DAWSON, Vesey (1842-1920), of Dartrey House, Rockcorry, co. Monaghan of 30 Curzon Street, Mayfair, London

Dawson was one of the small number of Irish Presbyterians to sit as a Member of Parliament between 1832 and 1868. A young military officer from a landed and titled family which had long been involved in the politics of his native Monaghan, his parliamentary career foundered after he proved unable to square his commitment to the Liberal party with his opposition to the disestablishment of the Irish Church.

Dawson was the scion of a family that originated in Yorkshire and had settled in Ireland in the early seventeenth century.1Burke’s Peerage (1909), 533. Beneficiaries of the Cromwellian settlement, the family represented County Monaghan in the Irish parliament from the mid-eighteenth century, and acquired an Irish peerage in 1770.2E. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800 (2002), iv. 27-31. Dawson’s great-grandfather, Richard Dawson (1762-1807), of Dawson’s Grove, sat at Dublin from 1797-1800 as an independent and firm opponent of the Union, and subsequently represented the county at Westminster, 1801-7, where he was a leading Irish spokesman and regarded as one of the ablest Irish county Members.3Ibid., 28-9; HP Commons, 1790-1820, iii. 579-80. His grandfather, Richard Thomas Dawson (1788-1827), also sat briefly for the county before succeeding his great-uncle as 2^nd Baron Cremorne in 1813.4Ibid., 580.

Dawson’s father, Sir Richard Dawson (1817-97), was a Presbyterian.5Dawson’s grandfather and great-grandfather appear, however, to have conformed to the established church as they attended the universities of Oxford and Cambridge respectively: Ibid., 579-80. A member of the Fox Club, he was regarded as a ‘model landlord’ and built Dartrey House on the family property in 1846.6Belfast News-letter, 18 Feb. 1859; Daily News, 14 Mar. 1859; Morning Post, 14 May 1897. He was created Baron Dartrey in 1847 and served as a lord-in-waiting to the queen, 1857-58, and 1859-66, before being appointed lord lieutenant of his county in 1871.7Morning Post, 13 May 1897; Graphic, 22 May 1897. Dawson’s uncle, Thomas Vesey Dawson (1819-54), sat as a Liberal for County Louth, 1841-7, and County Monaghan, 1847-52.8Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1847, 2nd ed.), 154. Dawson’s maternal grandfather was of a collateral branch of the family of the earls of Derby, and his mother, a maternal granddaughter of the 8^th Earl of Lauderdale, retained a strong personal tie with her cousin, Edward Henry Stanley MP (1826-1893), the son of the prime minister.9E. Lodge, The Peerage of the British Empire (3rd edn., 1834), 141; Morning Post, 13 May 1897; J.R. Vincent (ed.), Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party. The Political Journals of Lord Stanley 1849-69 (1978), 9. Dawson’s uncle, Edward James Stanley (1826-1907), sat as Conservative MP for Somerset West, 1882-5, and Bridgwater, 1885-1906: Stenton & Lees, Who’s Who of British MPs, ii. 337.

Dawson joined the Coldstream Guards, of which regiment his aforementioned uncle was a lieutenant-colonel, in December 1859.10Freeman’s Journal, 22 Dec. 1859; Burke’s Peerage (1909), 533. After being presented to the queen, 23 Feb. 1860, he became a regular fixture in London society, but his behaviour appears to have been somewhat unruly at this time. In January 1861 he accidently wounded his younger brother, Richard, during a tussle over a loaded pistol, and that May was fined £5 for an assault on the police at Cremorne.11Morning Post, 24 Feb. 1860, 31 May 1861; Standard, 24 Jan. 1861.

After celebrating his coming of age at Dartrey in September 1863, and being newly promoted to the rank of captain, Dawson was brought forward for County Monaghan at the 1865 general election.12Standard, 18 Sept. 1863; Morning Post, 18 May 1865. Although he boasted ‘many friends and many claims’ in the county, his experience of public duty was limited to membership of the county grand jury, and despite declaring that it was ‘the great ambition of [his] life’ to represent the county, his candidacy was mocked by the Belfast News-letter, which judged him to be ‘without any experience or any principles in particular, except a strong veneration for his grandpapa’.13Belfast News-letter, 27 June 1865, quoting Monaghan Standard; Belfast News-letter, 8, 25 July 1865. His youth was, however, presented as an asset that would guarantee his regular attendance at Westminster, and he was returned as a ‘warm supporter’ of the Liberal government after securing the backing of what his opponents described as ‘an unholy alliance of the priests and the Presbyterian ministers’.14Freeman’s Journal, 15, 24 July 1865. Professing to believe that ‘a man’s conscience rested between him and his Maker’, he saw no conflict between his firm ‘attachment to Presbyterian principles’ and his commitment to defending the established church. At the same time, he argued that ‘the Regium Donum never was in greater peril that in the time of Lord Derby’s administration’.15Belfast News-letter, 20 July 1865. In what was later described as ‘one of the hottest contests that ever took place in Ireland’, a number of men were injured when clashes took place between ‘thousands of armed ruffians’, leading Dawson to remark that his return had been ‘bought too dearly’.16Freeman’s Journal, 6 May 1868; Belfast News-letter, 25, 26 July 1865.

At Westminster Dawson voted consistently with the Liberals during his first year in Parliament. It was said that he ‘was never absent from any great division … and never voted except on the same lobby with Mr. Gladstone’,17Freeman’s Journal, 6 May 1867. and was described as ‘the only member in Ulster’ to have voted for the Liberal reform bill in 1866.18Freeman’s Journal, 4 May 1866. Like his father and grandfather he became a member of Brooks’s, being proposed by the former Irish viceroy, the earl of Clarendon, in February 1866.19Memorials of Brooks’s (1907), 73, 142, 195. He is not known to have served on any select committees, but participated in an inquiry on private bills concerning the construction of provincial gas works in April 1866.20PP 1866 (0.108) lvi. 583. In March 1867 he joined a deputation of Ulster peers, MPs and Presbyterian ministers which saw Lord Derby at Downing Street to discuss the regium donum, and that June accompanied a cross-party group of Irish MPs which urged the prime minister to back the state purchase of the Irish railways.21Morning Post, 6 Mar. 1867; Belfast News-letter, 12 Mar. 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 22 June 1867. In the same month he assisted with an Irish bill to regulate the sale of liquor on Sundays which upon its re-submission in March 1868 was referred to a select committee, on which he did not sit.22PP 1867 (377) lix. 305; PP 1867-68 (31) v. 13; PP 1867-68 (138) v. 17; Hansard, 5 June 1867, vol. 187, cc. 1645-8; 2 July 1867, vol. 188, cc. 918-22; 5 Mar. 1868, vol. 190, cc. 1144-6.

In contrast with his earlier loyalty to the Liberals, Dawson broke with his party over the question of the Irish Church, dividing against Sir John Gray’s motion for a committee of the House to consider the church’s temporalities and privileges, 7 May 1867.23Freeman’s Journal, 10 May 1867; Belfast News-letter, 10 May 1867. After generally voting with the Liberals on the 1867 reform bill, he was one of 60 Liberals who divided with the Conservatives to accept the Lords’ amendments to the bill, 8 Aug. 1867.24Pall Mall Gazette, 9 Aug. 1867. After a serious illness he returned the following year to Westminster to join six other Liberal MPs in voting against Gladstone’s motion for a committee on the Irish Church, 3 Apr. 1868.25Daily News, 10 Aug. 1867; Morning Post, 5 Mar. 1868; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 5 Apr. 1868. He was one of only four Liberals who again ‘cast in their lot with the Conservative party’ by dividing against Gladstone’s motion on the issue, 30 Apr., and voted against his subsequent proposal to suspend new appointments to the church, 22 May 1868.26Belfast News-letter, 9 Apr. 1868; Daily News, 2, 25 May 1868. He appears to have made only one brief contribution to debate in the Commons, when in June 1868 he remarked on the second reading of a measure to prohibit the employment of troops at Irish elections that in his own constituency a man had been ‘killed in consequence, not of the presence of the soldiers, but of their absence’, and for that reason withheld his support for the bill.27Hansard, 30 June 1868, vol. 193, c. 417.

Despite his committed defence of Protestant institutions, Dawson’s opposition to Gladstone’s policy on the Irish Church did not win over ‘a single friend’ among Monaghan’s Conservative proprietors,28Belfast News-letter, 20 July 1865; Freeman’s Journal, 13 Oct. 1868. while his overt anti-disestablishmentarianism deprived him of the support of Liberal electors of all denominations. He therefore abandoned his effort to gain re-election in 1868 after the Catholic clergy and laity formally withdrew their support. The county consequently fell entirely into Conservative hands and he did not seek another seat.29Freeman’s Journal, 13 June, 13 Aug., 19 Sept. 1868; B. Walker, Ulster Politics. The Formative Years 1868-86 (1989), 57-8. In 1897 he succeeded his father as 2^nd earl of Dartrey, taking possession of an estate of more than 30,000 acres in counties Monaghan, Waterford, Armagh and Louth. He subsequently became a successful cattle-breeder. Like his father, he became a Liberal Unionist in 1886 and in later years was a member of the Ulster Unionist Council, taking a prominent part in the County Monaghan Unionist Association and lending support to the Ulster Volunteer Movement. He and his wife also did significant work for the Red Cross Society during the First World War.30G.E.C., Complete Peerage, iv. 93; PRONI. Dartrey Papers, 16: http://www.proni.gov.uk/introduction_dartrey_d3053.pdf.

Dawson died at Dartrey in June 1920, when a part of the family estate, including Dartrey House, was vested in his eldest daughter, Lady Edith Dawson (1883-1974).31The Times, 15 June 1920. His widow married John Townshend St. Aubyn, 2nd Baron St. Levan of St. Michael’s Mount in 1933: Ibid., 12 Nov. 1940. He was succeeded in the earldom by his only surviving brother Anthony Lucius Dawson (1855-1933), who died without male issue in 1933, when the family titles became extinct.32PRONI. Dartrey Papers, 17. The Times mistakenly announced that he was to be succeeded by the elder of his two brothers, the Hon. Edward Stanley Dawson, who had died in October 1919: The Times, 15 June 1920.