Sir James Steuart Denham, 8th Baronet

General Sir James Steuart Denham, 8th and 4th Baronet (August 1744 – 12 August 1839) was a Scottish soldier of the British Army.

Birth and education He was born James Steuart, the only son of Sir James Steuart, 2nd Baronet, of Coltness in Lanarkshire, by his wife Lady Frances, daughter of David Wemyss, 4th Earl of Wemyss. The year after his birth, during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, his father attended the court of Charles Edward Stuart at Holyroodhouse, and consequently had to leave Scotland with his wife. Young James was left with the family of William Mure of Caldwell. He was then educated at Angoulême from 1749 until he and his parents were forced by the looming Seven Years' War to move to Flanders in 1755. He attended the University of Tübingen from 1757 to 1761.

Early military career On 17 March 1761 Steuart was made a cornet in the 1st (Royal) Regiment of Dragoons (General Conway's regiment), through the influence of his father's friend Lord Barrington. He served with the regiment in Germany until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763. On 13 January 1763, passing over the rank of lieutenant, he was promoted to captain in the 105th Regiment of Foot (Queen's Own Royal Regiment of Highlanders), but when the regiment was disbanded in 1764 he was placed on half pay.

From 1764 to 1766 he travelled in France and Germany, studying the cavalry tactics and organisation there, and then was appointed to command a troop of the 5th (or Royal Irish) Regiment of Dragoons, joining the regiment in Ireland. In 1769 he was an aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Townshend. He was promoted to major in the 13th Regiment of Dragoons on 6 November 1772, transferring to the 1st Irish Horse on 26 September 1775. On 15 July 1776 he went back to the 13th (now Light Dragoons) as lieutenant-colonel, a command he would hold for the next fifteen years.

Succession and Member of Parliament Steuart's father had been allowed to return home after the end of the war in 1763, and was formally pardoned in 1771. In 1773 he succeeded his cousin Sir Archibald Steuart Denham as 7th Baronet, of Coltness (his own baronetcy was "of Goodtrees", which he had sold in 1756; Coltness had been purchased from the senior branch of the family in 1712). In 1776 he inherited the estate of Westshield from Sir William Lockhart Denham, 6th Baronet, and the Steuarts father and son adopted the surname of Denham, being known as Denham in England and Steuart in Scotland. James Steuart Denham the younger succeeded his father in the baronetcies of Coltness and Goodtrees and the estates of Coltness and Westshield on 26 November 1780.

On 29 April 1784 Denham was elected Member of Parliament for Lanarkshire through the influence of the Duke of Hamilton. Though a cousin of the Whigs Henry and Thomas Erskine and the independent Francis Charteris, he had been elected as a supporter of William Pitt the Younger and voted with the government, including for parliamentary reform in 1785. At the general elections of 1790 and 1796 he was re-elected unopposed.

Sir James Steuart Denham died at Cheltenham in his ninety-fifth year; at the time of his death he was the senior general in the British Army. He had married on 30 September 1772 Alicia, daughter of William Blacker of Carrick Blacker, County Armagh, but they had no children, so he was succeeded in the baronetcies by his second cousin Henry Steuart Barclay.