Haileybury College

Haileybury College, 2 miles SE. of Hertford, erected in 1809 by the East India Company from the design of William Wilkins, R.A., as a place of training for cadets in their service, and so occupied until the transference in 1858 of the powers of the Company to the crown. An interval then ensued during which the college remained absolutely empty, though the solitude was for a few months broken by the arrival of a regiment from India, fresh from the mutiny; but the building was not suited for barracks, and it was soon again deserted. For a while there was a talk of converting it into a workhouse, but happily a better fate was in store for the place: the enterprise of several county gentlemen successfully carried through a scheme for establishing at Haileybury a new public school, and in September 1862 the school was opened, its numbers being limited under its charter to 500. Five exhibitions of from £60 to £20, tenable for three years at Oxford or Cambridge, and in some cases elsewhere, are open yearly for competition to members of the school who are under nineteen years of age; another of £50 is available every third year, and there are nine scholarships for boys at the school. Among the professors on the staff of the East India Company were Malthus, the political economist; Sir James Mackintosh, the philosophical historian; William Empson, editor of the Edinburgh Review; and Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Boden-Sauscrit professor at Oxford; and among the students who afterwards became illustrious, John Lawrence, ruler of the Punjab in the time of the Indian Mutiny, afterwards Lord Lawrence, Viceroy of India; Sir Charles Trevelyan; Bishop Forbes; and Sir Henry Bartle Edward Frere. See Higgen, Old and New Haileybury (1887), and Monier Williams, Reminiscences of Old Haileybury College (1894).