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Captain Rowland John Chute (or John Rowland Chute) was identified in The County Families of the United Kingdom as "formerly Captain 58th Foot". The 58th Regiment of Foot (Rutlandshire Regiment of Foot), part of the Royal Anglian Regiment, has a long history of service and was utilized in many of Britain's colonies as well: the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, Ireland and Scotland, and India. This entry did not specify the period of time Rowland Chute served as a Captain in the 58th Foot, so until records identifying his specific time and nature of service are found, it is impossible to provide a military history of his involvement.
There are some resources available:
The regimental website, which unfortunately does not appear to have been updated since 2000:Deacon Andrew Chute, living in Port Burwell, Ontario, Canada, wrote a letter to his son Alfred dated April 11, 1859, which included his thoughts about the growing unrest in Europe. He also mentioned the Donati Comet, visible in the fall of 1858.
You may wonder why Italian unification would have impacted anyone outside of Italy. Very generally speaking, the area now known as Italy was at that time made up of three large "kingdoms": Sardinia/Piedmont in the north, the two Sicilies in the south and the huge area controlled by the Catholic Church in the middle of the Italian peninsula and separating the other two: the Papal States. Sardinia/Piedmont and the Two Sicilies were controlled by Austria and France respectively; the Papal States were (obviously) under the control of the Pope in Rome. The fourth significant player in the events of this period were the Italian people themselves. From their ranks men like Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giovanni Mazzini rose to become leaders of a growing nationalist movement. Weary of being pawns on an international chessboard, Italians wanted to rule themselves and wanted the French and the Prussians gone. As for the Pope? It was not so much that they wanted him to disappear, but the Papal lands effectively cut Italy in half and prevented unification. They needed Papal lands to ensure the full unification of the peninsula, and they did want to take part in governing themselves: under Catholic doctrine and law at that time, this was not possible. Part of the Nationalist agenda included the retaking of Rome as essentially the heart of the new Kingdom of Italy, and restrictions placed on the power of the Pope over their secular world - in other words, they wanted to join the rest of Europe and the Americas by separating church and state.
Pope Pius IX did not help his own cause by, in response, calling for international military forces to raise arms against the people of Italy, and issuing an encyclical (Quanta cura) with an accompanying "Syllabus of Errors" that basically forbade all Catholics from believing in "freedom of speech, freedom of the press or freedom of religion" 1. (As you can well imagine, Catholic jaws all over the world dropped in shock). He followed this up with a Jubilee (the highlight of which was a mass book burning), and finally, an Ecumenical Council the object of which was to declare the Pope - that is, himself - infallible. Whatever support he may have had from outside of Italy began to dwindle rapidly; within Italy itself he was mercilessly ridiculed. The Pope's own Secretary of State privately thought this political move was disastrous. The rest of the world - Andrew's letter to his son is an example of this - watched events unfold in Italy with close scrutiny. Andrew, being a Deacon in the Baptist Church, would have been particularly interested. Canada, in fact, had sent several Bishops to the Ecumenical Council.
Despite the Pope's great unpopularity, it would be about 10 years before the Nationalist forces finally entered Roman walls in 1870 and declared Italy a unified nation under King Victor Emmanuel II. The Romans greeted the Nationalist forces as liberators. One of the first things the citizens of Rome - inarguably one of the greatest and most venerated cities in world history - gathered en masse to do was something they had never been able to do before that moment: exercise their right to vote.
Captain James Chute of Her Majestry's 54th Regiment and the son of James Pierce Chute and Margaret Reeves Chute of Ireland, was sent with the 54th Regiment to Italy to support the nationalists. James died, or was killed, in Florence on 24 NOV 1876, the year of the first Italian general election. The inscription on his tombstone reads, "IN LOVING MEMORY OF/ CAPTAIN JAMES CHUTE/ LATE OF HER MAJESTY'S 54TH REGIMENT/ WHO DIED AT FLORENCE, 24TH NOVEMBER 1876, AGED 37/ DEEPLY MOURNED BY HIS BEREAVED WIDOW ELEANOR CHUTE/ HIS WAS A NOBLE NATURE, GENEROUS, KIND AND TRUE/ On regimental regalia: REGIMENT 54/ MARABOUT// REGIMENT . . ST/ NORFOLK". He is buried in the Cimitero Accatolico (non-Catholic cemetery) in Florence.
During that same year, the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave the right to vote to black Americans - and the State of Georgia was readmitted into the Union after the Civil War - the War in which Andrew's son William Edward participated - before he took on the task of writing the Chute Genealogies.
1Kertzer, David. Prisoner of the Vatican: The Pope's Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Page 23.A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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