Robert Warren Stewart was born in March 1850 at Gortleitragh House,
Dublin, son of James Robert Stewart, a wealthy land agent, and Martha Elinor Warren, daughter of the leading
barrister Richard Benson Warren, and granddaughter of
Sir Robert Warren, 1st Baronet, the head of a prominent landowning family from
County Cork.
George Francis Stewart, Governor of the
Bank of Ireland, was his younger brother. He was educated at
Marlborough College (in England) and at
Trinity College, Dublin. After graduation, he studied law in
London, but the spiritual crisis of his conversion occurred at
Richmond, Surrey when he was just about to become a lawyer. He became a member of the
Church Missionary Society in 1875, and after a year's training at
Islington he was ordained at
St. Paul's Cathedral on
Trinity Sunday 1876, together with Rev.
Llewellyn Lloyd. Shortly afterwards Robert Stewart married Louisa Katherine Smyly and the couple set out for China with Rev. Ll. Lloyd in September and arrived in
Fuzhou on 14 November. , Sydney, 1892 Mr. Stewart's first years in China were spent in training the native schoolmasters and catechists, and his wife was put in charge of a school to train native Biblewomen. Stewart suffered severely from
dysentery in China. In 1891 he went home for a furlough and was redeployed by the C.M.S. Committee to accompany
Eugene Stock on his
Australian tour, after which he visited
India and returned to China via
Canada fully restored in the autumn of 1893. On 1 August 1895, he was brutally murdered in
Kucheng Hwasang by a sect known as the Vegetarians during the
Kucheng Massacre, together with his wife, two of his youngest children and seven other missionaries connected with the Church Missionary Society or the
Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. All six of them returned to China later in life. In particular, both
Arthur and
Evan were headteachers at St Paul’s College, while Kathleen established St Paul’s Girls’ School and married
Ernest William Lunn Martin before dying in a POW camp; James, Philip and Mildred also worked in education. == See also ==