CHURCH, SIR RICHARD (1784-1873), British military officer and general in the Greek army, was the son of a Quaker, Matthew Church of Cork. He was born in 1784, and at the age of 16 ran away from home and enlisted in the army. For this violation of its principles he was disowned by the Society of Friends, but his father bought him a commission in the 13th (Somersetshire) Light Infantry. He served in the demonstration against Ferrol, and in the expedition to Egypt under Sir Ralph Abercromby in 1801. He accompanied the expedition which landed in Calabria, and fought a successful battle against the French at Maida on July 6, 1806. In the summer of 1809 Church sailed with the expedition sent to occupy the Ionian islands. Here he formed a Greek regiment in English pay. It included many of the men who were afterwards among the leaders of the Greeks in the War of Independence. Church drew up a report on the Ionian islands for the Congress of Vienna, in which he advo cated the retention of the islands under the British flag and the permanent occupation by Great Britain of Parga and of other for merly Venetian coast towns on the mainland, then in the posses sion of Ali Pasha of Iannina. In 18 i 7 he entered the service of king Ferdinand of Naples as lieutenant-general, with a commis sion to suppress the brigandage then rampant in Apulia. In 182o he was appointed governor of Palermo and commander-in-chief of the troops in Sicily. The revolution which broke out in that year led to the termination of his services in Naples.
In 1827 Church became commander-in-chief of the Greek army. The rout of his army in an attempt to relieve the acropolis of Athens, then besieged by the Turks, proved that it was incapable of conducting regular operations. The acropolis capitulated, and Sir Richard (he had been knighted by George IV.) turned to partisan warfare in western Greece. Here his ac tivity had beneficial results, for it led to a rectification in 1832, in a sense favourable to Greece, of the frontier drawn by the Powers in 183o (see his Observations on an Eligible Line of Fron tier for Greece, 183o). Church had, however, surrendered his commission, as a protest against the unfriendly Government of Capo d'Istria, on Aug. 2 5, 18 2 9. He lived for the rest of his life in Greece, was created general of the army in 1854, and died at Athens on March 3o, 1873.