Colonel

Colonel

Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...

 Mark Wilks FRS (1759–1831) was a Manx soldier and administrator.

He was born in the Isle of Man

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man , otherwise known simply as Mann , is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, within the British Isles. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who holds the title of Lord of Mann. The Lord of Mann is...

, the son of Rev. James Wilks and Margaret Woods, and came from a long lineage of Manxmen.

At the age of 18 he went to India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 on a military commission and was appointed to the Madras Army. He served as the Town Major at Fort Saint George, the capital of Madras Presidency and later he was appointed the acting Resident at Mysore. He was the author of the historical document entitled, Report on the Internal Administration of Mysore. This document was a continuation of report the survey of the Kingdom of Mysore

Kingdom of Mysore

The Kingdom of Mysore was a kingdom of southern India, traditionally believed to have been founded in 1399 in the vicinity of the modern city of Mysore. The kingdom, which was ruled by the Wodeyar family, initially served as a vassal state of the Vijayanagara Empire...

 undertaken by Col Colin Mackenzie

Colin Mackenzie

Colonel Colin Mackenzie was Surveyor General of India, and an art collector and orientalist.Mackenzie was born in Stornoway, Outer Hebrides, Scotland...

. Mark Wilks was the uncle of Mark Cubbon who was the Commissioner of Mysore and after whom the Cubbon Park in Bangalore is named.

After his return from India, Mark Wilks with the active help and co-operation of James Kirkpatrick, the East India Company

East India Company

The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...

 Resident at Hyderabad, wrote one of the first histories of medieval South India: Historical Sketches of the South of India. This volume examined the rise of the Mysore Wodeyar

Wodeyar

The Wodeyar dynasty was an Indian royal dynasty that ruled the Kingdom of Mysore from 1399 to 1947, until the independence of India from British rule and the subsequent unification of the Indian dominion and princely states into the Republic of India.The spelling Wodeyar/Wadiyar is found in most...

 Dynasty in the confusion following the fall of Vijayanagara

Vijayanagara

Vijayanagara is in Bellary District, northern Karnataka. It is the name of the now-ruined capital city "which was regarded as the second Rome" that surrounds modern-day Hampi, of the historic Vijayanagara empire which extended over the southern part of India....

 in 1565.

In 1813 he was appointed Governor for three years of Saint Helena

Saint Helena

Saint Helena , named after St Helena of Constantinople, is an island of volcanic origin in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is part of the British overseas territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha which also includes Ascension Island and the islands of Tristan da Cunha...

 and the French Emperor, Napoleon is stated to have found Mark Wilks a highly engaging and affable man. On his return in 1816 he was elected to the Manx parliament, the House of Keys

House of Keys

The House of Keys is the directly elected lower branch of Tynwald, the parliament of the Isle of Man, the other branch being the Legislative Council....

, the oldest uninterrupted parliament in Europe. In 1826, after the death of his father-in-law , he became speaker of the house. A portrait of Mark Wilks still hangs in the Manx Parliament Building.

In February 1826, as Colonel Mark Wilks, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He died at Kelloe House, Berwickshire. He had married twice. His second wife was Dorothy Taubman, daughter of the Speaker of the House of Keys, who he married in 1813.