Co. Meath

A fertile pastoral county with a considerable coarse linen manufacture, Meath was credited with at least ten landowners worth over £5,000 p.a. and a ‘great many others’ worth between £2,000 £3,000 p.a. This division of property in a county in proximity to Dublin encouraged a strong independent group of gentry for whom Lord Fingall, the leading resident Catholic peer, aspired to be spokesman. The most effective interests were those of Lord Darnley (Bligh), Lord Headfort (Taylour) and Sir Marcus Somerville.Wakefield, Account of Ireland, i. 268; Oldfield, Rep. Hist. vi. 247.

At the Union, to which the independent sitting Members in 1801 were unfriendly, the Taylour family, who had supported the measure, received the marquessate of Headfort and the barony of Langford, the latter being awarded to the marquess’s brother, Clotworthy Rowley (formerly Taylour), one of the county Members until then. It would seem that Headfort and Langford decided in the summer of 1801 to support the pretensions of Thomas Bligh to the county. He was Darnley’s kinsman and brother-in-law and previously Member for Athboy, the disfranchised Darnley borough. In September 1801 Somerville, apprehensive because of ‘a brisk canvass’, addressed himself to ‘the independent spirit which characterized the county Meath’. On 10 Oct. Bligh published his intentions. By November, with Skeffington Thompson of Rathnally in the field as well as Gorges, the other sitting Member, there were four candidates.Add. 37308, f. 344; The Times, 27 Nov. 1801; Dublin Evening Post, 19 Jan. 1802. Shortly before the dissolution, Gorges died, and at this juncture Headfort evidently proposed putting up his brother Gen. Robert Taylour, former Member for Kells. He was taken to task for it by Darnley and withdrew him. The contest thus petered out, for although Thompson, whose ground is unclear, insisted on a poll, he was swamped by the Darnley proprietary interest and the thousand independent freeholders who came to Trim to support Somerville.Add. 35723, f. 63; New Cork Evening Post, 26 July 1802.

This feeble contest proved to be the only one in the period. Thompson again offered in 1806, but gave up a hopeless battle, admitting that the state of the registry placed the odds heavily against him.Add. 35646, f. 42; Dublin Evening Post, 20 Nov. 1806. Somerville and Bligh, both pro-Catholic, had the goodwill of the Grenville ministry, but when it was dismissed in March 1807, Bligh, having fallen out with Darnley, began to court its successor at the very time that Fingall, the avowed leader of the Irish Catholic laity, had resolved that any supporter of the Portland ministry should be opposed. Bligh believed that even with Headfort’s support (which he could not count on, evidently because Headfort’s son Lord Bective, then under age, might stand), he would be beaten in a contest he could not afford. He therefore decided, against Chief Secretary Wellesley’s advice, to avoid committing himself on the hustings. Wellesley had advised him either to stand on his new-found allegiance or decline the ‘degraded situation’ of being ‘the tool of Lord Fingall’. The election proved an anti-climax; Bective did not stand. The sheriff, guided by the chief secretary’s agent John Pollock, did not find it difficult at a meeting of ‘not more than twenty gentlemen’ and a considerable ‘rabble’, to discourage any attempt to instruct the candidates. Although Somerville’s seconder eulogized the outgoing ministry, some resolutions which Bligh’s proposer, John Pratt Winter, a champion of the Catholic cause, was to have been helped to bring forward were given up, so ‘no effect was made by any thing that passed and all went off well’.Wellington mss, Wellesley to Castlereagh, 19 May, Pollock to Wellesley, 22 May; Dublin Evening Post, 2 May, 4 June 1807.

By 1812 Bligh’s relations with Darnley, never easy, had so deteriorated that he did not stand again. Headfort’s son Bective stepped into his shoes and was too strong for a friend of Chief Secretary Peel, John Napier, who had contemplated standing.Add. 40280, f. 52 Bective, the son of a courtier, supported government, in which Somerville joined him in 1815. Both, however, supported Catholic relief and there was no opposition to them in 1818.