Bury, Charles Kenneth Howard- (1883–1963), soldier, explorer, plant collector, and politician, was born 15 August 1883 in London, though his parents generally lived in Charleville castle, Tullamore, King's Co. (Co. Offaly). He was the only son of Captain Kenneth Howard, army officer and grandson of the 16th earl of Suffolk, and his wife, Lady Emily Bury, daughter of the 3rd earl of Charleville. She had inherited Charleville castle and its estates. A sister died of typhoid fever in 1907, aged twenty-two. His father, who had taken the surname Howard-Bury on his marriage in 1881, died in 1885.
Charles was educated at Eton and Sandhurst before joining the 60th rifles in 1904. He visited Tibet, the Pamir, Turkestan and Tianshan, from 1905 to 1913, collecting plants, and also brought home a Russian bear with which he regularly wrestled. He inherited Belvedere House, Mullingar, from a cousin in 1912, and installed the bear in the arboretum. Diaries of his travels formed the basis for his book Mountains of heaven: travels in the Tian Shan mountains in 1913, which was not published until long after his death, in 1990. During the First World War he commanded the 7th and 9th battalions of the King's Royal Rifles at Arras, the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres. He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the DSO in 1918. He became a colonel and in March 1918 was made prisoner of war but managed to escape. He remained at liberty for eight days before he was recaptured; he was eventually released in December 1918.
On his return to Ireland he became justice of the peace and high sheriff for King's County in 1921 but, apparently unsatisfied with the life of a country gentleman, he volunteered to lead a deputation in 1920 to the Dalai Lama to seek permission to climb Everest. When permission was granted, he was selected to lead a reconnaissance mission there in 1921. The team members, including distinguished climbers such as George Leigh Mallory, were the first Europeans to set foot on Everest, and the first to map the area. They planned a possible route to the summit, and collected plants and geological specimens. Herbarium material from the expedition is at Kew; Primula buryana was a primula that the group discovered and named after Howard-Bury. His achievements were acknowledged when he was awarded the founder's medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the gold medals of the French Alpine Club and the French Geographical Society in 1922. Mount Everest: the reconnaissance (1922), jointly written with others of the team, including Mallory (who died on Everest in 1924), was well known in its day, and was republished in 1991 in somewhat different form.
Howard-Bury was a conservative MP for Wolverhampton from 1922 to 1924, and for Essex from 1926 to 1931. Though he took a pragmatic approach to Irish politics, apparently hoping that partition, if not independence, would be of short duration, he was unsuccessful when he stood for election to the Irish senate in 1925. From 1927 to 1932 he was honorary colonel of the 85th East Anglian brigade of the territorial army. During the Second World War he was assistant commissioner of the British Red Cross, and set up a small hospital at Belvedere for wounded soldiers. It was during this period that Howard-Bury met the Yorkshireman Rex Beaumont (1914–1988), then in the RAF and formerly an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company; the two men, from very different backgrounds, became inseparable, and for the rest of their lives were noted for their restoration of Belvedere House and its garden, for their parties, and for their travels in Africa. Howard-Bury died at Belvedere on 20 September 1963, leaving the property to Beaumont. After Beaumont's death, the house was taken over by Westmeath county council, and it was opened to the public in 2000; the gardens are notable for plants collected by Howard-Bury on his travels.