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Death of Jonah Barrington, Lawyer, Judge & Politician

Sir Jonah Barrington, KC, Irish lawyer, judge and politician, dies at Versailles, France, on April 8, 1834. He is most notable for his amusing and popular memoirs of life in late 18th-century Ireland, for his opposition to the Act of Union 1800, and for his removal from the judiciary by both Houses of Parliament in 1830, still a unique event.

Barrington is born in 1756 or 1757 in Knapton, Abbeyleix, Queen’s County (now County Laois), the third son of John Barrington, an impoverished Protestant gentleman landowner in Queens’s County and his wife Sibella French of Peterswell, County Galway. He is raised and schooled by his grandparents in Dublin and enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1773, aged 16, but leaves TCD without a degree.

Barrington joins the Irish Volunteers and supports the Irish Patriot Party in the early 1780s. His father raises and commands two Corps: the Cullenagh Rangers and the Ballyroan Light Infantry.

Barrington’s elder brother commands both the Kilkenny Horse and the Durrow Light Dragoons. Through his correspondence with General Hunt Walsh, Barrington’s father secures him a commission in Walsh’s regiment. Upon learning that the regiment is to be sent to America to fight in the American Revolution, and fearful of dying on some foreign battlefield, he writes to Walsh asking him to present the commission to another candidate instead, claiming that he himself is too tender to be of any real use. His fears prove well founded when his replacement, the only child of one of Walsh’s friends, is killed in his first engagement.

Barrington is called to the Irish bar in 1788 and in 1789 he marries Catherine, daughter of Dublin mercer, Edward Grogan. They ultimately have seven children. The following year he enters by the purchase of the seat the pre-1801 Parliament of Ireland as MP for Tuam. He accepts a sinecure post in 1793 at the Dublin customhouse worth £1,000 p.a. generally supporting Henry Grattan and he takes silk the same year. He is a member of the Kildare Street Club in Dublin. Appointed an Admiralty court judge in 1798, he re-enters parliament the same year as member for Clogher and votes against the Act of Union in 1799–1800, rejecting John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of Clare‘s offer of the solicitor-generalship in 1799. In 1802, he unsuccessfully contests a seat for Dublin City in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

Barrington’s comments on the Act of Union has a continuing resonance with the Young Ireland, Fenian and Irish Parliamentary Party movements, which hope to re-establish “Grattan’s Parliament” in some way. In particular, his Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation (1833) provides the basis for this romantic idealisation of Grattan’s Parliament adopted by the Irish Parliamentary Party from the 1880s.

Appointed an Admiralty court judge in 1798 at a salary of £500, Barrington finds there is little work to be done and his lack of a degree restricts other opportunities to support extravagant tastes. His award of a knighthood in 1807 brings no increased income. His court orders the sale of two derelict vessels and he gives instructions that the proceeds are to go to his own bank account. In 1810 or 1811 he takes his wife and family to England and from that time on his work in Ireland is carried out by surrogates. Still retaining his judgeship and salary, he moves to France in 1814 to escape his creditors and never returns to Ireland.

In 1828, commissioners learn of Barrington’s financial irregularities. He crosses the channel to London and protests that he is innocent but does not answer the charges based on the documentary evidence produced by the commissioners. In 1830, a parliamentary commission recommends that he be removed from office, finding misappropriations of court funds in 1805, 1806 and 1810. Pursuant to a provision of the Act of Settlement 1701, which seeks to protect the independence of the judiciary, both Houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom vote for an Address to King William IV praying for his removal, and the King duly dismisses Barrington from office. By then, Barrington’s first 1827 volume of memoirs has sold successfully, and they are republished and expanded. He is the first judge removed from office under the Act of Settlement, and to this day, is the only judge in the United Kingdom to be so removed.

According to one of Barrington’s sometimes spurious personal memoirs, on March 20, 1780, he travels to Donnybrook, Dublin, to duel with Richard Daly. Daly has fought 16 duels in three years – three with swords and thirteen with pistols. Remarkably, he, and his opponents, have always escaped serious injury. Barrington has no pistols so he and his second, Richard Crosbie, spend the previous night constructing a pair “from old locks, stocks and barrels.” At Donnybrook, Daly’s second, Jack Patterson, a nephew of the Chief Justice, approaches Crosbie, explains that it is all a mistake and asks that the two shake hands. Barrington is in favour, but Crosbie has none of it. Taking out a duelling handbook, he points to rule No.7 – “No apology can be received after the parties meet, without a fire.”

Taking up their positions, Barrington loses no time in pressing the trigger and Daly staggers back, puts his hand to his chest, and cries, “I’m hit, Sir.” The ball does not penetrate but does drive part of a brooch slightly into his breastbone. Barrington only then thinks to inquire why the duel is even taking place. This time the rule book notes: “If a party challenged accepts the challenge without asking the reason for it, the challenger is never bound to divulge it afterwards.”

Barrington is most notable today for his memoirs which include scathing but humorous thumbnail portraits of contemporary Irish lawyers, judges and politicians during the last years of the Protestant Ascendancy. Personal sketches also includes vignettes on Irish people from every background. His works are reprinted with frequent additions and renamings.

Since his death, Barrington’s work has been quoted by a wide selection of editors, primarily following two themes: the political drama surrounding the Act of Union and the colourful nature of life in 1700s Ireland.


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Death of Arthur Hill, 3rd Marquess of Downshire

Arthur Blundell Sandys Trumbull Hill, 3rd Marquess of Downshire KP, an Anglo-Irish peer, styled Viscount Fairford from 1789 until 1793 and Earl of Hillsborough from 1793 to 1801, dies on September 12, 1845, in Blessington, County Wicklow.

Hill is born in Hanover Square, on October 8, 1788, the eldest son of Arthur Hill, 2nd Marquess of Downshire, and his wife, Mary Sandys. He becomes Marquess of Downshire on the early death of his father in 1801. He is educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, gaining his MA in 1809 and a DCL in 1810.

During his early political career, Hill is identified with the Whigs and supports the reform of Parliament. After the Grey Ministry comes to power, he receives a succession of appointments, becoming Colonel of the South Down Militia on March 25, 1831, and carrying the second sword at the coronation of William IV on September 8. He is appointed a deputy lieutenant of Berkshire on September 20, Lord Lieutenant of Down on October 17 (a new office replacing the Governor of Down), and finally a Knight of the Order of St Patrick on November 24, 1831. He receives an honorary LL.D. from the University of Cambridge on July 6, 1835.

Hill is a very strong supporter of the Irish language, and is president of the Ulster Gaelic Society (est. 1830). In this capacity he plays an important role in helping preserve records of the language, poetry, folk and song collections and much else.

Hill is disliked by Elizabeth Smith, diarist at Baltyboys House, County Wicklow, who feels snubbed by him when she and her husband first move into the area. Writing of him after his death she recalls “The late Lord never called upon me when I first came here although the Colonel waited upon him. The Colonel never went near him again.”

High-minded, if also at times high-handed in manner and self-important, Hill works hard himself and expects all his employees and tenants to be equally conscientious. Naturally, he is often disappointed. He is particularly concerned about his failure, despite all efforts and exhortations, to make his southern estates as efficient and well behaved as those in the north. Though an absentee owner in the south, he visits both Blessington and Edenderry regularly. It is during one of these periodic tours of inspection that he drops dead at Blessington on September 12, 1845. He is buried in St. Malachy Parish Churchyard at Royal Hillsborough, County Down. The funeral attracts an enormous crowd of mourners and is reported at some length in The Illustrated London News. His memory is perpetuated in an impressive pillar monument, with his statue on top, erected at Hillsborough in 1848.


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Death of Sir Richard Church, Anglo-Irish British Army Officer

Sir Richard Church CB GCH, Anglo-Irish military officer in the British Army and commander of the Greek forces during the last stages of the Greek War of Independence after 1827, dies in Athens, Kingdom of Greece, on March 20, 1873. After Greek independence, he becomes a general in the Hellenic Army and a member of the Greek Senate.

Church is born on February 23, 1784, the second son of Matthew Church, a Quaker merchant in the North Mall area of Cork, County Cork, and Anne Dearman, originally from Braithwaith, Yorkshire, England. At the age of sixteen, he runs away from home and enlists in the British Army. For this violation of its principles, he is disowned by the Religious Society of Friends, but his father buys him a commission, dated July 3, 1800, in the 13th Somerset Light Infantry. He serves in the demonstration against Ferrol, Spain, and in the expedition to Egypt under Sir Ralph Abercromby in 1801, where he takes part in the Battle of Abukir and the taking of Alexandria. After the expulsion of the French from Egypt he returns home but goes back to the Mediterranean in 1805 among the troops sent to defend the island of Sicily. He accompanies the expedition which lands in Calabria and fights a successful battle against the French at the Battle of Maida on July 4, 1806. He is present on this occasion as captain of a recently raised company of Royal Corsican Rangers. His zeal attracts the notice of his superiors, and he has begun to show his capacity for managing and drilling foreign levies. His Corsicans form part of the garrison of Capri from October 1806 until the island is taken by an expedition directed against it by Joachim Murat, in September 1808, at the very beginning of his reign as king of Naples. Church, who has distinguished himself in the defence, returns to Malta after the capitulation.

In the summer of 1809 Church sails with the expedition sent to occupy the French-occupied Ionian Islands. Here he increases the reputation he has already gained by forming a Greek regiment in British pay. On September 9, 1809, he takes the position of Major in the 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry. On November 19, 1812, he becomes Lieutenant-Colonel of the unit, by then renamed The Duke of York’s Greek Light Infantry Regiment. Having gained the experience of managing foreign troops, he commands the regiments made up of Greeks he recruits himself in 1813, when he forms a second regiment composed of 454 Greeks (2nd Regiment Greek Light Infantry) to occupy Paxoi islands. These regiments include many of the men who are afterward among the leaders of the Greeks in the Greek War of Independence including Theodoros Kolokotronis, with whom he keeps a friendship and correspondence. He commands this regiment at the taking of the island of Santa Maura (Lefkada), on which occasion his left arm is shattered by a bullet.

During his slow recovery Church travels in northern Greece, in Macedonia, and to Constantinople. In the years of the fall of Napoleon (1813 and 1814) he is present as British military representative with the Austrian troops until the campaign which terminates in the expulsion of Murat from Naples. He draws up a report on the Ionian Islands for the Congress of Vienna, in which he argues in support, not only of the retention of the islands under the British flag, but of the permanent occupation by Britain of Parga and other formerly Venetian coastal towns on the mainland, then in the possession of Ali Pasha of Ioannina. The peace and the disbanding of his Greek regiment leaves him without employment, though his reputation is high at the war office, and his services are recognized by the grant of a Companion of the Order of the Bath.

In 1817, Church enters the service of King Ferdinand I of Naples as lieutenant-general, with a commission to suppress the brigandage then rampant in Apulia. Ample powers are given him, and he attains a full measure of success. In 1820 he is appointed governor of Palermo and commander-in-chief of the troops in Sicily. The revolution which breaks out in that year leads to the termination of his services in Naples. He escapes from violence in Sicily with some difficulty. At Naples he is imprisoned and put on trial by the government but is acquitted and released in January 1821. King George IV confers on him a Knight Commander of the Royal Guelphic Order in 1822. He is further promoted to Knight Grand Cross by William IV in 1837.

The rising of the Greeks against the Turks has his full sympathy from the beginning. But for some years he has to act only as the friend of the insurgents in England. In 1827 he takes the honourable but unfortunate step of accepting the commandership-in-chief of the Greek army. At the point of anarchy and indiscipline to which they have now fallen, the Greeks can no longer form an efficient army and can look for salvation only to foreign intervention. Church, who lands in March, is sworn archistrategos on April 15, 1827, but cannot secure loyal co-operation or obedience. The rout of his army in an attempt to relieve the Acropolis of Athens, then besieged by the Ottomans, proves that it is incapable of conducting regular operations. With the acropolis capitulated, he turns to partisan warfare in western Greece.

After the Battle of Navarino, and during the Kapodistrias period, Church is placed commander-in-chief of the Greek regular forces in Central Greece, together with Demetrios Ypsilantis. However, he surrenders his commission as a protest against the unfriendly government of Capodistrias on August 25, 1829. He lives the remainder of his life in Greece.

Church’s activity has beneficial results and leads to a rectification in 1832, in a sense favourable to Greece, of the frontier drawn by the Great Powers in the London Protocol (1830). Under King Otto, he occupies senior military positions. On October 3, 1833, he is promoted to lieutenant general in the Hellenic Army, and in January 1835 becomes commander of the forces in Continental Greece. On June 10, 1835, he is appointed head of the Secretariat of State for Military Affairs (Army Minister), becoming Inspector-General of the Army on October 28, 1836. He serves as a senator from 1844 to 1845. He is promoted to full general in February 1854, the grade being established for the first time for this purpose in the Hellenic Army.

Church dies following an illness on March 20, 1873. The funeral service takes place in the Anglican Church in Filellinon Street in the presence of King George I and a large number of official guests. Panagiotis Chalkiopoulos, the Minister of Justice, gives the funeral speech in Greek, while John Gennadius gives a speech in English. He is buried at the First Cemetery of Athens at public expense on March 27. The funeral monument has an inscription in English on the front and Greek on the back.

(Pictured: Portrait of Sir Richard Church, oil on cardboard by an unidentified artist, 1873)


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Death of Queen Victoria

queen-victoria

Queen Victoria dies at Osborne House, Isle of Wight on January 22, 1901, ending an era in which most of her British subjects know no other monarch.

With a reign of 63 years, seven months and two days, she is the longest-reigning British monarch and the longest-reigning queen regnant in world history until her great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth II surpasses her on September 9, 2015. She restores dignity to the English monarchy and ensures its survival as a ceremonial political institution. Edward VII accedes to the throne upon her death.

Born on May 24, 1819, in Kensington Palace, London, Victoria comes to the throne after the death of her uncle, King William IV, in 1837. As a young woman ascending to the throne, her future husband describes her “as one whose extreme obstinacy was constantly at war with her good nature.” Her first prime minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, becomes her close friend and adviser, and she succeeds in blocking his replacement by Tory leader Sir Robert Peel in 1839. Two years later, however, an election results in a Tory majority in the House of Commons, and she is compelled to accept Peel as prime minister. Never again does she interfere so directly in the politics of democratic Britain.

In 1839, her first cousin Albert, a German prince, comes to visit the English court at Windsor, and Victoria proposes to him five days after his arrival. Prince Albert accepts, and they are married in February 1840. He soon becomes the dominant influence in her life and serves as her private secretary. Among his greatest achievements as Prince Consort is his organization of The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first world’s fair, in the Crystal Palace in London. He also steers her support away from the Whigs to the conservative Tories. She later is a vocal supporter of Benjamin Disraeli, leader of the Conservative Party.

Victoria and Albert build royal residences at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and at Balmoral Castle in Scotland and become increasingly detached from London. They have nine children, including Victoria, later the empress of Germany, and the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. In 1861, Albert dies, and Victoria’s grief is such that she does not appear in public for three years. She never entirely gets over the loss and, until the end of her life, has her maids nightly lay out Albert’s clothes for the next day and in the morning replace the water in the basin in his room.

Disraeli coaxes Victoria out of seclusion, and she is impressed by his efforts to strengthen and expand the British Empire. In 1876, he has her made “empress of India,” a title which pleases her and makes her a symbol of imperial unity. During the last few decades of her life, her popularity, which had suffered during her long public absence, increases greatly. She never embraces the social and technological advances of the 19th century but accepts the changes and works hard to fulfill her ceremonial duties as head of state.

Following a custom she maintains throughout her widowhood, Victoria spends the Christmas of 1900 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Rheumatism in her legs has rendered her lame and her eyesight is clouded by cataracts. Through early January, she feels weak and unwell, and by mid-January she is drowsy, dazed and confused. She dies in the early evening of Tuesday, January 22, 1901, at the age of 81. Her son and successor King Edward VII, and her eldest grandson, Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, are at her deathbed. Her favourite pet Pomeranian, Turi, is laid upon her deathbed as a last request.

Victoria’s funeral is held on Saturday, February 2, in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, and after two days of lying-in-state, she is interred beside Prince Albert in Frogmore Mausoleum at Windsor Great Park. When she dies, she has 37 surviving great-grandchildren, and their marriages with other monarchies give her the name “grandmother of Europe.”