When the Peninsular veteran Dunlop was threatened by a Whig with a contest for the Stewartry in 1820, Lord Melville, the Liverpool ministry’s Scottish manager, asked the leading interests to support him as ‘a friend of the present administration’. Although one of his correspondents claimed that Dunlop was ‘uniformly considered in the county as a half Whig’, who had not only failed to support government in the aftermath of Peterloo, but had flirted with the local opposition, Melville’s intervention was decisive and Dunlop came in without opposition.
The threat to Dunlop’s hold on his seat had revived, and in 1824 the same freeholder who had voiced doubts about him four years earlier told Melville that ‘the general opinion is that General Dunlop is no more a Tory than the other two talked of candidates’, that he ‘never divides with ministers in any great constitutional question’ and that ‘his private opinions coincide’ with the Whig views of his wife’s nephew Thomas Henry Hastings Davies*.
As I shall not in future have occasion to make similar applications, permit me to express to you how much I have always felt myself obliged, not only by the disposition I have experienced on your part to attend to my requests, but also for the facility, promptitude, and agreeable manner with which my communications to you have been received and answered, and which have appeared to me, not less calculated to promote the public business than the satisfaction and comfort of those who were connected with it.
Add. 40387, f. 225.
His correspondence with Peel between 1823 and 1826 confirms that he was remarkably successful in his requests for church patronage.
Dunlop was given a colonelcy in 1827 and died in March 1832 after a long illness. His eldest son and successor John Dunlop (b. 1806), who was created a baronet in 1838, sat as a reformer for Renfrew Burghs, 1832-4, and Ayrshire from 1835 until his death in 1839. The baronetcy became extinct on the early death of his only son James in 1858.