Henry Elliot

Sir Henry George Elliot GCB KCMG PC (30 June 1817 – 30 March 1907) was a British diplomat.

[1] He argued in a dispatch he made on 4 September 1876 "that British interests in preventing change in the Turkish empire were 'not affected by the question whether it was 10,000 or 20,000 persons who perished in the suppression'.

[5] H. C. G. Matthews, in the concluding paragraph of Elliot's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, notes that: Elliot's role as Ambassador to Constantinople was a central theme in a book and BBC Four TV programme aired 22 February 2010 written and presented by Sir Christopher Meyer, former British Ambassador to the US.

The programme argued that Elliot supported Turkey because it acted as a bulwark between Russia and the UK's interests in the middle-east and India.

Elliot's critics accused him of turning "native" but he argued, and the programme lent support to this view, that there were capital considerations they had not taken into account.