John Hale (British Army officer)

General John Hale (1728–1806) was a British army officer, who is remembered chiefly for his close friendship with General James Wolfe, and for his exceptionally large number of children by his wife Mary Chaloner, a noted beauty who was painted by Joshua Reynolds.

As a very young officer, he played a part in suppressing the 1745 Rebellion, an experience which is said to have given him a lifelong aversion to the Scottish nation.

That year they were stationed in Scotland, where Hale's proverbial dislike of Scots people caused him to become engaged in a serious fracas with a toll-keeper, which might have had ended fatally.

[1] In politics he was something of a reformer, and during the Yorkshire by-election of 1785, he made a celebrated speech which was considered by most of the electorate to be dangerously radical.

Of their children William, John, Richard, George, Francis, Henry, Bernard, Vicesimus, Edward, Thomas, Emily, Elizabeth, Mary, Anne, Fanny, Catherine, Charlotte, Octavia, Jane and Harriet survived infancy and seventeen of the twenty-one outlived their father.

[14] There is a celebrated portrait of Mary Chaloner Hale as Euphrosyne, one of the three Graces, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who also painted her husband.