Lally-Tollendal, THOMAS ARTHUR, COUNT DE LALLY and BARON DE TOLLENDAL, a French general, was born at Romans, in Dauphiné, in January 1702. His father, Sir Gerard Lally, was an Irish Jacobite refugee, and commander of an Irish regiment in the French service. Lally distinguished himself as a soldier in Flanders, especially at the battle of Fontenoy; accompanied Prince Charles Edward to Scotland in 1745; and in 1756 was appointed commander-in-chief in the French East Indian settlements. He commenced vigorous hostilities against the British, took many towns, and besieged Madras itself; but, having sustained a severe defeat, he was compelled to retreat to Pondicherry, which was attacked in March 1760 by land and sea by a greatly superior British force. Lally, however, held out for ten months; then, capitulating on 16th January 1761, he was conveyed as a prisoner of war to England. But, hearing that he had been accused of treachery and cowardice in India, he obtained leave to proceed to France for the vindication of his character. There he was thrown into the Bastille, and kept two years before his trial took place. The parliament of Paris at last condemned him to death for betraying the interests of the king and the Indian Company, and the sentence was executed on 9th May 1766. But his son, supported by the powerful assistance of Voltaire, procured a royal decree on 21st May 1778, declaring the condemnation unjust, and restoring all the forfeited honours. See Malleson's French in India (new ed. 1884), and Hamont's Fin d'un Empire Français aux Indes (1887).
That son, TROPHIMUS GÉRARD, MARQUIS DE LALLY-TOLLENDAL, born in Paris, 5th March 1751, was one of those nobles who in the States General of 1789 united with the Third Estate; but, alarmed at the democratic tendencies of the National Assembly, he afterwards allied himself with the court. He laboured to procure for France a constitution with two chambers and a privileged aristocracy; and earnestly sought to protect the king, but was himself obliged to flee to England. After the Revolution of 18th Brumaire, he returned to France. Louis XVIII. made him a peer. He died at Paris on 11th March 1830. He was the author of a famous Defence of the French Emigrants (1794), and a Life of Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (2d ed. 1814).