Frederick North, 5th Earl of Guilford

He represented Banbury in Parliament from 1792 to 1794.

North served as Secretary of State to the Viceroy Sir Gilbert Elliot from 1794 to 1796 during the short-lived Anglo-Corsican Kingdom . North was tasked with the delicate negotiations with Pasquale Paoli and came to consider that Corsica was effectively 'ungovernable'.[3]

He served as first British Governor of Ceylon from 1798 to 1805. North proclaimed in 1801 that all rajakariya (royal service) was abolished and replaced it with a tax of one-fifth of their produce on low land and one-tenth on high land. North built his official residence, the Doric Bungalow, near the Mannar Sea according to his own plan; he himself used to supervise the pearl fishery, which at that time provided a substantial income for the British. North declared himself head of the salagama caste and appointed Robert Arbuthnot head of the karava caste; the Judicial Charter limited the governor's autocracy by establishing the Supreme Court and High Court of Appeal.[4]

In 1817 he succeeded his elder brother as fifth Earl of Guilford.

In 1824 North established the Ionian Academy on the island of Corfu, which was under British control as part of the United States of the Ionian Islands. It was the first University to be established in modern Greece. In this context, he financed the studies in France (at Ecole polytechnique ) of Giovanni Carandino, the founder of the modern Greek mathematics. The academy has now closed but a statue of the Earl stands on the island. A library and a street are also named after him.[5]