1792, which almost led to a duel. In November 1795, when Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke were charged with treason and cited his publications on reform in their defence, Richmond became perceived as a liability to HM Government and was dismissed in February 1795.
Appointed colonel of the Royal Horse Guards on 18 July 1795, he was promoted as Field Marshal on 30 July 1796. On 15 June 1797 he raised a troop-sized horse artillery unit of the Yeomanry Cavalry known as the Duke of Richmond's Light Horse Artillery at his estate of Goodwood House. The unit was equipped with his own design of a curricle gun carriage. In retirement, Richmond developed the family seat enhancing Goodwood's reputation as a sporting estate by adding, alongside his father's cricket pitch, the famous Goodwood Racecourse. He was also a patron of artists such as George Stubbs, Pompeo Batoni, Anton Raphael Mengs, Joshua Reynolds and George Romney.
