Local history: Landlords often competed for positions of influence in Mayo

PART TWO

By Tom Gillespie

IN 2020 author Tom Blaney published The Notorious Third Lord Lucan - an Embattled Life. The book had several references to the Lucan’s involvement with Castlebar, where as landlords they had control of 60,000 acres of land.

The plans for the new Lucan house in Castlebar were ready in 1825. Inspired by the prospect of this new Lucan residence, the principal inhabitants wrote in October 1835 to the second Earl asking him to come to Castlebar.

He replied expressing hope to be there ‘ere long - as soon as my residence is completed’ and proposing to pass ‘a great portion of my time in my native country’.

However, the building took place with little urgency. The house was certainly completed by the early 1830s: Lucan’s agent, St. Clair O’Malley, was using an apartment in the new house by June 1832.

Newspaper evidence suggests that Richard did return to his ‘native country’ on three short visits, in 1830, 1833 and 1838, using the new house in the latter two.

During the 1833 visit, he reportedly said that henceforth he expected to spend ‘some months each year’ in Mayo, but returned only once more, five years later.

On that final visit, he brought with him the new Countess Lucan, Adelaide, and their young daughter, Adele. And on that occasion, perhaps trying to avoid embarrassment, he requested that there should be no public welcoming ceremony.

Thus for the 1820s and most of other 1830s, Lord Bingham was the most frequent Lucan family visitor to Castlebar.

Despite absences and his relatively young age, George took seriously his new responsibilities in Mayo. Presumably with the full agreement of his father, he seemed to be in expansive mood.

He believed that Mayo remained attractive for investment, despite the current disappointing conditions for agriculture.

Aristocratic status was closely linked to the scale of land ownership - hang the inevitable borrowing.

In late 1824, he and his father spent £30,000 on land (from the Kilboyne estate), the purchase perhaps spurred by the knowledge that also interested in the land was the Marquess of Sligo, of the Browne family.

In July 1825, George was appointed to the Bench of Magistrates in Castlebar, a recognised seat of authority for local luminaries. There he joined representatives from a group of local families who dominated local affairs, including the Brownes (three of them), O’Donells, O’Malleys, Lindsays, and the Claremorris Binghams. Unsurprisingly, three of those names figure among the largest landowners in Mayo in the mid-1820s.

The largest landholding belonged to the Marquess of Sligo (Howe Peter Browne, the second Marquess), who had about 130,000 stature acres. Next came estates owned by members of Dillon, Palmer and Claremorris Bingham families, and then the Lucans, with about 60,000 acres.

There was considerable rivalries between, and often within, these families, although they sometimes found it advantageous to become allies, occasionally through marriage. Politics, local and national, were an area in which they often competed for positions of influence.

The Castlebar Binghams had had a tradition of participation - although little more than dabbling - in Irish and British parliamentary politics.

Richard Bingham had his ‘Representative Peer’ seat in the British House of Lords, but that was a lifetime position, and not heritable by his heir. It was common in peerage families for a male heir or younger son to seek the status of a seat in the House of Commons, almost as a rite of passage.

The two Castlebar seats, which had been in the pocket of the Lucans, had disappeared with the onset of the Union of 1801. The Castlebar area was now subsumed into the two seats of the County Mayo constituency, and so lacked the stratus, prominence and dedicated representation it had once enjoyed.

Before and since the Union, the Mayo seats had been effectively under the control of the Browne family, whose interests were largely centred on Westport, the seat of the Marquess of Sligo.

But George’s welcome in Castlebar and his apparent popularity offered a springboard into standing in the election of 1826 to challenge the hold of the Brownes.

Before the various Reform Acts of the latter 19th century, British elections were often very unsavoury affairs, almost designed to foster corrupt practices, and not infrequently involving violence between opposing interests.

The 1826 Mayo election was no different. Elections generally were the playground of political elites, local magnates, and small and often venal electorates, which often numbered as low as a few per cent of the population.

Election rhetoric may have embraced politics that purported to benefit communities at large, but often a candidate’s aims were primarily to maintain the influence of family and cronies.

MPs were often only loosely coupled to a political party, while alliances could be fluid and loyalties moveable.

The right to vote in elections was largely determined by an individual’s demonstrable financial standing in society, usually based on being a freeholder or a long-term leaseholder receiving or paying an annal rent above a specific sum.

This gave large landowners and landlords power to control much of the electorate and many electors were beholden to them and there were no secret ballots.

But candidates often had to spend large sums of money to rally their expected voters and to woo floating voters.

This involved expenses of election literature, voter registration, transport and meetings, and often more substantial inducements such as hospitality, patronage or even direct financial payments.

Even for the wealthy, parliamentary candidacy often became prohibitively expensive.

In Mayo in the mid-1920s, the franchise was dominated by the ‘forty-shilling free-holders’. Among a total population of about 330,000, there were around 24,000 registered voters, a relatively large number given that women and young people can be totally discounted. A significant number of Catholics qualified for that electorate, following the concessions of the 1790s.

While many Catholics were able to vote, no Catholic could be elected to occupy a parliamentary seat. Catholic emancipation (i.e. freedom for Catholics to sit in a Parliament or hold such public offices) was a highly contentious issue, most pointedly in Ireland, but had remained denied.

Many of the Protestant population considered that allowing full Catholic participation in politics would be an affront to the British constitution, which was built around Anglicanism and the monarch as Defender of the Faith.

On that argue, George III has resolutely refused to allow Catholic emancipation after the Union, despite Prime Minister Pitt’s declared wish, virtually a promise, to bring it about.

Protestants and other non-Catholics, in mainland Britain and Ireland, tended to see Catholics, and particularly poor Irish Catholics, as inferior beings, allied with forces across the Channel, and offering a constant threat of violent rebellion.

But would emancipation be realistically denied for much longer? The weight of the Irish population numbers had moved in the Catholic directions and Catholic voters had become a significant force in Irish politics.

By 1826, it was expedient for serious candidates in elections in much of Ireland to be seen publicly to support the case for emancipation, whatever they thought in private.

In Mayo each elector was able to cast votes for one or two of the candidates, giving scope for agreement to direct controllable votes to help ensure election of two candidates of common interests.

The continuing success of the Brownes up to 1826 had often been achieved by disuniting and deterring potential opposition, and in the 1820 election, Dominick and James Browne had been elected unopposed.

But by 1826, the Brownes showed signs of losing their political touch, not helped by squabbles between branches of the family.

Denis Browne was the senior political bruiser of the family. Browne had held a Mayo seat from 1801 to 1818, and he then passed it on to his son James.

Now in his 60s, he was a tough veteran of political campaigns dating back before the Union.

In his younger days, he was a keen duelist, who had provoked duels with electoral opponents both to settle disputes and to win support from voters: one such duel had been with John Bingham of the Claremorris Binghams, which clenched Browne an election win.

He was a public supporter of Catholic emancipation, but could be equivocal towards Catholic causes.

After the 1798 rebellion (in which his house, like that of the Lucan’s, was destroyed), while serving as High Sheriff of Mayo, he was zealous in hanging suspected rebels, and became known as Denis the Rope.

In 1815 he had made some unguarded critical comments about the Catholic clergy that had offended many of the Catholic electorate. Having been in control for so any years, the Brownes had inevitably created resentment and enemies, and there was also constant grumbling among the electorate about some prominent members of the family being absentee landlords. While Lord Bingham could hardly escape the charge of absenteeism, he was at least a fresh, hopeful face compared with the all-too-familiar Brownes.

Lord Bingham stepped into the electoral contest as an ‘independent’ in 1826, expecting to be confronted by the coalition of established forces represented by the two incumbents. But there was a surge of support for the newly arrived Bingham.

For example, Sir Neal O’Donell, who had supported Dominick Browne and had a family connection with the Brownes, exhorted his 3,000 elector tenants to cast single votes for Bingham alone.

And it was Dominick Browne, not James, who decided he could no longer depend on being readily elected: he withdrew, citing that competing in the election would be too expensive. Lord Bingham and James Browne were elected unopposed.