Co. Antrim

<p>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.<fn>E. M. Johnston, <em>Great Britain and Ireland 1760-1800</em>, pp.

<p>Commenting on the substitution of Carrickfergus, ‘the only <em>county of a town</em> which would have stood excluded’, for Strabane, in the list of Irish representative boroughs, 16 May 1800, Castlereagh explained:</p><blockquote><p>This change is acceptable to the parties, gives representation to a town very ill suited from its numerous electors to pecuniary compensation, and it obviates the anomaly of a freehold within that district giving franchise nowhere, which would have been the result of its ceasing to send a representative, as it is a distinct

<p>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.

<p>Lisburn, six miles south-west of Belfast on the north bank of the Lagan, was described by Henry David Inglis in 1834 as ‘a clean, neat and lively town, enjoying a good trade’, primarily in linens.<fn><em>Belfast</em><em> Dir</em>. (1819), 147-58; H.D. Inglis, <em>Ireland</em><em> in 1834</em>, ii. 272; S. Lewis, <em>Top. Dict. of Ireland</em> (1837), ii.

<p>Belfast, ‘a sort of metropolis of the north’, as Anne Plumptre observed, was already in the early nineteenth century a byword for economic prosperity and genteel, overwhelmingly Protestant, society.<fn><em>Strangers to that Land</em> ed. A. Hadfield and J. McVeagh, 225-7; <em>Hist. Irish Parl</em>. ii.

<p>The borough of Carrickfergus, the county town of Antrim, was coextensive with the parish of the same name and formed a county of itself. A seaport eight miles north-west of Belfast, it was largely dependent on its fisheries. By the 1830s it was ‘of no importance whatsoever’ and it was remarked that ‘it is the situation, more than anything within the town, that renders the place interesting’.<fn><em>PP</em> (1831-2), xliii. 21; H.D. Inglis, <em>Ireland</em><em> in 1834</em>, ii. 270, 271; S. Lewis, <em>Top. Dict.