India
In 1858 Cotton was offered the office of the Bishop of Calcutta, which, after much hesitation, he accepted. The government of India had just been transferred from the British East India Company to the crown, and questions of education were eagerly discussed, following Macaulay's famous Minute on Indian Education.
Cotton established schools for British and Eurasian children. The Bishop Cotton Schools in Bangalore and Shimla bear his name; he founded many other schools in India, including St. James' School in Calcutta and Cathedral and John Connon in Bombay. As the senior Anglican prelate in India, he also consecrated a number of new churches throughout the subcontinent, including St. Luke's Church, Abbottabad, and others on what then used to be the 'Punjab Frontier' and later became the North West Frontier Province.
On October 6, 1866, he had consecrated a cemetery at Kushtea on the Ganges, and was crossing a plank leading from the bank to the steamer when he slipped and fell into the river. He was carried away by the current and never seen again.
Cotton married Sophia Ann Tomkinson, daughter of Reverend Henry Tomkinson, on 26 June 1845. Their son Edward Cotton-Jodrell was later MP for Wirral.
A memoir of his life with selections from his journals and correspondence, edited by his widow, was published in 1871.
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