Birth Martin Gosselin was born at Walfield, near
Hertford, on 2 November. 1847. He was grandson of Admiral
Thomas Le Marchant Gosselin and eldest son of Martin Hadsley Gosselin of
Ware Priory and Blakesware, Hertfordshire, by his wife Frances Orris, eldest daughter of Admiral Sir John Marshall of Gillingham House, Kent.
Career Educated at
Eton College and at
Christ Church, Oxford, he entered the diplomatic service in 1868, and after working in the
Foreign Office was appointed attaché at Lisbon in 1869. He was transferred to
Berlin in 1872, where he remained till promoted to be second secretary at
Saint Petersburg in 1874. During the
Congress of Berlin in 1878 he was attached to the special mission of the British plenipotentiaries,
Lord Beaconsfield and
Lord Salisbury. He was transferred from Saint Petersburg to
Rome in 1879, returned to Saint Petersburg in the following year, and to Berlin in 1882. In 1885 he was promoted to be secretary of legation, and was appointed to
Brussels, where he served till 1892, taking charge of the legation at intervals during the absence of the minister, and being employed on occasions on special service. In November 1887 he was appointed secretary to the
Duke of Norfolk's special mission to
Pope Leo XIII on the occasion of the pontiff's jubilee. In 1889 and 1890 he and
Alfred Bateman of the
Board of Trade served as joint British delegates in the conferences held at Brussels to arrange for the mutual publication of customs tariffs, and in July of the latter year he signed the convention for the establishment of the
International Union for the Publication of Customs Tariffs. He was also employed as one of the secretaries to the international
conference for the suppression of the African slave trade, which sat at Brussels in 1889 and the following year and resulted in the
General Act of 2 July 1890. In recognition of his services he was in 1890 made a companion of
Order of the Bath (CB). Later in that year he was one of the British delegates at the conference held by representatives of Great Britain, Germany, and Italy to discuss and fix the duties to be imposed on imports in the conventional basin of the Congo, and he signed the agreement which was arrived at in December 1890. In April 1892 he was promoted to be secretary of
embassy at Madrid, was transferred to Berlin in the following year, and to Paris in 1896, receiving at the latter post the titular rank of
minister plenipotentiary. In 1897 he was selected to discuss with French commissioners the question of
coolie emigration from British India to Réunion, and in that and the following year he served as one of the British members of the
Anglo-French commission for the delimitation of the possessions and spheres of influence of the two countries to the east and west of the Niger river. The arrangement arrived at by the commission was embodied in a convention signed at Paris on 14 June 1898, and provided a solution of questions which had gravely threatened the good relations between the two countries. At the close of these negotiations he was created Knight Commander of the
Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG). From July 1898 to August 1902 he held the home appointment of Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. That month he was appointed British envoy to the Court at
Lisbon. He was received by King
Edward VII at
Balmoral Castle in early October, before his departure for Portugal. He held this post till his death in Lisbon on 26 February 1905 from the delayed effects of a motor-car accident. The relations of Great Britain with Portugal during Gosselin's residence were cordial but uneventful. Upon the state visit to the United Kingdom of the King and Queen of Portugal, Gosselin was made a Knight Grand Cross of the
Royal Victorian Order (GCVO) by King Edward VII. Before his unexpected death he was a likely candidate to be made the next British ambassador in the diplomatically important imperial city of Vienna. ==Family==