Edward Drummond
British politician (1792-1843)
Edward Drummond (30 March 1792 – 25 January 1843) was a British civil servant, and was Personal Secretary to several British prime ministers. He was fatally shot by Daniel M'Naghten, whose subsequent trial gave rise to the M'Naghten rules, the legal test of insanity used in many common law jurisdictions.
Life and career
Drummond was a member of the family who owned and ran Drummonds Bank, and a great-grandson of William Drummond, 4th Viscount Strathallan who died fighting for the Jacobite cause at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. His parents were Charles Drummond, a banker, and his wife, Frances Dorothy (herself the second daughter of the Reverend Edward Lockwood). He was one of nine children, of whom five survived to adulthood. His sister Charlotte did not marry and shared a house with him in Lower Grosvenor Street. His older brother Charles followed their father into the bank; younger brother Berkeley went into the army and younger brother Arthur into the church. Drummond joined the civil service in June 1814, becoming a clerk at the Treasury. He was later Private Secretary to a succession of British Prime Ministers: George Canning, Lord Goderich, the 1st Duke of Wellington, and Robert Peel.
Assassination
On the afternoon of 20 January, Drummond was walking along Whitehall on his way back to Downing Street from visiting his brother at the bank in Charing Cross when Daniel McNaughton, a Scottish woodturner, approached him from behind, drew a pistol and fired at point-blank range into his back.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5342648. VIAF identifies the subject as 75736896. The Library of Congress control number is n2006007407. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1792, 1843, 1746 and 1814.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Drummond” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.