BURY, Charles William, Lord Tullamore (1801-1851), of 8 St. George’s Place, Hyde Park Corner, London, Mdx. of Charleville Forest, Tullamore, King’s County

Tullamore sat unopposed as a Conservative for his family’s pocket borough of Carlow, 1826-32, but appeared to share none of his parents’ social energies and intellectual interests,1His father was a classical scholar and president of the Royal Irish Academy, and his mother was ‘long a leader in Dublin society’, recalled by Benjamn Disraeli as one of his ‘earliest and kindest friends’: C.J. Woods, ‘Bury, Charles William (1764-1835)’, Dictionary of Irish Biography, ii. 92-3; Gent. Mag. (1835), ii. 648; Gent. Mag. (1851), i. 429-30; G.E.C. Complete Peerage, iii. 141; Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1848-1851 (1993), 2112. and was described by a fellow MP as ‘by far the greatest bore the world can produce’.2HP Commons, 1820-1832, iv. 467-70 (at 467). Having seen Carlow opened up by the Irish Reform Act, which he had staunchly opposed, he entered the field at King’s County at the 1832 general election. Here he was regarded, even by enemies, as an ‘accomplished courtier’ and ‘a great favourite with the ladies’, who was skilled in the art of canvassing electors, his method reminding one local Liberal ‘of the power of fascination attributed to the serpent, which is said with extended jaws to charm the thoughtless birds, in order more surely to secure its victim within its poisoned fangs’.3Freeman’s Journal, 1 Dec. 1832. Lord Charleville’s influence over the constituency had, however, been curtailed by the Reform Act. His son’s opposition to Catholic emancipation and role as ‘the violent and untiring champion of the old regime’ attracted strong criticism in his native county, where he was portrayed as ‘a leaf of one of the worst branches of the aristocracy.4HP Commons, 1820-32, iv. 468-9; Freeman’s Journal, 18 Sept. 1832. After being dismissed by the Freeman’s Journal as a ‘mere Tory “cad” … at the beck of Peel’, Tullamore retired from the field after failing to gain support from the county’s Protestant clergy.5Freeman’s Journal, 26 Nov. 1832; O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, iv. 1940. One of several Irish Ultra Conservatives forced ‘to fly for refuge to less exacting constituencies in England’, he turned his attention to the new borough of Penryn and Falmouth.6R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party 1830-1867 (1978), 373; The Times, 31 Aug. 1868; Royal Cornwall Gazette, 8 Dec. 1832. Here he enlisted the support of the local patrons, Lords de Dunstanville and Wodehouse and displaced the sitting Conservative member, James William Freshfield, coming second in the poll.7Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1832; Morning Post, 21 Jan. 1833. Tullamore had been one of those to oppose the disenfranchisement of Penryn in 1827: HP Commons, 1820-32, iv. 468.

Tullamore appears to have been absent for the first two months of the new session, but opposed Joseph Hume’s proposal to abolish military flogging, 2 Apr. 1833. He was, however, in the minority which supported Daniel O’Connell’s motion for copies of papers stating the reason for the proclamation of Kilkenny, 17 Apr. 1833, and subsequently found himself voting with the Irish reformers on a surprising number of occasions.8Morning Post, 18 Apr. 1833. He supported Mathias Attwood’s motion for currency reform, 24 Apr., Sir William Ingilby’s amendment on the malt tax, 30 Apr. 1833, and Sir Samuel Whalley’s proposal to remove house and window tax, 21 May. He sat on the Mallow election committee, which unseated the repealer William O’Neill Daunt, and attended a meeting of country bankers to discuss Lord Althorp’s plan to renew the bank charter in June.9Standard, 24 Apr. 1833; Morning Post, 26 June 1833. Although he was in favour of relieving Dissenters from church rates,10Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1833), 169. he opposed the appropriation of Irish Church revenues, supporting Stanley’s motion to strike out the relevant clause from the Irish church temporalities bill, 21 June, and opposing its third reading, 8 July. He was alert to humanitarian concerns and was in the minority that supported Lord Ashley’s motion to extend the limitation of factory working hours to eighteen year olds, 18 July, and backed Buxton’s motion to restrict the period of slave apprenticeships to the shortest time compatible with the interests of the slave, 24 July 1833.

In February 1834 Tullamore defended his friend, Sir William Cusack Smith, against O’Connell’s accusation that the baron of the Irish exchequer had ‘expounded politics from the bench’ when delivering his charge to the commission court of Dublin, arguing that it was hypocritical for a Whig government to censure a judge who, he believed, ‘had felt it his duty to caution [the city jurors] and the public against the political agitation then in progress’.11S. Walpole, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 (1890), iii. 452-3; Hansard, 13 Feb. 1834, vol. 21, cc. 349-50. He supported Lord Chandos’s motion for a select committee on agricultural distress and relief of taxation, 21 Feb., opposed James Silk Buckingham’s motion for a select committee to inquire into the impressment of seamen, 4 Mar., and voted against Hume’s motion for a committee of the House to consider the corn laws, 7 Mar. 1834.

In August 1833 Tullamore had made a statement regarding his allegations of cruelty against the marshal of the King’s Bench, subsequently giving notice of a motion for the better government of the court’s prison, and calling for a select committee inquiry into its management, 22 May 1834. He consequently joined the largely radical minority that voted to pardon the editors of the True Sun newspaper who were imprisoned there, 23 July 1834.12Parliamentary Review (1833), iii. 600; Morning Post, 31 Aug. 1833; Morning Chronicle, 19 May 1834; Morning Post, 25 July 1834. During his time in the reformed parliament, he does not appear to have sat on any select committees or introduced any bills, but was appointed a lord of the bedchamber when Sir Robert Peel’s came in, 30 Dec. 1834.

In spite of a vigorous canvass on his behalf, Tullamore was ‘well beaten’ at Penryn and Falmouth at the 1835 general election, where he was said to have been viewed by Liberal electors as ‘an incubus’.13Royal Cornwall Gazette, 13 Dec. 1834; Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1834, 7 Jan. 1835; Standard, 24 Dec. 1834; Morning Post, 3 Jan. 1835; Leeds Mercury, 10 Jan. 1835. Although he re-enlisted Lord Wodehouse’s support, he failed to regain the seat at a by-election in May 1835 in what was seen as a contest between the ‘old scot and lot voters of Penryn’ against the new constituency of Falmouth.14Morning Chronicle, 28 Apr. 1835; Examiner, 3 May 1835. A subsequent petition presented on his behalf on grounds of bribery was unsuccessful.15The Times, 2, 3 July 1835. He succeeded to the peerage in October 1835 and in 1838 was elected a representative peer. He spoke in the Lords on a number of occasions, largely in connection with crime and agrarian disorder, and frequently defended the conduct of local magistrates.16HP Commons, 1820-1832, iv. 469. He was disappointed not to be offered office in Sir Robert Peel’s administration in 1841, and in 1845 spoke out against the Maynooth grant.17For example, see Hansard, 4 June 1845, cc. 99-105.

Lord Charleville’s wife, a daughter of the celebrated writer, Lady Charlotte Bury,18G.C. Boase, rev. P. Perkins, ‘Bury [nee Campbell], Lady Charlotte Susan Maria’, Oxford DNB, ix. 58-9. Lady Bury had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Caroline, and it was alleged that in January 1825 Tullamore had privately pressed Lord Liverpool to hold a public inquiry into the ‘mysterious and hitherto unaccounted for death’ of Princess Charlotte in childbirth in 1817: Lady A. Hamilton, Secret History of the Court of England. From the Accession of George the Third to the Death of George the Fourth (1832), 234-5. was a noted beauty, being described by Benjamin Disraeli in 1833 as ‘very tall and fair, with a classical face’ but ‘rather insipid’ in conversation.19Sir H. Maxwell (ed.), The Creevey Papers. A Selection from the Correspondence & Diaries of the late Thomas Creevey, M.P. (3rd edn., 1912), 630; Lady Dorchester (ed.), Recollections of a Long Life by Lord Broughton, with additional extracts from his private diaries (1910), iv. 101; Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1815-1834 (1982), 238, 269. She died after a long illness at Naples in February 1848. Charleville spent his later years ‘in somewhat reduced circumstances, the greater part of the family property having been sold to satisfy the claims of creditors’.20Blackburn Standard, 23 July 1851. The family nevertheless still owned 20,000 acres in King’s County in 1883: J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain (4th edn., 1883), 85. He died suddenly at his temporary residence near London in July 1851 and was succeeded in the peerage by his eldest son, Charles William George (1822-59), a retired military officer who took no part in politics.21Freeman’s Journal, 17 July 1851; Gent. Mag. (1851), ii. 317.