By 1797 Lord de Clifford, an English absentee who owned about half the town land, had re-established his personal interest in this small port and potwalloping borough, most probably by creating a sufficient number of non-resident freemen from his Irish estates to overwhelm any resident opposition. In 1804 he successfully resisted a bid to establish freedom by right rather than by selection. His interest returned the Members throughout, all of them relatives.
Cork was Ireland’s second most important commercial centre and, like Dublin, continued to return two Members after the Union.
During the 1730s and 1740s the patron of the largely protestant borough of Bandon, Lord Burlington, entrusted the general management of his Irish affairs to his nephew Henry Boyle, later 1st Earl of Shannon. Upon his death in 1753 his personal interest in the borough passed to his daughter and heir, the wife of the 4th Duke of Devonshire. This was the origin of a dispute between the Shannons and the Devonshires over the control of the borough which persisted until the end of this period.
The Earl of Egremont had a substantial property interest in Ennis, but the corporation was controlled by the Marquess of Conyngham and Sir Edward O’ Brien, who each returned a Member for Ennis to the Irish parliament. This arrangement was undermined by the disfranchisement of one of the seats at the Union.
Just before the Union, Lord Charleville bought control of this close corporation borough, in which he owned no other property, from William BurtonLife of Grattan, v. 188; Report on Mun. Corp. [I], H.C. 1835, xxvii, app. pt. 1, p. 167. and returned his step-brothers, the Pritties, before offering the seat to government unconditionally in June 1801. Chief Secretary Abbot accepted the offer and nominated Ormsby to the seat.
In January 1801 the question of who was patron of Armagh, a flourishing market town and centre of the linen trade, was a matter of debate. As the borough fell within the see of the primate of the established church, the archbishop of Armagh, he was commonly regarded as patron.
For most of the 18th century the 1st Marquess of Hertford was patron of this potwalloping borough, of which his descendants were described as owners in fee simple. Hertford usually managed to settle his electoral affairs in Ireland with a minimum of difficulty. The only serious set-back he had suffered had been at the general election of 1783, when the two volunteer candidates defeated his nominees.E. M. Johnston, Great Britain and Ireland 1760-1800, pp.
Commenting on the substitution of Carrickfergus, ‘the only county of a town which would have stood excluded’, for Strabane, in the list of Irish representative boroughs, 16 May 1800, Castlereagh explained:
Belfast was the most important town in the north of Ireland and in the later 18th century and throughout this period enjoyed a rapid growth in commercial and industrial prosperity. Before the Union, it had been the natural focus of political activity, particularly of the radical and revolutionary type, and to a limited extent this tradition persisted, but neither prosperity nor political tradition affected elections. Most of Belfast was owned by the Marquess of Donegall, ‘every brick of it’, according to one observer.
Since 1781 Edward Harley, 4th Earl of Oxford, having routed the rival interest of the Lewis family of Harpton Court after a 20-year struggle, had been unquestioned patron of the boroughs. His nominee Edward Lewis was, however, an opponent of Pitt’s administration, and the earl’s brother Thomas Harley prevailed on the dying peer to allow him to promote the candidature of his son-in-law Murray, who had in that Parliament supported Pitt and was duly adopted at Presteigne on 6 Apr. 1790.
