PARSONS, William, Lord Oxmantown (1800-1867), of Birr Castle , Parsonstown, King’s co. of 42 Clarges Street, London, Mdx.

Born at York, Oxmantown had sat as a Whig for King’s County since reaching his majority in 1821.1It has been stated that his early education was ‘conducted at home’, but also that he attended ‘a distinguished seminary in London’: Annual Register (1868), 425; The Picture of Parliament (1831), 72. Like his father, a disciple of the radical patriot, Henry Flood, he adopted the principles of financial retrenchment, but showed only a qualified commitment to constitutional reform.2HP Commons, 1820-1832, vi. 654-6. His father sat for Dublin University, 1782-90, and King’s County, 1790-1800, in the Irish parliament, and for the latter seat at Westminster, 1801-7. An Irish representative peer, he served as joint postmaster general of Ireland, 1809-31. E. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800 (2002), vi. 22-6; HP Commons, 1790-1820, iv. 728-30; P.M. Geoghegan & J. Quinn, ‘Parsons, Sir Lawrence’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, vii. 1100. One of ‘the most eminent practical astronomers of the nineteenth century’, his talents were not well-suited to the legislature, and his career had not been ‘marked by any brilliant feat of eloquence or statesmanship’.3J. Wills & F. Wills, The Irish Nation: Its History and Its Biography, iv (1871), 44; The Times, 2 Nov. 1867. Having taken little part in the debates on Catholic emancipation and reform (a period when he was occupied with the construction of his first ground-breaking telescope), he was not popular with newly enfranchised electors and was only narrowly returned in second place for the county in 1832.4Gent. Mag. (1867), ii. 813; Freeman’s Journal, 21, 27 Dec. 1832.

Oxmantown held independent views on some leading questions, such as education, but was a strong advocate of the national schools system.5The Times, 2 Nov. 1867. Like his father, who had also made a ‘personal odyssey from reformism to conservatism’, Oxmantown grew increasingly reactionary, and was particularly averse to O’Connell and what he considered to be unacceptable encroachments on the status of the Irish Church.6J. Kelly, ‘Parsons, Lawrence, second earl of Rosse’, Oxford DNB, xlii. 930-2. He voted with the government to uphold military and naval sinecures, 14 Feb. 1833, and enthusiastically backed the Irish coercion bill, denouncing the violence that occurred in his county in this period. After several members of an agricultural secret society called the ‘Terry Alts’ were convicted in March 1833, he contended that recent crimes in Ireland ‘proceeded, not from distress, but entirely from political agitation’.7Hansard, 8 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, c. 437; The Times, 9 Mar. 1833. In a long and powerful speech, 8 Mar. 1833, he claimed that, by exploiting the issue of tithe reform over the previous two years ‘the revolutionary party in Ireland’ had fomented a ‘perpetual state of political excitement which paralyzed all industry, and deteriorated the character of the Irish peasantry’, exposing those of them who were Protestants to ‘the terror of those banditti’. Despite making every exertion to suppress this ‘dreadful state of tyranny’, the magistrates and political authorities had, he asserted, been unable to prevent ‘the Terry Alt law’ from prevailing over ‘the law of the land’. Convinced that crime could now be committed with impunity as the chances of convicting offenders were, he estimated, ‘twenty or thirty to one’, Oxmantown recommended courts-martials as the only tribunals which could not be intimidated.8Hansard, 8 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, cc. 431-5. He viewed ‘the whole system’ of Irish agitation as ‘one which was essentially revolutionary … which was looking, not merely to revolution, accompanied by a change of Government, but to revolution, accompanied with confiscation of property’.9Hansard, 8 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, cc. 438. His speech was well received in the Conservative press, and a few days later he flatly contradicted a claim made by his fellow county MP, the repealer Nicholas Fitzsimon, that King’s County was then ‘in a state of peace’.10Standard, 9 Mar. 1833; Hansard, 13 Mar. 1833, vol. 16, c. 577.

Oxmantown opposed George Robinson’s tax motion, 26 Mar. 1833, and, unusually, opposed the ministry on Henry Lambert’s amendment to prevent the Irish Coercion Act from being used solely for the purpose of enforcing the payment of tithes, 19 Mar.11Standard, 20 Mar. 1833. He served on committees on the letters patent bill, the Irish spirits, wine and beer bill and the Dublin and Kingstown Railway bill, presenting the report of the committee and tabling a petition on behalf of the company, 6 June 1833.12Standard, 25 Apr., 20 June 1833; CJ, lxxxviii. 458, 498; Standard, 7 June 1833. He explained his regular absences from the committee (chaired by O’Connell) as due to its deliberations having assumed ‘so much of a party question, that he thought it useless to attend’, but was incensed when it was rejected. Notwithstanding O’Connell’s denunciation of the scheme as ‘one of the greatest bubbles ever promoted’, he moved that the petition be referred to a select committee of appeal, 11 June 1833, thus securing a scheme which came to be regarded as one of the most profitable in the United Kingdom.13The Times, 2 Nov. 1867; Hansard, 11 June 1833, vol. 18, cc. 566-7, 572-3. Despite this difference of opinion O’Connell backed Oxmantown’s successful amendment to the Irish church temporalities bill, 21 June 1833, which was designed to give tenants of ecclesiastical lands the benefit of improvements made when estimating the purchase price of their holdings.14D. O’Connell to P.V. Fitzgerald, 22 June 1833, O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, v. 48-9; Hansard, 21 June 1833, vol. 18, c. 1065; Royal Cornwall Gazette, 25 Jan. 1834. Oxmantown supported Stanley’s motion to strike out the appropriation clause of the bill, 21 June, and that year served on select committees on public walks, the Dublin and Kingstown ship canal and the vaccine board.15PP 1833 (448) xv. 337; PP 1833 (591) xvi. 451; PP 1833 (753) xvi. 149. He also sat on the committee on the Irish grand juries bill, which ‘agreed unanimously to recommend its withdrawal’, strongly opposing the measure ‘on the old aristocratic ground’, so his critics suggested, that it would ‘deprive the grand juries of their power of jobbing and favouritism’.16CJ, lxxxviii. 152; Standard, 11 Mar. 1833; Freeman’s Journal, 5 Aug. 1833. He did agree that a remedial measure was necessary but, backed by the grand jurymen in Dublin, presented a petition against the bill, 21 June, which he considered ‘to be impracticable’. He voted in the minority for the bill’s postponement pending further consultation with those ‘most conversant with the details connected with the system’, 11 July 1833.17Standard, 27 Apr. 1833; Morning Post, 21 June, 13 July 1833; Hansard, 11 July 1833, vol. 19, c. 568.

Oxmantown joined a deputation to Lord Althorp on the Thames tunnel in February 1834, but was absent from divisions on the corn laws, 7 Mar. 1834, and church rates, 21 Apr.18Morning Post, 13 Feb. 1834. He was one of only two Irish members returned by predominantly Catholic constituencies to vote to postpone the second reading of the Irish Church bill.19A. Macintyre, The Liberator. Daniel O’Connell and the Irish Party 1830-1847 (1965), 191, citing Littleton to Wellesley, 3 May 1834. He also opposed O’Connell’s repeal motion, 29 Apr., and the repeal of the Septennial Act, 15 May, and that year served on select committees on the Shannon navigation and medical education.20PP 1834 (532) xvii. 141; PP 1834 (602) xiii. 1, xiii (addendum). The committee on the tolls and customs at Irish markets and fairs, on which he had sat in 1830, also published its report in this year: PP 1834 (603) xvii. 229. That month, in his capacity as lord lieutenant of King’s County, he persuaded the Irish chief secretary, Edward Littleton, to place parts of the county under the coercion act, and when the measure came up for renewal in July Lord Grey expressed ‘his entire approval of the exemplary manner’ in which Oxmantown had preserved the peace without recourse to military tribunals.21Leeds Mercury, 23 May 1834; Hansard, 1 July 1834, vol. 24, c. 1021; Morning Post, 2 July 1834. Indeed, the views Oxmantown had expressed on the efficiency of agrarian conspiracy in Ireland in April were subsequently cited in a secret but widely published despatch from the Irish viceroy to Lord Melbourne, and Oxmantown later insisted that parts of the country remained in a ‘state of anarchy’.22Morning Post, 23 July, 23 Sept. 1834.

By now considered in Ireland as a Tory, the increasingly fractious politics of his native county made Oxmantown a particular target of O’Connell who, the Morning Post claimed, had ‘railed like a maniac’ against him in public.23The Times, 10 Jan. 1835; Morning Post, 26 Dec. 1834, 1 Jan. 1835. He unexpectedly retired from parliament at the 1835 general election to devote himself to astronomical science.24Daily News, 18 Jan. 1835; Freeman’s Journal, 5 Aug. 1833; The Times, 2 Nov. 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 1 Nov. 1867. In 1836 he was married in London by the archbishop of Armagh to Mary Wilmer Field, a wealthy heiress and pioneer in photography, whose fortune enabled him to pursue his research.25Morning Post, 15 Apr. 1836; C. Bloore, ‘Parsons [nee Field], Mary, countess of Rosse’, Oxf. DNB, lxii. 934-5; W. Garrett Scaife, ‘Parsons, William’, Dictionary of Irish Biography , vii. 1109-10. He thereafter made Birr Castle his family home and the base of his scientific endeavours.26For discussions of Lord Rosse’s achievements as an astronomer, see J.A. Bennett, ‘Parsons, William, third earl of Rosse’, Oxf. DNB, xlii. 947-50; Gent. Mag. (1867), ii. 813-4. Although he was widely expected to stand as a Conservative for King’s County at the 1837 general election, he declined but still attracted the ire of O’Connell after intervening in the public debate over the assassination of Lord Norbury in January 1839.27The Times, 1, 12 July 1837; The Times, 18 Jan. 1839; Freeman’s Journal, 24 Jan. 1839. He succeeded as 3^rd earl of Rosse in 1841 and sat in the Lords as an Irish representative peer from February 1845. Generally regarded as a ‘moderate Conservative’,28The Times, 2 Nov. 1867. Irish Liberals, however, regarded his politics as ‘those of the high Tory school’: Freeman’s Journal, 1 Nov. 1867. he devoted himself largely to committee business and sat on the royal commission on standards of weights and measures in 1867. He spoke against the repeal of the corn laws and supported Lord Derby’s ministries, voting for the reform bill in 1859. A liberal landlord, he ‘spent nearly the whole of his Irish revenues’ on the relief of distress caused by the Famine. A critic of the government’s behaviour at this time, he advocated large-scale emigration and an end to the subdivision of inherited land as the means to prevent further dearth and unrest.29Scaife, ‘Parsons, William’, 1110. See his Letters on the State of Ireland (1847). Late in his life he directed his attention the Irish land question, and in 1867 published a valuable collection of essays entitled Few Words on the Relation of Landlord and Tenant in Ireland, which attacked proposals for Irish land reform developed by political economists such as John Stuart Mill.30Freeman’s Journal, 1 Nov. 1867; Morning Post, 1 Nov. 1867; P.F. Meehan, The Members of Parliament for Laois and Offaly (Queen’s and King’s Counties), 1801-1918 (1983), 125; G.E.C., Complete Peerage, xi. 170; Bennett, ‘Parsons, William’, 949.

In later life Lord Rosse purchased a yacht in which he took his family cruising. He died at his residence in Monkstown after a painful and protracted illness consequent upon the removal of a tumour on his knee.31Scaife, ‘Parsons, William’, 1110; Morning Post, 1 Nov. 1867; Pall Mall Gazette, 1 Nov. 1867; Belfast News-letter, 1 Nov. 1867. He was buried in the old churchyard of St. Brendan, Birr (then also known as Parsonstown), the funeral cortege consisting of over 300 fellows, officers and students of Trinity College Dublin and more than 4,000 of Rosse’s tenants.32The Times, 7 Nov. 1867. He was succeeded as 4^th earl by his eldest son, Laurence (1840-1908), an accomplished astronomer and an Irish representative peer from 1868. His youngest son, Sir Charles Parsons (1854-1931), was the inventor of the Parsons steam turbine.33I. Elliott, ‘Parsons, Laurence, fourth earl of Rosse’, Oxf. DNB, lxii. 928-9; C. Gibb, rev. A. McConnell, ‘Parsons, Sir Charles Algernon’, Oxf. DNB, lxii. 911-4. His will was proved under £60,000 in England and £20,000 in Ireland.34Hampshire Telegraph, 25 Mar. 1868. He left an immediate legacy of £20,000 to his widow, and upon her death (she d. 1885), sums of £30,000 to each of his younger sons. He bequeathed his scientific apparatus and library to his eldest son and successor. A mural tablet was put up in his honour in the new parish church of St. Brendan, and a bronze statue was erected by public subscription in John’s Place, Birr in March 1876. A collection of his papers is held in the Public Record office of Northern Ireland.35Annual Register (1868), 426; Meehan, The Members of Parliament for Laois and Offaly, 125; A.P.W. Malcomson, Calendar of the Rosse Papers (2008).